The Topic of Feeling Guilty About Not Meditation, do...

January 13, 2009

There was an interesting YB quote in the daily calendar a few days ago that you can never get rid of fear, but you can drop it. Perhaps he could say the same of guilt. I've been contemplating the distinction.

To me, dropping a negative emotion means disattaching from it, no longer identifying with it. How many times our language give us statements such as, "I am anxious" or "My guilt". Instead, these are just feelings which arise, to be experienced, and then they move on. Feelings only get stuck when we identify with them, attaching beliefs and all kinds of stories.

There are a number of ways to drop a negative emotion. One I offer here is to meditatively explore the feeling like an adventurer ,with curiosity, trying to avoid judgment and old stories from the past. Take mantra in with you, infusing the emotion with Wahe Guru (or whichever mantra you happen to be using). All things come from God, so why not negative emotions, too? They just need meditative digestion to extract the nutritive spiritual essence, then the meditative excretory system can very healthily dispose of the waste products. God loves us so much that He/She will keep serving us the spiritual food until we have the gift within it. This is not bad news, but only good.

So, to guilt. In Ayurveda, the dosha of guilt is kapha. The subtle dosha associated with kapha is ojas, related in Sikh parlance to amrit. The energy of kapha and amrit are the same, one of a lower frequency and the other of higher. If you fully embrace the lower energy experience (in this case, guilt), feel it completely, see it and feel it authentically as Divine, then it transmutes into the higher energy. Each time you do it, it can (and hopefully will) find a different track, leading to new experiences, but it might go something like this:

"I feel guilty for not rising in the early morning, for not doing my sadhana like I am supposed to. I am such a failure, I am a lousy yogi, it's hopeless, I'm giving up. Let's find a rationalization to make it feel better and avoid this nasty feeling." So there you meditate, whenever, maybe even walking in the woods, and these thoughts come up. Stay with them and notice the feelings associated with them. Even ham it up a little so you can really feel what it feels like to believe this stuff. These thoughts, too, are coming from God, somehow or other.

Then ease in the Divine. Stay with the feelings, but penetrate with Wahe Guru. Use creativity and start playing with the thoughts to encourage the shift in frequency of feeling. For instance, "God, you give me so much, and I just keep not listening. I try, but I cannot succeed without You. By myself, without You, I am hopeless. I'm giving up to You. If you want me up at 3 AM, get me up. Increase the pain of what it feels like to forget You and Your Teachings. I don't want it to feel good to forget You, I want those feelings to be so acute that they remind me of You. Break my heart open with longing for You. I can only, I should only, fail without You. I am Yours, I am Yours, I am Yours." If tears come, let them flow, in the sweet sadness of longing for the One, for Eternal Union. The only way out of this mess is God.

As you stay with it, notice how the sensations of guilt become difficult to find. The sensations of Love and Grace are taking over. Even be grateful to the guilt for reminding you to return to Grace. And without the kapha ama, the ego attached negativity of the guilt, notice how it just might become really easy to get up at 3 AM. Or not. But that would be God's problem, right?

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