Meditation is strange and powerful medicine. I recently had an experience where I was confronted by memories and experiences from a long time ago. Not anything specific, just memories of pain and discomfort from when I was a kid. It kept me awake all night.

Strange thing now, is that I don’t seem to have any fear. I mean, I would’t drive my car into someone or get myself killed. Not even put myself in the way of things – that would be stupid. But I just have’t got that fear of dying I used to have. I don’t feel like nothing can touch me, but just that whatever does I can handle it and get past it. A feeling of great calm.

We all have defilements in our minds that make us see things wrongly. They are usually translated as fear, anger and craving (actually there are a lot more based on combinations of them). You tend to have one defilement that appears to be the one you have to deal with and that’s what you work with first. In my case I thought it was anger. I work on this all the time. But in fact it is fear. Fear has ruled my life until now. In fact the anger is a way of coping with the fear by pushing things away. Now the fear has gone. I don’t know if this will last, but it is a good feeling.

Still have further to go than I can even imagine.