Wednesday, My Own Experience
Seven Exercises for Firm Ground Under Our Feet
3. Wednesday: My Own Experience is Real and True
My own experience is true.
That is to say that it is truly happening, in me. I am having this experience.
Education, upbringing, previous experience may all cause me to reinterpret my experience to fit with a common narrative. Wednesday’s step encourages us to look deeper. Whatever others may say, whatever “Science” or “Wisdom” may say, this experience that I am having now, is real, and true.
What am I, actually experiencing, right now?
Sensory experience, inner feelings, impulses arising in me.
Notice them. See if you can separate these real experiences from the interpretations and constructs those around you would like you to put upon them. Which seems more real to you? Can you even delve through the constructs that hold you in society, safely and securely, to discover what is actually arising as your own experience, in this moment, now?
Of course, in claiming my own experience as real, and true, I have to recognise that yours (and that of every other soul) is real and true. Also, that what others may describe of their experience may be as secondary to what is really happening, as the ideas we tend to construct about our own experience.
Today’s exercise starts to build an inner strength that rests on the self-care we focussed on Monday. Tomorrow’s exercise will balance this one like Tuesday balanced Monday. For now, rest in this truth: My own experience is real, and true.
Distinguishing our own, direct, experience from the many constructs we put upon it, is something that meditation can really help with.
A first step in meditation is just sitting, and watching what arises within. Watching both the body and the passing moods etc that flow through us.
When we stop DOING things and just watch what is already happening, we learn a huge amount about ourselves.
Anthroposophy emphasises the will. Sitting and watching, if done clearly is an action of silence. In that space of silence, a mantra can land anew, like a pebble into quiet water. Once the mantra is opened, has flowered in our soul we can go into silence again and watch as it echoes, changes, and fades. Then notice, how different our inner garden is, for this flower having been there.
This level of doing-nothing is an activity. To actively hold the space is a doing, a doing of No-thing that allows us to begin to really discover: – What IS our own experience.
The deeper we go into our own experience, the more we find its truth. We go below the reactions, below the thought-streams raised by the experience (eddies of dust behind a wind) and we go into the genuine, after-image of the experience itself.
The intimacy of this experience can be almost sensual. This being-at-home with ourselves is the balancing factor to Mercury’s wild delight in communication and exchange. You might also find a connection here with the line in the Lord’s Prayer that says: Lead us not into temptation.
Where the pendulum of our attention swung from self on Monday, to other on Tuesday, it now swings less extremely, back towards ourselves.
Steiner’s original text for these Grounding exercises
Links
Article: www.SoundingBowls.com/1/freedom
Longform on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/561041941
Shortform on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XvKl6MQsbY
A guide to 7-day Rhythms of the Foundation Stone
