THE FUNK

It happens.  You wake one morning and it's as though you had never learned a thing about peace of mind in all your years of meditation practice.  You're in a funk.  Everything you have spent years building up in the way of inner strength has suddenly collapsed around you and you're left defenseless, unable to resist the feeling of worthlessness that overwhelms you.  You feel like a fool, a fraud.  You castigate yourself for acting the victim.  You look back over all those years of hard work, dedication and, yes, some pain, and it seems that nothing you've ever done amounts to anything.

Now nothing is turning out the way you had planned.  The things that seemed important and valuable only yesterday look like a sham today.  Your mortgage company calls early in the morning to announce that you have been assessed a late fee because, they claim, the payment that is made automatically every month from your bank has not been received.  You open your wallet and find that several cards are missing, including one that bears your social security number...

You know that kind of a day?  I woke up to it yesterday, and to the accompanying funk.  It survived an impatient morning sit and resisted every effort to dispel it.  You'd think you might have acquired just enough wisdom from your practice to be able to recognize the transitory nature of such feelings, but what you "know" is quite different from what you feel when the funk arrives.  The mind soon gets attached to the turmoil it's experiencing, and slips into high gear to keep up.  You end up no longer cruising along at a comfortable rate, but racing wildly just to keep up.

At the end of the day, just before bed time, I was unwise enough to do a final check on my email--only to find a late-night communication from the mortgage company reasserting their non-payment charge.  Obviously, the protest email I had sent earlier in the day to contest their claim had been read by a machine.  Then I cracked open a new book, sent to me for review, and was distinctly annoyed to be reminded that a day like this is a gift that is supposed to tell us something important about ourselves.  If only we can listen...

It's the listening, of course, that is the hard part.  And to tell the truth, I wasn't ready to do it last night.  I chose to be just annoyed.