The Melting Force of Satsang

At three years-old, I fell down, scraping my knee on the sidewalk. I entered our Chicago two-flat crying up a storm. I collapsed, melting into the kitchen floor, becoming the unity for the hurt, the child, the sensation of body against cold linoleum and the felt presence of my concerned mother walking toward me. In that moment there was no need for anything — I was alive, ever existing Being itself, that just happened to hurt. Then my mother, unaware of her ever existing Being that she had lost years before, kneeled down, held me in her arms and comforted me, reinforcing a most exquisite dual unity.

As the months and years passed by I, too, forgot Being, hypnotized by layers upon layers of distractions that camouflaged a deeper primal grip. I, like most of humanity, lost my Essence, believing myself to be a separate self fixated on anything outside me for completion, divorced from the ever existing Love in my own Heart.

So Satsang invites us to be like a child again, rediscovering how to melt into the floor, into the felt sense of Being. It is so simple, yet so hard. We arrive in this world as undifferentiated Being and through relationships with our early caregivers and environment we slowly lose touch with this most precious aspect of ourselves. We harden, draw fixed boundaries, grasp at what we think we want and avoid what we don’t want. We look outside rather than inside. We don’t feel safe, don’t trust, don’t feel held. Our world seems scary, feels dead rather than fluid and alive. Our fear supercedes Love.

But when we sit in Satsang we forego all the ideas, all the conditioned responses, the grasping, the pushing away. It’s not that all these things go away. Rather we let them be as they are and we collapse into the felt sense here that simply embraces. At first everything in our conditioning distrusts and fights this, but as we sink into the embrace of pure Being, there is an unforced burning followed by a softening. It is a journey back to ourselves — yourself — a love affair that is waiting to be revealed.

Satsang is the true way life moves. We don’t see this because of the layers of conditioning we hide behind. As with life, when I sit in Satsang I am helpless to act and speak from anything other than the revealed truth of the moment. I am the global embrace for the little ones called me and you. And in this transformative space the Love of the one true Heart explodes, burning our distrust, softening our armoring, changing our lives from something that is dead and stilted into a beautiful aliveness, a pulsating fluidity that senses itself over and over again, going nowhere, basking in the Love that we are.

— Tom