What sort of thing is this fear? Someone told me I'm different after returning. I knew that already, but I didn't know if people noticed or not. As I've been searching for jobs and being busy, I let my meditation slide. I didn't even sit yesterday, and at first I can hardly tell the dIfference. But I'm fairly certain there is all the difference. When I go to yoga with my teacher, it is as though I shed many layers in his presence. This allows for such a different experience than when I used to push and push in other classes. The other day we did a long series of hip openers and by the end, I was ready to scream out and cry. The poses just touch a deeper part of me when those barriers drop away. Similarly, when I meditate, layers of rationalization, compromise, and excuses drop out of my thought processes. It's like I see a truer version of myself, and the funniest part of it all is that I don't know the man who is exposed. There seems to be a steep learning curve to life, when one has never done it well before. How do you interact with people? How do you deal with your emotions?
I seem to make make innumerable mistakes. I find how unruly my mind can be, and I wonder if it's really possible to do the things I'm aiming for. Maybe I'm just where I need to be - paralyzed but growing in my self-awareness.
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"Like the beginner the swordmaster is fearless, but, unlike him, he grows daily less and less accessible to fear. Years of unceasing meditation have taught him that life and death are at bottom the same and belong to the same stratum of fact. He no longer knows what fear of life and terror of death are. He lives - and this is thoroughly characteristic of Zen - happily enough in the world, but ready enough to quit it without being in the least disturbed by the thought of death. It is not for nothing that the Samurai have chosen for their truest symbol the fragile cherry blossom. Like a petal dropping in the morning sunlight and floating serenely to earth, so must the fearless detach himself from life, silently and inwardly unmoved.
To be free from the fear of death does not mean pretending to oneself, in one's good hours, that one will not tremble in the face of death, and that there is nothing to fear. Rather, he who masters both life and death is free from fear of any kind to the extent that he is incapable of experiencing what fear feels like. Those who do not know the power of rigorous and protracted meditation cannot judge of the self-conquests it makes possible. At any rate the perfected Master betrays his fearlessness at every turn, not in words, but in his whole demeanor: one has only to look at him to be profoundly affected by it."
-Eugen Herrigel
