Forgetting to Forget That We Know Something

Can we ever really be totally still? I don’t know. I don’t know if anyone can know. It has been my experience that I continue to find ever deeper levels of stillness. I look back over the years of meditation and self-cultivation and see patterns of deep stillness giving way to deeper ones. I can feel like I’m really on my game, so to speak, and suddenly tap into a big ball of stress and discord. I don’t suddenly feel the stress and discord per se; I just realize that it is there, and that it has always been there. To me, this emphasizes the need for constant vigilance and awareness of one’s own inner state. Our practice can become so rote that it loses its questioning and probing qualities. We can fall into the doldrums of practice and quit forging ourselves. If we quit exploring and discovering what lies within us, we can stall out. The parts of us that are out of sync and doing us harm can reorganize and do even more damage. The road we take to healing can lead to our end if we take it half-assed.

In my experience, the biggest influence that distracts me from the Way is that of wanting to ‘use’ what I’ve gained in my practice to ‘do’ something. We let go of the big no-brainer things like our pettier emotions and simple distractions and gain some clarity. If we then turn around and replace all those things we let go of with the new distractions of our new-found awareness, we have jumped out of the pan into the fire!

The practice of the Effortless Way in whatever form it takes (Zen, Daoism, meditation, Yiquan, Taijiquan, etc.) is the same in the end as it is in the beginning and the middle – effortless! I forget that, and I’m sure you do to. But even in the forgetting we move toward the way of things don’t we? If we know we have forgotten, we create the opportunity to remember and to be.