Well!
That was a bit of a mad period!
The last practice session I completed was in Madrid in May!
Ever since coming back, work has been crazy. I've been working absolutely insane hours, and I haven't completed a single practice session.
It's difficult to get up at 5AM to practice when you've been working until 2AM, and are expected back in the office (an hours drive away) by 8AM!
However, fingers crossed, it seems that things have calmed down a little, so I'm going to try starting again.
And I do mean starting again. In the two months I've had away from practice, I have regained about one of the three stones in weight that I had lost, and have lost a lot of the flexibility I was painstakingly building up.
So, starting 'soon', maybe tomorrow morning, it's back to Lesson 1 in the Systematic Course. I'm going to do Lesson 1 at least until Sunday, at which point I will decide whether I can fast track to Lesson 2, or whether I need to stay on Lesson 1. To be honest, I think I'll need to stay with Lesson 1 for at least another week whilst I also get my diet back on track. The reason I think this is that several of the postures in Lesson 1 are concerned with the digestive system, and I recall that I didn't start to feel the full benefit of them until I was practicing with a fairly clear system in the morning, and this didn't happen until I'd been eating a lot less for a few weeks. So I think I need to reduce my food intake considerably right away, and that will take at least a week or two to work through my system, to the point where things are in much better balance.
You know, although I've been working a lot, and it really would have been very difficult to practice on the vast majority of days, I think there's also an element of the fact that stuff was starting to come out. I was starting to remember stuff from childhood. Some if it good, some of it - well, what a lot of people might consider odd - some of it really awful. It didn't come to me during my meditation practice. In fact, most of it came in my drives home from work - a time that I find oddly reflective.
I think maybe I fell for the 'somethings happening, it's scary, make it stop' story that a lot of people who really delve into themselves come across. I'm really surprised, and a little disappointed at this. I mean, I've been seriously pursuing self investigation since I was a teenager, and some of the stuff I did in my youth was incredibly powerful, stirring up a lot more than this recent stuff. Maybe I thought I'd got it all out, and that I was now going to sail into sainthood without any further ado. Probably. One of the things I'm most proud of is having no ego...get it?
Of course, when you think you have no ego, it just means it's grown so large you can't see the edges anymore.
Anyway, in case you are interested, here's one of the strange things I recall from childhood. This is a good one, because it definitely feeds my ego, and makes me think I'm special, so beter get it out there.
It's something I'd forgotten, and just came back to me on one drive home.
I used to sit at my parents feet at night, after my younger sister had gone to bed, waiting for them to tell me. You know, tell me all that stuff that they must know: the purpose of life, the real meaning of God and religion, the secret rituals that grown-ups do. No not sex. I don't remember being aware of sex. I was about 8, and this was nearly 40 years ago. 8 year olds really didn't have any clue about sex in the seventies.
I have no idea how long this carried on. They sat where they still sit today, although there was no coffee table then. 40 years ago, coffee wasn't invented. Not in our house anyway. So I used to sit on the floor, between the settee with my mum on it, and the armchair with my dad on it, by their feet, waiting. They were watching telly, but I was actively waiting. 'When are they going to tell me?', 'Why are they not telling me?'.
Eventually, I clearly remember one night, and I must have been about twelve by now, so this must have gone on some time, I was going to bed, and I left the living room, pulling the door shut behind me, and as I stood there in the dark, it finally hit me. It wasn't a gradual realisation, a slow dawning of acceptance. It was a thunderbolt out of nowhere: They don't know!
How can they not know?
How can any grown up not know the answers? Not know the secrets? I was really shaken to the core. If they don't know, then how on earth am I ever going to find out?! No point asking teachers. They are the dumbest of grown ups. The church won't help. They threw me out of Sunday school years before for 'being disruptive'...aka 'asking questions'.
I don't recall anything further. I can't say it sparked my search for truth. That search was already going on. That's why I wanted the answers from them. I can't say it left me devastated for days. Maybe it did. I don't remember. I just remember standing with my right hand on the living room doorknob, my left shoulder leaning against the louvre door to the kitchen, forhead against the doorframe, in the darkness, aghast, hollow and slightly dizzy, thinking, "They don't know."
Perhaps that's why I get so emotional about my Guru. And about Neem Karoli Baba, and those few others: They know. And their knowing fills the gap in me. Not the gap of my own knowingness, or lack thereof. That's a gap I can live with. But that awful, dreadful gap of shattering doubt: Maybe there is nothing to know!
At risk of sounding like Donald Rumsfeld: I may not know for myself, but at least I now know there is something to know!
By the way: that was a great quote by Don, and it was absolutely correct. The media lambasted it because it required about six seconds of thought to figure out what he was saying, and that's about 5.5 seconds more thought than your average journalist can manage in any one incarnation. If you want to know about known unknowns, look it up.
Anyway, that was one thing that came back to me in the days before going to Madrid. Here's another.
For one of my school essays for my CSE English (my school wouldn't enter people for GCE. I had to enter it myself), I wrote about an initiation ceremony.
I have no idea where it came from, and again, I had completely forgotten about it. It was quite Masonic in nature - and I wouldn't have known that until just a few years ago when my curiosity got the better of me. No, I didn't join, but a lot of the so called secrets are published by the Masons themselves, and if you want to know what happens in their ceremonies, you can go to their online bookshop and buy the scripts for the ceremonies.
Even when I bought a few of these books out of curiosity, and read them, I still didn't remember the essay I wrote at 14 years old. Again, that came back to me on one of my journeys home just a few weeks ago. I can't remember any great details about the essay, just that it was an initiation ceremony. I don't think I used the word initiation. Maybe 'induction', because I think the cubs had an induction? But the ceremony, whilst I'm sure it wasn't in any way an accurate description of a Lodge Working, I definitely remember now that it had that feel. I also remember Mr. Croft being very puzzled and slightly disturbed. But he did give me an 'A'.
So, that's a couple of the weird things that came back to me. Very few nice things have come back, but then I suppose they don't have any power. Nice things don't tend to build neuroses, so there's no point having them resurface.
One day I might tell you some of the awful things.
But I doubt it.
