Seeing the Waterfall

Have you ever noticed, if you are awake in bed at night, how tough it can be to get back to sleep? Do you find yourself saying "Just relax. Go back to sleep. Rest?" And the more you exhort yourself to sleep, the more elusive sleep becomes! I am experiencing the opposite phenomenon. I am all too often walking around in a fog that feels like sleep, exhorting myself to wake up!

The Buddhists have a term for this: seeing the waterfall. It occurs when we begin observing our own minds and see a constant flow of thinking and change. It feels non stop, like the waterfall, and although we know better, it sometimes feels beyond our control. After all, how do you stop a waterfall? How do you tell yourself to be quiet, to "not think?"

When I am "lost in thought" it feels like I am asleep. I know I am living mostly out of old patterns and mindsets. I am making my present out of my history. This frightens me, this waterfall of thinking. I know another way of being, something I drop in and out of when I am mindful enough to pause that gush of thinking, observe it, and identify more with myself as observer than as thought itself. In this place, I feel awake. In this space beyond words, I feel alive. In those moments, I remember who I am at essence and wonder how I could ever fall back into the unconscious, thought-driven way of living. But I do fall back. Again and again, I fall asleep at the wheel.

I find different prompts to jog myself back into wakefulness. I have tried using every doorway I pass through to remind me to pause, breath and remember who I am. I have also let the ping of incoming phone messages prompt me in the same way. My success with both of these prompts has been sporadic at best.

I remind myself, when I am becoming frustrated with my own "sleepy" state, that my life is the instruction book and that the very fact that I notice my waterfall of thought is encouraging. Still, always the overachiever, I want to "get somewhere." What is that "somewhere?" Enlightenment? Nirvana? No, I don't delude myself that there is such an end goal for me.

So, I write about the waterfall to remind myself that although it can feel discouraging, our life itself is an extraordinary journey and not to be discounted. I remind myself to cultivate those moments of wakefulness, for they are surely bliss. Maybe, if I am blessed, some of these wakeful moments will begin to permeate my sleepy state and I will begin to have more and more of them. I know I am a better person when I am awake, better to myself and to those around me. For now, I am cultivating the pauses, the space between breaths, between words on the page, to remind myself that there is more to reality than the barrage of the inner waterfall.