You have just had an argument with a close friend. This relationship seems to be shaking. You try to understand what you did wrong, and what the friend did wrong. You try to understand life without this friend by your side. You go over and over the entire stream of lines spoken by you and him.
But beneath this mental activity lies a fear. Fear that I will be alone, fear that I will have to navigate the lanes of existence by myself. Fear that I am not enough by myself and need someone by my side, all the time.
The fear presents itself as a dense sensation in the centre of the chest, tight, crumpled up, wanting to radiate left and right like ripples created in a lake by the drop of a pebble, but something in you holds it down to that point in the centre of the chest.
***
Our usual experience of relationships is that they take us away from this fear and from our body as it exists in this fear. Through talking about other things, through talking about this very thing but in a way that evades the intensity of our emotions, through good humouredness, through doing things together, we often come to something other than what is.
A contemplative conversation is one in which one person invites the other to be still, and to be with. With what is. Here. And now.
A contemplative conversation makes transparent the various layers of repetitive thought, overwhelming emotion, and dimly felt sensation, so that we are present to ourselves and to the other, without veils.
***
Such a conversation makes space for what is. Let us be in this fear. Let us allow this fear to exist. Let us feel it in all its fire. Let us share, through our words, how our bodies feel when this fear is alive. How the chest feels like it burns. How sensation radiates from centre, outward. How the eyes light up in the fire of intense feeling. How there is a wish to shut down, numb out.
Let us be honest about our struggles with the pain of what is.
Let us not just make space, but let us make time, so that we can stay with all these feelings and sensations for minutes, for an hour perhaps.
In this space and time, let us create a different world from the one where we have learnt to ignore pain, or ignore any intense feeling in all its nuance, without changing it.
***
Being with what is, when sustained over time, brings the courage to be with what is.
Sitting with fear shows us that the fear will not destroy us. We will rise out of this fire, and a part of us is vaster and deeper than what any fear can touch.
Being with sorrow shows us how deeply we are capable of longing and desire, because sorrow is simply the acknowledgement of the loss of what we longed for. Being with sorrow, in a sustained way, re-kindles our desire for life, our wish to love.
Outside the confines of medicalised psychotherapy treatment, the cure for being stuck in sorrow is to feel more of that very sorrow.
Being with anger, without acting it out in deed and word, shows us the tremendous strength and vitality we are capable of.
After some time, the fear, sorrow, or anger will come back, and at a deeper level, we will again offer our clear presence to it. Thus we will choose the path of meeting our reality, allowing it to be catalysed in the light of attention, and meeting it again and again in whichever form it arises.
The contemplative conversation is simply a real, genuine, burning exploration of reality as it presents itself to us in our emotions and in our body.
It brings about a change in what we are experiencing, simply by the fact of sustained sitting with it.
It brings us to the open, vast, un-ending ground of all experience, from which all emotions, and all sensations, arise and to which they all fall back.
A contemplative conversation is the seed of a relationship that is rooted in this very ground.
The dominant culture can be understood as, essentially, an assault on contemplative conversation, and our desire and capacity for it.
The films, the hoardings, the marketplace, the parties all bait us to a different kind of conversation with the other and with ourselves.
***
One finds such a conversation in the most intense experiences of poetry and music, when a line that is recited or sung resonates so deeply that our own emotion rises from the depths and its intensity moves us to tears.
Sometimes we find a contemplative conversation in people’s experience of humble, simple prayer.
Sometimes we find it in the work of some therapists and philosophers.
In finding it, we find meaning and connection. In losing it, we are, as if, in flight from the ground of ourselves.
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