Silence So Beautiful

I attended a Quantum Wealth workshop last weekend. It was led by Mr. Steven Sashen from Boulder, Colorado. Luckily I didn't have to travel there (although it would've been nice) since it took place in my hometown. It felt really a priviledge to be able to attend. Steven's teachings were all about using our relationship with money as a practical spiritual practice. A lot of the stuff was based on The Work by Byron Katie, which I was only anecdotally familiar with before. I liked the direct approach of it. The other "Work" known to me is G.I. Gurdjieff's Fourth Way practice. Katie's to-the-point inquiry seemed like a great supplement to the sometimes tedious but very stabilizing  practice of the Fourth Way which I've been involved with for some years now. Another point of departure was a meditative standpoint similar to that of vipassana meditation. I attended vipassana (as taught by S.N. Goenka) course in the summer of 2005. Although I prefer zazen as my daily sitting meditation practice, the "passionate equinimity" of vipassana was appealing. I'm glad it appeared again in my life in the form of Quantunm Wealth. In that it was all about finding the still point, the fulcrum where the opposite ends of the pendulum meet. That still point exists as a compassionate acceptance of all our conflicting desires. By resting in that Witness it is easier to let whatever decision might arise lead us into taking the next step.

That is what brings me to the actual topic of this post. What I've come to notice is that our lives tend to go around in circles. We have our set of desires and aversions. Swinging from one end to another we are bound by what we want and what we don't want. I've been painting myself into that corner for a while now, and experiencing that empiness beyond the opposites, however slightly, is a great relief. In my daily life it sometimes comes in the form of a feeling that I'm lying as I speak "my mind". More often than not it could be such a good practice just to refrain from choosing. Just seeing and feeling into those opposites that claim their space inside our beings, and realizing them as the contours of my limiting self. I think I might've written a song about that a while back. I'm not sure, since I mostly don't have a clue what my songs are about, but I think so.


PS. As a part of the course we had to make an exchange with two "million dollar bills". The point was to see what comes up not only in the form of concrete results but also in form of thoughts & emotions about the task too. Well, I won't go into those now, but I'm pretty pleased with the trade I made. I got a friend to work totally illeagal hours in filming & editing a music video for me, and another friend (who's a graphic designer) to make unique covers for it. Really cool! I might post the video here later on. It's for the song I mentioned above called Silence So Beautiful.