[Note: I began this writing on Sept. 6. Finally got back to it. Today is October 18.]
This morning before I got up I listened to this meditation by Rupert Spira. In it he compares the fluctuations of the mind to the ripples and currents in the ocean and talks about how, as you go down deeper and deeper beneath the surface, the ocean becomes more and more still.
In 2006 I had a pretty serious head injury. A heavy speaker fell off a shelf and swung from the cable hitting me square in my right temporal lobe. The injury came with a gift. About a week after the injury I began having shirodhara treatments from an angel, Denise O’Dunn, whose Ayurvedic treatments put me on the path to recovery. (For more on Denise O’Dunn and her Ayurvedic treatments click here.) I received seven consecutive days of shirodhara, a beautiful modality which is one of the primary treatments for traumatic brain injury in the ancient Indian system of Ayurvedic medicine.
When we began I was in a great deal of pain and it literally hurt my brain to think. If I tried to speak I would stop after a few words because it was too painful. The thoughts were there but it was too strenuous to actually attempt to elucidate them, so I would just let them go. The result of this was that the first few weeks after the injury I experienced being totally in the moment, because that was a place within which I could rest. If I was having a cup of tea, I was simply having a cup of tea. I was fully present because it was simply to painful to be anywhere else. It was an incredible gift.
About 3 or 4 days into the treatment, as I was lying on Denise’s massage table having warm medicated oil poured onto my forehead, a thought came into my mind. In that moment, as I became aware of the thought, I had an image of water striders, the small insects that skim across the surface of water. I would often see them in our swimming pool as a kid and was fascinated by them. The awareness that accompanied the image was that the water strider was the thought, floating on the surface of a pool of water, and I could either follow the thought or I could dive down below the surface and remain in stillness. For weeks afterward I was able to simply choose presence, stillness. Initially it was a necessity. It became a choice. As time passed and the acute injury subsided the more my chattery mind returned, but the experience, knowing that place of quiet, is something that has never left and the memory of it still allows me to occasionally drop in there with relative ease.
