Healing is reaching into the spaces where new sentences are put together.
The breath does the reaching. New stories emerge. Rocks, legs, hearts, relationships, water: these are all stories we tell. Can you see a rock without seeing it through language? Can you love another person without reducing them to old sentences? These questions keep me fascinated with practice, which is essentially the undoing of clinging. Clinging to old narratives. And as narratives unbuckle, what emerges is compassion. Not just empathy (resonating with another’s suffering), but movement toward doing something. Unrehearsed activity. A new response.
Although people don’t often articulate it this way, one of the things that meditation practice is doing is teaching you how to use your imagination in new ways. When you’re sad, or when your issues are right in your face, one of the problems is there’s a failure of imagination. You don’t have a way to frame what you’re experiencing in a bigger, more spacious way. In a way, neurosis is just when there is no space around what you’re perceiving. It’s filling up the view. Part of meditation practice is changing your focus so that you can see what you’re stuck on differently, and experience what you’re experiencing with a much larger background.