Set Your Chickens Free

In trying to present meditation without credentials and as a Way of Being, I have learned how to say the things that allow some of the habitual mental reactions to this teaching to relax.  When I heard that Dorje Denma Ling was presenting The Posture of Meditation, my research clicked on the words, alignment and relaxation and I stepped out of my shadow to attend.

Meeting Will Johnson was so much more than expected.  He has a relatively large, long body that is not that often seen in meditation halls for obvious reasons.  The usual presentation leaves people with that physiology in considerable pain, quite quickly.  He sat in front of us revealing the gentle moans of both pleasure and pain, describing a way to work with ourselves through the felt experience of breath moving body.  Urging us to allow the inevitable movements to bring us to an inner stillness that can never be found by any kind of “holding against” or even “holding for” … no holding!

The content can be summarized by an interview with Will in Tricycle but the experience of spending time with him goes beyond any verbal description.  He asked for far more of us in terms of time and persistence than most modern meditation programs dare e.g. the evening sessions from 8 to 10 pm took us beyond the tiredness and resistance he compassionately acknowledged, but he did not indulge the escape artist inside.  This, in itself, showed the way to work with our habitual resistance, not just to meditation, but to change in how we relate – what we come for in the first place, but are often disappointed in somehow not achieving.  Reframing habitual struggle as a process of discovery, led to sessions that began to shift from, “how long until this is over” to “I could become so curious about where this is going, that I might get past longstanding evasions to doing it at all”

We talk about journey, even adventure, but are mostly stuck in our patterns of shutting out what is labelled uncomfortable.  For me he not only got me to encounter physical discomfort directly and properly, but in so doing, my relationship to emotional discomfort was exposed.  The cocoon was being rocked and gently rolled towards freedom.  Thank you Will.

The following was written as a short review for the program coordinator:  Having spent far too much time in meditation halls where people torture themselves, I came to hear Will because of the keywords alignment and relaxation.  He added so much more; an experiential description of what we label "not too tight, not too loose" he spoke of as an "amoeba-like pulsation" and the head on the shoulders is floating like a fisherman's cork.  Stillness is not holding against, but results from allowing the breath to move the body.  Our practice became a dynamic experience rather than a struggle to hold either a static posture or conform to some kind of static concept of what we should be doing.