12 Aug. Waiting for my own funeral.

Last night, I sat for 20 minutes. Poor. Opposing a healthy need for sleep is not meditation. I should have gone to bed. Grumpy afterward. Felt like a person woken up in the middle of the night. Meditation used up that little energy I had left. Attachment to meditation is still an attachment. Makes you do stupid things.

This morning I did 60 minutes of Buddho. When the final bell rang I decided to sit until my family wakes up. I felt pain in lower back. So strange: when I tried to distract myself from the pain it became almost unbearable. When I gave it my full attention, looked at it with compassion and kindness, assured myself that the pain is not a threat, that it will not kill me, the pain disappeared. Just like that. Shocking. Truly shocking.

I ended up sitting for over 50 minutes more. Until my 3-year-old daughter walked into the kitchen. Nearly 2 hours altogether. When I managed to focus on my breath, on the present moment, the meditation was pleasant. It was like existing outside of time. When I got distracted the sitting became a horror. Pure horror. With all its hellish delights. Pain in the whole body from remaining in the same position. Brain frying up. Fear that what appears to last 10 years is actually only a minute.

Later today I continued reading “One hundred of solitude” while sipping my damn good coffee outside the house and came across a passage that perfectly describes my morning sitting:

“How are you, Colonel?” he asked in passing. “Right here,” he answered. “Waiting for my funeral procession to pass.”

And then, when I walked inside to grab my phone to take a note of the quote, a seagull drank my damn good coffee: