Intention is one of my staple practices, in different forms. One is to ask to be shown (by life) what I am not seeing, what I need to see, what stands between me and Big Mind, and so on.
I did this before falling asleep the second night at the Crater Lake trip, and I got exactly what I had asked for…
The trip up until then had been very comfortable, easy and enjoyable, with a sense of headlessness and no separate self coming and going and never far away.
That night, a storm came through and the temperature dropped significantly (in itself fine since I have a good tent, wool underwear and a mountaineering sleeping bag), the air went out of my thermarest, and my body heat got sucked into the ground. Normally, all of this would have been fine and workable, but instead, old and ingrained patterns of resistance got triggered and came right up to the surface… resisting it all, being annoyed with everything, everything feeling wrong… and then, after having resolved the cold issue, the dream about my relatives being insane and believing their own stories, just as I had done that night.
I got exactly what I asked for. I got to see patterns that are still there, although often not triggered or so mild that I don’t notice or can easily brush it off. It is sobering and humbling, and although I was certainly not grateful when it all came up full force and I was completely in the grips of it, the gratefulness came up later on. There is nothing more precious than seeing where I am still stuck… Seeing where the gold is, behind the ugly facade.