I’m finally feeling better, seeing things a little clearer. It’s easy to see now how far off the path I have strayed. Fortunately, I often have the impulse to write when I’m graced with moments of clarity, so I have all these blog posts and journal entries to help me remember the core insights that have contributed most to my sanity over the years. Coming out of the fog, I find myself retracing my steps, looking for a little familiar ground from which to carry on.
Today I made it back to base camp by way of jumping around the room like a lunatic. Strange as it may sound, this has been by core spiritual practice for the past decade or so. Calling what I did today “movement meditation” sounds pretentious as hell, considering that a fly on the wall would probably call it “bad dancing,” but whatever the label it left me in a state of energized clarity. And I’ve repeatedly discovered over the years that if I do whatever it takes to keep the window of my soul clean, everything else just takes care of itself. What baffles me is that while I know this to be true and also know precisely the set of daily practices that keep my grounded and clear-minded, I still choose–again and again–to ignore these hard-won insights. The price I pay for this ignorance is lost time, lost hope, and developmental arrest. I make myself spiritually sick until everything I do feels as fruitless as the dry heaves. I’m like so many of the drug addicts I work with–I know what to do, yet for some reason I don’t do it.
There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to change, that doesn’t want to grow, that doesn’t want to see things clearly. And that part of me can’t stand bad dancing.
