Confidence to go beyond hesitation

I’m a practicing Shambhala Buddhist.  Maybe the specifics of that aren’t super important, but it seems like good context to have.  For at least three years I’ve been longing for a group of younger folks to meditate and generally share community with.  The local group of practitioners is sufficiently small that I knew at those first pangs of longing that I would need to be a primary instigator of said group.  I have experienced a lot of hesitation around putting effort into starting a group like this.  What if it takes more energy than I’m able to give?  What if I try to get it going and no one is interested?  I’d like to introduce you all to my two familiars Failure and Rejection.  I’d like to call them friends in the kind of aspirational sense that I can accept them without letting my fears about them run the show, but that would be disingenuous.  

In November in Boston I went to a 30’s and under meditation group thinking it would be nice to connect to 10 or 15 people who just get each other and what it’s like to be at the stage of life between adolescence and 100% certified grown-up adulthood.  The short of that night is that there were not 15 people but 50 people.  They do a practice called social meditation.  I had a potent and direct experience of not holding back any part of myself in social interaction.  That experience totally inspired me and decided me to make it happen in my town.  So I gave the ball a nudge and with ample help and guidance from a dharma brother in Boston, I began preparing to have the first meeting in my town aiming for the middle of February.  It is now July, and we have yet to have the first meeting.  When I began back in November (and re-upped my inspiration at the end of December in VT) it became clear to me that trying and failing felt like a much more genuine outcome than not having tried at all.  So, the past 4 months have tasted a lot like failure from not having tried at all — now, I can see that that’s not a wholly accurate assessment of what has happened, but the feeling has been like trying to pull a mid-90s Buick up hill by wearing a harness and rope.  Seem’s like I ought to be able to do it.  I can walk up hill, the harness doesn’t cut painfully into my shoulders or thighs.  I’m just not strong enough (read “Just not good enough”).  

A magical thing happened two weeks ago.  It was my turn to give meditation instruction and lead the weekly group sitting.  The first half hour is for giving meditation instruction and for the first 20 minutes, only two other people showed up.  Both of them had not been coming to weekly sitting on a regular basis (neither had I), but these were my people.  Both of them have been working with meditation as an important part of life for years, and I’ve known each of them for the last few of them.  I knew that after sitting was over, I was going to say something.  Interestingly, I had no doubts about this, no hesitation reared it’s head.  It was simply the right thing to do.  When I say ‘right’, I mean appropriate or beautiful or perfect in the sense that a puzzle piece is the ‘right’ piece for it’s respective spot in the puzzle.  One of them had to leave early, so I’ll have to say something to her later, but I mentioned that I was trying to make this happen to the other one (whom I’ll call Shining Smile), and her eyes lit up.  She said that two of her friends (whom I’ve never met) were just saying that they wanted a group of younger folks to do mindfulness practice with.  This felt easy.  Not in the sense that I was right and could see what needed to be done.  The feeling was that I had finally gotten out of my own way and the way of everyone else who might be longing for this kind of group.  When I feel seized by doubt, it’s difficult for me to remember this feeling of possibility.  It’s also hard to remember that help is available, and that I have the intelligence to find it.  Having the conversation with Shining Smile, it seemed like the environment was ready for this group to happen.  But I had to be ready to see the state of the environment and my place in it, rather than nearsightedly fixating on my own doubts.