It has been some time since I have attempted meditation as an aid to self-centering. I have never gotten too sophisticated with the practice, I have about three different methods I use, and I usually stay with it for no more than a month or two when I am doing really well. Recently feeling rather unfocused, I decided to try again, and found my mind much more resistant than usual. Counting breaths proved an arduous task. A briefly empty mind would be intruded upon with vivid images fraught with intense connections in memory, both wonderful and painful to revisit. I have been able to force myself through these moments into that quiet space, but after my sessions feel no such capacity to get these experiences out of mind. It's led to a kind of intellectual and emotional disengagement. I have not tried to quiet my mind with drinking, as has been one mode of the past, but have allowed myself to vegetate, as with television and chain movie-watching. It has been less an act of laziness than of self-preservation. But my brain feels like mush. I have been keeping with my fitness schedule and am pretty close on my nutritional goals, but it is time to allow some real quiet.
The truth is, I have been more heart-broken than I imagined I would. And I have not understood for years how to engage the world without an "other" with whom to coordinate some shared vision of things. Even in this, there has been intense unfocus and confusion. Whenever there are doldrums, they are always accompanied by ghosts of the woman, the only one who ever really mattered to me, and this has ruined relationships and hindered my ability to process conflict or difficulties. It seemed important to me to face this reality of late, to accept that I may never be done with it. But I have a tendency to wallow. To then become upset by my wallowing, and subsequently to hide from everything.
But it is the misplacement of this struggle that has caused the most mischief, I think. It does not belong at the center of things. It holds far too much sway with me. This along with my loss of religion in my early twenties--this is becoming more interesting to me. Having spent my youth believing that I was engaged in a meaningful narrative with a glorious conclusion, and later having come to the conclusion that this was a ridiculous thing, my lack of a clear narrative now renders a lot I do or strive for meaningless. It is less a flaw in my philosophy, I think, than a byproduct of yet another great loss. It would seem no greater loss could exist than the loss of one's god. Even if there were no real thing to lose, the thing certainly seemed real, for all purposes was real inasmuch as it effected thought and action.
So I find myself swimming around in an abstract fish bowl. I have an intellectual attachment to individual meaning and morality, but long for those youthful days of deity-dictated absolutes. Perhaps this is the usual dilemma--that struggle between childhood simplicity and adult ambiguity--but I sense it very sharply. It is sometimes debilitating.
Even so, there must be some way of continuing on path (as I have previously defined or left undefined in parts) while honestly and forthrightly admitting these struggles, but also placing them properly on their right shelves. Letting the things in that deserve to be there as well. Not allowing things to inflate beyond reason and distract from the good parts, favorite kinds of silence. A concept once more of what I am seeking for its own sake, rather than for the sake of sharing with an "other."
We'll see.
Journaling at ghosts is fun sometimes.
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