This morning while grumpily washing dishes--grumpy from a frustrating phone call, grumpy from not being able to get the Bose Sound Dock to work so I could listen to my NPR, grumpy because in the course of a half-hour I had already knocked several things over in the kitchen including one glass jar which broke, grumpily, on the floor--I heard something that I haven't been able to stop thinking about since.
I had finally gotten the Bose to work, though NPR didn't want to stream, so instead I turned on a podcast interview I wasn't particularly interested in, just to have something, anything, to distract me from my aggravation. I can't even tell you now who the woman being interviewed was...but I can tell you what she said.
She was talking about prayer, this woman whose name I don't know, and she was talking, in particular, about contemplative prayer, which I don't know much about, but is apparently pretty similar to meditation. And she kept coming back to this idea of "self-emptying", specifically: that contemplative prayer (or meditation, depending on which dog you're chasing) is really this process of emptying out so that God (or Presence or Source or Whatever-Makes-You-Least-Squirmy) can enter and fill all that space. She said basically that it's all this process of letting go, of dropping our need to control, of dropping our resistance, and then, the kicker:
"Because, the absence of resistance," she said, "...is love."
And when she said it--it was like some little gnarly hand had been pulled away from the outside of my grumpy heart.
The absence of resistance is love.
What she was saying, of course, is what everyone who has ever grabbed even just the smallest piece of real waking-up-ness has said--in a nutshell, that suffering is self-generated, and that there IS something which remains once we stop doing all the things we're doing to create that suffering, and that thing which remains...is love.
I am not a Christian. I wasn't raised Christian. I wasn't raised anything, actually. Unless "hippy" counts as a religious upbringing. HOWEVER, I do seem to carry around, despite all my best efforts, a kind of puritanical need for self-improvement.
(Oh, wait, yes...you're reading my mildly-obsessive yoga blog. Sooo, perhaps you've picked up on that.)
Anyhow, there I am, slamming dishes and grousing around my kitchen when I hear this thing, this me - resistance = love thing, and I realize that ALL of it, all my broom-dropping and jar-smashing and thought-spinning...is only only resistance. And all that it's doing is preventing me from experiencing the one thing (maybe the only thing) that's true and honest and reliable...
L.O.V.E. love.
And I don't mean the "I love you so much I want to kiss your sweet face" kind of love (though that's nice, too). I mean the kind of love that's just the simple love of the universe for a person (you. me. us.) when that person (you. me. us.) is not standing in his/her/my/our own way. You know the thing I'm talking about? It's just that feeling of walking down a street when you're not preoccupied, when you're not nursing or hemming or hawing--you're just walking and noticing and feeling...okay. It's that okay-ness feeling. And the hypothesis being presented, this "in the absence of resistance there is love" hypothesis is that, that feeling of okayness, is our natural state. That if we were to just let go of everything that we're stirring up to crapp-ify our own days, that what we would be left with is a pervasive sense of goodness.
And the f-ing amazing thing about this hypothesis is that, like any good idea, it can be tested. You can, right now, stop doing what you're doing--which doesn't mean distract or numb yourself from what you're doing, but actually means STOP--as in, put down, as in let go, as in surrender--and see what's there.
What happens when you stop subtracting and (just as importantly) stop trying to add (my personal patch of quicksand) and instead just let be? What IS it? Actually, truthfully, with no modifications...what is it? How is it?
I don't know, Shanti-towners, I honestly don't know....but I would really, really like to find out.
