One fact of meditation is that feelings are the only facts. One fact about feelings is that they are not facts. This paradox reopens for us every time we sit down to practice.
Today a million people gathered to hope for something. On a Tuesday, in the middle of a work week, with travel prices soaring higher than the planes that brought them there, a million people gathered to hope together.
For the past two weeks, hundreds of children have been killed while the world watched from the comfort of home, in utter hopelessness.
Chuang-Tzu said in the Inner Chapters that a person is most easily understood by the movement of their bodies in relation to things and events. Some things get you up and moving, and some things make no impact. What gets the yogi up in the morning to practice? What keeps the yogi still in meditation? If we approach our practice like we approach our world, then it has to be fear and hope that drive us.
Yogi Bhajan said that worrying is praying for something that you don’t want. If we start practicing out of any sense of lack in our lives, then the character of our practice will hinge on hope and fear. We will feel guilty when we don’t practice; we’ll feel proud when we do; and in between we’ll feel bored, depressed, or superior. Our relationship to our motivation to practice will cycle through a million dualities, and we will yo-yo through our asana and through our meditation and through our kriya, practicing just enough here to counter our guilt, and just enough there to sate our pride.
But hope and fear get us only to the door. To enter, we must leave them both behind. We love to hear this about fear. But without hope, all that’s left seems depressing. We forget that hope and fear are both based on lack, on an absence of something that makes us desire.
After our practice ceases to revolve around the balance between fear and hope, it begins to chisel away our desires. We stop laughing at jokes from last night’s T.V. show. We become alienated from water cooler conversations at work. Friends think we’re emotionless or detached. It takes a long time to re-establish perspective, and to realize that we have found joy in its true place: not inside an object – a pair of shoes, a movie, a president – but inside ourselves. Joy comes to us as a constant gift from the universe, like flowers that bloom once the weeds are torn away. And it is a daily practice – beyond hope for change, beyond fear of death – that clears the weeds of desire away so that joy may bloom in its own, unstoppable creativity for which we are its beloved spectator.
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