An Experience of Emptiness

I participated briefly in a "Men's Group". Most of the participants were going through a transition that involved their intimate relationship and/or professional issues. An important part of the process was learning to draw upon others for help, which meant revealing our vulnerabilities.

The experience occurred during the testimonial of the man that was clearly the most physically powerful in our group. When he stood up, he gathered in front of the rest of the team, and I was isolated behind him. As he began to speak, I noticed the hunch in his shoulders, and found myself considering the tension that revealed. I reached forward and put my hands on his back, and with a little probing discovered that his muscles were incredibly hard.

The insight that came to me, in that moment of intimacy, was that this was a man that had never known a moment of peace in his life. I felt that idea resonate with him, and wordlessly came back the desire to know what peace felt like. I paused, lifting my hands off of his back, and waited for him to make use of me. Slowly, my hands began moving along his neck, the three middle fingers spreading apart. Something clicked between us, and I pressed on each side of his neck on spaces between the cervical vertebrae, and he immediately and completely relaxed. Really relaxed, like standing corpse pose.

I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. My hands had moved of their own accord.

At our next gathering, he rebelled against the intimacy of that experience, telling me that he didn't want me doing "any more of [my] voodoo shit". Recognizing that it was an unusual event, I simply said that I understood. At the time, I had the idea that he was't entirely conscious of using me in the way that he had, but I see also now that he simply felt a need to assert his ability to maintain his individuality.

What I received through that experience was participation in reallocation of energy from modes of self-protection into modes of positive experience. There's an expansion of the personality that occurs in such moments that causes others with the same kind of need to resonate with us. My interactions with such people have helped me to become a more effective intermediary in such processes. I am able to enter into the engagement with a sense of the forms of resistance that will arise, and address some of them during the course of the engagement.

I think that this is the positive consequence of the practice of compassion. By emptying ourselves when we share experiences with others, we are able to help them see themselves clearly, and they in turn provide us insights regarding our self. We enter into a process of co-creation. When neither party tries to channel the engagement into specific channels of attachment, the process expands outwards as the reality around us perceives the joy of our liberation, and we find ourselves doing service in more profound ways than we could ever possibly have expected.