Dying With Each Exhale

I wrote this post yesterday, but felt it was off and didn't publish it.  The topic is one I feel close to and I hoped to say something about it, but in the moment, found this quite difficult.  Perhaps the reader will think I have said something about it, but I have not been able to express anything close to what I feel.  Nonetheless, here it is :)

Last Monday at young urban Zen, a discussion of “living and dying continuously with all being” (my interpretation of the subject) gave rise to the topic of living completely with each inhale, and dying with each exhale.  This expresses a feeling that my body has great intimacy with, and that, like so much of my bodies knowledge, I have never attempted or known how to express.  In my life, there are times of exploring the knowledge of my body regardless of whether I can talk about it or express it: these are times when my faith in and love of myself gives me a powerful self-sufficiency.  But there are also times of less faith and strength, when not having words, and not having people to discuss my experiences with, has led to me letting go of the spiritual path of listening to my body altogether.  Considering this, it strikes me that one of the functions of the sangha is to help people learn to express, or find peace in not expressing, experiences which words do not so easily convey. And of course it s also the purpose of the sangha to help people love themselves and gain faith in themselves, and to help us all learn how to do that for each other. 

To feel this continuous living and dying with is deeply important to my heart, especially right now.  The recent realization that my heart was closed in various ways has been a fresh wind, bringing with it the sincere desire to once again have an open heart.  Preoccupied with self-presentation and appearance – sexual, professional, needing to appear to myself in various ways to cover old wounds – my heart, while a beautiful one, was not involved in living and dying continuously with all being.  I have not been striving to live intimately with the moment.  Although beautiful, there was a lot of beauty missing – the beauty of living a life geared towards trying to see clearly and thus see beauty everywhere.  The beauty of my path was missing, and ultimately I want to be loved by a woman for my beautiful path and heart.  I realize now that, concerned with lesser things, I have not been presenting this side of myself to the world.  To be the man I truly want to be, and to beloved for being that man, I need a period of time to refocus and reorient my energies.  In this way my recent heartache feels like a blessing in disguise. 

Every moment in this world is like a flower that is secretly blooming as it dies.  This morning in the zendo, I exhaled fully over and over again, practicing letting go of that desire to inhale once more.  My body felt like a calm dark night, and then the sun rose, again, and again, and again.  But both the dark night and the sun rising were the full blossoming of being. 

It's a pretty clear metaphor for my life right now :)