During meditation today I recall a sense of forward vs backward cosciousness. Forward encompassed the next impulse, backward was the past, our baggage, and the thoughts that just arose. It’s like we’re a comet hurtling forward and the plume is our memories and experiences. We get caught up when we turn back to try to analyze instead of trusting in forward momentum. This plays out pulse by pulse in meditation, resting and trusting in the next thought, the next heartbeat, or the next emotion, or getting stuck on a particular thought, believing it’s real or worrying about what it means.
This has been instructive in shedding my vigilance, the insidious tone that makes me judge even mindfulness, its correctness. Instead I’m learning to accept days when focus is easily lost and to settle into the presence that is actually, effortlessly happening, be it frenetic and nervous with tension in the body or stillness that seems to envelop everything. Either way, I remember that I’m separate and simply observing.
In this way I felt a wonderful aliveness today walking on the deck with the intermittent sun and cool wind of the fall, the trees in various shades of yellow, red, and green. The voluminous, ethereal peaks of the distance clouds looked like Olympus itself. For a moment I could almost feel myself soaring in their midst, over the vastness into everything, as if I were a creature of pure, unburdened consciousness taken by the breeze. Only looking forward.