Blue truth, p.7
Blue Truth, page 7
Disgust may be your natural response to some people all the time and to everyone sometime. But closing down and pulling away is an additional act of unlove that creates suffering in you and the world. Your separation is the deed of unlove, not your loathing or judgment.
You can try not to judge others, but even that is based on a judgment: “People who are non-judgmental are better than people who judge.” The fact is, feeling good or bad in response to others is natural and inevitable. The trouble starts when you allow your emotional response and mental judgments to result in heart-closure and separation. When you clench your belly, close your heart, and pull away from others, then you are actively creating unlove and suffering. It’s one thing to be disgusted by some jerk; it’s another thing to close your heart and add separation.
You can be open as love even when someone is acting in the vilest way. If necessary, you can move against an adversary with great force, and still you can remain open, feeling your opponent’s heart as if it were yours or your lover’s.
Again, when you pull back in closure, you create the distress of ongoing separation and perpetuate the anguish of unlove. Your disgust and loathing are natural emotional responses; separating your feeling heart, pulling away from those who disgust you, is the additional act of unlove, the original moment of deep suffering.
When you look into the eyes of those who most disturb you, practice feeling the openness behind the face of their fear and distress. Whether they are on TV or standing in front of you, no matter how closed or twisted they may be acting, feel through their pained expressions into their yearning heart. Their moment is open as yours, though they may be closing, unwilling to open as love, and therefore they are suffering their denial of love’s openness.
Feel into their heart without adding your own closure or self-protection. Breathe openly with their heart as if breathing with a lover. Perhaps speak from your openness to their openness. If appropriate, touch or tussle to help loosen their cringe around love’s open bloom. As uncomfortable as you may be, practice opening your body. Even if you are repulsed or furious, practice to keep your belly soft, your jaw relaxed, and your heart unclenched as you feel into their heart, open to open.
When someone disgusts you, and in every moment, practice to relax as the moment blooms open as every body. Allow openness the opportunity to live through you and your relationships by practicing to feel and breathe the deep openness that in everyone yearns to flower as love.
20
UNDO ALL EFFORT
***
In every moment
of real practice,
your effort undoes
the need for effort.
Suppose you feel trapped by financial lack. You feel anxious. Your gut clenches. Your mind reels into a jumbled knot. You feel miserable. You don’t know what to do.
First, you can feel exactly what you feel: the physical tightness, the mental racing, the emotional anguish. Breathe these textures of closure in and out of your heart. Then, feeling as these textures, heat them up. Actually feel your feelings becoming hot, and evaporating. For many people, it is easier to learn to open while heating the texture of their closure to evaporation. Eventually, you no longer need to heat up closure. You can simply feel fully, and as the feeling’s texture, open.
As the feelings open, feel as the openness. Be openness, feeling openness.
Resting as openness, feel whatever you feel, as openness. Feel any remaining tension in your belly or thoughts in your head as textures of openness. As openness, examine your situation, make decisions about your career, and devise a plan of action to put your financial life back on track.
If you lose this openness as you plan to carry out your actions, then practice feeling your closure fully. Feel and breathe its texture. As the closure, heat it up and open as its texture, feeling whatever you feel as openness.
Eventually, this entire practice takes place instantaneously. You notice closure, and open. Openness abides—for a while. Again, you can notice closure, allow yourself to be closure, then, feeling as closure, heat it up and open.
You can practice opening in every moment. In truth, you are openness. This is why such practice is instantly and deeply effective: you are only doing what you are.
Practice is absolutely necessary, although you are only practicing what you are. Suffering is the felt difference between what you seem to feel and what you would be feeling if you allowed yourself to feel what actually is.
In other words, you are habitually doing a feeling of closure. When you practice to feel as openness, then the habit of closure is undone. In truth, you are openness, always. Even the entire moment of seeming closure is wide open, now and every now. Feeling as openness is simply feeling what is true, although you have habits to the contrary.
Suppose you are with your lover but you feel closed, separate, alone. You can practice to open. You can look into your lover’s eyes and try to feel into your lover’s heart. You can practice to connect heart to heart, so your love feels your lover’s love, even through the closure-mood of the moment. You can allow your breath as one with your lover.
Breathing as one, feeling as one love, you are doing openness. In moments of real love, you know this is true—you are open as one. You and your lover want nothing more than to live as this truth, to live this truth through your bodies, to merge together and open as one, to feel as each other, alive as one love, even sexually.
This intuition of open oneness is at the root of your deep yearning. If you are dissatisfied with your love life, it is precisely because, deep down, you know how open love can be.
You and your lover may be afraid to be open, afraid of being hurt, afraid of opening without a story, without a future or past, without a drama or strategy for self-protection or self-worth. Yet you yearn to open as one love, and so this tension defines your life. The difference between your true openness and the closure you do creates the necessity for practice.
Practice, then, is simply to do what you truly are. In any moment of effective practice, the need for practice is alleviated. You realize that you are what you were trying to achieve or create. You are openness, alive as love.
Every moment is a cusp. If you abide as openness, then what is also seems to be. If you miss this mark even slightly, you slide down the slope into apparent problems. Love seems to be separation. Openness seems to be closure. Spontaneity seems to be effort. And yet, all the while, opening as what is instantaneously reveals the truth.
You are what is right now, you are the openness of love right now, even if your lover is screwing your best friend. Practice abiding open as the cusp of this moment without clinging to a single experience for a millisecond, lest you initiate a vortex of clench. This practice of abiding open as the form of every experience—opening as the texture of jealousy, opening as the texture of anger, opening as the texture of deciding to get a divorce—this practice can be lived naturally, loosely, yet relentlessly.
Opening as the cusp of this moment, all is as it is, wide open. Clenched as the vortex of clinging, grabbing onto that, pushing away from this, openness is forgotten in the swirl of edges. Your lover did this to you, so you are going to do that back. Your bank account is low so your gut contracts and fear motivates your career choices.
From the vortex of clench, all thoughts and actions beget further clench. Open as the cusp of this moment, all thoughts and actions emerge from depth and open without a trace. As you are. As this moment is.
Practice undoes itself open.
Love & Sex
21
ALLOW LOVE’S HURT
***
Opening your heart to love
also opens your heart to hurt.
Love is openness. When you allow yourself to open, then love can flow unimpeded. When your heart is open, you can commune with your lover, or anyone else. You can open with them in oneness. Whether you are having sex or discussing politics, you can open and commune as one love expressing itself through two bodies.
When you are open and the other is not, you will feel it. When your lover lashes out at you with vicious criticism, your heart feels slashed and wounded.
Eventually, your heart closes in order to feel less vulnerable. Yet you still desire love. Behind your walls of protection, your yearning backs up into frustration and then anger. Filling with rage, you may finally strike out at your lover, trying to hurt the one who has hurt you. You both close even more. You want their love and they won’t give it to you, so you punish your lover for not loving you, and then he or she closes down more and punishes you back.
To break this cycle of closure, you can learn to practice love. You can practice remaining open even when your heart reflexively wants to close in order to guard itself from hurt. You can choose to feel the hurt and practice to stay open. Instead of closing in anger, allow yourself to feel your deep sorrow, your raw yearning, the wounding slashes of your lover’s anger, and practice opening. By staying open, the cycle is broken, and your love awaits your lover’s readiness to open.
In response to your lover’s hurtful words and actions, you can practice love. Instead of holding your breath, you can breathe deeply and fully. Instead of tensing your body, you can relax your belly while you breathe and feel deep hurt. Instead of turning away, you can look into your lover’s eyes while you feel their pain. You can serve your lover’s openness by offering yours.
Feel into your lover’s heart, beating yearningly, waiting for love behind their unloving guard. Rather than reacting to unlove by closing down, you can remain open and deeply connected, breathing and feeling the deep heart openness which hides behind the hurt of your lover.
You can practice this openness and deep heart-contact with everyone you love—in fact, with everyone. Whoever you are with, look into their eyes. Feel through their mask or social face, and feel into their heart’s desire; they want to open, to connect and feel deep love, just like you do.
With whomever you choose, feel through their layers of habitual guardedness, their muscular tension, their lonely closure and protection. Without actually touching them, you can allow your heart to feel theirs. Inhale and exhale love with them as if doing heart-to-heart resuscitation from a distance. All of this can take place in a fraction of a second, casually, even with a grocery store clerk who remains unaware of any practice on your part.
Life is a lesson of love. Your life feels full in every moment you stay open as love, however painful or joyous the love is. If you close, even for a moment, then you are creating unfulfillment in your heart and pain in the heart of those who would open in love with you.
For your life to feel profound and full of love’s power, practice opening at all times, including times of hurt. Feel and breathe your heart’s deep hurt, and the hurt of others, without closing. Offer the openness of your heart to everyone, and especially to those who are wounding you. The only alternative is to close and live unfulfilled.
22
RECOGNIZE YOUR REFUSAL
***
Unless you are opening,
everything you do, think,
and feel is actively
refusing openness.
You want so badly to be accepted as you are. You want to feel worthy, acknowledged, and loved. These desires to be seen and felt as worthy are symptoms of your closure. The self-reflexive tension you call “me” is trying to sustain itself. Your emotional sustenance is grounded in this need to be mirrored, to know that you are seen, felt, and loved.
In truth, in depth, you are the openness of love. But as a separate “me,” you are the refusal of this openness. You are the tension of self-sustenance, fidgeting to touch yourself, masturbating, filling your mouth with food, thinking about yourself, self-concerned. Even your desire to grow spiritually is self-concern. Everything you do acts to sustain the felt sense that you are a separate self, hopefully on the road to greater love and freedom.
Sustaining your sense of separate self is the refusal of love. For most of every day, you are actively refusing to be the openness that is love. You would rather be a closed someone with a personal life of pain and pleasure than openness alive as all beings and things.
There are two major phases in spiritual growth. During the first phase, you actually believe you want to grow more open. You believe that you want more love in your life, more caring. You want to give your love and help others. You believe that your thoughts, feelings, and actions can actually lead toward getting and giving more openness and love.
The second phase begins when you can feel, moment by moment, that you are actively closing. Every thought, feeling, and action is reinforcing your sense of separateness. You are doing unlove. In fact, “me” is the very act of unlove. “Me-ing” is the process of holding back, protecting yourself, hoping to be cherished, hoping to grow open, thinking to yourself, strategizing for your success. You are utterly self-involved. Everything you do is an effort to sustain this sense of me that is hopefully loved, loving, and successful.
When this second phase of life begins, you realize that you absolutely do not want to grow in openness. Truly, you are terrified of being open. You want to be a little bit open in order to feel comfortable and safe, but total openness—without any “me” you can point to—is terrifying.
In truth, you are love, not a “me” that wants to love and be loved. The meing that wants to be separate and loved may continue with momentum from the past, but you can treat this me-ing with the same care you would a bowel movement. It is something to be felt as it occurs, sometimes enjoyed, sometimes suffered, and naturally released, as time will have it.
If you want to obsess about the movement of “me,” about your emotions, thoughts, and actions, about who loves you or whether your career or spiritual practice will succeed, you can do so for as long as you want. At some point, you realize that all this movement is natural, but it doesn’t go anywhere profound.
Why be obsessed with your own do-do? When you reduce yourself to this process of me-ing, you are actively refusing to be the love who you are, open, boundless, and free.
23
LET LOVE LIVE AS ANGER
***
You can be open in love
and also full of anger.
Many people seem to believe that to love means to be sweet and peaceful. But love is openness. All emotional expressions are waves in an ocean of love. Even anger can move in deep love.
Imagine that you find your children at the open cabinet beneath your kitchen sink. Your daughter has a bottle of drain cleaner to her lips. Your son is about to pour bleach in his eyes. You baby girl is about to drink insecticide.
Without thinking, you shout, “No!” You grab the poisons away from your children and shout, “No, no, no! Don’t play with these! They’re dangerous!” You may even shake your children, squeezing their shoulders tightly. You shake them because you love them so much. Then you hold your crying children tightly to your chest. “I love you! I love you so much. I don’t want you to hurt yourselves.”
Because your anger comes from love, soon your body softens, your children stop crying, and they feel your care. Your eyes are as moist as your children’s. They feel your love, but they also know the urgency of your demand: Danger! Your anger cuts through the casualness of the moment. This is serious business. A quiet and gentle voice doesn’t convey your love with the same urgency, power, and consequence.
As you grow in your capacity to stay open under all circumstances, your emotions become stronger, not weaker. If your husband is wasting his life, frittering away his time in trivial pursuits, distracted by TV and lost causes, your heart will shout its love: “I can’t stand when you are like this! You are a great man! I want to feel your fullest gifts!” The urgency of your demand for his fullest potential is unmistakable.
If your wife is blabbing because she is tense, hardly looking in your eyes, prattling on in a superficial way, your heart may shout: “I love you! Enough of this! I want to feel you open with me!” Your sudden thunderbolt of love can crack her surface tension so for a moment she stops. You can swoop in while she is surprised, embracing her in openness, pervading her with your deep and present love.
Some people aren’t ready for uninhibited love. If your lover is a person who has been abused in the past, he or she may need well-established boundaries in order to grow: You are allowed to say you’re angry, but not to shout it. Or, you are allowed to shout your anger, but not to touch your lover angrily. Boundaries provide a sense of safety, which some people need in order to practice staying open and not be paralyzed by fear.
But as you grow, there comes a time when you and your lover are unwilling to settle for anything less than unrestrained love. You both want to give and receive unconfined, unsuppressed, untamed love. This kind of love may yell and scream and cry and demand—without warning—because your desire for openness and communion is so intense.
Everybody closes now and then. Everybody has his or her moments of laziness, superficiality, and mediocrity. Therefore, patience, kindness, and support are the essential matrix of a healthy relationship. But some moments require passion’s intervention. As with your children drinking poison under the sink, your love’s urgency won’t allow your intimate relationship to wither and die. If you lover is threatening their own growth by being less open than he or she can be, then your loving heart is free to roar.
Love can be gentle and nurturing. But love can also be angry, when you are open. And such passionate love evaporates the moment its urgency has been received. If your anger is love’s anger, it comes on strong, serves to deepen communion in love, and then dissolves instantly. It is spontaneous anger, and leaves no trace of guilt, no residue of stress.
