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boya sun

jacob sanders

peter schmidt

Sarah Schneider

Chris Carfolite

Courtney Bernard

Jacob Sanders

The following is a transcript of a guided meditation from Dr. Leslie Tanner’s seminar, “Explorations”. This was recorded November 12, 1982, in the banquet hall of a Holiday Inn Express in Evansville, Indiana.

“...So for our next Exploration, I would like to discuss a more specific phenomenon, one to me that elucidates the fragility of the mind in particular ways: Christmas. Whether Christmas is right around the corner or if you’re in a state of reflection on the holiday, it is indeed a remarkable time of year. A time to be close to our loved ones, a time to look around us and give thanks for the many blessing we have in our lives. Around Christmas, we are bombarded with these messages, and for many of us, and I assume that there are a few of us in this room, this pressure to be happy, loved, and loving can make us acutely aware of a visceral, immediate emptiness inside of us. Many people have different words for this void, however the term I use most with my students is The Abyss. We all feel this to varying extents at different times in our lives. You may have experienced a sudden loss or trauma, this Abyss quickly becomes another consistent figure in our lives, like the cashier at your corner store or a polite, but distant co-worker. Or some of us may be in the middle of a relentless grind of which there is no apparent beginning or end, a grind that so frequently leaves us exhausted and numb, merely going through the motions of daily life. Or some of us may have no good reason at all, but we are still stalked by this chasm inside.

Throughout the year we may be only vaguely aware of it, and we may manage to keep it at bay by temporarily filling it with food, alcohol, drugs, tv shows, or even other people and our relationships. However, for me this Abyss can become overwhelmingly immediate during the holiday season as we are bombarded with messages and images of complete contentment and togetherness. These images come with a degree of shallow comfort, but they are also lies; falsehoods that, deliberately or not, can remind us that we are incomplete. (pause) And alone. So for those of us that fall into this camp, I’ve put together a fun exercise in which we’ll explore this Abyss and see if we can give ourselves a little something to take home and think about.

(Soft, ethereal music begins) Before we begin, I’d like to take a moment and notice our breath. Do not attempt to change how you’ve been breathing, there’s no right or wrong way to breathe. Just watch your body take air in and push it out, as effortlessly as possible, as if it’s just a machine that functions without you. As you sit with your breathing for a moment, you may feel an urge to breathe more slowly or more deeply, allow your body to shape the breath. Give your body permission to deepen and elongate each inhale and exhale.

As your chest and stomach regulate your air, bring your awareness to how your breathing has been affecting the rest of your body. For a moment, imagine that while watching your chest breathe slowly in and out, a small mass of bright, warm, golden light has grown in the center of your chest. It is small and would normally be overlooked, but in your stillness

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you feel it. Notice your chest rise and fall, and feel the bright warmth inside of you grow with every breath, slowly occupying more and more space inside of you. As the bright, golden, syrupy mass of light expands in your body, it brings with it a sense of renewed joy and energy, but also complete relaxation. Allow the constant, regular rhythm of your breath slowly work warmth and relaxation to fill your entire chest, stomach, shoulders, into your biceps and triceps, into your forearms, into your hands. Now as your body continues to breathe, feel the mass of pure, energizing warmth push its way through your abdomen, into the front and back of our thighs, through your knees, down through your shins and calves, and finally into your feet and toes. As your neck and head have also been taken by this energizing light, your body has become merely a vessel for the gorgeous light, and it continues to grow effortlessly with your body’s breath. It’s expanded so much that now it’s starting to spill out of your body. Out of your eyes, ears, mouth, it even begins emanating from your pores. The light has now overtaken the borders of your body entirely, and for a moment, there is no real “you,” only a source of gorgeous, comforting light, sending vibrations of warmth and beauty to everyone and everything around it

Now, with this newfound relaxation, I’d like you to imagine for a moment that you are at home and getting ready to attend a holiday party with your closest friends. Your romantic partner is in the kitchen making cookies for the party, and the smell of baked goods fills your home in a thick cloud of holiday comfort. As you take in the relaxing energy of the moment, you lay your cutest outfit onto the bed and prepare to enter the shower. On your way to the bathroom, Silent Night comes on Pandora, the preciousness of the moment makes you feel like you’re in a corny christmas movie, and you laugh to yourself. You stroll into the bathroom, start the shower, and check the temperature of the water. As usual, it will need a moment to warm up, so you continue to disrobe. As you peel your socks off with the toes of your opposite foot and pull your underwear down, you catch a glimpse of your naked body in the mirror with a momentary pang of self-judgment that stops you for a moment. You’ve long had a rough relationship with yourself, always criticizing, always finding areas you’ll remember to work on this week. However, in this moment, it might be shallow holiday euphoria, but you can’t ignore the feeling that, right now, everything just feels right. Even as you look in the mirror, you notice things about yourself you would normally wish were different: the weight you’ve gained around your stomach since winter began, your arms you’ve always wanted to be more defined. Noticing these flaws habitually lead you to other harsh and more personal self-criticisms, like the things you might have achieved by now if you just had more discipline and direction, like so many of your more successful friends have. However, right now, you feel completely free from these familiar pressures. You’re about to spend a relaxed, fun, warm evening with your closest friends and lovely, loving partner. You’ll drink a little or maybe a lot, you’ll snack, you’ll trade stories and laughs and listen to Christmas music with a mix of ironic nostalgia and genuine enjoyment. As you look at your naked body in the mirror and imagine in your mind what will be a blissful, comfortable night, you find yourself in a rare moment of self-acceptance and 8

contentment. You hold eye contact with yourself in the mirror, and after a moment, you start to cry, just looking at yourself in the mirror. In this fleeting moment of clarity, you realize that you deserve to be happy, with and in yourself. You even know that this moment will pass and you’ll forget this truth, but you take even further comfort knowing that it’s ok, because it doesn’t mean that this seemingly fragile truth is any less real.

After letting these thoughts float around in your head for a while, you smile, wipe a few tears away, take a deep breath and get in the shower. The heat of the water burns slightly and is almost uncomfortable as it works it’s way from the top of your head down to other parts of your neck, chest, and back. You relax for a moment, but you realize during your special moment of solitude, you remembered that you wanted to shave but forgot your razor by the sink. You pull the curtain aside, take a few steps out of the shower, grab the razor and turn back toward the shower.

What happens next occurs in a matter of seconds, but because of the nature of the event, you remember it happening extremely slowly. As soon as you take a step into the shower, you realize you stepped in with your left foot when you usually lead with your right. Your weight displacement is slightly off on your weaker foot, and it causes you to slip suddenly. Because of your velocity and weight distribution at that exact moment, you lose control of your entire body and completely leave the ground. Your head swings up, your arms reach out for anything it can grab to keep from falling, but you find nothing. After a brief flurry of naked arms and legs desperately trying to keep from falling, the first thing to make contact with the ground is the side of your head. It sharply cracks against the tile floor, where the floor meets the wall to the left of the door. Almost simultaneously with the crack of your skull against the floor and wall, you hear a swift but uneventful snap, and finally a sloppy thud as the rest of your body collapses onto the ground. You quickly surmise that the snap was the sound of several of your vertebrae fracturing and severing your spinal cord in your neck, just at the base of your skull. Your mind is now a blinding hurricane of emotions and images, one of the most prominent being a choking panic that sets in as you attempt to move your now paralyzed body, to do anything to prevent your inevitable asphyxiation on the bathroom floor. Your mind hopelessly, wildly rages against it, but all of the anguished sobbing echoing through your mind is only for you to hear as you lay trapped in a silent pile of soft flesh on the ground. However worthless your body has come, your senses remain for the moment. Blood has gathered at your eyebrows and drips over your eyes as it pours from the wound in your head, combining with your tears as they run down your face.

You’ve been unable to breathe since you fell, and you can feel your brain’s storm of panicked emotions begin to muddle as your brain has been cut off from oxygen. The slow fade of your senses and consciousness has given you some space from the frenzied terror of your looming death. In the space from the panic, you are momentarily overtaken by how uninteresting your death is, and how differently you wanted everything to happen.

Continued on page 12

Boya Sun

Peter Schmidt

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Your entire life, you’ve had the implicit belief that you would die accomplished, content, surrounded by people who loved you, but here you are. You’re lying naked and helpless in a pile on the floor. You’ve never really enjoyed any of the jobs you’ve had, always waiting for someone to notice your potential and give you an opportunity to really use your talents. You’ve never looked as skinny or muscular as you wanted to be, always picking at fleshy parts of your body in disdain. You’ve always found excuses not to travel, citing family reasons or misguided career goals. However, the most crushing thought in this barrage of regrets is that you’ve never truly let anyone love you, and you’ve never allowed yourself to love anyone to the extent you know you’re capable. (Pause) Years of unrealized dreams, plans, and potential, gone in the length of a Christmas song as Pandora continues to play on your laptop in the next room. There you lay, begging your lungs to draw a breath, just one breath, so that you may stave the coming darkness for just a moment, maybe tell your loved ones that you’re sorry and that you love them, but it is all futile as your conscious thought becomes cloudier and your senses fade. No one is there to comfort you as muddled thoughts of rage and panic give way to utter and terrifying loneliness, all while the sound of your shower is lulling you to eternal rest.

Your eyes close for the final time, and the moment you perceived as your death passes. (Long puase). However after many moments of foggy disorientation, you find that your mind did not stop, and you’ve slowly regained some clarity of thought. Your mind feels somewhat normal, as you talk to yourself in your head, but there’s something odd about the space you’re in. You move your head around to look for a source of light, but there is none. You are in total, silent blackness, physically suspended, and entirely alone. You try to yell as if someone or something might hear you, but the sound seems to be immediately absorbed in the darkness around you. This feeling of absolute isolation and solitude surprisingly is not foreign to you. It’s as if part of you has been here all along, and you’ve merely returned to some sort of source. To regain your bearings, you bring your hands to each other to feel your body, but while you partly feel your hands making contact, you also sense something odd. The space in which you hold each of your hands pass right through each other. You bring your hands to your face, and again, you feel something that reminds you of touching your face, but you also experience your hands passing through the space you expected your head to be. You continue to search for the rest of your body, but with the same vague, hazy results.

Maybe there is something wrong with your hands? Is it possibly this place that’s affecting your senses? However, what if you’re suspicions are correct, that you may be completely without a body now? Are you just remembering the sensations and creating this entire experience with your mind? And what about your mind, are you just a floating head to contain your consciousness, or is even that an empty expectation? You continue to reel through questions like this, but the more you inquire, the more you can’t differentiate between thoughts and expectations and what might actually be real in this place, or 12

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whether the idea of a “place” is just another illusion you cling on to. Ultimately, you conclude that even if you hold any of these ideas to be truer than others, you have absolutely no way to prove any of them.

Confused and exhausted trying to understand your new existence, your mind relaxes and wanders to your last memory in the bathroom. You find your mind attempting to recreate the spatial dimensions of the room, the color of the walls, but it’s shaky and unclear. You concentrate harder and try to introduce the smell of cookies your partner was making, but it eventually shakes apart and returns to blackness. The warm memory of your apartment combines with the stark loneliness of your new existence and immerses you into a deep and profound sense of sadness and frustration. After recreating the feeling of sitting and putting your head in your hands, you settle for what you remember of Nat King Cole singing Silent Night as you try to remember what it was like to cry.

As we conclude the first half of the exercise and come back into our bodies for lunch, remember to do the reflection worksheet on page 20 of the workbooks I gave you this morning. For those who wish to have lunch with me and my staff and discuss our experiences today, the Bennigans in the lobby will be offering a 20% discount on appetizers until 2pm to all of my students here today. Thank you and namaste. Good work everybody. (applause)”

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Jardley Jean-LouisDrew Alderfer

Ryan HumphreyPeter Schmidt

Jacob Sanders