There are moments when nothing particularly profound seems to be happening. You’re sitting in an airport waiting for a delayed flight. You’re watching a family with little kids. Somebody across from you is staring into space. People are getting coffee, looking at their phones, wandering toward their gates. You’re not having some great spiritual experience. You’re just sitting there living life and watching other people live it. But that can be enough. It doesn’t have to come out as a particular insight or some piece of wisdom you can explain later. Being present is already a form of wisdom. There is something about simply watching the comings and goings of life without needing to do anything with them that begins to loosen the usual boundaries of the mind.

We tend to block ourselves off as little islands. That’s ego - the illusion of separativity, and it’s part of the definition we’re handed in the human condition: I am here, you are there, and we are separate. We live as though this separateness is an absolute fact. Then you have these little moments when you move outside of it and sense unity - we’re all part of the same fabric of existence. You realize how much life there is beyond the borders of your own concerns. There is so much richness. The toddlers in the airport, the old guy sitting there doing nothing, the parents trying to manage everybody, the people arriving and leaving. They are all part of it. We’re all the flavors of existence. Some people are aware of that and some aren’t, but that really doesn’t matter. What matters is that you are awake enough to notice.

Ordinary Life Is Where You Study the Mind

Once you begin paying attention this way, ordinary life becomes a great place to study the mind. You notice the judgments that come up. You notice your preferences, your reactions, the stories you immediately want to tell about somebody. You don’t have to pretend those thoughts aren’t there. You can see them and let them go. That’s very different from following them. Somebody does something and there is an immediate reaction in you. Okay. Interesting. There it is. Now what? Do I want to build an entire story around what they did, what they should have done, why I’m right, why they’re wrong, what this means about me, what this means about them? Or can I stay here and continue watching?

That sounds simple until another person gets close enough to really push the buttons. Relationships are wonderful for this because you get to see ego up close and personal. You see what happens when another person wants something from you. You see where you automatically defer, where you become attached, where you want somebody to behave differently, where you feel crowded, where you try to control an outcome. You also begin to understand that another person’s desires belong to them. They can have their hopes and dreams and schemes. You don’t have to get pulled into them. You can love somebody and still remain where you are, in your own truth. You can enjoy what is happening now without turning it into a promise about six months from now. Sometimes “maybe” is a wonderfully honest answer.

That kind of honesty creates room in a relationship. We do our lives. We come together. We have fun. We learn from each other. We see what gets stirred up. You don’t have to get unconsciously pulled into another person’s vortex of desire before they even understand what it is themselves. You can keep learning about your own attachment without demanding that they learn about theirs on your timetable. If somebody respects your freedom, and you respect theirs, a lot becomes possible. They may be dreaming about a trip to Europe while you’re simply enjoying dinner tonight. Fine. Europe can wait. Reality is here.

Pain Is One Thing. The Story Is Another.

We have an odd habit as human beings of going back into our stories, particularly the painful ones. What we’re mad about. What somebody did. What isn’t fair. What hurts. We become extremely skilled at this. We tend to use our life energy more for recounting what went wrong than for remembering what was beautiful. You can have an extraordinary day, a beautiful dinner, a trip, a celebration, an afternoon full of love, and the mind can wake up the next morning and go straight back to whatever is bothering it.

What about when a loved one is suffering? There is a skill in learning how to be with another person without automatically following them in their suffering. You can hear someone’s pain without climbing inside the consciousness they have built around the pain. You can love them without joining every storyline. Sometimes the most compassionate thing you can do is remain present enough that both perspectives can coexist. You don’t have to be afraid of their pain, and you don’t have to make their pain your own. Pain is one thing. What the mind does with pain can become something much larger. You don’t have to follow the heavy state of others as they complain simply because it comes up. You can recognize, “I could go there right now, but I don’t need to.” That isn’t avoidance - it’s discernment. Wisdom includes knowing your own capacity.

This is also something you learn about your own mind. There can be a subtle belief on the spiritual path that every difficult feeling has to be entered, examined and wrestled to the ground because that must be where the growth is. That’s therapy and sometimes people need that. As a teacher, I often find myself rolling up my sleeves to go into difficult places with students. What happens then? We look with curiosity, without judgment, with acceptance. Then the charge lessens and becomes a point of learning about how ego was formulated. That’s not only useful, it’s freeing. Once you see the issues, the tendencies without locking in and judging, then you can do something about it.

Touch Lightly

When something difficult in life does need to be faced, the real practice is learning how to stay with it without immediately turning it into a story. Feel the part of you that is being pulled. Watch the tendency. See how familiar it is. You’ve gone down that road a thousand times, so of course the mind wants to go there again. But this time you stay. You allow yourself to be with it in a light kind of way. This is the way you can touch lightly in your world. Just being with the emotion and not using your mind to indulge in stories or create narratives. As humans we misuse our creative powers to impregnate difficult experiences with reactionary emotions that keep birthing new emotions. And then we’re far away from our center. We’ve spun out into an entangled web of fog and confusion.

You don’t have to do this. You can feel what’s happening within you. If you’re with a person, you can acknowledge them. You notice the interface happening on the surface while, underneath it, life is still moving. Awareness is still there. The life force that makes any of this possible has not gone anywhere. Two human beings are standing there in the middle of an enormous existence, having a strange little encounter, possibly learning something. Either way, you can take responsibility and stay with the initial reaction and emotion without it going anywhere. Without blaming someone else.

Fear as a Doorway

For example, if you’re dealing with fear, facing it is powerful. When you can’t face it and are completely caught in it, yes, a teacher with a wider perspective can sometimes help you see beyond it. For a moment you borrow their perspective and discover that the fear isn’t the whole world. Eventually, though, you learn how to make that movement yourself. You begin to recognize fear while it is happening. You stay with it. You stop feeding it quite so many stories. Slowly, the part of you that can see the fear becomes stronger than the part that automatically follows it. Fear itself becomes a doorway to fearlessness.

Over time you develop muscles you didn’t have before. You become more capable of remaining with yourself when things get difficult. You can sit with someone who is unhappy without becoming unhappy with them. You can love someone without taking responsibility for all of their desires. You can notice judgment without needing to believe it. You can be delayed in an airport and discover that there is nowhere else you particularly need to be. None of this means you become passive. It means you have more choice about where your attention goes.

Refuse to Leave

One of the great things about being on the path is that you keep seeing, growing, getting stronger and becoming more skillful. Sometimes the practice is so simple: refuse to leave. Stay with yourself. Stay with the moment. Stay with your love. Stay with your truth. You don’t know exactly what will happen if you do. Something will. Life has a way of showing you the next thing when you are actually here to see it.

And maybe that is part of the cosmic joke. We are born to get moved far away from our truth, to align to a false set of man-made value systems where we become so very good at criticizing ourselves and others based on that value system and suffering when we don’t live up to it. We learn to leave the moment, creating the stories, holding the judgments, nursing the grievances and chasing the future. Then the game becomes cutting through all that to get to the core of truth that is life without definitions and descriptions, to get to the essence of life without our constant micro-judgements and ego assessments. And eventually we learn how to stay with life. We get our out of control mind under control and keep it out of the way. Then we’re open minded, open hearted.

Then an airport becomes a meditation hall. A relationship becomes a teaching. A difficult conversation becomes practice. A delayed flight becomes several extra hours of existence that you actually get to notice. You start to realize that life was never waiting somewhere else. It was present in you the whole time.

I think there’s also a beautiful energy at those times for meditating and feeling things in new ways, or more deeply. There are things we sense that we don’t really have words for. We have all of existence within us, and almost anything in life can open that up. It can be a clue, or sometimes a full-on doorway. The surprising thing is that some of the biggest doorways are the glitches of our own egos. You find yourself getting taken out by something, upset by something, afraid or angry, and there is a tremendous amount of energy underneath that reaction. Usually we get caught up in the story of what happened and miss the energy itself.

If you can stay with the reaction without letting your mind continually go back to the thing that created it, that energy becomes available to you. Anger has enormous energy. Fear has enormous energy. So does attachment. We put so much spin on these experiences by immediately deciding what they mean, whether they’re good or bad, what somebody did to us, what should have happened instead. Before long, we’re no longer experiencing the original feeling. We’re experiencing everything the mind has built around it.

That’s where something very interesting can happen on the path. You stay with the energy itself. You don’t have to judge it or push it away. If it’s anger, you feel the anger without feeding the story that keeps the anger going. If it’s fear, you stay with fear and find out what is actually there. The anger can become a doorway into love or acceptance. Fear can become a doorway into fearlessness. The very thing that seemed to be taking you away from yourself can bring you more deeply into awareness. It’s one of the funny cosmic jokes: our egos can become pathways to enlightenment.

The Mind Builds a World

A lot of human life runs on attraction and aversion. We move toward what we want and away from what we don’t want. That sounds simple, but look at how deeply it operates. Something happens and we immediately decide: I like this. I hate this. This is good. This is terrible. I want more of this. I need this other thing to go away. We’re constantly interpreting experience through that value system, and it can remove us from the experience itself.

Take anxiety. Anxiety comes up and almost immediately there’s a second reaction: I hate feeling this way. I don’t want this. Something is wrong. Now the mind is involved, and the anxiety has become something larger than the sensation that originally appeared. We can start thinking about why it’s there, what it means, when it happened before, whether it will happen again. Pretty soon we have built an entire world around something that, if we had stayed present, might simply have moved through.

Your mind is much more like the sky than the clouds moving through it. Thoughts are transitory. Emotions are transitory. The problem comes when we hook onto one of those clouds and solidify it. It becomes the mood we’re in, then the day we’re having, then perhaps a way we begin to see ourselves. We do this over and over without realizing how much of our identity is being constructed out of reactions that were never permanent in the first place.

There is another possibility. Something hard happens and you simply meet it. Okay, here it is. This is what I’m experiencing right now. You stay present enough to move through it without adding all the resistance about how much you don’t want it to be happening. You have more of your awareness available because your mind isn’t consumed with arguing with reality. That gives you a center within yourself from which you can actually respond.

Let the Mind Rest in the Heart

The mind gets in the way of so much because it’s flighty. Thoughts come through constantly, and we tend to believe them simply because they appeared in our own heads. Those thoughts can become barriers between us and the open truth of life, and they can become barriers around the heart as well. There’s a beautiful teaching in the Upanishads: let the mind rest in the heart. I’ve always loved that.

Everybody is looking for love, happiness, freedom, whatever word you want to give it. We tend to look for it through people, experiences and situations, hoping something outside ourselves will finally give us the feeling we’re looking for. Of course, beautiful experiences happen. Love happens. Happiness happens. But our whole experience of life is arising within us, and strangely, that’s the place human beings often examine the least.

When the mind settles, another kind of knowing becomes available. Awareness doesn’t need to have a thought about everything. It can simply be present for what is here. This particular moment has never happened before and will never happen again. It is completely unique unto itself. There is something extraordinary about actually getting to be here for it, yet we humans get bored, anxious, distracted, angry. We’re thinking about yesterday or worrying about tomorrow while this completely unrepeatable moment is happening right in front of us. When you actually stop and look, the wonder is already there.

The Ordinary Doorways

Sometimes that opening comes in meditation. Sometimes it comes through music or dancing, being with a friend, being alone, looking at the ocean or watching the moon through a window. It can happen in a completely ordinary exchange with a stranger. You’re doing some mindless human task, washing your hands or buying groceries, and for a moment you actually meet another person. Something opens. There’s a little breath in the day where you feel life again.

I’ve had moments traveling alone when I felt an incredible intimacy with life. Years ago I was in Venice by myself, sitting in San Marco Square at night listening to Vivaldi under the stars, with the waterways all around. That moment has never really left me. I don’t experience it as nostalgia. There are moments that seem to open onto something timeless. They become doorways, and over a lifetime we gather these doorways without necessarily realizing that’s what we’re doing.

You don’t need Venice. It can be the moon through the back window of a car. It can be the ocean, a walk, a conversation with someone you didn’t expect to meet. These experiences don’t have to be grandiose. What matters is how available you are to them. Life is happening all around us, but so much of the time we are somewhere else in our minds.

Bringing Meditation Into Life

This is what I mean by integrated enlightenment. The path includes the big esoteric truths and the extraordinary states we can experience in meditation, but then we bring them into daily life. How do you approach things? How do you look at things? How do you bring yourself back to yourself? You may have learned tremendous focus through meditation. Can you bring that focus to a school assignment, your work, or something difficult you need to finish? Can you bring the openness you find in meditation into a conversation? Can you find some of that spaciousness when your plans fall apart?

Each person finds their own way into practice. For some people, sitting meditation comes easily. Someone else may find that yoga releases the tension in the body and allows the mind to settle. Breath work may open the door. Walking may do it. There really isn’t a paint-by-numbers approach. You find what works for you, and you learn to recognize those moments when awareness is there. Then you learn how to stay with it.

Over time, meditation begins to have less of a boundary around it. You don’t only meditate when you sit down and close your eyes. You start noticing how you are meeting the day. You become more keyed into your own mind and less willing to be dragged around by every thought that comes through it. You notice when you’re closing, grasping, resisting, getting caught in some old loop. Daily life starts showing you where the work is.

A Relationship With Life

This is also why being around people of like mind can be so powerful. It’s an ancient premise of spiritual practice that seekers benefit from being around other seekers. There is the friendship, of course, but something else happens too. You are having a mutual relationship with life. You’re around people who are also paying attention, asking questions, working with themselves and trying to see beyond the usual patterns.

That doesn’t mean everybody has to be interested in the same things or see the world the same way. But there is something different about being with people who are interested in what is actually happening inside themselves. You can go further together because the conversation itself can move into places that ordinary conversation rarely goes.

One of the most useful things we can ask ourselves from time to time is very simple: Am I transforming? You can look back without getting lost in memory and see the arc. Maybe something that used to completely take you out no longer has the same power. Maybe you love more easily. Maybe you recover faster. Maybe you’re more honest with yourself. Maybe your mind has become clearer and your life less contracted. You begin to see that all those small moments of awareness have accumulated into something.

Dancing With Life

The path becomes very different when you stop expecting life to follow the plan you had for it. There’s so much limitation in deciding how something should go and then becoming upset because it went another way. Life is constantly moving. We can spend an enormous amount of energy resisting that movement, or we can become interested in what is actually happening and see where it leads.

That doesn’t mean becoming passive. You participate. You make choices. You work hard. You create things, try things, explore, experiment, change direction. You bring everything you have to your life. But there can be an openness in it, a willingness to discover instead of always trying to force life into the shape you expected.

And you practice this everywhere. You practice it in the beautiful moments because they remind you how open you can be. You practice it in ordinary moments because that’s where most of your life is happening. You practice it when things are hard because those moments show you where you still get pulled away from yourself.

Eventually you begin to understand that the path was never somewhere else. It was in the anger, the moon, the work in front of you, the stranger you met, the anxiety, the ocean, the friendship, the disappointment, the music, the silence. All of it has been giving you opportunities to wake up.

Life itself becomes the meditation.

Your ego is your pathway to enlightenment. The ego doesn’t like being exposed, so there’s this funny, tricky resistance that you have to work around. You have to get a little wily with it, not be so obvious about it, and let yourself see it for what it is. Work with it in a compassionate, kind way. Think of the ego as a little two-year-old. You would take a two-year-old by the hand and walk with it. You wouldn’t be mean to them. Or maybe it’s more like a two-year-old having a tantrum when things don’t go the way they want. You can understand the tantrum without letting the two-year-old direct your life.

We’ve all trained for years to do exactly the opposite. Something happens, we get hooked into the charge, and off we go. We get angry or upset or jealous or disappointed. We feel pummeled or drained and then indulge in it. That’s what Don Juan calls indulging: when you give yourself over to the disappointment, dissatisfaction, depression, whatever it is. Instead, you can stay with it. Sit with it, see it for what it is, and let the transitoriness of it burn away like a cloud. Then you’re back to this clear essence of who you’ve always been. That’s the foundation.

Don’t Waste the Trigger

This is one of the great opportunities that comes with being triggered by life. Whatever hooks you is wonderfully revealing. On the fast path, you learn from every single thing that comes. What gets you? What is an ego trigger for you? Instead of immediately looking outward at the person or situation that caused the reaction, you begin to see the reaction itself as what is worth knowing. Eventually there can even be gratitude for the person who brought it out in you, because now you get to see it for what it is.

The higher you go, the more you get tested on whether it sticks or whether it was just a moment. You can have an extraordinary meditation, go right into the essence, experience that openness and beauty with no mind, and then a few hours later something happens and you’re completely knocked off center. That’s not a negation of the meditation. Now you’re getting a chance to bring that essence into your life. And if you can’t do it yet, that’s okay. You’re not there yet. It takes years to grow the strength and the ability to stay with your own truth when you’re getting knocked around.

This is why it’s important not to be frivolous with insights. There are days when you go into the total beauty of existence for what it is, with no mind, just an openness to the essence. That’s a full-on empowerment from life. It’s a gift. You can dismiss it as a beautiful moment that came and went, or you can hold it close as something that becomes a doorway you learn to go through again. Writing about these experiences can help. You go back into what you saw, what you felt, what you understood, and it becomes internal to you rather than merely intellectual. Someone can tell you these things a thousand times, but then you have the experience yourself and suddenly you understand.

The same thing is true when you begin seeing your ego. You can hear teachings about attachment and reactivity for years, but there’s a moment when you actually catch yourself doing it. You see how quickly you can go from a beautiful state into pain because something didn’t go the way you wanted, somebody didn’t treat you the way you wanted, or somebody you love made a choice you don’t like. Suddenly you’re looking directly at attachment instead of thinking about attachment as a concept.

Love Without Ownership

One of the places attachment becomes particularly clear is in our relationships with other people. We become attached not only to the person, but to our ideas about how that person should live. We think we know what’s good for them. We judge the choices they’re making. But if you love someone for who they are, their life has nothing to do with your judgments or ideas about how they should live it. You’re not walking in their shoes. You don’t know what they’re here to learn. Maybe they’re going to learn an enormous lesson from something. Maybe they’re going to get completely caught up in it. You don’t know.

If you love them, then you love them. Not for how well they’re acting, for making the choices you approve of, or for doing life in the way you think they should. You give them the leeway to live. And then you look at what their choices bring up in you. That’s where your work is.

Judgment is interesting in this way. Somebody behaves badly and our mind immediately starts telling us who that person is. But what if you’re what you’re experiencing is their insecurity? What if you’re watching someone who has no idea who they are, grabbing onto something outside themselves for security? You can judge them for the behavior that comes out of that insecurity, or you can have compassion for the insecurity. That doesn’t mean pretending you weren’t hurt by their rudeness. It means seeing more of what’s actually happening.

Your Opinions Aren’t Necessarily Honesty

This is also where we have to be careful with the idea of honesty. People often think that because they have a strong reaction to something, expressing that reaction is being honest. But your ego’s views aren’t necessarily honesty at all. Just because your reaction is felt by you doesn’t mean your interpretation of the situation is true. You have to detach from your own ego’s view before you can see clearly enough to know what actually happened. When it’s strung around your perspective that came from the reaction that you’re spinning in, then it’s filled with judgements and opinions. That’s not honesty. That’s spewing from a place of reactivity.

Your opinions can become ways for the ego to keep you separate. As long as you’re aligning to them, it becomes us versus them, me versus you. The ego can take something that happened and build an entire narrative around it, and then you live inside that narrative as though it were reality. The feelings underneath it may be completely real. The narrative is something else.

The Feeling Is Real. The Narrative Isn’t True.

That’s an important distinction. You don’t want to take yourself out of what you’re feeling. You want to stay very, very present. If there’s jealousy, that’s real. Don’t judge yourself for it. Sit with the jealousy. Go into the heart of it in yourself. If there’s a feeling of being dismissed or not valued, sit with that. Those feelings are real. Don’t go into the narrative. That’s the thing you want to get away from.

Your body is a much more stable assessor than your mind. Your mind is so unstable that if you keep using the mind to tell you what’s real, with all of it’s hooks and reactions, you’ll just keep spinning out. Feel what the jealousy is like in your body and sit with it. Like everything else in the mind, it’s transitory. Watch the cloud of it dissipate. Then sit with the feeling of not being valued. What does that actually feel like? Stay there instead of immediately looking for somebody to blame or some explanation that will make the feeling go away. It won’t.

If you do that, something very different can happen. You can begin to have compassion for everyone on this planet who feels undervalued and dismissed. You can say, just like me. Just like me, other people feel this. Just like me, people are jealous, afraid, hurt, dismissed, insecure. You sit with that and it opens you into the spaciousness of love rather than closing you into the story of what somebody did to you. This is bodhicitta. This is the path of the spiritual warrior.

When you stay with the body and the actual feeling, it can open you into the field of unity that is the truth of existence. Your ego wants to do something with the feeling, which is why it spins off. It wants an explanation, a judgment, somebody at fault. But when you take control and do something with it simply by sitting with it, the ego starts to quiet down. You aren’t dismissing what’s happening to you. You’re actually experiencing it much more directly.

This is how you learn to handle life as it comes instead of going off into narratives and calling that honesty. Write about what happened. Get real with yourself. Then sit with each thing that came up. Jealousy. Anger. Feeling unvalued. Feeling pushed away. Whatever it is, feel it until the cloud begins to dissipate, then go to the next thing. You might have to catch the same pattern red-handed a thousand times before one layer dissolves, and then you’ll get to the next one. But as you do, you become stronger, clearer and more capable. You get the rhythm of it.

Your Ego Is Your Pathway to Enlightenment

This is why the ego isn’t something bad. Your ego is your pathway to enlightenment. These fears bring you to the doorway that takes you toward fearlessness. The upset itself becomes the doorway into clarity and acceptance of what life is. It’s constant fodder for learning and dissolving and growing and realizing. If you don’t blame somebody else for the uncomfortable feelings, but instead sit with whatever is happening in your mind, you will get through them.

Learn to Laugh at Yourself

And you have to learn to laugh at yourself. That’s a big one. The loosening of the ego can come through laughter. You begin to see that the fabric of ego isn’t as tight as it appears to be. There are holes in it. You can get a little joke through there. There’s this whole gap between the ideas you’re caught in and what’s real, and that gap can become filled with laughter instead of disappointment, pain and judgment.

The endeavor itself is serious. If you’re committed to waking up, you have to really be committed. But the journey itself doesn’t have to be so serious. Meditation, mindfulness and laughter will take you a long way. You were trained into behavioral patterns. You became reactive because the world around you showed you how to be reactive. There’s no reason to add shame to that. See it. Learn from it. Laugh when you can.

You don’t have to know how to do all of this tomorrow. You may go through the same thing again and again. Each time, though, you’re a little closer and a little stronger, a little more in tune with who you truly are and who other people truly are. That’s why it matters to hold close the moments when you see clearly. They begin to give you another way to move through confusion - not with distraction, not with more confusion, but with wisdom.

Eventually you begin to recognize the feeling: This doesn’t feel quite right. I want to know what’s real here. That intent becomes stronger. The possibility becomes more open. And when something hooks you, instead of seeing it only as something painful that happened, you begin to understand what an extraordinary opportunity you’ve been given.

Something has shown you where you’re caught. Now you can look at it. And if you stay with it, you can be free.

At first, that seemed sensible. We all talk things through. But she began to notice something underneath it. She wasn’t always looking for perspective. Sometimes she was looking for validation. She wanted someone else to confirm that what she wanted to do was okay. So this time she decided to make the decision herself, without running it by others.

That was a beautiful recognition - not because we should never ask anyone for advice, but because there is an enormous difference between using another person as a sounding board and handing that person authority over your life.

The point of a spiritual path is not to become dependent upon a teacher’s or anyone’s opinions. Quite the opposite. The point is to become increasingly capable of seeing clearly for yourself. When students bring their lives into sessions with me, I don’t want to tell them what to do. We put the situation on the table. We look at it from different angles. What are you afraid of? What are you attached to? What aren’t you seeing? What other possibilities exist? Where are you cycling inside your own mind?

Because that’s what human beings do. We cycle. We think about the same thing again and again until the thought begins to feel like reality. We create an internal loop and then make decisions from inside that loop. Part of spiritual practice is learning to bring those loops into the light and then loosen them. Eventually we see the looping mechanism that is ego and it begins to slow down until it’s gone.

Ego or Truth?

Eventually the student made her decision and took the trip she had been considering. And there she was. All of the consternation beforehand - Should I? Shouldn’t I? Is this right? Is this wrong? had disappeared into the simple fact of the present moment. She had gone on the trip.

That itself was something to learn from. Human beings ultimately tend to move toward what they want. Our minds may travel all over the universe beforehand, but eventually we act. For someone on a spiritual path, however, another question begins to arise: Where is the wanting coming from? Is it coming from ego, or is it coming from something deeper and truer?

In the beginning, you don’t necessarily know. And that’s okay. People sometimes imagine that once they begin meditating they should suddenly know exactly what is right, what is dharmic, what is ego, what is intuition, what is attachment and what is truth. You don’t. You learn.

You try something and watch. Did it bring greater clarity? Did your energy open? Did you become lighter, kinder, more awake? Or did you become cloudy, contracted, obsessive and drained? Then you learn from that. As the years go by, this discernment becomes increasingly refined. Sometimes you begin to recognize trouble before you walk into it. Other times trouble walks directly through your front door, but you’ve developed enough presence to meet it differently, gracefully, even humorously. That’s part of growing up spiritually.

There is a tricky part, though. You can move away from truth without realizing you’re doing it. Desire can be extraordinarily convincing. So can fear. So can attachment. So can the desire to be a good spiritual person. You can become so immersed in what you want that you lose the ability to see anything other than your own self reflection.

This is one of the reasons we meditate.

Meditation Creates Space

Meditation is the wild card. You sit down. You become still. The intensity begins to loosen. The thought that seemed absolutely compelling twenty minutes ago isn’t quite as solid. The fear isn’t quite as enormous. The desire isn’t quite as unquestionable. Space appears. And inside that space, sometimes you see.

Not always. But often enough.

Rather than continually asking, Is this good or bad? Is this right or wrong?, learn also to watch. Watch without fear. Watch without immediately turning what you see into another judgment about yourself. Eventually you begin to catch the ego red-handed.

I learned this one the hard way. As a student, I could be incredibly hard on myself. I wanted to get it right. I wanted clarity. I wanted realization. I wanted to be a good student. I would come down on myself for not being enlightened.

A whole new brand of ego was forming as I was progressing on the path. It had simply learned how to become spiritual. Instead of judging myself according to ordinary worldly standards, I had acquired an entirely new set of standards with which to torment myself. Am I conscious enough? Am I meditating well enough? Why am I confused? Why am I reacting? Why am I not in that beautiful state I experienced yesterday?

It took years to recognize how subtle this could become. Eventually something changed. I came to trust myself very deeply. And then something deeper changed: I began to trust life. That is a very different way of living.

The student described something she had begun noticing in meditation. She would watch a thought or feeling arise and recognize, I can see this. And if I can see it, she wondered, is it really me? Then something subtler would arise. She could see that too. And that would pass.

This is one of the extraordinary gifts of meditation. It creates spaciousness around the structures we ordinarily call ME. Our personality, fears, preferences, history, reactions, desires and self-images can feel like a straitjacket because we are usually living from inside them. We don’t recognize them as structures. We simply assume they are reality. Meditation loosens the straps. Suddenly there is enough space to observe.

Gradually another question becomes possible: What is transitory, and what is eternal?

Thoughts pass. Feelings pass. Relationships change. Bodies change. Circumstances change. Identities change. What doesn’t change? The spiritual journey eventually becomes an exploration of that question. Not intellectually, but directly. What were you before all these ideas about yourself? What remains when they become quiet?

You are the doorway into that investigation.

Impermanence Teaches Us to Love

The student had recently gone through a difficult experience involving people she loved. Something unexpected emerged from it. She realized that somewhere inside herself she had assumed certain relationships would always be there. That they would last forever.

She knew intellectually that everything changes. Of course she did. But she hadn’t known it. Then suddenly she did.

Nothing guarantees that a relationship will remain exactly as it is today. Strangely, that recognition didn’t make her love less. It allowed her to love more. Instead of asking, Will this person always understand me? Will they approve of my choices? Will this relationship remain the way I want it to be?, another possibility appeared: I can love them now.

I can love without requiring permanence. I can love without requiring agreement. I can love without requiring the other person to behave according to my expectations. I can cherish what is here because it is here.

That is a profound shift. Impermanence doesn’t diminish love. Impermanence teaches us to cherish. Love because you can. It is so much freer than spending your life worrying about whether love will last.

The Teacher Is a Signpost

This is also where the role of a teacher becomes clearer. A teacher cannot hand you realization. We can talk about impermanence a thousand times. You can read about it in books. You can hear Dharma talks about it. You can meditate on it. Those are signposts.

Imagine driving through a magnificent landscape. A sign says: Scenic Lookout: 2 Miles. You pass the sign. Maybe you pass it twenty times. Then one day something happens in your life and suddenly you make the turn. You arrive at the overlook, and you see.

Now it is no longer somebody else’s description. You know the view. The next time you travel that road, you recognize the turn yourself. That is how spiritual teaching works. The teacher doesn’t own the view. The teacher helps you discover the road to it.

There is another dimension to the teacher-student relationship as well. Sometimes, through meditation together, retreats, gatherings and simple proximity, a student experiences a state of consciousness that they don’t yet know how to access consistently on their own. Love becomes palpable. Stillness becomes palpable. Spaciousness becomes palpable. For a moment, you experience love not simply as an emotion directed toward somebody, but as a field of being.

That is part of transmission.

And then you go home. The next morning you wake up and think, Where did it go?

It didn’t go anywhere. You simply haven’t learned to live there yet.

Learning to Live There

The ego is powerful. You’ve spent your entire life building it. You’re not going to permanently dismantle it in one beautiful meditation. You may experience an extraordinary opening and think, This is it. Now I’m going to live here. And the next morning: Wait. What happened?

Nothing went wrong. Practice continues.

Moment by moment, through things you love and things you hate, through clarity and confusion, praise and criticism, getting what you want and losing what you thought you needed, you begin to recognize the architecture of your own ego.

And here is one of the great jokes of the path: Your particular ego becomes your particular road to enlightenment. It is what you’re going beyond, but it also gives you the exact material you need in order to go beyond it. Your attachments show you where you are attached. Your fears show you where you are afraid. Your judgments reveal your value system. Your reactions reveal where you are caught.

Your life keeps showing you yourself. So use it.

Meditate. Pay attention. Don’t demand perfection from yourself. Don’t turn spirituality into another elaborate system of self-judgment. Stay watchful. Stay curious. Learn to recognize what contracts you and what opens you.

Slowly, the state you once visited in meditation, at a workshop, with a teacher, or during some unexpected moment of grace begins appearing in ordinary life: walking down a street, looking at another human being, sitting quietly, falling in love, losing something, beginning again.

You discover that spaciousness was never somewhere else. Neither was love.

And neither were you.

A student told me recently that she was finally ready to look at what was really going on inwardly. Doing really hard things with learning, work, athletics, relationships, she had taken on more than she ever had and was thriving, yet experiencing anxiety.

And her mind was having a field day with it.

You can’t do this. This is too much. You don’t have enough time. You’re going to get stressed.

Something wasn’t adding up. She was acing her hardest classes, doing things she hadn’t thought she could do. The evidence of her own life was beginning to contradict the person she thought she was.

She said, “I’m seeing how I’ve lived in a very certain idea of myself most of my life.”

That’s where things get interesting.

We have ideas about ourselves that are so old we don’t recognize them as ideas. This is who I am. This is what I’m good at. This is what I can’t do. This much is too much for me. I’m not that kind of person.

Then we meditate, open our hearts, work with our minds and life moves outside the lines.

The ego gets nervous.

One of the reasons I encourage students to take on difficult things is because you get to see what happens inside of you. Take hard classes. Try something that uses your mind in a different way. Do something that doesn’t fit the picture you’ve made of yourself.

You may discover that you’re capable of much more than you thought. That’s wonderful, but there’s another part of it that interests me even more.

You get to see the machinery.

The anxiety comes up. Fear comes up. All the reasons you shouldn’t do it come up. The voice that has been directing your life suddenly becomes audible.

She was beginning to hear it.

For a long time she had spun out with the anxiety when it appeared. Now she was starting to sit with it long enough to ask what was underneath. And she discovered:

Fear.

Then she looked at the fear and said something revealing: “It’s founded on nothing.” That’s a very different experience from somebody telling you not to be afraid. She found it herself.

This is what I want for students.

I don’t want them to replace one set of beliefs with another set of beliefs that I give them. I want them to become interested in what is actually happening inside themselves. To see the value system that they were prescribed since birth, that they’ve taken for granted and lived inside of as if it was reality. And to question that. To ask if there’s something outside of the bounds that have been setup for us.

That takes courage.

The ego makes looking at yourself sound terrifying. Don’t go in there. Something awful is waiting. You’re going to discover something terrible about yourself. Usually you find something much more ordinary. A fear. An attachment. An old idea. Something somebody told you when you were young that became part of the way you see yourself.

The student had recently gotten into an argument with her mother. In the middle of it, she suddenly saw the environment she had come from. She could see how much pressure there had been to become a particular kind of person.

And now she was doing things her parents hadn’t expected her to do.

She got into a prestigious university after hearing from them, there’s no way you could do that - you’ve always been too lazy. She was accepted into a research position that surprised them. She was succeeding in the technology classes that had never before been a prominent part of her personality, her usual. How could she succeed or be good at things that weren’t her proclivity?

Her life kept getting bigger than the identity she had inherited. She could also see that she had participated in keeping that old identity alive.

That’s harder.

It’s relatively easy to say, My parents imprinted me this way. It’s another thing to see the voice continuing inside of you long after your parents have left the room.

You can’t do this - This is too hard - Stay where you know yourself.

That’s where spiritual work becomes practical.

The word ego can sound very grand and spiritual. It isn’t. You can watch it operate on a Tuesday afternoon when you’re supposed to go to the gym and don’t go. You can watch it while doing homework and you don’t feel like it. You can watch it when your mother says something and your whole body reacts.

You can watch it when you’re succeeding, too.

Success has its own traps. Suddenly there’s a new identity available: I’m good at this. I’m impressive. I’m spiritual. I’m advanced.

In my personal experience, my teacher pushed me through numerous progressions as well as ego shatterings on the path. I began to see how easily identity reconstructs itself. You get through one thing and there it is again in another form.

So when this student told me she thought she might have a spiritual ego, I wasn’t alarmed. Of course.

She said, “I think my ego didn’t want to realize that I have so much growing to do.”

Now we’re getting somewhere.

You don’t have to be ashamed that you have an ego. We all get conditioned with a value system of what life is, what’s good, bad, right, wrong. Then we get behind our attractions and aversions with a big charge of energy. That’s attachment. When we like how things are going, we say life is good. When we don’t like how they’re going, we say life is bad. All the enlightened yogis and buddhas of yore have pointed out this value system and our attachments to these values as the source of all suffering.

You have to become able to see it, and then accept it, and then work with it. That takes courage. And you don’t have to uncover the whole thing today.

I told her not to worry about all the layers she hasn’t encountered yet. Life will bring them. Right now she’s seeing anxiety differently. She’s looking underneath it instead of automatically obeying it. She’s discovering that some of the limits she assumed were real aren’t real at all. Later there will be something else.

That’s why I trust life as much as I do.

I can give somebody a meditation. I can suggest a class. I can point something out. But life does most of the teaching.

It knows exactly where the attachment is.

So live. Try things. Make choices. Pay attention to what happens when you get what you want and when you don’t. Notice what happens when you’re stretched beyond the person you thought you were.

You don’t need to manufacture some enormous spiritual ordeal. Your life is already showing you. And little by little, you will begin to recognize the difference between the voice that has been defining you and something deeper that doesn’t need all those definitions.

We have ideas about enlightenment, but we can’t really know. It’s about being present with life - being in the moment, right here right now - with life.

What she knows right now is simpler: this feels true. Looking more deeply feels true. Becoming more real feels true.

We can just be - be in our natural state.

That’s enough.

The path can begin there.

And then he thought, Let me just smile. I can smile.

That is the beginning of the best philosophy of life. I’m going to smile because I can.

It came up again when we were talking about a meditation we’d done under a tree. I had asked everyone to just be with nature, to stop doing so much and be there. He felt something crawling toward him and decided, well, I might just be a rock. He stayed still.

Finally he looked. There was a little lizard on his knee staring at him.

He said, This is happiness.

The lizard stayed there for most of the meditation. And what came to him was that he was just this little fleck in a big world. He didn’t need to be more important than anything else. He didn’t have to hold all his narratives and ideas as being so important just because he lives in a world with cars and jobs and all the rest of it. He could just be.

That’s one of the things I love about being out in the natural world. There’s so much to learn there. Everything is in the perfection of its own beingness without thoughts and ideas about what it’s supposed to be. It is what it is.

And we’re part of that.

We’re nothing and we’re all of it simultaneously. We’re not such a big deal. Our minds make a big deal out of who we think we are and what we want the world to see us as. We spend so much energy projecting an image of ourselves to others and even to ourselves.

When that stops, you’re just being.

Then there aren’t all these barriers between you and existence. You can feel life moving. You’re not stopping it every five seconds with another idea about yourself.

The lizard doesn’t have any of those ideas. He doesn’t have judgments and insecurities about being a lizard. He’s not wondering if he’s doing lizard correctly.

He was teaching.

And the funny thing is, we honor that teaching just by being present.

What is knowledge? It’s easy to get caught up in words, semantics, concepts and ideas. Knowledge is useful. It gives us ways of organizing things in our heads. But the real experience is whatever it is. It has very little to do with the thoughts we have about it.

We wrap the thoughts around it and remove ourselves from the present, from the actual experience. While you’re actually in a direct experience, you’re there. You’re with life. You’re with everything life is bringing in that moment. And if you’re really present with it, there isn’t necessarily a limitation to that moment. It could open into all of eternity.

Our thoughts, reactions and narratives limit us. They’re what put the barriers between us and life.

This is where meditation gets interesting. The point isn’t just to have some beautiful meditation, get up, and then go back to being unconscious for the rest of the day. Eventually it becomes the way you live. Can you bring it into the grocery store? Can you bring it into driving your car? Into a job interview? Into a conversation with somebody? Into walking down the street?

Another student told me he’d been out walking and found himself staring at bees pollinating flowers. He became completely absorbed in how beautiful they were. Then a tree branch hit his hair as he walked by. Instead of getting irritated, his immediate reaction was, Oh, the tree is saying hi to me.

That’s it too.

The path becomes awareness moving through you in new and varied ways in everyday moments. It’s not some set of doctrines. It’s not worshiping a teacher. It’s not living according to a set of rules. You’re learning to hold your truth in relation to existence as you move through life in a body. You move through the trees and rivers and bays, the sidewalks and buildings, the grocery stores and everything else.

And you become more aware as you go.

That’s why the path is so alive. It isn’t a concept. Love isn’t a concept. Awareness isn’t a concept when you’re actually aware. It’s realizing how all this joy and love is ordinary. It’s nothing extravagant or special or shiny. It’s just very basic and down to earth and present. And as you become more real, the motivation to be present with life grows stronger. Your intent becomes more vivid and intense around keeping yourself online and open. That is called shining your spirit. And as you do that, you become shiny. Life becomes more brilliant.

So yes, sometimes life is extraordinary and shiny. You’ll have meditations that will blow the doors off. A single insight can change your life. Both are true.

But sooner or later it comes back to your everyday life. Being grounded in your truth. It’s right here, in the present moment. Walking down the street, sitting at your desk, creating something, talking to somebody, noticing a bee, getting annoyed, laughing, eating, driving.

Your everyday moments can carry this subtle awareness of the vividness of life.

It’s ordinary. It was never anywhere else. It was always right here.

Sometimes it takes a little lizard to point that out.

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This article is based on a talk I gave in Dec. of 2024.

What is life, really? What are we doing here? And what gets in the way of experiencing what life actually is? These are enormous questions, but in some ways the answer is very simple. When you begin to cut through the noise, the static, the conditioning, and all the ideas the world has given you about who you are supposed to be, something else begins to emerge: life itself. And life, when you experience it directly, is beautiful, brilliant and alive.

This isn’t about becoming special or constructing some grand spiritual identity. The extraordinary thing is that the deeper nature we are looking for isn’t reserved for a few unusual people. It is inherent in everyone. The question is who is interested enough to discover it. Who is willing to explore life as it actually is, rather than simply accepting what we have been taught it is?

There is an old Buddhist image of the 10,000 states of mind. Ten thousand really means innumerable - an enormous spectrum of possible ways consciousness can experience existence. Yet most people live in only a handful of them. Think about that. You have this immense range of consciousness available to you, but perhaps you spend most of your time moving among anxiety, frustration, desire, sadness, anger, excitement, boredom and temporary satisfaction. Those become the notes you play, and eventually those notes become your composition. You begin to say, “This is my life.”

But what if it isn’t your life? What if it’s simply the state of mind you’re in?

This is one of the most important discoveries meditation can give you. A state of mind can feel completely real while you are inside it without being reality itself. Anger can fill your entire field of awareness. Depression can do the same thing. So can fear, jealousy or disappointment. When you’re inside one of those states, it can appear to explain everything. But you’ve entered a room. That’s all. And rooms have doors.

We tend to think about karma as something mysterious or cosmic, but there is a very immediate way to understand it: Where do you find yourself right now? What state of mind are you inhabiting? What patterns keep repeating? What thoughts do you continually return to? Those patterns create momentum, and momentum begins to feel like fate.

Meditation interrupts that process because meditation makes you aware of what is happening. Once you can see a state of mind instead of simply being consumed by it, something extraordinary becomes possible: choice. You begin to discover that you don’t have to play the same note over and over again. You can change the music.

Whatever you continually feed with your attention becomes increasingly dominant in your experience. If you continually feed resentment, resentment becomes easier to access. If you continually replay an injury, the injury remains psychologically present. If you continually feed fear, you begin encountering life through fear.

But the reverse is also true. Feed awareness, love, beauty, truth and silence, and your inner world begins to change. This isn’t positive thinking. You’re not pretending that difficult things don’t happen. You’re becoming responsible for what you continually energize with your attention. You start discovering that attention is one of the most powerful forces you possess.

Most of us live on the surface of ourselves. We see, hear, react, think and feel, and almost immediately categorize what happens: good, bad, I want this, I don’t want that, I like this person, I don’t like that person, this should be happening, this shouldn’t be happening. We have been conditioned to navigate life through thousands of these categories, many of which we didn’t consciously choose.

We could describe this surface existence as two percent. The number isn’t literal; it’s a metaphor. Imagine that the ordinary personality - the thoughts, emotions, conditioning, preferences, fears and reactions that normally occupy our attention - is only two percent of what we are capable of experiencing. Meditation introduces us to the other 98 percent: silence, awareness, vastness, stillness, love without an object, and a sense of connection that doesn’t require an explanation.

When you begin contacting that deeper awareness, it changes how you navigate the surface. The two percent is still there. You still have a personality. You still have emotions. You still get irritated. Things still go wrong. But now they exist within something much larger, and perspective changes everything.

There is another illusion worth dropping: the idea that someday you’re going to have everything figured out. You won’t, and that’s wonderful. Look at the stars. Look at the cosmos. Look at a tree. Look closely at another human being. Do you really think you’re going to figure all of this out? Why would you want to? Participate in it. Experience it. Bring your totality to it.

Life is infinitely more interesting when you stop demanding that it conform to your ideas about what should happen next. You can figure out what this moment requires. You can become completely present. You can respond intelligently. Then the next moment arrives. Life keeps moving through you, around you and as you. The practice becomes one of learning to trust that movement.

This includes the difficult parts. Sadness, loss, anger, failure and disappointment can all become part of the path. Even experiences that tear apart our previous understanding of ourselves can become openings. Sometimes the reality we’ve constructed has to break before we realize it was a construction.

We experience this in our own lives. Some of the events that open us most deeply are not gentle. At the time, we would never have called them gifts. But meditation gives us the possibility of using everything. Instead of asking only, “Why did this happen to me?” we can eventually ask, “What can I see now that I couldn’t see before? What is this showing me about attachment? What is it showing me about fear? What remains when the identity I depended upon gets shaken?” Nothing has to be wasted. Everything can become part of awakening.

Conditioning is like walking into a room filled with smoke. At first you can barely see. Stay there long enough and you forget you’re in a smoky room. You simply think that’s what the world looks like. Our thoughts can become like that. Our judgments can become like that. Our emotional patterns can become like that. The mind fills with so much psychological smoke that we can no longer distinguish what is actually happening from what we are thinking about what is happening.

Meditation clears the room. Mindfulness keeps clearing it throughout the day. You notice a thought, a judgment, a story you are constructing about a situation or another person, and instead of immediately believing it, you see it. Then perhaps you let it go - not because you are trying to become a “good” person, but because you would rather see clearly.

In my experience, a real path has three indispensable elements. Meditation gives you access to deeper states of awareness. Mindfulness teaches you to bring that awareness into ordinary life. And then there’s laughter. There has to be laughter, because once you begin stepping outside the dramas of the personality, you start noticing something: we’re hilarious.

We get tremendously serious about our stories. We become offended. We obsess. We construct elaborate interpretations of what somebody said Tuesday afternoon three weeks ago. We replay conversations. We defend identities we constructed ourselves and then forgot we constructed. Sometimes the most liberating response is simply, “What am I doing?” And you laugh.

The moment you can genuinely laugh at a state of mind, something has already broken open. You are no longer completely trapped inside it. The spell has been interrupted. That’s why humor can be profoundly spiritual: it restores perspective.

We spend much of our lives building an increasingly elaborate idea of who we are. Our families begin the story. Culture adds to it. School adds to it. Success and failure add to it. Relationships add to it. Eventually we have chiseled out a remarkably detailed identity, and then we become trapped inside it.

There is nothing inherently wrong with having an identity. We need one to navigate the world. The problem begins when we mistake it for the totality of who we are. You can improve the dream. You can manifest things inside the dream. You can make the dream more comfortable, successful or exciting. But meditation asks a more radical question: Can you wake up from the dream?

As meditation deepens, there can gradually be less fixation on ME - my story, my image, my victories, my failures, my importance. Strangely, as there becomes less of that constructed self, there is more life. More immediacy. More awareness. More connection. More freedom.

What if as an exercise, you ask yourself to imagine your highest self looking at your life. What would your deeper self say to you? The student asked, “What would yours say to you?” Hopefully you can say, “Good show.”

Not because you’ve done everything perfectly. Far from it. I’ve personally spent plenty of my life thinking I should have handled something differently, understood something sooner, been wiser, clearer, better. Eventually I began to see that constantly judging myself was simply another form of self-absorption. There is so much to learn from not doing something perfectly. Now, when I see that I could have done something differently, I look, I learn, I adjust, and I keep going. That’s very different from building another identity around having failed.

At this point in my life, what matters most to me is fairly simple: awareness, truth and love. I try to live there. Sometimes I don’t. Then I notice where I’ve gone, learn whatever there is to learn, and return. No drama required.

And what if you get lost periodically in the confusion and chaos of your own mind - the haziness, thoughts and emotional patterns that become so convincing that you temporarily lose touch with what you know.

Coming back feels like coming home.

The smoky room isn’t your home. It’s just a room you walked into. Once you remember that, you can walk out.

This is why we meditate. Not to become religious. Not to become impressive. Not to become some perfected spiritual version of ourselves. We meditate so that we can see clearly. We practice mindfulness so that we can keep seeing. So that we can sit with whatever is happening in the present moment, without labeling it, without judging it, without turning it into a story that carries us away from ourselves and the moment. And we laugh because we will inevitably forget, and remembering doesn’t have to become another problem.

There are far more than a few discordant notes available to you. There is an entire symphony. Meditation gives you a chance to hear it. Pay attention to where your mind goes. Learn to recognize the rooms you keep walking into. Open the door.

And choose life.