In love with the world - 21. No picking, no choosing

Contributors

Laura and Ann

Summary 

• In this chapter MR starts his homeless life. He has no money left and he starts begging for food.
• He will have to accept any offer without picking or choosing.
• In his own words “the moment that I would skewer my pride, test my humility and measure my resolve”.
• Start asking for food is a big step for him and he finds it difficult. When his request is rejected by the corn vendor, in the beginning he takes it personally, with feelings of vulnerability, shyness, rejection, self-pity. But he realised that the hurt received was self-inflicted, being our essential nature just emptiness. 
• He compares open awareness to a guest house, where any kind of traveller passes through.  Sensations, emotions, thoughts. Sometimes they are nice, sometimes they create troubles. Now the visitor was called embarrassment and he was asking for attention. 
• He starts to meditate on emotions, looking at how this embarrassment impacted on his body, in particular his chest looked caved in, the shoulders forward, the body looking smaller, the eyelids lowered, the head pushed down.
• The intention when meditating with emotions is to stay steady with every sensation, same as we do with sound meditation.
• So, he starts working with these sensations in his body being aware of them and letting go of the resistance. He rests in these feelings of being small, unloved, unworthy bringing them to the bigger space of awareness where they became smaller. He meditates for several hours, and he ends up with a physical feeling of contentment from the acceptance.
• In the evening he receives some rice and dal that had been left on people’s plates and scraped into his bowl. The rest would be fed to dogs. 
• There was no choice to be made and he eats standing at the door a meal more delicious than any he had eaten at 5 stars hotels.
• When the night came, laying on the grass, he realises how much his previous life had been protected by others.
• With their care they had provided a circular shield around him.
• Now he feels stripped of his own skin, lonely, undefended, disoriented and marvelled. Throughout the sleepless night he vacillated between distress and delight.

The guest house by Rumi (poem) 

Questions

• Have you ever been in a situation where your request was rejected and you felt unworthy?How would you go about it now?
• Have you ever accepted just what you were given and eventually discover that it could not have been better?

Meditation

Meditation on emotions