My teacher Shinzen Young offers a descriptive term for the qualities of undulatory energy that I talked about in my post entitled ‘Lifeforce Energy.’ He labels that kind of energy ‘Flow.’ Flow is a product of impermanence, in other words it is the process of phenonema moving and breaking up in the body-mind, and our experience of flow is the direct contacting of that constant change. This change is occurring whether or no we are paying attention to it, though our conscious awareness of flow can cause it to deepen and expand, or contract in our experience. The energy may expand and contract at the same time, or suddenly vanish. These movements in all sensory domains, when contacted with our mindful awareness are the heart of creation, the force from which life is infused with energy…Shinzen calls it the Great Unborn, taking those words from his teacher Sasaki Roshi.

Flow is an interesting experience to work with in our practice. I find that flow in the body is easiest to contact, though it can occur in our visual and auditory thought spaces (Image/Talk) and also in our emotional and physical body sensations (Feel/Touch). I’ve talked about these sensory spaces in more depth in other posts.

Flow is impermanence in action. We notice that as we pay attention to a phenomena, say thougths for instance, they do not remain stagnant, but instead change over time, maybe each minute, second, nanosecond…we start off thinking about ice cream and end up circulating through thoughts about how our ex broke up with us at an ice cream shop, and then begin to catalog our terrible memories of that person. A few minutes later we might be ruminating on the pain of being single, or the pain of being in relationship. One things leads to another and as the popular saying goes ‘the only thing we can count on is change.’

Whether it is the flowing energy in our physical body, pulsation of emotional energy in the emotional body, a flow of thoughts or a persistant physical pain all these phenomena have a certain dynamic energy that we can pay attention to and witness….Impermanence doesn’t have to be an abstract concept it is occurring every moment in our experience. If you become of aware of this flow of experience in any of the sensory domains pay deep attention to it an soak your awareness in. Even our experience as a human follows these same laws of impermanence.

One experience flows into the next until we cease to exist. Humans like all other phenomena have a beginning a middle and an end. In light of this awareness of our own impermanence and the impermanence of experience we realize how precious the present is and how unique each moment is. We can strive to experience fully the present moment as deeply and richly as possible.

Some time ago I was working with anxiety in my meditation practice. I was at a time of transition, entering into a long term relationship in it’s beginning phases (exciting, but still somewhat stressful), juggling courses with working in my professional life and doing deep healing work on myself. These things added up to a lot of uneasiness and a low grade anxiety in day to day life. One day, when I happened to have a meeting with my meditation teacher, I was feeling particularly anxious and stressed. As was customary in these meetings we sat for a few minutes together at the beginning of our time together. I noticed the anxiety as a pulsating flow that originated in my heart center splashed out in vibratory waves over the rest of my body and dissipating out over my limbs before beginning again in a cycle that began at my heart. When I started speaking with D., my meditation teacher, I explained that I was feeling ‘anxiety’ during our sit. She asked about what i noticed and i explained the intense flowing and cascading energy I felt and how it was causing me to feel increasingly uneasy.

She gazed intently into my eyes and we sat in silence for a few moments. D. then said to me: : “That ‘anxiety’ is just your lifeforce energy.” I sat stunned for a moment. All of these years I had associated the feeling I was experiencing in that moment, particularly intense at that time and varying intensities throughout my life, as anxiety. It was my anxiety, it was bad and I had to get rid of it. I suddenly was crystal clear and sure that she was right and all these years i had made a major error in my view of what was going on. In the months that followed I began to notice that it was the thoughts that came with the feeling that were scary and uncomfortable. My aversion was mostly to these, but the feeling that I associated, or that co-occurred with these thoughts had been lumped into a general category of something bad and to be avoided. To think of this feeling as my ‘lifeforce energy’ completed changed how I related to it. Not only could I do nothing about this experience (if I wanted to remain alive , but I wanted more lifeforce in my life I wanted to increase my energy and live fully with my energy. This was a major impulse and intention in my pursuit of spiritual practice. Though D.’s comment had woken me up to how I had conditioned myself to be afraid of this feeling.

This insight completely changed how I approached my so-called ‘anxiety.’ Two things happened. When this feeling came up I would no longer label it as anxiety I would approach it in a friendly way and soak my awareness into it. Internally I began to say ‘yes’ to this experience, whereas I had previously always tensed and said a fully embodied ‘no’ to it. Now I found that if I was aware of what was happening in my body I would begin allow my experience, it became an ok thing to feel.

The thoughts on the other hand were scary, things like ‘You can’t do this, It will be too much,’ ‘You’ll never meditate correctly,’ ‘This is all a waste of time.’ I am aware, looking at these now in writing these seem like overgeneralized statements and not particularly scary at all. However, if these thoughts circulate in our minds without our awareness and are accompanied by the energetic undulations of our lifeforce energy…this formed a fear strong enough to be registered as anxiety by me. Awareness of the thoughts begins to allow them to be just thoughts and lose their attachment to the high energy of lifeforce. In my experience as we concentrate more an more on the thoughts with concentration and awareness, as well as equanimity they start to lose all power.

The energy inside the body, the lifeforce energy can then be savored. We can soak into it’s movement and organic power. For me, this energy was thought to be too intense initially. However, by our total mindfulness and soaking in of our awareness into the lifeforce energy that arises we can in fact become acclimated and begin to integrate higher and higher levels of energy. In fact, by engaging in practices like meditation, Tai Chi, yoga, etc. we are in fact conditioning our body-mind to handle more and more of the lifeforce energy inside of us, and more and more it can arise unhindered as this conditioning occurs. Of course, we will have to work through our fear and ignorance to get to that place where we encounter the lifeforce energy. It is important to know that much of our fear is not because this feeling is actually dangerous, in fact quite the opposite. The thoughts have made an incorrect or ignorant assessment of the situation.

Underneath our fears and anxieties is a wellspring of energy that if opened to and allowed to be in our bodies can have healing and purifying effects. Forgive me if I’m being repetitive, but I ask that you begin to look at this in your own experience. Feel the feelings and think the thoughts of anxiety and look at the different elements of this experience with your mindful awareness and notice what you find. Be open. Challenge your assumptions about your experience.