Friday, November 30, 2012

The first true sentence

I just heard that Hemingway said to write something you start with the first true sentence. "All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know." - Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast."

Here's my true sentence: One of the most challenging and yet fulfilling moments is teaching the art of living course. I've been teaching it for a few years, but each time it is completely different and unpredictable. On the first day we do an hour of breathing exercises, some meditation and people find themselves in a peaceful and blissful state. And I love asking them at the end of the meditation how they feel. In my last course, a woman started by saying that it was the "the only meditation where I had so much guilt and despair". I swallowed and prayed that my usual response of "whatever is happening it is fine" will not sound too ridiculous. Then she added that she could hear some music playing during meditation which I could hear as well coming from somewhere outside. Then she started to recognize the songs one by one to the point that she had the scary thought that it was her own ipod which she activated by mistake. She had only one thought for battery to die which eventually did.

I'm trying to figure out if the rest of the people meditating could nullify her anguish, guilt and the rest of plethora of negative emotions.

In another course I asked one participant to imitate me and play my role. She was supposed to ask the other participants to share some of the knowledge in the course and supposed to make make it light, even make fun of me. I put on my face of practicing what I preach by having a check on my ego, not forgetting to smile and getting ready for my accent to be imitated or some other embarrassing characteristic to be played out in front of my eyes.

She started and the first participant shared some knowledge point and it made sense. The second one's knowledge point made sense too, and I start thinking that wow these guys are getting it after two days while these points it took me years to get comfortable. +Sri Sri Ravi Shankar has said that if you fully live one knowledge point you are enlightened. By the third sharing I was fighting the tears. It is such a feeling to see the beauty of the knowledge blossoming like in a time-lapse photography. 

Have you had that feeling while you are doing something that you are passionate about, you put everything you have, your whole energy, creativity and somewhere in the process you realize you are not doing it, it comes from somewhere else. 

Einstein once said:  "The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it Intuition or what you will, the solution comes to you and you don't know how or why".
I must say that my intuition started to develop after practicing meditation.

The more I meditate, the easier is to find the right solutions, right judgements. It is like carving the shores of a river called life in such a manner that water never gets stagnant, it gushes like it knows what direction to flow.

It is the greatest comfort. I cannot imagine how I carried my mind before. Now another water analogy comes to my mind that +Sri Sri Ravi Shankar used to say, but now I experienced it. Before my mind was similar to an agitated lake where events and people are creating impressions in the mind like pebbles are thrown in the water, never letting me see the clear water, the bottom of the lake. What a relief I get everyday discarding all those impressions to start the moment fresh.

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