A Breakthrough On Vernal Equinox: Was This Nirvikalpa Samadhi?

For the past nine hours of the Full Moon of the Spring Equinox, this body-mind-personality complex has been held in a thrall, an altered state, and now it is over. Earlier, as our T’ai Chi Chih class directed by Marie Dotts finished a silent series of movements, an unfamiliar process overcame me, like a tsunami of unaccustomed awareness.

The day’s theme was stillness. Marie said there are three stages of the journey to stillness: First we seek it, or make the journey to stillness. Then we make the journey with stillness. Then we become stillness, as stillness, as Being.

Marie invited us to sit in a circle after the silent practice. Various group members offered reflections on the practice, wherein we had formed a circle within a circle so that newer students stood behind an inner ring of more experienced students, and could easily observe their movements and follow the general flow.

When it became my turn to share, I was unaccountably weepy and mentioned that during this process of still practice, I felt fed, full, nurtured. I became aware of the great (detached) love that I have for each of my fellow practitioners; and that when they are not present, I miss them. I became aware that this (stillness) is the place where we are all the same, where I am you and you are me. No separation. This stillness is always there, inside, available to us, if we are available to it.

I could feel my heart center expanding, without my (egoic) permission and I couldn’t stop it. An expansive oceanic warmth was coming over me, as if I might levitate off the chair, so I held onto the armrests. The class energy was drawing to a close. We sat in our chairs, in no rush to move, eyes closed. Marie tapped the cylindrical bell with its tiny mallet – ding, ding, ding – signifying its end. We arose, little clusters of students talked with each other and I wafted out the door.

Since the spring day was warm, Jim proposed we sit by Lake Windsor in our canvas lawn chairs. When we reached the lake twenty minutes later, tears were streaming down my face. A slight breeze chilled the tears coursing to my chin. Dozens of seagulls floated on the gray-blue waters and a fisherman paddled his small boat into the cove near us. It was a cloudless sky; few sounds were heard. The tears continued. I didn’t feel sad or happy, but felt that immense universal energy was throbbing and pulsing, pushing through me from the inside, as if I were a doorway to this dimension, this so-called Reality.

After half an hour we drove home, marveling at the warmth of the air and the unusual stillness around us. Traffic was light. At home, a profound sleepiness overtook me, and I needed to lie down for a while. I apparently slept quite soundly because when I next opened my eyes, Jim said, “You conked out as soon as you hit the pillow. I only napped for two hours but you slept for five and a half. I wonder what hit us so hard during the class that we had to recuperate beside the lake, then take deep naps.”

I replied, “That was a profound and eventful class. In fact, the entire past nine hours feels as if I have been radically altered. Even now, I feel I am an Aperture, as we all are, and that all of my life – and prior lifetimes – I have put maximal unconscious energy into preventing the universal energy of love from breeching the dam of my ego. It’s as if I’ve been the little Dutch boy with his finger in the hole in the dyke, trying to save the town. But I’ve been trying to save the town/world from my Self, from the love that I am, that we each are, as Spirit, or Atman.

But today the dam broke; it’s now impossible to wall off my love. This impersonal compassion is not grasping, clutching or sentimental. It accepts the human condition like an ancient watcher that witnesses suffering humanity, realizing that individuals cannot be fully and impactfully helped until they cease their own self-destructive tendencies.

My own self-nullifying proclivities seem to have evaporated. An ancient separation has been erased, overwhelmed, nullified, submerged into nothingness. I feel what Walt Whitman must have felt when he wrote his ecstatic poetry: open to all of life, as All That Is. Is this new state Nirvikalpa Samadhi that has stealthily crept into my consciousness and taken up residence, uninvited, like an opportunistic homeless woman who found the front door open and plunked herself down in a living room recliner? She’s not leaving. That much is clear. I might as well welcome her home and fix her some tea.