Then, when the emotion without cause becomes very intense, you'll find that it has become pure emotion, like pure energy, and it's no longer possible to identify it as sadness, or grief, or joy, or any single emotion. This is the pure spring that is the source for every emotion. From this experience, every emotion flows. Now you follow another stream, a different path from the emotion that got you here, and follow that stream of emotion as it becomes more and more personal and eventually emerges as an emotion with cause.
Here is an example, as reported by a woman who has experience with meditation on the heart.
"A shift is occurring with regards to my mother. When meditating today, something hit me, and that is just how it felt: like my heart was hit. I had just listened to a tape of a song about mothers. One of the stanzas was about birthing a dead child. Although this hasn't been something I have experienced, I felt engulfed in sadness so thick it was hard to cry. Suddenly I realized I was inside my mother's heart. She had three miscarriages late in her pregnancies, after my birth and before my bother was born. She also became pregnant while in college and put that child up for adoption, according to my uncle, but she has never spoken with me about this.
So I sat with the pain of my mother's lost children covered in stagnant heavy sadness, wondering what it might have been like to be in a family of 6 children where I wasn't the oldest instead of a family of 2 children.
I didn't think I could feel any more pain when my heart expanded and tears started pouring from my eyes. It felt like the sorrow of all mothers who had lost their children wanted to be in my heart.
I remembered a summer when I was a little girl, about a horse and the birth of her baby. I was very close to the horse and this allowed me to become very close to her offspring. Then we had to sell the little one and I was so sad that they had to be separated, I felt so bad for both of them.
More images of mothers loosing their children appeared, through slavery and through hunger. I felt the pain of watching a child be sold and I felt the pain of watching a child starve to death. How helpless and powerless I felt, how I would want to die rather than endure such things. And I thought about all the women who had gone through these things. What kept them alive? How did they survive? Now my heart ached so bad I thought it would shatter into pieces and I began to sob loudly.
Then I realized it was their other children, or other children they helped to take care of, that made their pain bearable and their life worth living. I felt so incredibly lucky to have had the experience of being the mother of my son. I felt so blessed for the opportunity of being a mother. I felt so much love generated by all the mothers that feel the way I do. I continued to breathe with my mother's heart until I felt the sadness lift.
As much as I love my son and feel so much joy to be blessed with him, I wonder what my reaction would have been to the loses my mother endured. I have known intellectually that my mom was in pain, but I understand it differently now. I was glad to have had the experience that meditation allowed me to have."
By Puran Bair, author of "Living from the Heart" (Random House, 1998)
© 1998 by The Institute for Applied Meditation, Inc.
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