As I wake up at 3 a.m., I notice I am doing puja, and I have a sense I have been doing puja for a long while through sleep and dreams. (This kind of puja is from Vortex Healing. It’s aimed at straightening out life situations and done through intention.)
The other night, in another dream, the turnaround to a stressful thought was with me as I woke up. (“It’s safer to speak up” which is a turnaround for “It’s safer to be quiet”.) This is a part of The Work of Byron Katie which I did daily for many years, and which now lives in me.
This is not so new or unusual. When I got into spiritual practices in my teens, I noticed that they tended to become continuous through the day and night and even through sleep and dreams.
That’s how it is with anything we do for a while, it becomes a new habit and orientation. Whatever our attention is on for a while stays with us and follows us through sleep and dreams. It lives its own life in us.
I especially remember this when I got into the Jesus / Heart Prayer. It’s a simple phrase said with the breath and heartbeat. Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me. The first part is on the in-breath, the second on the out-breath. When I do it with my heartbeats, the comma is on one beat, “on me” is on one beat, and the dot at the end is on another beat so there are eight beats altogether. (I don’t know if this is the “official” way to do it, to be honest.)
What I noticed is that over time, this prayer lived its own life in me, including through the night and in my dreams and when I woke up.
It’s similar to just about any other exploration.
Basic meditation is to notice and allow whatever is here in the field of experience, and then notice it’s already and inherently noticed and allowed and rest in and as that noticing. Doing this for a while makes it much easier to notice the same in daily life, it becomes part of daily life.
The headless experiments help us notice our nature, that we are capacity for the world as Douglas Harding put it. This too is part of my daily life now. I find myself as that which allows and forms itself into any and all content of experience.
When I did koan practice, the koans stayed with me in a similar way. My being explored and processed them outside of the Zendo.
As I mentioned above, this is not special to spiritual explorations or practices. It’s what seems to happen with anything we put attention on for a while.
When it comes to spiritual explorations, it is quite beautiful when it starts living in us.
It makes it easier to dip into it more intentionally during waking time.
Even here, it does require some intention to keep it going, it requires engaging in it consciously and intentionally now and then during waking time.
When it lives its own life in this way, I also find that it’s easier to dip into it again later if I have been away from it for a while. It’s easier to pick it up again.