Mindfulness Meditation Retreat at Home Part II

One more snowy weekend in New England allowed me to have another mindfulness retreat in the (dis)comfort of my own home with a 5 year-old who is crawling the walls with cabin fever and a 15 month-old who is now getting in to everything within her reach, and a few things that are not which she doesn’t realize until the fall comes. I guess Mother Nature has determined that I am need of back to back to back retreats where I must confront my urge to escape discomfort head on.  She’s hard core I’ll tell you...

I’ve found though, each time has been a little bit different, and I attribute that to two things. 

One, I try my best, as Eckhart Tolle suggests, to practice the power of now in order to notice the nuance that makes this moment truly unique and therefore never to pass this way again.  This allows me to experience each moment with my children (the good, the bad and the ugly- I mean me of course!) while holding reverence for the brevity of it all.  It allows me to try to live the words my auntie spoke at the time of her passing from colon cancer: “I’ve had a good life. I’ve had a hard life. I’ve enjoyed it all.”  So perfectly dialectical which is the nature of parenthood I believe- the trick is holding the tension between the poles without falling on your face, especially when trapped inside a 1000 foot ranch house with 2 children, 2 cats and a dog in the middle of a snow storm!

The second piece that has begun to shift the way I experience my escape urge that seems to rise up in moments of mindfulness retreat, is to say to myself: “it’s totally okay. That’s just what happens for me. I don’t know if it always will, but for now it is what it is, so how can I work with it?”

If you have read my blog, you know I find the words and lives of others to be extraordinarily helpful in navigating this spiritual unfolding, and what I’m describing above is no exception.

Let’s take poet Mary Oliver.  I once heard Mary Oliver described in a Unitarian Universalist sermon with humor as the patron saint of UU’s, and personally, I have found this to be true.  Hearing or reading her poetry, especially to us who find great serenity and comfort in the natural world, allows me to let out a long and necessary exhale. But recently I learned more biographic details about the poet herself that have stayed with me as they validated my own experience, which is to say, I didn’t feel as separate and alone. 

In an interview, which as I understand is quite rare for this poet who has largely stayed out of the press by choice, Ms. Oliver shared that she has always had difficulty with what she called “enclosures” and has maintained a preference for staying in motion.

You know when you hear something that strikes a cord inside of you so perfectly that goose bumps spring up all over you? That’s exactly what I felt when I learned of Ms. Oliver’s difficulty and preference because I have the same ones.  But I have always deemed them to be a fault of mine- something that needed fixing or repairing, something I must improve about myself, which I of course aimed to do through mindfulness meditation.  Imagine my surprise to be able to instead say “me too,” and begin to accept this piece of myself as perfect just the way it is.  Or in other words, it is absolutely fine that I have trouble being enclosed in my little house with little possibility for motion during a snow storm.  The great Mary Oliver might have difficulty with that too!

To me, her now very famous poem “Wild Geese” captures the essence of this acceptance of self.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Around 2 p.m. on Sunday afternoon the snow finally stopped and the temperature at long last reached above the freezing mark so me and the kids were able to venture outside.  So I packed them up (no small task in and of itself), and drove them over to the local park that has a fantastic hill for sledding.  By the time we got there the sky was this gorgeous light blue, the sun was bright, and enough kids had already been sledding to make for the perfect paths to go down at top speed.  Filled with gratitude, I put my daughter in the carrier on my back and walked by son to the top of the hill thrilled (and relieved) to be outside and moving again.  Mary Oliver might have been too.

How about you? What aspects of yourself have you encountered in the mirror of  mindfulness meditation? Were you able to accept them?

Encountering Prayer

I remember the time I first really encountered prayer. Actually, I think prayer encountered me because the first prayer was born of an unplanned moment. When, almost organically, words began to feed themselves to me, and there seemed to be no other choice but to speak them. In fact, it did not feel like choice at all. My hunch is that this is not so unusual.

I recall I was lying on my bathroom floor wrapped in a towel. I had just finished taking a shower.  I remember feeling that the act of taking a shower had seemed to take the very last bit of energy that I had, and  I could not take one more step. So I just lay down right there on the bathmat and I cried. That moment was utterly painful and scary, no terrifying.

At the time I did not know that I had postpartum depression. I had just had my first child only weeks before and I was in that tailspin of confusion and anxiety that is inherent in first-time parenthood.  I only wish now I could go back to that younger version of me lying on the floor of the bathroom crying to reassure her. I would pick her up, hold her, and tell her with confidence and tenderness that everything will be okay.  I would say, “I know you cannot imagine this now, but you will get through this.”

According to Barbara Brown Taylor, who is a former Christian minister and now full-time writer and professor of theology, the beginning of my prayer life stemming from a moment of the most painful vulnerability I have ever experienced is no surprise. In her book An Altar in the World she says:

Pain is provocative. Pain pushes people to the edge...Pain strips away all the illusions required to maintain the status quo. Pain begs for change, and when those in its grip find no release on earth, plenty of them look to heaven-including some whose formal belief systems preclude such wishful thinking.

Yup, that was me in April, 2009.  And I would say, this includes an utterly secularbelief system.

The interesting thing is, that first prayer was spoken without any hesitancy or self-consciousness.  This was arguably because desperation and major hormonal imbalances were at play, but nonetheless noteworthy because when I tried to recreate that moment (the engagement in prayer, not the pain) it was comically awkward and uncomfortable.  In fact, it took years for me to begin to settle in to a prayer life that resembled anything like comfort or familiarity.  

And it took effort. In the beginning I couldn’t come up with my own words without feeling like what I was saying was trite, corny or just plain inauthentic. So I turned to others for guidance.

I tried reading books on prayer like Kate Braestrupp’s Beginners Grace: Bringing prayer to life. I printed out song lyrics and poems off the internet that I thought sounded like prayer-like but still using words that were more “me.” I read other people’s prayers by paging through books by Marianne Williamson and the like in the morning or before bed.  I went to my local library’s annual used book sale fundraiser to find all three of the Conversations with God trilogy by Neale Donald Walsch plus Friendship with God: An uncommon dialogue.  I even went back to my mind to my old AL-ANON days to try to remember what folks had said in meetings about prayer being a means of talking to my higher power and meditation being a practice of listening to her/him/it.

It took quite some time to get passed the judgments that what I was doing and saying sounded goofy or weird.  Which, if you are reading this and you come from a long lineage of prayerful people, this may make little or no sense to you.  But I can tell you from experience, that if you didn’t like me, and you are not in one of those throwing-your-hands-up-in-the-air-I-will-try-anything moments like I was that day in April, it takes quite a bit of time before you can embody your prayer because all those inner dialogues about what prayer “should” look like or sound like or be like persist.  It can be so hard in fact, that, without the experience I had of hitting a rock bottom on my bathroom floor, I don’t know that I have would have ever begun to pray.

I think that is the possibility of pain though. Maybe even the function of pain.  Barbara Brown Taylor says “pain makes theologians of us all. If you have spent even one night in real physical [emotional] pain, then you know what that can do to your faith in God, not to mention your faith in your own ability to manage your life.” I couldn’t agree more. And I can tell you, I manage my life far differently now than I did 6 years ago.  But isn’t that the hope for us all? That we gain wisdom and insight as we grow and awaken, and have compassionate space for our younger selves who were doing the best they could with the information they had at that moment in time?

What helps me to remember that compassion is to hold the image of a road in mind as the spiritual path.  Sometimes we are on a Rt. 1 driving up the Pacific Coast on a road so windy that we cannot see what is next.  No way to know how the difficulty we are going through now will flesh out in the straight ahead that will follow. And just having to trust, have faith, that all will be revealed in time.  For now though, we have all we need including the episodic pain and suffering that can, as Taylor says, “pop your clutch and shoot you into the next gear.”

On my desk at work I have a bookmark given to me by a former patient of mine.  It says “Every moment has something to offer us. Every single moment.” That’s it’s own prayer right there, and a good reminder to hold during those painful rock bottoms.

What about you? How did you begin to pray? What pain in your life prompted the beginning of a spiritual practice?

Navigating Our Minds in Meditation

They say mindfulness meditation helps you increase your awareness of your own mind. I have absolutely found this to be true.  It is certainly not the only way. Any good Cognitive Therapist worth her money should be able to do the same thing.  But I have found the length of time it takes to identify, notice and untangle my thought patterns goes far beyond 6-12 sessions, and is more like 6-12 years.  Therefore, a mindfulness meditation practice makes far more sense from a practical sense. For me, this is a marathon, not a sprint.

One particular thought pattern I have become more conscious of over the years is comparisons.  On a regular basis my mind is calculating, as if in a GPS, where I stand in relation to something else.  The comparison thought pattern is certainly not uniquely my own.  In fact, I would argue it is dreadfully human. As common place as brown hair, which I also have.

Yet despite its epidemic nature, comparisons has continued to slink around into the confines of our minds without the CDC coming up with a new vaccine for this thought pattern that I believe causes a good part of the suffering in our lives.

Now, the suffering does not come with the comparison itself, the stating of facts.  The suffering comes with how we interpretthose facts.  I’ll give you some examples:

1.)  I used to meditate every day, now I do it once a week. Translation: My practice is not good enough!

2.)  At least I have a job, my friend just lost hers. Translation: What am I complaining about?

3.)  My neighbor always takes her son on and off the bus, and I do not. Translation: I’m not a good mom.

4.)  She has lost all the baby weight, I haven’t. Translation: I failed at that.

You don’t have to be Judith Beck, the famous Cognitive therapist, or Jack Kornfield, the famous Western Buddhist teacher, to see a pattern here.  Not good enough.  Insufficient. Not worthy or deserving.  Unquestionably, this is notrocket science. It is hard though, and moving beyond our automatic thoughts and core beliefs about ourselves takes time.  But the pay-off is huge for practicing, as is the cost of remaining stuck believing our limited thoughts are actually who we are as whole people.

In past posts I have written about author, psychotherapist and Buddhist teacher Tara Brach who wrote Radical Acceptance: Embracing your life with the heart of a Buddha, and in it she talks about this very subject. She says:

“Perhaps the biggest tragedy in our lives is that freedom is possible, yet we can pass our years trapped in the same old patterns.  Entangled in the trance of unworthiness, we grow accustomed to caging ourselves in with self-judgment and anxiety, with restlessness and dissatisfaction.”

For me, it is enormously validating to hear that others, who I would argue are further along this path of waking up than I am (oh, there goes another comparison… It’s insidious!), have battled their own way through the same labyrinths with the same one-eyed monsters looking them down.  If you do as well, I think this is important because validation can lead to a feeling of connection, rather than separateness. 

Tara Brach says in particular reference to the thought pattern I myself struggle with, though I think it is true for most others too, “feeling unworthy goes hand in hand with feeling separate from others, separate from life.  If we are defective, how can we possibly belong?”  Which is why for me, historically, comparisons have been not at all benign, they were malignant. Analogous to a diseased tree that not only needed to be cut down to its stump, but also removed all the way to the root source.

The thing is, comparisons don’t have to go down this way. Noticing the space between myself and something else is not inherently harmful, it’s what I do with that space in my own head that’s the problem. In fact, comparisons, if navigated skillfully, do not have to prompt feelings of unworthiness or inadequacy at all, but could instead yield inspiration, compassion or gratitude, and every so often, joy or love.

In The Art of Happiness the Dalai Lama talks about this very practice.  He says if we think of comparisons as “an ability to look at events from different perspectives,” then it can be a strategy that can be very helpful.  He writes:

“If you can make comparisons, view your situation from a different perspective, somehow something happens. If you only look at one event, then it appears bigger and bigger.  If you focus too closely, too intensely, on a problem when it occurs, it appears uncontrollable. But if you compare that event with some other greater event, look at the same problem from a distance, then it appears smaller and less overwhelming.”

Author Anne Lamott says basically the same thing, in her much more humorous and irreverent way, at the beginning ofSmall Victories when she says: “The worst possible thing you can do when you’re down in the dumps, tweaking, vaporous with victimized self-righteousness, or bored, is to take a walk with dying friends. They will ruin everything for you.”

Of course she is being funny here, super funny I think!, but making the same point as the Dalai Lama all the same.  Comparison, if used for good instead of evil (toward ourselves that is) can bring us to authentic gratitude, inspiration, compassion, joy and/or love.

I’ve experienced this myself a few times.  Once, was similar to Anne Lamott’s observation, in the context of my auntie’s 5 year battle with colon cancer with all the fun stuff like a colostomy bag and a tumor (this is going to be gross, but it’s still true) on her behind.  Sometimes, when I am going through something difficult or painful, I imagine my auntie’s experience and the integrity and honor she brought to it, and I have to say it helps. It truly does.  More recently, I had a patient tell me about her struggles that are both very much based in poverty, one being bed bugs and a negligent landlord, and I couldn’t help but gain some perspective on my own current stressors.

What’s more, if Tara Brach’s observation is correct, that comparison has the potential to breed a sense of separateness, I have to say in both examples I described above I felt the opposite.  I felt drawn to these individuals and my own life as a whole.  Not a shame-on me-for-not-being-stronger kind of way, but more like, “okay, I havesome resources. I can get through this. I can do it.”  Reminders of my own abundance versus scarcity. Reminders of my own strengths versus limitations. Reminders of our common human emotional experience versus our life differences.

So I ask you, what thought patterns has your meditation practice revealed to you? How have you been able to transcend these patterns?

Spiritual Seeking & Sexism

Lately I’ve been contemplating women and the life of the soul.  Not exclusively my own per se, but those around me as well as those of the past.  It seems amazing to me that in 2015 there are still very few prominent models for us female seekers who have chosen more than one vocation (motherhood and work and a spiritual life) to follow. How is that possible?

If you read my blog you already know author Sue Monk Kidd is a favorite of mine, and last night I just finished reading her novel The Invention of Wings. Briefly, it is a historical novel based on the real life of a white, southern, feminist, abolitionist woman named Sarah Grimke and a fictionalized African American slave named Handful. The story tells the narrative of their two unfolding lives in the 19^thcentury.  I’ll let you discover the book for yourself, but last night I was left with a sadness inside that reflected my sense of scarcity for these types of stories—fictional or historical—that help us imagine women in complex 3 dimensional fashion.

Not surprisingly, if you have read other works by Sue Monk Kidd, both characters Sarah and Handful have rich and evolving spiritual sensibilities that seem as important, if not more, than all the stepping stones of life events that each follows.  

But alongside that spiritual life, Sue Monk Kidd also painted the painful reality of sexism and racism in the lives of American women, and this led me to reflect on my own grandmother.

She was born in 1911, and when she was a student at the University of Michigan from 1929-1934, as a woman, she was not able to walk through the front doors of the student union building. She was forced to enter through the rear.  I learned this when she returned many years later to visit her alma mater, and was surprised by the invitation of my mother for her to walk through the main entrance, reserved in her time only for men. This same grandmother was also later fired from her job in the 1940’s when her employer learned she was pregnant. Only to have to look for work again to support her two young children when her husband died at the age of 38, and she was left with no income.

In considering my grandmother’s experience, or that of the characters in the novel, it seems all women have experienced a variation of these obstacles with differences being only in degree whether it be1829, 1929 or 2015.  And while this saddens me deeply, it also makes it perfectly understandable why women still struggle with feelings of insufficiency or continue to feel unsure that they may pursue a life containing love and creativity, both necessary for the life of the soul I would argue. Obstacles such as sexism and racism just reinforce these harmful beliefs that still sit at the core of many women.

And spiritual communities are certainly not immune to these isms either.  In my search for models of women seekers I’ve been reading about folks who’ve dedicated themselves to a spiritual path as a vocation in and of itself. For example, I’ve been piecing through Dakini Power which is a book about several prominent female Buddhists of the Tibetan tradition.  I want to say, I have thoroughly enjoyed a completely female focused perspective on this topic (it is also written by a woman Michael Haas), but felt dismayed to hear the tales of “spiritual” male teachers who pushed their own sexual agendas with their female students. 

I had read similar accounts in Stephen Cope’s book Yoga and the Quest for the True Self where he in part discusses  the legacy of sexual relationships between Amrit Desai, founder of Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in the Berkshires--a place I’ve come to know and love--and his female followers.  And abuse of power to say the least.

For me, stories like these, and  historical reminders like I discussed above, can leave me feeling both disillusioned and inspired.  Disillusioned because my naive little girl inside still seeks a perfect safehaven for her to endlessly explore the world without risk of injury.  Inspired because I am wanting, craving actually, representations of women who persevere despite the obstacles, the isms.  Women who are interesting, multi-layered and dynamic.  Women courageous enough to blaze a path for the rest of us that is both outward, through the creation of a vocation in the world including motherhood, and inward, through the nurturance of a soul that thirsts for something authentic and meaningful.

I challenge you to continue to persevere with me. And if you come across models of women who have persisted in the development of a spiritual life and vocation, I would certainly love to hear from you. We need their stories!

Maitri in Day to Day Life

Sweetheart.  Darling.  Or my mother’s favorite, sweetness.  Some spiritual teachers tell us to refer to ourselves by these names in moments of distress.  For some, this is the start of loving kindness practice.

Now, I don’t know about you, but calling myself “sweetheart” does not come naturally.  In fact, for me that word is just plain corny.  But I must tell you, I’ve used it.  When I’ve been irritable, agitated, restless, anxious or some other variation of god-awful, I have called myself sweetheart in the context of a prayer.  The prayer is not my own, it belongs to author, Buddhist teacher and psychotherapist Sylvia Boorstein.  It goes like this:

Sweetheart,

I can see that you are in pain.

Relax.

Take a breath.

Pay attention to what is happening.

We’ll get through this together.

I find this self-compassionate prayer to be completely counterintuitive during times of distress because my automatic response is to be critical and frustrated with myself.  Some version of this can literally come out of my mouth or just circumnavigate my heart space: Get it together! Moving on… What is the matter with you?! The spoken or silent version of this is always edgy and kind of mean to be honest.  Certainly not the way I speak to others in times of distress or otherwise.  But I do to myself, especially when I am not performing in life the way I believe I should be (those damn should statements, right?!)

When I think of the word “ahimsa,” a Sanskrit word which means to not injure, I am reminded of the work I still need to do on my harsh inner critic who still seems to rear her ugly head during stressful times. In the past, I might have tried to do the why: as in why do I do those harmful things?  However, in my experience, rehashing the “why,” does not seem to deter me from engaging in the harmful automatic behavior, even if the insight is there.  What I can do though, is practice, which is to say, condition, a new response to how I speak to myself during situations that cause intense unpleasant emotions. The practice could be “maitri,” another Sanskrit word, which means friendliness or benevolence, often in the form of loving kindness exercises.

Take this morning for example.  Well, this morning actually began sometime in the middle of the night when my husband was called out to plow snow again.  This was quickly followed up by my daughter crying off and on for several hours due to a belly ache. Of course I didn’t know it was a belly ache at the time, until the explosive diarrhea came just minutes before leaving for daycare.  And so on and so forth.

Because I don’t have any trouble at all practicing compassion toward others, if my colleague had come in this morning sharing the same story, some version of Sylvia Boorstein’s prayer would have effortlessly spilled right out of my mouth.  But with myself…it’s more like kick a horse when it’s down. 

How is that helpful? Well, it’s not, my rational mind knows that.  But unfortunately my rational mind does not always rule the roost when it comes to being tender toward myself.

Though it could.  I would like it to.

I’ve had glimpses of this maitri practice.  For instance when I am distressed now I may light a candle to consciously invite the spirit of god into my living room or kitchen, what have you, as a symbolic way to say: “HELP!”  The other day, a weekend, when time is more flexible, I stopped everything I was doing and just sat down at my dining table to read a paragraph from a book that basically said: “You are doing okay.  Keep it up. You will get through this.  This is only a moment in time.”  Not overly Susie-Sunshine, but not cruel or punitive either. Progress.

I had shared in an earlier post that I spent several years in my twenties going to AL-ANON meetings, and one popular slogan that has always stayed with me these years later is: progress not perfection.  I try to remember that slogan when I am struggling to practice ahimsa with myself.  When reciting Ms. Boorstein’s prayer is the foreign equivalent of me trying to speak Arabic.  Sweetheart, you are working on it…

What loving kindness exercises do you practice to bring more ahimsa into your own life?

Mystical Experiences

I’ve heard it said by mystics that the best way to imagine our relationship with god is to imagine a small circle on the inside of a very large circle.  To be clear, we humans are the small circle, god is the large circle.  We are quite literally encircled by god, from the inside out.  So when I see someone looking upward at the sky saying “why god?,” I think, couldn’t you just as easily look down? Look left or right? Or just close your eyes? 

I have always liked the image of the circles because it is such a simple reflection of my own growing theology.  But I must admit, it has been few and far between that I trulyfelt myself in communion with god.  I’ve intuited so much.  And my heart tells me this is so.  But I’ve always been just short of the sensation of that held, embodying quality.  And craving it does not seem to help you get closer to the source in case you wondered…

On last Sunday, though, I felt it.  I felt god.  In me and around me.  I close my eyes now as I write, and the sensation stirs in me again.  It makes me want to cry…

The experience happened in a yoga class, though I suspect it could have been anywhere where you have been intentionally cultivating a unified relationship with god.  For me, that is in church, in my work, in my parenting, in my relationships and on the yoga mat.

I have to tell you though, I worry about writing and sharing about such moments.  The words “wack-a-doodle” and flakey start to come to mind which is a reflection of  my own internalized judgmental critic of spiritual and religious people.  The part of me that is still embarrassed by my own faith; wanting to shamefully break eye contact when the subject of god comes up in conversation.  Not that I generally let it….

There is a Rabbi named Lawrence Kushner who was interviewed on my favorite NPR show, “On Being.” He is an expert on Jewish mysticism, Kabballah, who said on the topic of sharing mystical experiences: "You don't get invited to dinner parties if you start talking that way."  I thought that was very funny.  And maybe it is not true for certain parts of the world or certain parts of the United States, or celebrities like Madonna.  But in liberal Waspy New England, I would say it is.  Being a heretic here seems to be anyone who is nonsecular, not the other way around.

Yet, I felt it.  I felt that experience of what Rabbi Kushner called “the suspicion that the brokenness, discord & discontinuities of everyday life conceal a hidden unity.” And then, for just a moment, on that yoga mat, the sensation that I, to paraphrase Kushner, have been all along a dimension of the divine which was reflected in the spiritual awareness that the boundary was momentarily erased between god and me.

I have this urge to apologize here or maybe minimize the experience to sound more intellectual and less “out there.”  Because to meet me you would think this woman is such a Type A personality, and I am.  I guess god just embraces us all.  So I will do neither.  I will continue, and I will describe how it felt.

The sensation was a soft, warmth.  It was like a deep, penetrating calm.  Not a I’m-not-anxious-right-now-calm.  Something different and more central and stable having nothing to do with how I was feeling or my mood at the time which all seems more superficial or at least too fluid somehow.  This experience was more like connecting to something that has always existed.

I’ve heard people use the analogy of the depths of the ocean or other bodies of water to describe the potential of mindfulness meditation.  Jon Kabat Zinn does in his book I posted about the other day Everyday Blessings in the chapter “The Eighteen Year Retreat.” The top of the water is like the mind and subject to all the weather conditions of the day including calm seas with brilliant sunshine to dark hurricane conditions.  But underneath, underneath is the jewel.  Always there. Always available to us no matter what the mind state.

This analogy has always worked for me because since I was a girl learning how to swim at Girl Scout camp each summer, I have loved swimming underwater.  Standing in an ocean, a pool, a river and taking a huge breath in, jumping up just a little bit, and then diving down head first only to stay underneath as long as I can possibly hold my breath.  My favorite swimming quarters has always been lakes though.  Clean, clear freshwater lakes allows me to open my eyes, which is hard to in the salty ocean or a chlorinated pool.  I prefer to actually see the calm and hearthe quiet that lies beneath the surface.  In fact, I have always found it very reassuring. 

Until recently though, I never really knew what I was reassured of.  I think I do now.  Faith. Faith that no matter what is going on up here, on the material level that is my day to day, you are always quietly holding me, surrounding me with your knowing calm.  I forget that.  Multiple times a day in fact, and so my burgeoning faith requires still daily reminders.

The experience on the yoga mat was not just a reminder though, it was the real deal.  And even if it means I won’t be invited to dinner parties anytime soon, I will say, I find so much solace, even now sitting at my computer, to pause, close my eyes and refocus my attention on that sensation of god.

So I must ask you, have you ever truly experienced the sensation of god? I won’t tell anyone…