Strange Beautiful Musik

Strange Beautiful Notes
Room (ii)

Encounters in Presence, Music, and Healing

You Must Not be Frightened

Under a tin roof during a ten minute hail storm

So, you mustn’t be frightened,
if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen
if an anxiety, like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands
and over everything you do.You must realize that something is happening to you,
that life has not forgotten you,
that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall.The Eighth Letter from “Letters to a Young Poet”
Rainer Maria Rilke

Like a Thief, by Stealth

“In the middle of the night when all things were in a quiet silence,
there was spoken to me a hidden word.
It came like a thief, by stealth.
I didn't see it coming, the ground.It revealed itself to me and shone forth before me,
declaring something to me
and making God known to me.Yet, what it was remained hidden from me.
This was a stealthy coming, in a whispering stillness to reveal itself.I’m aware of something within me that gleams and flashes before my soul.
Were this perfected and fully established in me,
that would surely be eternal life.It hides.
It shows itself.
It comes like a thief with intent to take and steal all things from the soul.But by emerging and showing itself a little,
it aims to lure the soul and draw her towards herself,
to rob her and deprive her of herself.Just because it is hidden, one must and should and always pursue it.
It shone forth, and yet it was hidden.
We are meant to yearn and sigh for it.Meister Eckhart
The Birth of the Word in the Soul

Abandonment by Withholding (b)

There is a further complication that needs to be named carefully.Abandonment by withholding does not always exist on its own. In some families, the withholding of support, the denial of reality, and the performance of respectability coexist with more overt forms of harm: physical abuse, sexual abuse, intimidation, bodily violation, and fear.When this happens, the injury is not simply additive.It is not only: there was abandonment by withholding, and also abuse.It is multiplicative.The abuse does not sit beside the neglect as a separate wound. It enters the same relational system. It is held inside the same denial. It is protected by the same family story. It is hidden behind the same appearance of resources, stability, education, morality, or social decency.This makes the effects in adulthood deeper, stranger, and harder to name.

Why this combination is especially damaging

When abuse happens in an environment of acknowledged poverty, there may at least be some external explanation for suffering. This does not make the abuse less harmful or the child safer. But the surrounding conditions may sometimes provide a context: hardship is visible, instability is named, others may know that something is wrong, and later the adult may be able to say, that was a dangerous environment.In a gaslighting abandonment by withholding environment, the situation is more disorganizing.The child faces several distortions at once.Abuse is happening.
Resources exist that could stop it.
Those resources are withheld.
And reality itself is denied.The child is therefore not only harmed. The child is harmed inside a world that has the capacity to intervene, but does not. Harm occurs inside a family system that may be able to provide protection, privacy, medical care, therapeutic help, relocation, financial escape, social accountability, or adult intervention — but chooses silence, minimization, or control instead.This creates a form of total relational betrayal.Not simply: Someone hurt me.But: The people who could have protected me chose not to — and then acted as if nothing was wrong.That is foundationally disorganizing.It damages not only safety, but reality. The child’s body knows something is terribly wrong. The family atmosphere insists otherwise. The child’s fear is real, but the surrounding adults behave as if the fear has no legitimate source. The child’s need for protection is urgent, but the family narrative may recast that need as exaggeration, disobedience, weakness, ingratitude, or fantasy.The result is a deep split between bodily knowledge and permitted knowledge.The body knows.The family denies.And the child has to survive inside both.

Core adult impacts

The adult impacts of this configuration are often deep, but not always easy to recognize from the outside.The person may appear intelligent, perceptive, articulate, spiritually serious, psychologically aware, or unusually insightful. They may be able to speak about harm with precision. They may understand patterns in others. They may function in certain contexts with remarkable capacity.And yet, underneath, the foundations of self-trust, intimacy, receiving, money, and embodiment may be severely disrupted.It is the afterlife of a childhood in which perception, protection, and bodily safety were all made unstable at the same time.

A. Severe disruption of self-trust

One of the deepest impacts is a disruption of self-trust.This can become an epistemic collapse: a collapse in the person’s ability to trust what they know, even when the knowing is clear.As an adult, this may look like chronic self-doubt, even in obvious situations. The person may need excessive evidence before acting. They may freeze at decision points. They may find themselves internally asking:Am I allowed to be sure?This question can govern an entire life.The difficulty is not ordinary indecision. It comes from a childhood in which the body registered danger, but the environment denied danger. The child knew something was terribly wrong, but was not allowed to know it in a way that could lead to protection. Help was structurally impossible, because the very adults who should have helped were implicated in the denial, the violence, the silence, or the preservation of the family image.The mind learns that perception is dangerous.To perceive accurately may threaten attachment. To name harm may threaten belonging. To trust the body may expose the child to punishment, disbelief, ridicule, or abandonment. So the developing self begins to distrust the very signals that might have saved it.Later, as an adult, the person may still be waiting for permission to know what they know.

B. Shame fused to survival

Sexual abuse already produces shame.Abandonment by Withholding can lock it in.When bodily violation occurs in a family where resources exist but protection is withheld, the child may unconsciously draw a devastating conclusion:If I were worth protecting, someone would have intervened.This is not a belief the child chooses. It is a meaning the nervous system may form in the absence of rescue.Many adults from this background carry a felt sense of being inherently corrupt. They may feel contaminated, even when they intellectually know they were harmed. They may believe that needing help means they have failed. They may experience vulnerability not as innocence, but as exposure. They may feel that their own need is shameful, dangerous, or morally compromised.This shame is often pre-verbal and somatic.It does not respond easily to reassurance.Someone can say, It was not your fault, and the adult may understand the sentence cognitively, even sincerely.But the body may still carry a deeper imprint:
Something in me must have made this happen.Or:
Something in me made protection impossible.This is why shame fused to survival can be so difficult to reach. It is not merely a mistaken thought. It is a survival atmosphere that became internal.It is not simply a matter of the person feeling ashamed after harm.Shame became part of how they stayed alive.

C. Collapse of safety in intimacy

Another core impact is the collapse of safety in intimacy.Adult relational patterns may include attraction to unavailable or controlling partners. The person may alternate between hyper-independence and desperate attachment. They may dissociate during closeness or sex. They may long deeply for care, but panic, freeze, or feel disgust when care is offered. They may test love, flee from it, submit to it too quickly, or mistrust it even when it is genuine.This is not confusion in any shallow sense of the word.It is a body remembering, that early intimacy was not neutral.Early intimacy may have meant violation, secrecy, authority, coercion, humiliation, or betrayal. The people who should have made closeness safe may have made it dangerous. The home, which should have taught the body that closeness could be warm, ordinary, protective, and mutual, instead taught that closeness could become the site of fear.So the adult body may not know how to receive intimacy as simple goodness.Closeness, care, being seen, being wanted, being touched, are all charged.Even emotional warmth may carry danger, because warmth may once have been mixed with control, secrecy, or manipulation.The person may therefore seem contradictory: longing for intimacy while organizing against it; desiring support while distrusting dependence; wanting to be known while fearing the consequences of being visible.But this contradiction has a history.A body forced to learn that closeness could not be assumed safe.

Money, power, and the body become linked

In abandonment by withholding, money is rarely only money.When abuse occurs in a wealthy-but-withholding family, money can become associated with control, silence, and impunity. Authority becomes suspect. Support feels transactional or dangerous.The person may learn, very early, that resources do not necessarily mean safety. They may even learn the opposite: that the presence of resources can make denial more elaborate, power more protected, and escape more psychologically confusing.This can create a profound confusion around receiving in adulthood.The adult may have difficulty accepting financial help even when needed. They may sabotage opportunities involving patronage, sponsorship, mentorship, or institutional support. They may feel secretly “owned” when someone helps them. They may distrust benefactors. They may unconsciously remain loyal to poverty or struggle because hardship feels cleaner than dependency.This is part of the conditioning this dynamic sets in motion.If help once came with strings, silence, control, humiliation, or danger, the body may later treat all help as suspect. If resources were used to preserve family image rather than protect the child, the adult may experience money not as freedom, but as contamination. If power protected the wrong people, the adult may mistrust power even when it could now serve life.This also complicates ambition.The person may want stability, but feel uneasy when stability approaches. They may want recognition, but fear being captured by the systems that offer it. They may need support, but experience support as a threat to autonomy. They may long to be free, while unconsciously associating freedom with debt.Money, power, and the body become linked.And untangling them can take a long time.

Fragmentation of identity

Many adults with this history show some form of identity fragmentation.This does not necessarily mean pathology in the way the word is often used.It means that the self had to organize under impossible conditions.There may be compartmentalized selves. Sudden shifts in capacity or confidence. Long periods of dormancy followed by bursts of clarity. A sense of living behind glass. A feeling that different parts of the self know different things, want different things, or remember different realities.One part may be articulate and lucid.
Another part may be frozen.
One part may understand the family system clearly.
Another part may still be waiting for permission to speak.
One part may be capable of deep compassion for others.
Another may feel unreachable, wordless, or ashamed.This can resemble what is sometimes called structural dissociation: not a personality flaw, but a survival structure.The psyche learned:
To survive, I must not be whole.Wholeness may have been dangerous. If the child fully knew what was happening, fully felt what was happening, fully protested what was happening, or fully registered the betrayal, survival might have become impossible. So the self divided labor internally. Some parts carried terror. Some carried compliance. Some carried intelligence. Some carried hope. Some carried numbness. Some carried the forbidden truth.In adulthood, this may look confusing, even to the person themselves.They may ask why they can be so clear in one moment and so unable to act in another. Why they can hold complexity for others but not cross a simple threshold for themselves. Why they can speak beautifully about healing but still freeze around money, intimacy, visibility, or receiving.But this is not hypocrisy.It is fragmentation doing what fragmentation was designed to do: keep unbearable knowledge from overwhelming the whole system at once.Healing, then, is not simply “fixing.”It is integration.Not forcing the self into premature unity, but slowly creating enough safety that what had to remain separate can begin to come into relation.

Why adulthood often looks under-realized

This is painful, but important.From the outside, people may see intelligence without traction. Depth without stability. Vision without resources. Sensitivity without practical grounding. Talent without consistency. Capacity without worldly arrival.It may make people wonder why the person has not “done more” with their life.The person may wonder the same thing.But internally, the adult may be carrying unprocessed terror, managing an overactivated nervous system, navigating shame, avoiding reenactment, trying not to collapse, and running life with no margin for error.They may be making ordinary life decisions while carrying invisible weights. They may be trying to build a career while their body is still organized around threat.
They may be trying to receive mentorship while their nervous system reads help as capture. They may be trying to enter intimacy while closeness activates old danger. They may be trying to manage money while money carries the charge of control, humiliation, silence, and betrayal. They may be trying to become visible while visibility once meant exposure.This is why adulthood can look under-realized.Not because they lack depth, are lazy, or weak. This does not mean they do not understand responsibility.They are running a different race with invisible weights.The world may measure them against people who were given bridges, safety, protection, encouragement, and clean forms of support.But they may have had to construct basic internal ground while appearing, from the outside, already privileged enough not to need help.This is one of the cruelest aspects of the configuration.The person may be judged as privileged by those who see the family background, education, speech, or class markers. But internally, they may be carrying the nervous system of someone who survived violation, denial, and abandonment without reliable protection.They are not behind.
They were carrying more than was visible.

What actually helps in healing

Healing from this kind of history often requires more than standard therapeutic language.This is not because standard therapy is useless. It may be profoundly helpful. But the work has to include the actual structure of the injury: betrayal, power, bodily violation, money, shame, denial, and the collapse of protection.Trauma work that focuses only on abuse may miss the abandonment-by-withholding frame.
Work that focuses only on family dysfunction may miss the body.
Work that focuses only on mindset may miss terror.
Work that focuses only on forgiveness may bypass justice.
Work that focuses only on resilience may repeat the original abandonment.What is needed is truth with structure.The work has to include betrayal and power, not just symptom relief. Modalities such as Somatic Experiencing, EMDR with a relational focus, carefully held parts work, and trauma-informed therapy that understands familial or sexual abuse may be useful when practiced with skill and care.But the modality is not the only issue. The frame matters.The person needs help understanding that the problem was not merely what happened.It was also what did not happen.The adult may therefore need explicit work around entitlement to protection.This is often missing.The person must slowly internalize:
Protection was owed to me. I did not fail to earn it.This sentence may sound simple, but for someone raised inside this configuration, it can take years to become real. The mind may agree long before the body does. The body may still feel that protection had to be earned through goodness, silence, usefulness, obedience, or suffering.But protection is not a reward for being an exceptional child.Protection is owed.A child does not have to become worthy of safety. This is one of the central repairs.Another late-stage task is repairing the right to receive.The person may need to learn, slowly and concretely, how to accept help, money, mentorship, rest, care, and stability without collapse. They may need support that does not humiliate them. Help that does not own them. Money that does not silence them. Guidance that does not invade them. Intimacy that does not require self-abandonment.This is often not an early task.It may come after years of naming, grieving, stabilizing, and separating the present from the past.Receiving can be one of the most difficult forms of healing because it touches the original wound directly.It asks the body to risk a new conclusion:
Support can exist without capture.
Care can exist without violation.
Help can exist without debt.
Protection can exist without shame.This is not quick work.
And it should not be forced.

Truth without spectacle

There is a way of naming these histories that does not require spectacle.The point is not to display the wound. The point is to understand the structure of the wound clearly enough that it stops being mistaken for personal failure.The presence of abuse inside affluent neglect creates a particular kind of adult confusion. The person may struggle to locate themselves socially, emotionally, economically, and relationally. They may carry markers of privilege while lacking the internal ground privilege is presumed to provide. They may speak the language of insight while still living with a body organized around danger. They may long for repair while mistrusting the very forms of support that repair requires.This is not contradiction in the moral sense.It is the afterlife of contradiction.The adult is not simply someone to whom bad things happened.They are someone whose access to reality, protection, embodiment, support, and self-trust was interfered with at the same time.That is why the healing has to be patient.
It has to be precise.
It has to be embodied.
It has to restore the right to know, the right to receive, the right to protection, and the right to become whole.And perhaps one of the most important sentences is this:
What happened was not only harm. It was harm inside a system that denied the conditions for naming harm.That is why naming matters.Not for drama or for accusation as an end in itself.But because a life organized around denial cannot reorganize around truth until the truth is allowed to exist.

I Want to Ride my Bicycle? (a)

The bicycle's arrival in my life, was timely because, without it, I would have been stuck.After school was over, my parents did not easily give me bus fare. So as a twenty-year-old, without that bicycle, I would quite literally have been trapped at home. The bicycle opened Colombo to me. It gave me the possibility of work, friendship, wandering, escape, encounter.Dejan, a friend gifted it to me.I do not know whether he understood, at the time, what he had given me. Perhaps he did. Perhaps he did not. But he had given me far more than transport.He had given me access.I could travel to apprentice with an architect. I could cycle forty to fifty kilometres a day, teaching guitar to make money. The city became available through my legs. Roads, heat, rain, lanes, traffic lights, sea wind, dust, pavements, faces, shops, sudden turns, familiar routes, unexpected encounters.It would be easy to romanticize that now.But much of it was simply practical.I had to move.The bicycle let me move.And because it let me move, it also placed me in the path of things I might otherwise never have seen.Or perhaps more precisely, it gave mobility to a faculty that had already been there. I had been noticing things for a very long time. Hidden labour. Hidden cost. The lives behind the visible function people served. The domestic worker who had to travel from far away to reach another house by morning. The person who appeared in one place already carrying the fatigue of another life.But with the bicycle, the seeing had streets.One night, I was cycling back home late when I heard a blood-curdling scream.I stopped.There was an old lady on the street. She was surrounded by three or four young men, about my age. They had a broken bat with them. It seemed as though they were about to do her serious harm.I approached.They ran away.I do not remember having heroic thoughts, or a plan. I remember the scream. I remember stopping. I remember going closer. I remember them running.Then I stayed.That night, I slept on the pavement next to her, with my shoelace tied to the bicycle stand.That detail still feels strange to me. The shoelace tied to the bicycle stand. Practical, foolish, vulnerable. A small device of alertness. A young man’s way of making sure that if the bicycle moved, or if I moved, I would wake.In the early morning, I carried her across the road. She was old and fragile. I brought her near a tea stall and purchased a bag of plain tea for her.Then I left.There is not much more to say about it.There was another man I came to know on the streets.He had moved to Colombo from Jaffna. This was during the first decade after the millennium, when the civil war in Sri Lanka was still going strong. Tamil people from the north could encounter harassment in Colombo, and he was exposed in multiple ways. He lived on the street. He was Tamil. He was poor. He was ill. He had elephantiasis, if I am remembering the name correctly. His body itself made him visible.I began spending time with him on some weekdays, either in the mornings or evenings.Sometimes I sat with him for hours. Talking. Listening.I cannot remember much of the conversation now. But I remember the sitting. I remember being there. I remember that a relationship of some kind formed, steady enough that I began to understand something of his nights.The nights were difficult.Patrolling army jeeps would stop and harass him.So I began taking blankets and sleeping next to him on the street.Sometimes the jeeps would come.I would wake up and argue with them.They would ask mocking questions, implying that I was in some kind of sexual relationship with him. My Sinhala, for someone brought up in a Burgher household, would become unusually sharp in those moments. I would meet their mocking questions with sharp Sinhala, questioning what sort of Sinhala values they were exhibiting.Looking back, it was dangerous.Possibly foolish.They could have snuffed me out, and no one would have known.But at times, I noticed that they seemed to back away. Maybe there was a force moving through me that is not easy to articulate. It was not exactly courage in the ordinary sense. I do not know whether I had enough imagination to understand the danger fully. But something in me became very clear in those moments.A man sleeping on the street should not be harassed by armed men because he is poor, sick, Tamil, and alone.And if I had seen it, I could not unsee it.So again, the bicycle mattered.Not because it solved anything. It did not solve homelessness. It did not solve the civil war. It did not protect Tamil people in Colombo. It did not cure his illness. It did not change the army. It did not change the country.But it got me there.It moved me through the city until I came into contact with the places where action was possible.This is why the title of this essay needs its question mark. It's much more than a charming or eccentric title.“I want to ride my bicycle” sounds almost carefree. A Queen-song kind of title,. A joy ride. A young man with wheels and wind and city roads. And there was joy in it, yes. There was freedom. There was the opening of Colombo, the practical miracle of not being trapped at home.But the question mark, is intentional.I want to ride my bicycle?Is this as light as it sounds?What kind of house makes a twenty-year-old need a friend’s bicycle in order not to be trapped?What kind of city did the bicycle open?What kind of people did the bicycle lead him to?What did riding make possible?It took me to work. It took me to music students. It took me to an architect’s office. It took me through heat and traffic and rain.And sometimes, it took me to a scream in the night.Sometimes, it took me to a man from Jaffna sleeping on a Colombo pavement.Sometimes, it took me to places where there was nothing grand to be done, nothing measurable, nothing that could be called a solution.Only this:stop,stay,sit,argue,carry,buy plain tea,sleep beside,tie a shoelace to the bicycle stand,and refuse, for one night, to let someone be entirely alone.

I Want to Ride my Bicycle? (b)

In a few of my sessions with Tommy, he would do EMDR with me.What I found interesting working with Tommy was, what often surfaced were profound and positive memories.I found that unusual.Whenever someone told me about their experience in therapy, they often had a lot of dark stories. Painful memories. Traumatic scenes. Things that had to be revisited, named, worked through.But with Tommy, many of the memories that surfaced were strangely bright.Not necessarily light, exactly.But luminous. Profound. Grave. Poignant.In one such session, near the end, a few tears must have rolled down my cheeks.Tommy asked me a quiet question.I still remember feeling chilled by the tone in his voice.“What is that tear?”Not tears.Tear.Singular.The tone was almost dangerous in its firmness. Not unkind. But chillingly precise. As though he knew something about that tear. As though the tear had come from a very particular place, and he was determined not to let it pass into general sadness, or sentiment, or therapeutic vagueness.What is that tear?In retrospect, I wonder whether his determination to bring that tear to light was the reason for his tone.So I told him the memory that had come up.I would leave home in the mornings on my bicycle. At the traffic lights at the top of my road, there was a bunch of children, perhaps five or six years old, selling incense sticks.I would stop and watch them.The vehicles would pause at the lights. The children would move toward them. And often the owners of the vehicles were not kind. They would scold them, shoo them away, sometimes respond with stronger forms of anger.It incensed me.And then the familiar pattern began inside me.Their young age.
The constant rejection.
The long hours.
The fact that they were working instead of having ordinary childhoods.Whether they were working for parents, or some kind of street handler, I did not know. But the questions gathered in me. What did their mornings look like? How long were they out there? How often did adults speak to them as though they were irritants? What happens to a child who is rejected hundreds of times in the space where other children are allowed to play?I did not have a solution.I had a bicycle.So I began to let them ride it for a little while I hung around.It felt like revenge.Not against anyone in particular. More like a finger given to the system.The system had placed children at traffic lights to sell incense sticks.
The system had taught adults in cars to see them as nuisance.
The system had taken something of their childhood and put work, rejection, heat, danger, and pleading in its place.So I let them ride.I was smugly pleased to see their joy and glee.Eventually, I began allowing them to keep the bicycle for most of the day. Sometimes overnight. I would take the bus.I knew it was risky. They could have taken off and never returned. They could have sold it. It could have been broken. Something could have gone wrong.But something in me made the choice to take the risk.Perhaps because the bicycle had not come to me from surplus either. It had been given to me by a friend, and without it, I would have been stuck at home. It had opened Colombo to me. It had given me movement when movement had been withheld.So when I let them ride it, I was not giving them an extra object from a life of comfort.I was lending them the very thing that had given me access.Sometimes, in the middle of the day, from the window of a bus, I would see them whizzing around the city in the most unexpected places. Doubling, tripling, sometimes more, all on the one bicycle.There was something wild and wonderful about it.Children who were supposed to be standing at traffic lights, being shooed away by adults in vehicles, were flying through Colombo.Not safely, or for that matter, sensibly. Certainly not in a way that would satisfy a well-designed child welfare policy.But joy has its own kind of intelligence. It felt like poetic justice.And these children knew what to do with movement.One day, I came back home and it was raining.The bicycle was with them.I came to the gate and saw one of the boys cycling down the lane in the rain.He was wet, perhaps sweaty too, but his face was glowing with joy.There are moments one does not understand at the time. One can at best, simply receive them.A child, who by the logic of the street should have been selling incense in traffic, came riding down my lane in the rain with his face lit up.That was the memory.That must have been the tear.When I told Tommy, he listened.Then he said quietly, almost matter-of-factly:
“You are a revolutionary.”He did not say it as flattery. Tommy could not be flattered, and he did not flatter.He named it plainly.You are a revolutionary.I do not think I fully understood it then. The word felt too large, too dramatic, maybe even embarrassing. Revolutionary? I was not overthrowing a government. I was not leading a movement. I was not writing manifestos. I was not changing systems in any measurable way.But perhaps Tommy was not speaking about scale.Perhaps he was speaking about the quality of the act.A revolutionary is not only someone who changes a state. Sometimes a revolutionary is someone who refuses the basic emotional logic of a system.The system says: these children are a nuisance.
Me: they are children, and they should ride.The system says: their childhood can be converted into labour.
Me: for a few hours, let labour be converted back into play.The system says: protect your property.
Me: let the bicycle go.The system says: be realistic.
Me: I am. Look at his face in the rain.Years before India, before the call of my heart took shape and found language, before I began to understand the cost of systems and public goodness and religious ambition, I had already been acting in these small, strange, bodily ways.But something had happened to my confidence in those actions.Before my mentor took me to India, he and I were walking on a street in Colombo. I stopped and bought a parcel of rice for a poor person.Later, my mentor confronted me.“Do you think you’re making a difference?”I felt indignant.But something about the challenging tone made me doubt myself.By then, I had already done years of things on the street. Sleeping beside people. Sitting with people. Stopping for people. Giving food. Letting children ride my bicycle. Small acts, yes, but not casual ones. They had come from some place in me that felt older than argument.Yet his question entered me.Do you think you’re making a difference?I must have believed him in some strange way.I lost a lot of confidence in myself from that question.It is a powerful thing when someone with authority shifts the measure of an act.I had been acting from contact. From the point where my body met someone else’s vulnerability. I was not asking whether the whole system could be changed by one parcel of rice, one night on a pavement, one bicycle ride, one bag of plain tea.I was responding because the person was there.But my mentor’s question moved the act into another courtroom.Effectiveness.
Scale.
Outcome.
Difference.Do you think you’re making a difference?Measured that way, almost every small act becomes easy to humiliate.No, buying one parcel of rice does not end poverty.
No, letting children ride a bicycle does not end child labour.
No, sleeping beside a man on the street does not end ethnic harassment.
No, staying beside an old woman for one night does not make the city safe.But perhaps that was never the right question.Tommy’s question was different.What is that tear?My mentor’s question made me doubt the act.Tommy’s question made me return to its source.My mentor asked whether the act was effective enough.Tommy sensed that the tear carried knowledge.And when the memory came into the room — the children at the traffic lights, the bicycle, the risk, the boy riding through the rain with his face glowing — Tommy did not ask whether it had changed the world.He said:You are a revolutionary.I think now that he was restoring something that had been injured.Simply giving back the right name to a quality of action that another man’s question had made me distrust.The bicycle did not end child labour.
It did not fix Colombo.
It did not save those children from everything they were carrying.But for a few hours, children who were supposed to be rejected at traffic lights flew through the city.One of them came down my lane in the rain with his face glowing.That was the tear.And Tommy, in his terrible precision, would not let me lose it.

Tommy (d)

I find myself pondering how to go about describing the arrival of help when the help did not announce itself as rescue. Tricky one, that.It is difficult to say how he entered my life, because the usual words are too large and too sentimental. And yet, without him, I do not know how certain things would have become possible.Before him, I had completed the first year of training and, given my track record with academics, had done unusually well.What seemed to hold everything in place were the first intimations of a calling, which had begun to grow in me in the months leading up to that first year. So when I arrived on campus, I was quiet, but it was the sort of quiet that carried beneath it a laser focus — as much as that is possible for a twenty-six-year-old.Because the sense of call had not come from within the campus, I arrived with an unusual sense of direction. The campus, and the training itself, became secondary. They were a necessary backdrop, perhaps, against which to wrestle with the call.I did what needed to be done, but I did not go out of my way to become overly involved in campus life.At the start of the second year, I decided to tell my mentor explicitly about this sense of calling, which had been brewing.It was very different from the vision he had for me.I knew there would be resistance. But having grappled with it for two years, I felt I should let him know.Bad move, in retrospect.Though understandable.I was only twenty-six, after all.My mentor did not take well to it.Thus began the gradual slide downward — in concentration, discernment, and my ability to meet the necessary requirements of the training. I tried to tell a faculty member on campus, and while the response was listening, it was clear that nothing meaningful would happen. My mentor was too influential.Somewhere in the second half of that year, we had one of those mandatory elective sessions — a nice oxymoron in itself. It was held in the chapel, and perhaps made available to more than one class.I cannot remember much of what was taught.Except one phrase.Psychotherapy, the lecturer said, is a friendship with the divine.Something in that phrase stirred me.At the end of the lecture, I found myself walking toward the front, where several others had lined up to speak with him.This was very unusual behaviour for me. I was not the sort of person who easily asked for prayer, counsel, or advice. Even if I felt drawn to approach someone, my tendency was to resist the impulse, or even walk away.And yet the stirring was strong.Not simple to ignore.I found myself walking.When I reached him, I began crying.That too was unusual, a public display of emotion and vulnerability, in a setting where I would normally have held myself together.He put his hand on my shoulder, and with a kind smile said, “I can see you, if you wish.”I said, “I cannot afford to pay.”He responded that we could meet once a month. Without payment.That is how I soon came to find myself waiting for that one Saturday a month, to take the fifteen-minute bus ride to his house, about two or three kilometres away.

Tommy (e)

One thing I remember about Tommy was that he gave real time.The meetings were sometimes very long — occasionally three hours or so. And when he became tired, he did not hide it, push through, perform endless availability, or quietly resent the demand.He would simply say something like:“I need to rest now, because I am reaching my limits.”It was such a simple sentence, but it was almost unimaginable to me at the time: someone naming their limit cleanly, without accusation, without collapse, without making the other person responsible for it, and without turning the limit into rejection.What I recollect is the shock.And the relief.And the astonishment.That kind of honesty is so rare that the nervous system almost does not know what to do with it at first.Because usually, when someone reaches a limit, they disguise it. They withdraw, become irritated, perform professionalism, hide behind policy, or subtly make the other person feel like too much.That is probably why it landed as both shock and relief.Shock, because one expects limits to arrive with punishment, shame, irritation, or abandonment.Relief, because here was a limit that did not withdraw love or presence. It was just reality, spoken cleanly, without wounding.

Centering Prayer (b)
OOPS — I Did it Again!

What Counts as a Thought?

In the second analogy of meditation — the scuba diver — the definition of a thought is itself deliciously radical.A thought is not merely an idea. It is not only a sentence in the mind, or an argument, or a memory, or a plan, or an image.A thought is anything that draws attention to a focal point.That changes everything.A sudden sadness is a thought.
A flash of irritation is a thought.
A beautiful illumination is a thought.
A remembered conversation is a thought.
A voice from God is a thought.
An itch on the nose is a thought.
A surge of bliss is a thought.
A pain in the knee is a thought.
An overwhelming urge to go to the bathroom is a thought.This is not a slant that these things are unreal. Nor are they unimportant. And it certainly isn’t the sort of spiritual bypassing in which the body does not matter, or feelings are being dismissed, or where divine communication is being reduced to mere mental chatter.They are “thoughts” in this very particular contemplative sense because each one has the same effect: it gathers attention around a focal point.

Anything That Says, “Come Here"

In one form or another, however intelligent the guise, they tend to say a variation of the same thing: come here.Look at me.
Solve me.
Interpret me.
Scratch me.
Follow me.
Fear me.
Enjoy me.
Obey me.
Preserve me.
Explain me.
Tell someone about me later.

The Beautiful Boat Is Still a Boat

Even the "spiritual" thought can do this. Perhaps especially the spiritual thought. A sudden illumination may arrive with such beauty that the practitioner is immediately tempted to climb into it, examine it, decorate it, theologize it, remember it, turn it into a teaching, or preserve it as a spiritual possession.And in this form of meditation, that too is a boat.This is where this second form of meditation becomes almost ruthless in its gentleness.It does not divide the passing boats into noble boats and ignoble boats, spiritual boats and unspiritual boats, meaningful boats and meaningless boats. The point is not the content of the boat. The point is the relocation of attention.Has attention left the rock?
Has awareness been drawn upward into a focal point?
Has the diver discovered himself no longer resting in the depth, but enclosed inside the hold of some passing vessel?Then, in this very precise sense, a thought has happened.This can feel humiliating, though not in a shaming way. It is humiliating because it reveals how little mastery one actually has over attention. The mind does not only run after crude distractions. It can be taken by noble ones. It can be carried away by insight, beauty, devotion, compassion, bodily discomfort, theological brilliance, emotional urgency, or the sudden certainty that one has finally understood the whole thing.

OOPS, I Did It Again

And then comes the small, comic awakening.Oops. I did it again.There is a special mercy in being able to laugh here.It is the sort of laughter that makes an awkward little hole in the boat of spiritual grandiosity. One wakes up in the boat again, perhaps in the hold of a very impressive boat, with incense burning and sacred music playing and prayer flags hanging from the mast announcing “Profound Realization.”

The Gentle Humility of Returning

And still.... the instruction is the same.Climb out.Swim back down.Return to the rock.This is why the second form requires such profound humility. It does not allow the practitioner to build identity around being a good meditator. The practice is not proven by never leaving the rock. The practice is proven by returning without drama when one discovers one has left.And the definition of thought protects the practice from subtle forms of self-deception.Without this definition, one might think: “I was not distracted. I was receiving an insight.”Or: “I was not distracted. I was processing emotion.”Or: “I was not distracted. I was listening to God.”Or: “I was not distracted. I was noticing my body.”But in this form of meditation, the question is not first of all whether the content was true, meaningful, spiritual, psychological, or bodily. The question is simpler and more exacting:
Did it draw attention to a focal point?If yes, then for the purposes of the practice, it is a thought.Outside the period of meditation, the insight may need to be reflected on. The emotion may need care. The bodily signal may need practical response. The voice from God may require discernment. The memory may belong to healing. The pain may need attention. The urge to go to the bathroom, (believe it to not!!) may, in fact, require getting up.But within the prayer itself, the instruction remains spare.Notice.
Release.
Return.The beauty of this is that it creates a radical equality among experiences. Grand thoughts and petty thoughts are treated the same way. Sacred thoughts and ridiculous thoughts are treated the same way. The itch on the nose and the luminous revelation both have to surrender their power to organize attention.This is not anti-intellectual. It is not anti-body. It is not anti-feeling. It is not anti-revelation.It is simply loyal to the rock.
The rock is the deeper consent.
The rock is the surrendered place.
The rock is the place beneath commentary, beneath management, beneath spiritual acquisition, beneath the endless attempt to turn experience into possession.So the diver does not even need to rank the boats. He only needs, when he wakes up in one, to recognize where he is.Then, with as little fuss as possible, and perhaps with a small inward smile, he climbs out of the hold, slips back into the water, and returns down again.

Open Mind, Open Heart, Thomas Keating

Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, Cynthia Bourgeault

The Heart of Centering Prayer: Nondual Christianity in Theory and Practice, Cynthia Bourgeault

The Heart of Centering Prayer: Part 1 of 4, Cynthia Bourgeault

Centering Prayer (c)
Errr..... Return to What Exactly?

After All This Talk of Returning

This is the beginning of a whole different way of holding attention.In fact, it may be the tip of the tip of an iceberg that goes way, way down into a different understanding of what attention even is.And this different understanding of attention is at stake in everything that happens in this second form of meditation.

Attention as a Beam

Normally, when we speak of attention, we mean something like an energy connecting a subject to an object.I pay attention to my driving.
I pay attention to the lecture.
I pay attention to what I am reading.
I pay attention to what I am doing.
I pay attention to my breathing.The grammar is revealing.Whenever someone says, “Pay attention,” the almost automatic response is: to what?Because in our ordinary understanding, attention requires an object. There is an “I” over here, and something else over there. Attention is the line, the beam, the energetic bridge between the two.This is not wrong. In fact, this form of attention is immensely important. Without it, one could not read, drive, cook, study, listen well, or live responsibly in the world.This form of attention, is the beginning of much formatory instruction around meditation. The practitioner learns to take attention back from the chaos of involuntary distraction and place it consciously on a chosen object.A mantra.
The breath.
A candle flame.
A sacred phrase.
The sensation of walking.
The movement of the abdomen.
The sound of a bell.

When the Object Grabs the Subject

This is already revolutionary for most people, because most ordinary attention is not truly voluntary. It is grabbed. Something flashes, vibrates, threatens, seduces, entertains, or irritates — and attention swivels toward it. Then something else grabs it, and attention swivels again.The power seems to lie in the object. The object hooks the subject.This is what many traditions are naming when they speak of monkey mind. Attention is not seated within the person. It is scattered across whatever can claim it.So introductory spiritual training often begins by reversing this. Attention is gradually brought under conscious control. Instead of attention being seized by objects, the practitioner learns to place attention deliberately and keep it there. The power begins to return to the subject.This is no small thing.It means that attention no longer belongs entirely to the world of stimulus. The practitioner can choose to remain with the breath even when the breath is not interesting. The practitioner can return to the mantra even when the mind would prefer entertainment, planning, fantasy, resentment, or spiritual drama. Attention becomes less reactive and more obedient to intention.But in these concentration and awareness practices, there is still an “I” who is doing the returning.There is a subject and an object.There is an I who returns to my breath.
An I returning to my mantra.
An I who observes this sensation.
An I noticing that thought.
An I who comes back to the chosen point.This is profound and necessary training. But it is still operating within the subject-object structure.There is an “I” here, there is a breath or mantra there, and attention travels between them.The second form of meditation — the scuba diver — is subtler.It does not merely ask, “Can you return your attention to the breath?”It asks something more radically destabilizing:
Who is the “I” who is returning?
And what exactly are they returning to?What is this subject that stands over here and attends to an object over there?What happens when attention is no longer organized as a beam connecting a subject to a focal point?

The Rock Cannot Be Grasped

This is where the scuba diver analogy becomes so important.The analogy gives us a rock because language needs a rock. The imagination needs somewhere to place the diver. We need to picture the diver returning somewhere.But in the actual practice, there is no literal rock.And this is what makes the practice so steep, even though it appears gentle.In mantra meditation, the mantra is there. In breath awareness, the breath is there. In candle meditation, the flame is there. In awareness meditation, there are feelings and bodily sensations. The practitioner may wander, but there is an object to return to. One knows, at least in principle, where to go back.But in the second form, the “rock” cannot be grasped as an object. If one turns the rock into an object of attention, then the rock itself becomes another boat.This is very subtle.Returning is not the movement of a subject back toward a chosen object. It is the release of the whole subject-object contraction.This means that the practice is not primarily about placing attention somewhere. It is about withdrawing attention from focalization itself.Every time attention is drawn toward a focal point, a thought has happened. It doesn’t have to simply be a verbal thought. A thought, in this contemplative sense, is anything that gathers attention into a focal point.A memory does this.
A fear does this.
A bodily itch does this.
A surge of grief does this.
A mystical illumination does this.
A voice from God does this.
A theological insight does this.
An urgent need to go to the bathroom does this.The content may be humble or grand, ridiculous or sacred, psychologically important or spiritually luminous. But the movement is the same: attention has been gathered around something.The field has collapsed into a point.The diver is in the boat.This is why the definition of thought in the second form is so radical. It is not defining thought by content. It is defining thought by the movement of attention. A thought is not primarily “an idea.” A thought is a focalizing event.Something says, “Come here.”
Look at me.
Interpret me.
Scratch me.
Solve me.
Fear me.
Treasure me.
Write me down.
Turn me into a teaching.
Protect me.
Preach me.This is why even spiritual experiences are boats, in this analogy of meditation. Perhaps they are among the most seductive boats of all, because the practitioner can justify remaining inside them.“This is not distraction,” one says.
“This is insight. This is discernment. This is God. This is healing. This is important.”And it may indeed be important.
But during the practice, importance is not the category.The question is simpler and more exacting:
Has attention been drawn into a focal point?
If yes, then in this precise contemplative sense, it is a thought.This is not a dismissal of the experience. It is not saying the experience is false, trivial, or merely mental. It is simply noticing that attention has been organized around an object.And the second form of meditation is exploring what attention is when it is not organized around an object.

Attention as Field

This is where the image of mercury becomes so beautiful.Attention usually behaves like a beam. It goes out toward something. It connects subject to object. It reaches, grasps, studies, names, likes, dislikes, compares, interprets.But attention can also gather itself.It can have tensile strength.It can become more like a living field than a line.Like mercury, it can scatter into a puddle, but it can also collect into a shimmering, quivering whole. It has cohesion. It has a kind of inner surface tension. It does not need to be attached to an external object in order to exist. It can hold itself.This is a very different configuration of awareness.One is no longer aware by splitting the field into “me here” and “that there.” There is awareness, but it is not organized by opposition. There is consciousness, but it is not dependent on a focal object. There is presence, but not the familiar subject standing over against the world.This is why the second form is not simply concentration.Concentration strengthens the beam.This practice gathers the field.Concentration says: place attention here.This practice says: release whatever has captured attention, and allow attention to recollect itself.Concentration still has a chosen object.This practice moves toward objectless awareness.And objectless awareness does not mean blankness. It does not mean being unconscious, vague, spaced out, or dissociated. In fact, it may be more awake, not less. But the awakeness is not organized around a focal point. It is more like a whole-field knowing.One is conscious of the whole without having to split the whole into the usual subject-object polarity.This is why the second practice can feel so difficult to explain.The moment one says, “Return to the rock,” the mind imagines an object. The moment one says, “Rest in awareness,” awareness becomes something to look at. The moment one says, “Be present,” presence becomes a subtle project. Even the instruction can become a boat.So the practice must be learned almost by taste. Not by grabbing the rock, but by discovering what it feels like when one has left it.
Not by locating objectless awareness as a new object, but by recognizing the constriction that happens when attention has been captured.This is where the humility comes in:
again and again, one wakes up in the boat.Not only in crude boats. Or only in anxious boats, lustful boats, angry boats, petty boats, or distracted boats. One wakes up in elegant boats, spiritual boats, theological boats, compassionate boats, healing boats, boats with incense and stained glass and a small choir singing in the hull.And still, the music blaring from the speakers is: “Oops, I did it again.”There is something wonderfully freeing about this. The practice does not require one to pretend to be more advanced than one is. It assumes sleepwalking. It assumes capture. It assumes that attention, trained by a lifetime of focalization, will keep collapsing into objects.The work is not to be shocked by this.The work is to notice, release, and return.

Returning from Thing-ness

But now “return” has a deeper meaning.The practitioner is not returning to a thing.The practitioner is returning from thing-ness.Returning is not the movement of attention back toward an object called the rock, or the breath, or the mantra, or even awareness itself. It is allowing attention to come back into its own collectedness. It is the release of the whole subject-object contraction — the whole machinery of me-attending-to-that.This also changes the meaning of subjectivity.At first, one might say the practice returns power from the object to the subject. In ordinary life, the object grabs attention. In formatory spiritual training, the subject learns to reclaim attention and place it voluntarily, on an object of one’s choosing.But in the second form, even this is not the final movement. Because the “subject” who proudly reclaims attention can itself become another focal point. The “I who meditates well,” the “I who returns,” the “I who is becoming spiritually mature” — this too can become a boat.So the second form does not merely strengthen the ordinary subject.It loosens the whole structure by which the ordinary subject stands over against objects.It is not simply that attention is returned to “me.”Rather, attention begins to be thawed from the habitual structure of a self over here attending to an object over there. The reflex of turning awareness into an invisible line between myself and something else, begins to thin.What begins to emerge instead is a new center of perceptivity. A deeper, more collected awareness. A field with tensile strength. A center that does not need to define itself over against an object in order to be awake.This is why the practice feels both gentle and merciless.Gentle, because nothing dramatic is required. One does not fight thoughts. One does not analyze them. One does not suppress them. One does not even need to classify them. One simply lets go and returns.Merciless, because everything can be revealed as a thought.Even the beautiful thing.
Even the urgent thing.
Even the holy thing.
Even the thought about how well the meditation is going.
Even the thought about objectless awareness.
Even the subtle satisfaction of understanding there is no "rock" to return to.All of it can become a boat.This is not meant to make the practitioner suspicious of life. Outside the meditation, one must think, discern, respond, remember, plan, care, study, create, and act. The world of subject and object is not evil. It is the necessary operating system for ordinary life.But it is not the only operating system.The second form of meditation introduces another possibility: awareness without immediate division, attention without focal capture, presence without possession.The boats are still there.
The river is still there.
The ordinary mind still does what it does.But beneath the surface movement, another kind of attention becomes possible — gathered, tensile, whole, objectless, awake.And perhaps this is why the scuba diver image works so well, even though the rock finally disappears. The diver is not learning to stare at the boats more carefully. Nor is he learning to cling to the rock as an object. He is learning, again and again, the felt difference between being enclosed in a passing vessel and belonging to the depth.The whole practice is hidden in that difference.To wake up in the boat.
To smile, perhaps with a little embarrassment.
To climb out.
To swim down.
To discover that the depth was never absent.
Only attention had been captured.

Open Mind, Open Heart, Thomas Keating

Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, Cynthia Bourgeault

The Heart of Centering Prayer: Nondual Christianity in Theory and Practice, Cynthia Bourgeault

The Heart of Centering Prayer: Part 1 of 4, Cynthia Bourgeault