The Sun is Inside You

How quickly I forget the summer.  We are officially only halfway through it, but the last weeks have been filled with intermittent rain and grey cloud, and the last three days have seen persistent heavy showers with leaden skies and frigid temperatures.  Only in the UK.

But what amazes me is how, when the sun is out, and the days balmy and evenings light and long, I always think to myself, 'Well, this will keep me going for weeks, for months, for the whole of winter.'  And it never does.  It usually keeps me going for about three days.

Like retreats, or spiritual breakthroughs.  How liberated and light I feel, how convinced that this change wrought in me will last forever, how impossible to forget what I have seen or felt or experienced.  Give or take a few days of continual stress at work, conflict with someone, or perhaps a bad cold or stomach bug, and you feel you are back at square one.


But it's not all hopeless.  What this reminds me, more than anything else, is that while we human beings have extremely short memories when it comes to positive experiences, and deeply-ingrained unhelpful habits of negative thought and reaction formed over years, there is one thing we can do which makes all the difference.  If we endeavour to live each moment in the 'present', then no matter how tedious, dull or unfulfilling it may seem, it truly does begin to transform into something quite different, something deeply satisfying and entirely independent from our life circumstances.  I notice that when I have had times of being very 'present-aware' I remember those moments vividly for a very long time, no matter what I was doing: wandering around an airport terminal waiting for a flight, standing in a queue at the cashier, sitting still doing nothing under the skylight at home.  It is as if they become illuminated, somehow.  I feel the inner energy in my body, my limbs, my torso.  I hear you ask, what if the moment is very unpleasant, or painful?  Well, though I am by no means very practised at this, I am trying to stay in that unpleasant moment and feel the uncomfortable feelings for a little longer each time, without it becoming an endurance trial.  Most importantly, though, I have to keep dropping the narrative that goes with those feelings, I have to shake off the story. What this is gradually teaching me to do is not to avoid the painful times in life we all run away from.  And in not avoiding them, you begin to lose your fear of them. Until one day, I hope, I will know I can face anything and even if it kills me, I won't need to be afraid of it.  Buddhists say this is true.  Tolle, who is not a buddhist - or anything at all - agrees with them and this is central to his teachings.  But even more importantly,  I know of people who are in prison, who are homeless, who suffer profound grief and loss, who also say this is true.  I think we'd be idiots to not listen to them.

It makes a hell of a lot of sense to me, but in the meantime, the unhelpful momentum from the turning wheel of the past sometimes seems relentless, like the steely skies and the bitter wind in a mid-English summer. 

It isn't.  The sun is right there inside you.  You will see it again.

Related links: Forgetting the Sun