Can't Take My Eyes Off You

I just plain feel better when I meditate. When I woke up this morning, I'd had some tough dreams about a friend with whom I've fallen out of contact. Fully awake, I recalled a conversation I'd had with another mom during one of the two indoor soccer games I went to yesterday (both kids played) about nutrition. My kids aren't great eaters, and I was talking to her about the importance of teaching your kids the eating habits you want them to have for life. I feel like I'm falling short in this category as a parent and between those guiltys and the icky feeling from the dream, I didn't like the feel of the start to this Sunday.

So I reached over and pulled my laptop onto the bed and fired up Jack Kornfield's Mind Like Sky Meditation. Over the course of the next half hour, I felt peace returning with the recognition that my true self, my essence, is perfect, and yeah -- I can keep tweaking the human form -- but I can let thoughts and feelings about what I've done or haven't done pass through me rather than mistaking them for my being.

The meditation ends with these words:

"As you ready to open your eyes, know that the appearances that reveal themselves as sight in your eyes also are the play of experiences of this vast open mind and the great compassion that it holds. Open your eyes and enter the world now while you rest in the great stillness. Trust this refuge -- it is your own true nature. It is never too late to remember the true nature of your own mind -- in any moment, you can return, open, spacious, compassionate and free -- remember who you really are."

Beautiful. Shortly after the last bell chimed, itunes launched into a rockin' song with "can't take my eyes off you" as its refrain. (It was "Eyes" by the North Mississippi All-Stars -- I hadn't ever heard it and I'm not sure what it is doing in my itunes, but an unsuccessful search for it on youtube led me to this song, of which you can listen to Muse's version, the late Heath Ledger's, or this beautiful rendition by the incomparable Lauryn Hill, or even go all the way back to Frankie Valli's original if you're so inclined.)

This song presents the same juxtaposition as "Eyes"-- the peace that comes with knowing that what we're "seeing" is just a play of experiences and the chaos (in the best possible sense) that comes with the intensity with which we sometimes see (or even fixate on) a lover:

You're just too good to be true.

Can't take my eyes off you.

You'd be like Heaven to touch.

I wanna hold you so much.

At long last love has arrived

And I thank God I'm alive.

You're just too good to be true.

Can't take my eyes off you.

Sometimes it does seem like I can't take my eyes (or my mind) off my love. But I've learned, from Jack Kornfield and others, that it's what I can see and feel when I close my eyes that is most true. And when that inner knowing is in harmony with the eye candy I sometimes get to behold, I daresay it's powerful beyond what any song lyrics can describe...