By admin 
I often use the image of the ocean and the wave, because for me it comes closest, in form, to understanding the relationship between awareness and everything that appears within it. The wave has a shape, a beginning and an end, a movement of its own and yet, at no point is it anything other than the ocean.
Yesterday, I tried to meditate and I saw myself walking into the sea, dive beneath the surface and somehow dissolve into it.
And then a thought came…: I am trying to become what I already am.
Gonny is the wave, and that wave spend its entire life searching for the ocean.
It could travel thousands of miles across its surface. It could study other waves that seem more peaceful and enlightened. It could practice becoming still. It might even become very good at repeating, “I am the ocean.”
But none of this would make it any more ocean than it already was.
The problem was never that the wave was separated from the ocean.
The problem was that it believed itself to be only a wave.
Something happened recently. My body suddenly wasn’t behaving as it normally does. Nothing makes the body quite as convincing as when something seems to be wrong with it. When everything works, I hardly think about it. But let one little alarm light appear on the dashboard and suddenly the body has my complete attention.
What is this? Will it go away? Is something wrong? What if it gets worse?
And beneath all those questions is one assumption I almost never
question: This is happening to me because this body is me.
So instead of only examining what was happening to my body, I tried to examine that assumption.
I became very still and tried to feel the ocean again.
Not the physical sea, but that vastness of awareness in which everything I experience appears…thoughts, sensations, fear, sounds, memories, the room around me, and yes, this body too.
And something shifted.
Most of my life I have assumed that I am a body that somehow possesses consciousness. But at some point I started doubting, and asked myself: How can this body produce consciousness?
And even more important: What is it that is aware of my body?
The answer?
I started noticing… my hand is known, my breathing is known, the sensation in my stomach is known, my thoughts are known. Even the thought “this is me” is something I can notice.
So what is doing the noticing? That is where something extraordinary begins. Because whatever I am at the deepest level cannot simply be another object appearing in my awareness.
The eye can see almost everything except itself. And perhaps consciousness has a similar mystery. It knows the body, but is not itself another thing inside the body that can be found and pointed at.
For a little while, I rested there. And then, of course, my mind came rushing back……Who do you think you are?….Do you seriously think you can heal your own body?
I almost had to laugh. There was the frightened little wave again, desperately trying to decide what the ocean is allowed to do.
But it raised an important question. Where does f.e. illness begin?
I don’t pretend to know.
Bodies have biology. They become injured, infected, tired and old. Medical care matters, and recognizing ourselves as more than the body is certainly not a reason to neglect it.
But there is another part of illness that we rarely investigate: the meaning we give to what is happening.
Fear…..vulnerability…..control….the assumption that whatever happens to this body ultimately happens to what I am.
And perhaps sometimes the body becomes the very thing that forces us to look at beliefs we would otherwise never question.
When the body is comfortable, who asks, Who am I?
We go shopping instead. But when something suddenly goes wrong, the question becomes real.
And so I looked.
Not for a magical thought that would repair my body. Not for the psychological mistake that had supposedly made me ill. I looked beneath
all of that.
What if the deepest mistaken thought is simply: I am only this separate, vulnerable form? And what happens when, even for a moment, that thought loosens?
Something interesting happened. My body seemed to correct itself. Was it because of what happened inwardly?…..I don’t know. Perhaps it would have happened anyway.
That is the only intellectually honest answer I can give.
And yet I also don’t want to dismiss what happened simply because I cannot explain it.
We do that surprisingly often. If something doesn’t fit our existing model of reality, we either turn it into a miracle story or quickly explain it away.
But what if mind and body are not related in quite the way we have assumed? What if an inner shift can sometimes be reflected in the body?
What if changing our deepest identification changes more than we currently understand?
I don’t know….But I am willing to remain curious.
The purpose of remembering the ocean is not to create a perfect wave.
It is to remember what the wave is made of.
If my body feels wonderful today, I am still what I am.
If tomorrow it hurts, I am still what I am.
If something heals, I have not become more whole.
If something doesn’t heal, I have not become less whole.
That doesn’t mean I stop caring for the body. Quite the opposite. I can care for it lovingly without asking it to tell me who I am.
And perhaps that is a very different kind of healing.
We normally think peace will come when the wave finally becomes calm.
Bu maybe the peace begins when the wave remembers that even during the storm it has never stopped being water.
And perhaps that is why we sometimes need the interruption.
The body sometimes feels bad, because an interruption may make me question something I never question while everything is going well.
Then ask: Who is the one to whom this is happening?
Follow that question far enough and something remarkable may happen.
You may discover that you cannot find the separate little self you have spent a lifetime protecting.
Maybe our deepest longing has never really been to find God, enlightenment, consciousness, healing or even peace.
Maybe it is the longing to remember what we were before we imagined ourselves separate from it.
We were never looking at the ocean.
The ocean was looking through us.
With love and light,
Gonny