Ah, one of those days...  As if good yoga and meditation had a backlash...  but, you turn the pain and lonesome feelings into life energy.

The days you seem to have time to write are sometimes the harder ones...

It's human nature, that you grow tired of the same old story line.  You have to turn things around, look at them in a different way, explore, through meditation, your response, your experience of what's going on in your head, thus finding the means to turn the negative into something positive...

Indeed, meditation can be unsettling, irritating, the things that come through your head.  "Try to visualize how the pained perceptions feel, do they feel cold, dark, heavy..."  Yes, the feelings there in your mind are indeed quite uncomfortable and unsettling.  But patience...  Work through them, with them.

And then you come out the other side, whether or not this too will last so solidly, but it is good in the sense that through doing meditation on your blues, the usual triggers, you find yourself loosening away from that old identifier, in my case, say, The Princess, should have would have could, or, my job, say...   You find a new energy, even as it was very tiring and lonely to go through.  You come out a new person, more Buddhist...

For a few days I could not write.  Or if I tried, I was not satisfied...  Am I done as a writer?  Then, if so, what will my claim on life's work be.

But you don't have to renounce the work.  You're just changing the way you're looking at things...

What was an issue for you, becomes the light that frees you from attachment, unnecessary attachment to a created identity that perhaps you've outgrown, in doing so, becoming a better person.  The very thing that was perceived as a cause of sorrow and regret, of general unhappiness, is transformed into the thing that heals you.  You breathe freely again.

Perhaps then what you observe about yourself might not be so pretty.  Perhaps you'll find within yourself that which we locate through the term of sin.  Covetousness, sloth, envy...  avoidance...  And this, I suppose, as it is treated in books on Buddhist philosophy, as in Pema Chodron's Taking the Leap, is all forgivable, and normal.  (I found the book hard to take, at first, convoluted.)  The point is to liberate yourself and all your innate love, kindness and intelligence, to find new energy, and to keep at that new energy.


The things that hurt turn out to be a gift.

I wasn't all bad, the bad person, I might have thought I was, in so hiding from myself, I suppose...  a survivor of the terms and put-downs that nice people come across in this modern world...



I found feelings of shame, a lot of shame, as I meditated upon it all.  Shame for being a writer, shame for being overly sensitive and thin-skinned, bound to flights of imagination in impractical ways.  And the shame I was feeling, I suppose, it made the escapism into something bigger...