Can I have my batteries replaced please?

This morning, while on my pre-writing  jogging routine, the feeling came back again. The feeling that has been quietly around for about eight years, but somehow just occasionally penetrates the awareness full throttle.

For the first time, as I can remember, I experienced it while in Morocco on an intense retreat, lead by a French ex-ballet dancer. We were staying in a traditional Tuareg tents among the dunes of northern Sahara, spending our days getting in touch with our bodies and movement, practising our presence, awareness, with nothing in our view but dunes, dunes, dunes… Although the retreat and the activities were utterly enjoyable, I felt something was starting to build up within me and finally came up one day, while we were doing some exercises on these sandy dunes. Suddenly I felt I just could not do it anymore. My whole body felt ultimately tired after being forced for decades, and my mind felt tired of forcing and bossing the body around. I just crashed down and remained lying flat on my back, staring at this Saharan sky, motionless, not wanting to move. I totally seriously felt I wanted to just rest there, completely unmoving, for at least a hundred years. Yes, no mistake, for at least a hundred years. I felt tired like the whole planet, though I was not tired of the activities we did during these days, but tired of all the forcing of my body I did throughout my life. It took the French guy and his assistant quite some time to persuade me to get back on my feet. Finally I did it out of empathy – I really did not want to drive him crazy like this.

Today this feeling came back. The feeling that I have been forcing myself my whole life, using my will in order to do, to change, to move, to go, to sit, to run, by the schedule, on time…

About twenty years back or so I was practising, for a couple of years, a type of yogic natural meditation in which you, for 90 minutes per day, basically just let go of the control over your body, mind and emotions and let them follow whatever natural impulses they may have; rather than trying to superimpose even more will on them, in order to concentrate, put the body in a specific position… So in general terms you aim to take the wilful control off and let your whole being get in back in touch with the natural impulses and then follow the natural course. Well, the result was that for the first half of the year I was sleeping throughout my meditations. Immediately after the beginning of each meditation, my body fell down and I slept flat through the hour-and-a-half meditation periods. Day after day. The next half a year I was just dozing through meditations, half awake, and only after a year or so my body and my mind would remain awake for the assigned period of time, doing something that somewhat resembled the concept of meditation…

Anyway, if I put my focus on my body and my state of beingness, one of the main feelings I can identify is feeling damn tired. As simple as that. And I just want to stretch out on the couch and not move for years. Stare at the clouds through the window, sleep, perhaps watch really dumb movies, so that no thinking effort would be required. But if I do this I know, out of experience, I will soon start feeling really bad in my body and also pretty depressed in my mind and feelings, so existence does not get any more enjoyable really. But getting up and going somewhere is an effort, jogging and swimming and bicycling and all of that, it is an effort and forcing my body into something. And I am fed up with efforts and forcing in my life.

So, I am really a bit confused. Since I don’t think I am alone in this overall tiredness, I am wondering whether we have, by becoming “civilized”, lost all the touch with the natural energy flow and are now trying to replicate it by physical exercises, rest and all of that, neatly scheduled and programmed? I wonder whether it is possible at all to exist and live life 24 hours per day in alignment with your energy, to enjoy resting and to enjoy moving and making effort. Perhaps this is what animals do. Or maybe they don’t, but they at least don’t make a big fuzz around it, like I do. At least when I look at our cat, she seems to be feeling tired most of the time, but that’s why she simply sleeps most of the time. Problem solved, case closed.

Or perhaps this is what Zen masters have been saying all along: “The true Zen is in eating when you are hungry, and sleeping when you are tired.” Yeah. I seem to be doing something dreadfully wrong here.

Or perhaps it is just the age. I am 43, after all. Maybe I just need to get used to a somewhat lower level of energy then I have had when twenty years old. Because after four decades, isn’t it that the tiredness somehow builds up and the energy level goes red? Perhaps human body is really not meant to live as long and should be switched off after 30 or so… Or is it something in the food? Perhaps global conspiracy of illuminatis? Or invasion of body snatchers? Or climate changes?

And here comes the last dilemma; do I really even want to become less tired (and then have more energy so as to work more, oh no no no no!), or do I really just want to rest more, not really minding being tired. You know, just happily resting my life away.

Right now the second option seems more appealing.

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Just once in my lifetime

Just once, just one single time in my life I would love to experience a relaxed day before I fly somewhere, and a good night sleep. But my sad reality is, for the last two decades at least, that the last day I need to do so many urgent and important things (that I failed to do a couple of days earlier, to be honest) and so the last evenings are always frantic with finishing articles, doing administrative things, meeting deadlines, taking care of the projects that are supposed to start while I am gone… Packing bags starts about half an hour before departure. The record was about six years back when I have managed to sleep only 20 minutes during the night before I left for the desert dance experience in Morrocco. After changing a couple of flights and a painful drive across the Atlas mountains, I have entered the Sahara in deeply psychedelic state.

Anyway, it is never the excitement that causes the chaos, it is just pure work that needs to be done. Crazy.

So, there is yet another night of sleep deprivation and chaos ahead of me and tomorrow early morning we are leaving for Spain, this is to say me and Marjeta. Attending some trainings, a big congress of interculturalists and some fun and relaxation too. It will be Granada and the Andaluzia region mostly.

So, hold on, dear friends. I’ll be back. In two weeks, if I don’t get really inspired somewhere in Sevilla along the way.

Sounds of Silence

Today I woke up with a headache and things got worse in next two hours, so I decided to go back to bed. Lying there with a fever-like dizziness, I started to get extremely sensitive to sounds around me and everything was so irritating; the distant sound of cars, the sound of refrigerator switching on somewhere far bellow, the sound of the roof getting warmer from the sun rays and expelling some sort of cracking sounds… It was driving me crazy, but somehow I managed to relax and fall asleep for another couple of hours.

Sitting later with a cup of tea in the kitchen, feeling much better, I grabbed the new issue of the Ode magazine, the magazine for intelligent optimists (the level of my intelligence is still OK, but my optimism is definitely going downhill), and realized that it was a special issue, The Silence Issue. Reading articles about the noise pollution and the importance and the meaning of silence in our lives, it dawned on me just how much I have been suffering from the lack of silence in my life.

I guess this is why I go to Zen seshins and actually enjoy them from the first until the last second (who cares about hurting knees, just give me some silence and I will not complain…). This is why I almost don’t even listen to music in my car anymore. This is why I tend to run away from people, sit in my room alone… I need silence. It is like air and water and food for me. When I do not get enough of it, I start biting.

There is less and less of silence in our lives. Shopping music everywhere, traffic noise, TV-s turned on 24/7, everybody walking around either talking over the cell phone or with their ears stuffed with i-pod music. Couple of weeks back me and Marjeta stopped in a tiny little Albanian town, sat on a bench and enjoyed the local scene, with people outside on the stools and benches, talking to each other. And I felt something was really weird, but couldn’t tell what it was, until I realized after about ten minutes that there was no background noise at all. No cars, no music, no nothing. NOTHING! Just voices of people speaking. In the middle of a town. It was a bit spooky, but it was great too. Being in a place where just interacting was perfectly good enough, no need to stuff in more noise. It was beautiful, so pristine and primal.

So, yes, I guess I need to seriously consider this need of mine for silence, and start planning how to bring more of it back into my life.

About five years ago I attended a seminar about awareness of the body and of the moves of the body and within the body. The seminar was held by a French ex-ballet dancer, deep among the sand dunes of Moroccan Sahara. We were sleeping in improvised nomad tents and haven’t seen, for about 10 days, nothing but the dunes around us, stretching out to the horizon. I don’t know if you have an experience of what the sand dunes do to the sound and human perception of the sound, but just having been surrounded with this sound of silence for days after days, with only being able to see endless dunes and nothing less, had a tremendous impact on my perception of my existence in this time and space. At least for a whole week it was so damn clearly obvious that this life was not what it seems to be. And I completely understood an old Tuareg proverb:

God created lands full of water so people can live in

and God created the desert so people can find their souls