What might arise from the practice of staying with?
In meditation practice, we practice staying with the nature of our experience, whatever that experience may or may not be. By staying with, I accompany myself, I accompany this moment. What is unpleasant, of course, habitually receives the attention. I grow bold and ask, “what else is here?” What arises at this inquiry never ceases to amaze.
The practice of staying with might be the invitation of our times. And I mean with not just with what is unpleasant. I’m a little addicted to staying with the harbingers and headlines. It’s become unpleasant to stay with what’s pleasant. I gladly disrupt a nice day in the park for a quick scroll through the worst the 24-hours news has to offer. It’s an odd phenomena. Widening attention, I also ask, “what else is here?”
I feel trapped in the impossibility of it all. Might I stay with this?
Geese peck at the grass. The pond shimmers in the sunshine. It’s a bright, balmy day. The practice of staying with as an exercise in remaining present. If nothing else, staying with as a regulating anchor. The senses reminding me that much of this experience is pleasant. The solidness of the Earth beneath me, still, somehow. Neutral is here too.
The practice is also staying with what is so unpleasant about a nice day in the park. It’s another record high day. I’m the only not-laboring person of color in this park. A blacked-out car is stealth parked a ways off. Pleasant tangled with unpleasant in a dance of push and pull. The tensions are woven as tight as a paradox. Might I stay with it?
I feel trapped in this tightly woven, Gordian knot of the polycrisis. I’m totally dumbfounded by the question of strategic action for liberation while within global, hegemonic capitalism. The tools are the master’s tools. This house belongs to him too. Master’s money is the only means. My survival is his system, but another’s death tomorrow, and my death not too long after. I feel trapped in the impossibility of it all. Might I stay with this?
If I stay with long enough in meditation, the relationship between me and the moment changes. Staying with simply becomes staying, aware of an ever-changing, interdependent field of consciousness. There is freedom here, just beside the feeling of trapped, just beside perception of impossibility. Might I stay with this, as strange as it may be?
I wonder now: what instead of acting for liberation, I acted with liberation? Instead of going after this knot with a sword, slicing from the inside, trying to get out, I relax and ask this sense of freedom, just beside it all, “where would you like to go together?”
This is a freedom that is beyond hope or fear. It’s a freedom that cannot be diminished by despair, extracted and sold by a system, or granted by the technofeudal master. It’s how I imagine it feels to die, yet go on living. It’s a powerful freedom, and perhaps our wisest companion in working with the paradox of polycrisis. It’s a freedom that stays with even as I let go.
Sensing into this freedom, I wonder about the course of events in which a critical mass of us sensed into this freedom and acted not from hope or fear, but with the liberation that is inherent and always? These are my dreams Sangha, and liberation writes them with me.
