Daily living often evolves into a routinized series of transitions. We start our day with coffee or a shower, breakfast over paper, perhaps prepare a lunch and off to work we go. For most of us, work is a series of sub-routines that often repeat the same tasks day after day. And so it goes. Happiness, well-being, deep personal satisfaction and (gasp!) ecstatic experiences are overarching desires that tend to contain (or not) our day to day routines. While we must surrender to the necessities of daily life and work in order to pay the bills and keep our responsibilities intact, I want to advocate for integrating something that generates the experience of the ecstatic. Is this really too much to ask? I don’t recommend activities that end up in addictions for that kind of perceived ecstatic reality is short lived with dire consequences. No, I am recommending the real thing that reminds us about what life is really all about and why it is worth living. Not that the mundane is to be denigrated–I love gardening and cooking and other less demanding time-discretionary tasks but they don’t qualify as ecstatic. I have my own way to experience ecstatic states and they do not include drug induced states. These experiences keep me very happy knowing I can access them regularly. What do YOU do to experience ecstatic states? I would enjoy hearing from you. If you let me know what your ways are, I shall share with you my own.
Posted by Howard Brockman, LCSW
March 19, 2012
Howard Brockman
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Howard this is wonderful – I so agree! It is the leaving out of ecstacy that drives people to seek intense experiences in unhealthy ways. Or it is an afterthought to an accepted boring routine, instead of enjoying high positive moments as central to our nature and our purpose.
To be honest I’m not sure how deep the ecsacy is that I access on most days. I sense it could grow in its intensity. It is my priority and I get tastes. I arrange most of my activities to allow for it.
If there are some extraneous items needed to be stored in the entrance way I’ll arrange them I’ll arrange them be an art piece. After a recording session I may leave the mics set up just as they were and remember the people who were here making lovely vibrations.
I keep a harmonium in our kitchen where there are two inspiring altars and once a day or so will just spontaneously receive a song of appreciation out of the air and sing it with my wife. We often do this just before leaving the house and take it with us.
Every morning I’ll sit in silence for a time and do some asana yoga, letting go of a few layers or stiffness and reside in the pool of light that emerges in its place.
Sometimes on the spur of a moment I’ll go visit a new or familiar Hindu temple, Yoga class or Buddhist sitting where the group brings their precious little hearts to shine them up together and feel greatly uplifted watching as everyone engages together. Sometimes ecstacy shows up there.
Every day, usually during meditation or during a two minute pause somewhere out in the city, I am able to “remember” and gather a handful of the ocean that animates all things, in that moment actually identifying with Source as Self in a still and quiet kind of ecstacy.
A few times in my life it was an intense connection where I experienced just how loved we are and how we are that love, a quality of love that is super-love, clear ,clean and understatedly all powerful.
The first time was when I was 12 and had taken a small amount of LSD (although I now feel the LSD may have been a side-story). During the expereince I was ecstatic and absorbed and afterwards I felt a new and unremovable kind of knowing. It happened once again during a Zen Retreat when I was 45, again at 50 when a being some feel is “enlightened” touched me on the head and once more a year ago while spending a week with an Avatar named Mother Meera.
These few experiences I could call ecstacy and the daily moments of stillness in meditation or chanting are like remembering those, or mini-versions.
On another level, musically and energetically interacting with other players and/or an audience has brought transcendent feelings of intense happiness. Also what comes to mind are memories of sexual moments that surely felt ecstatic. Another thought is the joy of special “ordinary” moments when my wife and I truly connect, and the joy of the big hug I get every time I spend time with my 7 year old niece and the way she calls me “uncle Gary”.
I try to experience one or more of these kinds of things each day, and allow chores like filing parking tickets, doing income tax or drumming up new business to go on the back burner if they will inhibit having these moments.
I am shifting towards taking more pleasure in others’happiness and am looking forward to experiencing more ecstacy by being more proactive in that way.
Thanks so much for your reminder Howard – so…how to you make room for, and daily experience ecstacy?
The natural world is Mother Earth’s repository of limitless chi. It fills us up if we open to it.