The cocoon is an all too familiar place for me, it is a place in which I find comfort - a protection mechanism that I have built in order to deal with challengers that I do not have an alternative means to deal with. Trungpa Rinpoche, explains the cocoon as a place of cowardice, a place in which a person escapes to in order to land back into a place of comfort. This familiar place allows is to “surround ourselves with our own familiar thoughts, so that nothing sharp or painful can touch us” (Trungpa pp.60). Freeing ourselves from this cocoon “brings a feeling of being a truly human being” (Trungpa pp.62) - this gives us the opportunity to bring awareness to everything we do, to fully embody the human experience so that we do not shut ourselves
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Trungpa mentions that this requires discipline, a kind discipline that is an organic process, that grows with awareness and that comes from within the individual, because they feel inspired to be embrace the human experience.
Within my own life, I have experienced many hours inside of the cocoon. I have spent hours pondering on and trying to figure out the composition of my cocoon. Sometimes this cocoon is ridged and fixed, sometimes it changes and adapts - but one thing I must make clear is that the foundation of my cocoon is one of loneliness, not the act of being alone, a very clear distinction must be made between the two as I believe they are two very different concepts. The changing/adapting cocoon is one that I am more familiar with and deal with almost everyday. I call it my ‘chameleon coat’. I have spent most of my life away from home, this has given me tremendous …show more content…
For so long many of us have been conditioned to take, take, take - never really ever thinking or being conscious of our most intimate gift - that to give of ourselves. However, for me, it landed me in serious trouble. I was of the perception that I owed the world something, that the past years had been so bad that I had to heal myself, to constantly purge out all the negativity that I had been apart of. This unfortunately lead me down a path of, again, seeing only one side of the coin. It lead me back into the cocoon, except this time I was alive and awake within the cocoon. I felt buried alive, I had given so much, that I had nothing left to give. I ceased to see a side of me that still existed, only wanting to experience the light, thinking that the light was what we were all seeking. I felt drained and lonely - forgetting what it meant to take, the act of giving back to yourself. The spiritual world had only shown me one side of the coin, the opposite side to what traditional institutions had shown me, and again, I felt let down and betrayed. So I went into my cocoon, smoking pot, taking drugs, drinking aggressively - justifying my life through my new found ‘spirituality’, using it as a way to define my character. It was a dark road, a slippery slope and I shriveled up. It was cowardly, but what else do you do? This where I realized that being alone does not represent loneliness, as it was in this
Trungpa mentions that this requires discipline, a kind discipline that is an organic process, that grows with awareness and that comes from within the individual, because they feel inspired to be embrace the human experience.
Within my own life, I have experienced many hours inside of the cocoon. I have spent hours pondering on and trying to figure out the composition of my cocoon. Sometimes this cocoon is ridged and fixed, sometimes it changes and adapts - but one thing I must make clear is that the foundation of my cocoon is one of loneliness, not the act of being alone, a very clear distinction must be made between the two as I believe they are two very different concepts. The changing/adapting cocoon is one that I am more familiar with and deal with almost everyday. I call it my ‘chameleon coat’. I have spent most of my life away from home, this has given me tremendous …show more content…
For so long many of us have been conditioned to take, take, take - never really ever thinking or being conscious of our most intimate gift - that to give of ourselves. However, for me, it landed me in serious trouble. I was of the perception that I owed the world something, that the past years had been so bad that I had to heal myself, to constantly purge out all the negativity that I had been apart of. This unfortunately lead me down a path of, again, seeing only one side of the coin. It lead me back into the cocoon, except this time I was alive and awake within the cocoon. I felt buried alive, I had given so much, that I had nothing left to give. I ceased to see a side of me that still existed, only wanting to experience the light, thinking that the light was what we were all seeking. I felt drained and lonely - forgetting what it meant to take, the act of giving back to yourself. The spiritual world had only shown me one side of the coin, the opposite side to what traditional institutions had shown me, and again, I felt let down and betrayed. So I went into my cocoon, smoking pot, taking drugs, drinking aggressively - justifying my life through my new found ‘spirituality’, using it as a way to define my character. It was a dark road, a slippery slope and I shriveled up. It was cowardly, but what else do you do? This where I realized that being alone does not represent loneliness, as it was in this