The seat on the agitated water.
Field Notes 20260807 - Friday
This week’s “return to form,” after last week’s adventure time, was foiled by a nasty virus that I am certain Kim and I caught during our attendance at the aquarium. Most of the week I spent in survival mode, casting aside physical training for another week. As I’m climbing out of the foggy delirium of sickness, I’m feeling the “softness” of not going on a run or lifting heavy things settle in, and the leg cramps from inactivity feel like a quiet protest from the body itself.
Most of the week was also spent on shorter meditation sessions, as anything longer than 15 or 20 minutes would end up in just sleeping, which I did plenty of as well. Today, however, was the first day all week I sustained a good 45-minute sit. The goal wasn’t to explore but to recalibrate, something I’ll be focusing on more seriously this time, unlike the previous break from disease that knocked me off my game for months.
I went into an F12 (expanded awareness) meditation to clear my field and cast the following request during trance: “Show me the seat on the water.” One aspect of illness I can count on dealing with every single time is the invasion of negative thinking, depression, and general dragging of the mood down into lower bands of self-flagellation. I know, kinky.
I began to watch for this because it always comes, and if I’m not careful I’ll be dealing with it long after my physical body recovers, or worse, the total situation will be prolonged by this self-negativity. I’m never perfect at it, so it tends to slip through and affect various aspects of my life right as I notice the process begin to form.
Today’s session didn’t reveal the answer in a forward-thinking way but rather pointed back at something I performed the other evening. After logging off for the day, I found myself in a terrible mood and ruminating, which is a sharp contrast to my typical normal.
This is more or less what went on inside my mind:
I knew it was a bad idea to take the family to that place; I knew it’d be packed with coughing kids and disease. I was feeling perfect before the trip! I was running strong, lifting with calm self-assurance, and now look at me… I’m starving and weak, and I haven’t done anything, just fighting this thing. Am I going to want to run again? I’m sleeping in all the time now, getting soft and weaker every passing day. Remember what happened last time? I bet altered-state access is going to dry up again, why wouldn’t it, this is impossible.
This went on for an hour and evolved into crapping all over other things and aspects of my life. By the end of that hour, I was pretty damn low. I wasn’t present anywhere but inside my own egoic mind, ruthlessly spinning out and lashing out against my own total self and others around me. As I caught myself doing this, I automatically began to interrogate what was happening, putting my mind behind a one-way mirror and watching the operating self ask it uncomfortable questions about what it was saying.
To ease the mind’s suffering after putting it on blast, I did something I hadn’t done before, not consciously until that evening: a “good cop” performance to remind it of the actual reality it was living through and not its egoic delirium. It went something like this:
The boys had such a blast exploring the aquarium! You held it together through all of the issues that came up on the way there, once you got there, and you got everyone back safely. Not only that, but again, the kids were happy and healthy. So many memories were made in just three days; so much learning happened for them, you, and Kim! You took your family to a beautiful location with amazing views — that’s where you slept two nights. Synchronicities abounded. While things went wrong, they were solved right then and there, correctly, and everyone was better off than before it all happened. Remember that amazing core memory of your own on the beach? You can picture it now, can’t you? The sound, the smell, the wind, the atmosphere, the presence. You’re there now, aren’t you?
And just like that, I felt the anchor dragging me down release, my mood lifted, I smiled an unforced smile, and even my I’m-sick-shuffle got a pep in its step.
Did I magically become the virus-free beacon of health in that moment? Physically, no. Mentally, yes.
Nothing I wrote about should be new to anyone; we’ve heard, learned, discovered it all before. We just forget in the moment because it’s easier to succumb to the physical state and match its energy; it’s the balancing act we do to make it feel right. If I physically feel like shit, then why should I be happy about it?
That’s the faulty thinking that makes things unbearable. It’s not so much being happy about suffering but realizing you don’t need to suffer in areas of your self that aren’t actively suffering. Becoming sick happens; it’s hardly a voluntary situation in which you participate to feel awful, but your internal state and where that awareness goes is voluntary. It always is.
So where is the seat on the water? There isn’t one. Get out of the water and sit where it isn’t trying to drown you and carry you away. Stand up. Maybe it wasn’t that deep to begin with.
