Finding freedom: change of  lineage

Sitting in church – silence – a presence – images. When I was young, these were what I sometimes experienced. And they were good.

But as time went by, their magic faded; adolescence came along, and other excitements took hold; other concerns seemed to be ‘real’.

Some years later a friend suggested that I took up yoga, but I didn’t follow it up. Leaving home, going to the big city full of promises for the future became a new focus. New friends, the world of academia, putting the world to rights, the seeking of temporary states of mind so that the world around promised to make me happy. After some time these things started to go awry. I lost interest in studying, experienced lots of rejection and could see no clear way forward.

And then an extraordinary period of many months of avid reading and reflection, mulling over and over all sorts of ideas from all parts of the world – mythology, religion, accounts of dreams, symbols, images, ritual. My whole being was being fed by all this material; I was hungry and couldn’t get enough. I would read for a while and then go out for a walk, and all around would be the livelier for the richness of this new world I could now inhabit. I would seek out others I could try to share this enthusiasm with, who I could learn more from, whom I could travel along with. Another reality had opened up to me: I found I could do things I had not done before – draw pictures, write poems, have more meaningful relationships and dance the night away.

Then one day, some friends and I got into conversation with a few other people. They said that they had been going to a meditation class and asked if we wanted to go with them. We went. It seemed the natural thing to do, that here was something to do with the mind and body; here was something that might actually go somewhere. There were others practising meditation too, which was incredibly reassuring.

For a while it all went well. I continued to find life enjoyable and meditation gave me energy, even more enthusiasm, and it started to dawn on me what I was actually trying to do. I began to question a little. What did I actually know? I found, to my surprise, very little! What was working with meditation actually doing to me?

I learned each stage of the practice and sat most days and began to slowly notice a change come about me. I had started to learn to listen and not just to what I wanted to hear. A part of me was growing that could go to quiet and, from there, pay attention to others, pay attention to the world around. An old habit of letting my enthusiasm take over began falling away.

What began to arise was some sense of the possibility that the mind could be trained, could be brought under some control. It was through this early process of recognizing change that my commitment to practice first really came about. I was no longer just playing. This needed some serious effort, and some space and time to allow things to grow. The teacher talked about the ‘chatter-box’ mind – I know it well and had begun a journey where it would be re-visited and worked with again and again.

So, going back to the beginning - what of these early childhood experiences in church – the peace, the power of images, the presence of something potent? The contact with meditation brought these alive again. And more. Now they were something I could share and come to know better and explore with greater facility. I also knew that I could put them down again as necessary and realised that it might be possible to find freedom in all things in the same way.