03/28/2020
“In the Midst of Movement and Chaos, keep stillness inside of you.” Deepak Chopra
I have sailed more than 40,000 miles in a small (35-feet) cruising sailboat on the Pacific Ocean. I grew to crave long ocean crossings (up to 33-days at sea with no land in sight). On the infinite spaciousness of unbroken ocean, nondual consciousness came alive for me. It revealed itself as a tangible experience centered within the internal space of my body.
There is no stillness aboard a small boat on a large ocean – movement is constant and flows in multiple directions, even when conditions are perfect and the is boat sailing at its most comfortable. After a few days out of sight of land, my psyche and soul would come to a place where I felt would give anything, anything at all, if the movement would stop. Stop! Even five seconds. Stop!
Intolerance of movement overwhelmed me; exhausted and desperately struggling, I would break down and give up. Once I finally let go, from the depths of my body, to my grasping desire for change, a transcendence would occur – all of a sudden it felt like everything inside me became still (unmoving) even while our small boat continued to toss in a dozen directions at once.
For the remainder of that first ocean crossing, and subsequent out-of-sight of land experiences, my whole body and being became unified. I felt I was part of, indeed the center of, an infinite, unchanging, spacious stillness. The ocean awakened an embodied nondual experience inside me. At sea, I found relief in a self-arising experience, within my body, of myself as unchanging stillness that was deeper than the movement.
At sea, I felt completely whole. My experience of being was that I was the stillness, I was transparent space. I felt the essence of myself as unmodified by all the movement of oceanic aliveness even as the cacophony and beatitude of life on a small boat at sea flowed everywhere around and through me. Inside my body, I was undisturbed by, even while intimately engaged with, the movement of the world, of all of life.
Everything changed whenever I stepped onto land. The chiaroscuro of life engaged my conscious awareness and filled all my experience. On land I no longer felt myself the center of unchanging pervasive space, unified with all life. The movement of the world’s ways was more likely to catch me, trigger me, into expressing habits of body and mind that interfered with the nondual experience uncovered at sea.. On land, I lost the spacious stillness. I could find it in meditation, but it never revealed itself as part of a wholeness that was disentangled from the movement. Being on land was a constant disappointment.
That is, until I found Judith Blackstone’s Realization Process.
More coming soon!
