Hello Friends,

I hope this post finds you healthy, semi-happy, and navigating the shitstorm* that is our modern life.

Devon and I are doing well, occasional restlessness notwithstanding. We've been teaching a whole lot on Zoom. Monday nights, of course. And also all the tour stops. Just minus the tour, the stops, and the actual physicality of being together in the same room with people. 

All this teaching is making me rethink my meditation practice. As in, what is it I'm doing here all these hours every day? And how can I talk about that with others?

The word I've been working with most, the one that has been capturing my attention, is ecstasy.

Which surprises me. I always thought the word ecstasy was for club kids and tantric sex workshops.

But consider the etymology:

Ecstasy comes from two Greek roots: Ex, meaning "outside of." And stasis, meaning "constrained or stable or stationary."

So to be ecstatic is to stand, at least momentarily, outside of boundaries, beyond what is stationary, stuck, or stable.

And that, to me, is a pretty decent gloss of what happens in meditation.

When we meditate our concepts soften. And along with our concepts, the boundaries of self soften, too. We experience this as a feeling that the world is touching us, or is inside of us somehow, and sometimes that our felt body extends beyond the borders of our skin.

We could also say we begin to recognize, and then live in, an awareness that is non-composite and unconditioned and really very sweet.

Anyway, this experience is not ecstatic by club kid standards. There's not much to write home about, in fact. It's just a loosening, a mild untangling of the mind's entrenched knots.

Still, that loosening is a really good thing. Over time, if we hang out in that loosened space, we begin to habituate to openness, and that habituation leads to less stress, more love, and freedom from cultural and personal scripts that don't really serve us.

So, yes, ecstasy. I'm taking the word back. To me it means an unbinding, a fluidity and dynamism that arises when we bring dharmic attention and intention to our days.

Or that's how it seems to me on this Thursday afternoon in April, as the flowers explode all over Ashland and the white clouds traipse through the cerulean radiance of the sky.

Be well, my friends, wherever you are. And may your days be filled with a very mild, mind loosening ecstasy.

All the best,
Craig

P.S. You could always order our book.

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*On an unrelated topic, I just looked up "shitstorm" and Merriam Webster informed me the word is "vulgar slang" meaning "a situation marked by violent controversy" and that it first appeared in the English language in the 1960s before gaining more and more usage between 1970 and 2010 and then peaking the day before yesterday. I happen to love the word shitstorm just as much as I love the word ecstasy, because the image of a shitstorm so beautifully captures the psychic space of our contemporary moment.