For when going within scares you

Sometimes to go within is the last place I want to go. For to go within is to face the noise, the chaos, the vestiges and ruins of that which has been erected and destroyed here. It is to remember that which I’ve tried to forget; it is to see what I’ve wanted to unsee.

But once I cross that rugged terrain

there is stillness.

Before that there is restlessness, frenzy, manic motion;

there is turning away from the noise or intensity.

And that restlessness can take a lifetime to reckon with. For to feel what is beneath its’ chaotic movements is to feel the dis-ease and the groundlessness of existence.

The outside activity and motion mimics the internal unsettled mind. To quiet and find stillness is to accept that there is dis-ease and suffering. That is the first noble truth.

Attachment to the restless, endless to do’s and underlying dissatisfaction and pain is to detach from or resist the acceptance of the reality of conditions just as they are. I don’t mean to accept that which is intolerable.

I’ve noticed that my own dissatisfaction and dis-ease arises when something is not going “my way or how I’d want them to be going”, an ego agitation, and sometimes more insidious, a trauma or an oppressive force or system.

The truth is also that we are each whole. Too often, I let a situation or a person take me out of myself and into the restlessness, that gnawing compulsion to flee.

To stay within is to repattern the wiring, is to radically change the nervous system response and that of the mind.

It is to remind the body that it gets to stay here

to rest in place

to rest in body.

What is here is You.

Welcome Home.