Meditations in the air

The Narrowing
 
It began with anxiety. The word itself comes from angina—narrowing. Anxiety is a bottleneck, a constriction. It is like the birth canal: tight, dark, suffocating. Yet when we pass through it, what awaits is relief, peace, and the opening of a new world.

Even pain instructs, if we let it. The task is not to recoil, but to listen, to observe.

On the airplane, I felt claustrophobic, pressed in by the cabin walls and the closed air. It reminded me of a tragedy—a medical student who died while exploring a cave, trapped in a passage as narrow as a birth canal. The body suffocates, the mind suffocates, when it cannot see a way through.
 
The Heart in Its Masks

The heart, too, can narrow. A disheartened heart is ugly. An indifferent heart turns cold. A possessive heart creates anger. An assaultive heart wounds. A demanding heart repels. A judgmental heart hardens. And yet, even when told it is wrong, the heart feels pierced.

We live caught in craving and aversion, pleasant and unpleasant. These are the universal ingredients of human life. But if all beings share them, why is not everyone enlightened?

Because enlightenment does not come from the ingredients alone—it comes from vigilance. The vigilant one is prepared; he allows even darkness to be his teacher. He lives mindfully, while others live an unexamined life.

Lessons of Opposites

To sit on ice while drinking fire is to wound both throat and skin. Cold and hot do not cancel each other; they both burn in their own ways. Step on the brake and the accelerator together—the car will not move.

But see things as they are, and the contradictions become wisdom. From the same ice blocks that freeze you, you can build an igloo, light a fire inside, and cook your food.  
 
I learned this in my own aversions. Hatred for someone, left unchecked, turns into lament—and often, into craving for the very person once rejected. Aversion and craving, fire and ice, are two sides of the same mistake.


The Veil of Ignorance

Not knowing both sides is a benign ignorance. Knowing just one side is a deadly ignorance -it is a veil to the other part.  Every word, every thought, does not reveal but veils what it is not revealing. So are the feelings: they appear solid, but they are constructions, passing clouds. Destined to soften and soothe.

When seen with awareness, both feelings and thoughts dissolve back into the law of nature: all constructed things will pass away.

The passing constructs:

A full bladder in a long 16-hour trans-Atlantic flight with a lavatory constantly occupied is an odd sort of teacher. The sensation itself is unpleasant, but what makes it unbearable is not the bladder alone—it is the construction my mind builds around it. How awful sleepless air travel is. How I hate this endless discomfort. Yet the same bladder, held through the last scenes of a favorite film, becomes tolerable. The body is constant; it is the mind that magnifies or softens the pain.

Relief follows after I empty myself. The body relaxes, the mind eases, the construction collapses. But not for long. A new construction arises: pain in the leg, perhaps, or the fleeting pleasure of a meal and wine. That too decays, That too wanes, That too passes. The truth is simple, though rarely remembered: everything constructed is destined to dissolve.


The Knot of Reaction

Vipassanā meditation is not mysterious in its working, though it feels miraculous in its effects. There is a simple law: react, and the knot tightens; observe, and the knot loosens.

The law of nature is one of cause and effect. Punishment and reward are not postponed for some future life; they unfold here, immediately. The moment I am angry, I suffer. The moment I give way to sadness, I am already punished. Freedom, too, is immediate, found in the same place: in observation without reaction.

The Body as Energy, the Mind as Builder

We cannot touch the mind directly. But we can touch its effects: the internal sensations it constructs. The burdensomeness, racing heart of anxiety, gloomy shades in the surroundings.  Mind runs the simulation of sensations and makes us feel what we feel. By observing them, patiently and steadily, we begin to see their true nature. They rise, they pass. Only the passing is beautiful.

The body is a field of energy. At the tips of the nerves, sensations shimmer: tingling, burning, aching, vibrating. Yet these raw signals are not suffering until the mind interprets them. The mind builds stories, weaves judgments, and creates entire realities around them.

Still, our instincts betray us. We are wired to obsess over what approaches us—threats, desires, opportunities—and to cling, fight, or control. Meditation reverses this gaze. It reveals that the only sane relationship to sensation is equanimity.


Daily Life as Teacher
 
My body keeps score of every ordinary tension: the rush to the airport in a traffic jam, the anxiety of not finding a gate during a hurried transit. Yet all of it passes. Relief arrives, and gratitude quietly follows. Life is a string of experiments in impermanence. The passing things are beautiful. There is a certain sweetness in goodbyes.


The Middle Way:

Between craving and aversion lies a fragile interval. In that space, the heart breathes a sigh of relief. A sweetness emerges, not from grasping, not from resisting, but from letting be. This is what the teachers call vītarāga—freedom from entanglement.

The path to such freedom is ancient and demanding. It rests on three pillars: sīla (discipline), samādhi (concentration), and prajñā (wisdom). It requires patience, right effort, and steady mindfulness. But its promise is profound: every knot can be loosened, every construction allowed to pass.

 
Lessons from the World

The wiser approach is to make the unpleasant my guru. Let irritation instruct me. Let discomfort sharpen my awareness. If I can learn from the unpleasant, then I will also be free to enjoy the pleasant without clinging—and, perhaps most importantly, to discover wisdom in the vast, neutral terrain of ordinary life.

 
Meditation in the Air

Yang..Yang..Yang... Sixty minutes of stillness in the air, and the mind begins its quiet cleaning. It is a deep housecleaning of consciousness: no need to reopen every old paper, no need to cling to mental relics. Let them be recycled, dissolved.

Then comes vanga—the dissolution of sensations. It feels like a scanning machine, registering pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral without bias. Consciousness, the operator, remains steady and equanimous.

Pain shifts from one thigh to the other. As one recedes, it becomes sweet. As the pain gathers in the other thigh, it hurts more. Yet in Vanga, neither hurts. They simply are.


A Heart of Loving-Kindness

Out of this equanimity grows compassion. I whisper the phrases of mangal maitri:


May good things happen to me and to all.

May we be free of suffering.

May we be happy.

May we know the law of nature. Everything is constructed by the mind. The mind is the constructor. Knowing causation, we can unbuild, release, and rest.
 
Bhabatu sabba maṅgalaṁ—may all beings be blessed.


Even “Bad” Meditation is good


Sometimes I drift. In the middle of breathwork or body scan, I forget where I was. Head, hands, belly, legs. A flimsy thought carries me, then disappears in thin air.

Is this enlightenment? Or merely the edge of sleep? It doesn’t matter. There is no bad meditation. Even a distracted sitting teaches. To drift toward sleep without feeding thoughts is itself a small lesson in letting go.