Moving into your heartache Part II-- A meditation to ponder

Imagine that you are on a large boat crossing a vast expanse of water. There are many people on the boat, all of whom are enjoying a party of some kind. In a moment of carelessness you fall off the back of the boat into the water. Everyone on the boat is having so much fun that no one sees that you have fallen overboard. Treading water, you yell and wave to no avail as the boat continues on its way, growing smaller and smaller, and eventually disappearing into the distance. Realizing that you cannot tread water for very long, but that you can float for a long time, your strategy becomes that of floating until hopefully, those on board will notice that you are missing and, in doing so, will come back to rescue you. Now in order to float you have to relax, for if you tense up you sink. And so there you are, all alone in the vast expanse of water, floating, relaxing, floating, relaxing. How would you be relaxing out there? Knowing your life depended on it, you would be
relaxing very seriously. You would be relaxing with all your heart. Each time fear arises, causing you to tense up, you renew the letting-go embodied in you life-saving relaxation. Tensing up, you relax, tensing up, you relax---a life-saving dance in the middle of the sea!

Then a most extraordinary thing happens--floating there all alone, looking up into a boundless sky, it dawns on you that you are being sustained in a a vast Presence that sustains you whether you live or die. While at one level it would be truly tragic to drown, to go under, to face the scary end, yet another level, too big to think about, there arises a bliss beyond feeling. There is granted a body-grounded realization that even in going under you would remain sustained. You would remain safe in the undoing. Floating there beyond the dualism of life and death, in a timeless moment beyond time, anchored invincible in a boundless sky, you realize that in drowning you would become what you already are. You would become one with the primitive sea of UN-manifested Presence your presence in the present moment is mannifesting.

If, while floating in this wondrous awakening, you were suddenly to see the boat coming back to get you, you would no doubt experience a profound sense of relief and joy. In being pulled back on board, you might be overcome with emotions that your life was saved. But deeper down within yourself you would know that you were being pulled back on board as one transformed in a great awakening. You would know that in some profound sense beyond the power of thought to grasp, beyond the ability of words to describe, you were saved out there in the midst of the sea, where, in an unto-death dance of choosing to relax, choosing to let go, you found a life beyond life and death.

As seekers of the contemplative way we have indeed fallen off the boat into the sea. At first the falling was isolated to our moments of spontaneous contemplative awakening in which we found ourselves momentarily sustained in body-grounded awareness of the abyss-like nature of the concrete immediacy of the present moment. Each falling ends in being pulled back on board, which is to say, ends in our once again returning to our customary ways of experiencing things to which we are accustomed. But lf little by little this pattern of falling and returning, falling and returning forms our character, making us someone whose daily living has become imbued with a quiet, inner desire to live in a more abiding awareness of the ever present depths. Our sitting still and straight in meditation is our free choice to leap into the sea.. Or perhaps, more true to the experience, it is our free choice to ease ourselves over and over again into the fathomless sea of presence, the present moment
manifests. As we become seasoned in the self-transforming power of simply sitting, we become ever more habituated to sustained state of body-grounded serenity. We become ever more habitually at home in a pure and simple awareness of the divinity of the Present moment manifesting itself in and all that arises, all that passes away. James Finley 9pp.71, The Contemplative Heart)