LIFE-LINE

Here's how it went this morning...

After metta, I started out with a familiar exercise to settle the mind, bringing the attention to fingernails, fingers, wrists and forearms, upper arms, shoulders; then down to the toenails, bottoms of the feet and ankles, lower legs, thighs and hip joints, pelvic bone; lower back, mid-back, upper back and neck; skull and jawbone; both hemispheres of the brain, eyes, nose, mouth and ears; and following the breath down through the throat to the chest, lungs, heart; upper abdomen, lower abdomen, and out...

That steadying feat accomplished to the best of my ability, I brought my attention to the thought that I've been working on: I don't want to die.  And what came up, surprising me, this morning, was the oldest of all my deeply buried memories: the closest I ever came to actually dying, to my knowledge, was at the moment of my birth.  The umbilical cord got twisted around my neck, so my father told me later in my life, and I was saved only by the swift action of the midwife with a pair of scissors.  Ironically, the life-line that had assured my survival since conception now threatened to prevent my entry into the the world.

These things keep coming back to haunt us.  Much, much later, I came to associate this sublimated memory with fears about writing, about being choked off at the throat in such a way that the words would not come out--or come out only in a strangled version of what I wanted to say.  I came to understand the need to open up that passageway through an act of consciousness.  It was perhaps the first of many epiphanies that helped me to change the course of my life, and to become the writer I was always meant to be.

So that came up.  And the truth is that the identity I have created for myself as a writer has been threatened, recently, by a lack of energy and motivation.  Yet I fear what might result if I were to allow that particular entity to "die."  Who would I then be?  Would I lose my value, my sense of worth as a human being?  Would I be nothing?

Then a second insight: the neck pain I have been suffering from for too long now, more than a month, surely plays into this.  The neck, of course, is the physical connection between head and body, the direct passageway between brain and heart.  If the neck is locked up, as mine has been, that connection becomes tenuous.  And if the head is severed from the body, of course, the result is... death.  Having lived for the better part of my life "in the head" and having learned the hard way of the importance of the heart, I have tried to remain aware of the need to maintain that connection through a continuing act of consciousness.  To lose it is, in some important way, to die.

The work of meditation then, as I see it, is to open up that life-line and to keep it open.  I surrender too easily to old habits--particularly the bad ones!  To revert to the question that started this whole line of thought: why am I doing this?  To facilitate the passage between head and heart!  Which is an answer I can live with...