I sit, every day that I can, and follow my breath.  My thoughts come and go – some are pleasant and some are worries that I have collected over the years – but the space between breaths is where I find peace.  The waiting, pure and simple waiting without expecting anything, is where I find peace.  When I first started sitting I became very worried with my leg falling asleep.  I imagined that I would sit right through the pressure on my nerve until it failed to return and I had a permanent foot drop.  I was very afraid of this for awhile, in every way possible.  How would I explain the damage to my colleagues at work?  Or my family?  When I said that I had sat so still without moving even when the leg was going numb that it was permanently damaged I was sure they would consider me crazy.  I considered myself sort of crazy at the idea too.  What part of my super-sized ego was so concerned with getting meditation “right” that I was going to ignore the reality of my leg dying?  This mixture of debate and fear and fear of failure went on for some time, but since I was sitting I have no idea if it took seconds or minutes or the better part of an hour.

Irony:  In my work as a trauma surgeon I often have to amputate limbs to save a person’s life.  Talking with them about this is difficult, but I have often stressed to them that they are the same person after the amputation they were before. You are not your leg.  Nor your hair, nor nose nor eyes nor even your face, though we often define each other by some compilation of those things.  This takes my patients some time to wrestle with, and not everyone gets there.  I don’t always have this conversation with the patient – sometimes it is with a family member who is afraid of the change and they don’t grasp it any easier.  Often I am asked by a concerned family member, in the setting of being able to save a limb:   “Are they going to have a limp?”  I answer “yes”, and then follow pretty quickly with “but so what?”  What is a limp?  What is your right way of walking?

Then it occurred to me:  would I trade my leg for pure peace and happiness?   If my leg died and fell off, but I gained insight and wisdom and peace and happiness, well … that seemed an acceptable trade.  So I let go. 

There is always something to hold onto.  Second after second, another item to grasp arises in the mind.  They can be grasped equally well by sitting still or by running around.  One way of living is to choose your side of the coin, the other is to be the coin as it spins through the air before it falls.  Whatever you choose will be your True Expression.