Energy Burst

My energy levels have always fluctuated a lot. Sometimes there’s massive energy, at other times there’s a depression. Many people only remember me and my work from high energy periods. We do not often talk about our depressions, but I think it's important to reflect on both our peaks and our valleys. Let's start with a valley. Roughly a year ago, a low mood got really nasty and I nearly burned out I. With much effort I documented the episode. Afterwards I took some steps back and started meditating more seriously. This post is about some of those recent meditations.

Many phenomena arise during meditation. It’s about staying with those experience, without clinging. Emotions come and go. For example, I remember that roughly two months ago it was time for fear to arise. So I allowed fear to consume me, base-level fear, like a horror movie. Imaginations came of monsters tearing my body apart while laying bed. I struggled walking through the dark to the bathroom, feeling like a little child again. I tried to accept it all, stay equanimous. A thought wants to destroy the body? Fine, let it try. Slowly fear went away again.

Then came heat and passion, like never before. Tummo, I learned this feeling is called (apparently Wim Hof uses Tummo to go under the ice). I let Tummo consumed me whole, flooding the body and mind. I lay awake for hours just enjoying it. After a while it became intertwined with Metta, kindness and love. Rest in it all.

You can anthropomorphize Tummo and Metta. Let gods and goddesses caress you. Or let them in, to become you. You are these gods, they are you. Your entire phenomenal world experience becomes heat and loving kindness. You may ask them to aid you during the day, not just in meditation. Or they simple come to help, arising spontaneously from your unconscious mind. An ocean of gods telling you they love you.

It’s all a mind trick of course. But as Rob Burbea says somewhere in Seeing That Frees; do whatever helps reduce suffering. The tricks are scaffolding that you have to find yourself. Let them go again when no longer needed. The tricks helped me for a while. Massive energy surged through me.

One night, a deep strategic feeling came. Not a booming voice or anything. A feeling that my inner voice translated into quiet words. To be of service and become freer, we’d need to write a book, to share our knowledge with people who needed it. (A specific book about work, not some self-help book. I remain a technologist.) Writing a book is tedious. So let’s first write blogs. And promote those on LinkedIn and elsewhere.

I couldn’t act on the feeling right away. But a few weeks later an opportunity presented itself. A two week holiday period in my local area here in The Netherlands. With most of my colleagues away I decided to use the calm at work and combine it with some days off, to write, write, write. I wrote a lot for almost 3 weeks. Since then I published 9 articles and I still have many drafts available for further polishing. They vary in topics, but it’s all about uniting scientists and software engineers. We will see if a book emerges from it all.

One downside of indulging the energy is that it became extremely jittery. An endless train of thoughts swept through my mind, or actually multiple strings of thought constantly competing and weaving through one another. Social media distractions became more enticing, talking to whoever commented on my posts, the social media addiction levels were rising. The storm of thoughts was there in every meditation session.

But over time the energy dissipated. Inspiration is waning. The words are drying up. People are coming back from holidays and make more demands on my time.

The energy is mostly gone now. Apparently it is time to rest and accept what comes next, whatever that is. Introspection maybe. It’s all a little weird. Who is doing all this? Is there a self, steering this? Is my subconscious flooding my awareness with what it wants? Are my body, my consciousness, my subconsciousness, all just a vessel for the forces of the universe? Who knows, it depends on how you look at it. But I can imagine now that people feel driven by some ‘divine’ force.

Actually I can imagine some people ALWAYS feel this energy and obsession. How else can you explain the productivity of certain individuals? I felt limitations of course. There is always limited time and resources. I have obligations to others to fulfill. I have to sleep and maintain my body. My headaches still appeared, but I would patiently wait them out, and then promptly continue writing. Yet during this period, this drive, this energy burst, was always there in the background.

This article has a lot of woo, doesn't it? My old rational self might shiver at writing such a blog post. But he didn’t know anything. Where does your drive come from? Why do you have certain feelings and desires? Why are you in certain mind states and not in others? Why do those mind states feel the way they feel? What’s all this you experience anyway? Who or what experiences it? How can we begin to answer these questions? Do we even need to answer these questions?

I do not know. We shall see what comes next.