From: Five Elements Five Dakinis 2
Full transcript
Audioclip
Full transcript
Audioclip
For instance can you recall something over the past week where you were rigid? Can any of you think of anything like that? Okay, check.
Okay. Just go back to that feeling of being rigid. And let your attention go beneath the rigidity. What do you find there?
Most of the time, and actually I’d probably say all of the time, you find that that rigidity is a kind of hardness which is covering a sense of hollowness or uncertainty. And that’s why you’re rigid because inside there’s this uncertainty. If you’re really confident about something you’d never get rigid. You always stay very relaxed. But it is that little lack of confidence which causes you to clamp down. “I’m not sure it should be this way,” so you clamp down. You become rigid.
Now if you go a little bit further than that, you get in touch with an internal feeling that things are actually pretty unsteady inside. The ground is shaking and this is the earthquake and you’re not sure if you’re going to keep your footing, or you’re going to keep your balance. And there’s a very definite fear here.
Now in the ordinary course of our lives this stuff usually goes by so quickly we don’t even notice it. And what we’re doing in this practice is actually slowing the whole process down so we actually feel each component of this.
And I think if you review situations in which you react rigidly—you just dug your heels in and became very stubborn and stiff. You’ll see that there’s an underlying fear of losing your position or losing your balance. And that’s what’s provoking you actually.
So here I’ve described the movement from form which is this rigidity and stiffness. To emptiness, which is this open space when it feels like the ground is shaking, in which there’s a fear. A fear of losing balance.
Now when we hit that fear, it’s very predictable. What happens?
You know if you stand somebody on a table or something like that and then you start shaking the table that’s like the ground is shaking. What’s the first thing that a person does? They grab something, just like that. That’s what we do. That’s the reflex reaction. And so we grab anything in order to keep our balance
Now, once we grab that thing and because we think I need this to hold onto my balance, now we hold on to it. And then something very interesting happens. We’re holding onto this so tightly, like this. We can’t move. We’re stuck. We’re in imprisoned. And you see this in people all the time. That they are so, holding so tightly to certain principles or certain ideals or certain aspects of their life that there’s no flexibility there and they themselves are imprisoned by their perspective. So that describes the movement from emptiness to form.
And the reaction chain is, it just cycles around and around and around. We become rigid as a reaction to fear. We grab something. It imprisons us. And because it imprisons us we become very, very inflexible. And any kind of movement puts us in touch with the underlying shakiness again, and so it just keeps cycling around becomes more and more intense.
