There are moments on the path when you suddenly catch yourself. Nothing particularly dramatic has happened, but you see something you couldn’t see before. Maybe you’re doing something you love and discover that part of the reason you love it is because you’re good at it. Then somebody comes along who’s better, and suddenly you’re not having quite as much fun. That’s interesting. Or you’re working hard at school or work, excited about what you’re learning, and one small thing goes wrong and fear comes rushing in. Suddenly this thing you were doing because you loved it has become a referendum on whether you’re succeeding or failing. These are wonderful moments because life has just shown you something. You don’t have to condemn the ego for being there. You get to see it. And once you see it, there’s another possibility.
I think this is one of the ways we grow up on the path. Life humbles us in small ways. It shows us where we’re attached, where we’re frightened, where we need something to go a particular way. And if we pay attention, those little experiences prepare us for the bigger ones. You begin to realize that you don’t actually have to go wherever your mind goes. Everything can be twirling around you without you twirling with it. That’s a huge discovery. Life can be moving, people can be moving, circumstances can be changing, and you can sit still in the middle of it. You don’t have to grab onto the nearest thing that’s spinning and hope it will ground you. It won’t. It can’t. Nothing outside of you is going to do that anyway. The only real ground is within your own being. All you truly have in this life is the truth of your own experience.
What Happens When You Stay
Fear is a great place to learn this because fear has such tremendous persuasive power. Fear comes along and we immediately believe something must be wrong. Then we leave ourselves. We go straight into the mind and the poor body is sitting there with nobody running the ship. Now fear has the whole place to itself, and it starts having fear babies and anxiety babies and stress babies and paralyzing babies. Pretty soon we’ve created an entire reality out of something that might have been a moment of fear passing through the body. But you can do something else. You can stay. This fear is here. I’m going to sit with it. I’m going to feel it. I’m going to love myself while it’s here. I’m not going to abandon myself because I’m afraid.
And something very beautiful can happen when you do that. Fear starts teaching you. You see where you block the natural flow of your life. You also begin to understand other people differently because you’ve felt this thing in yourself. You understand how much fear there is in the human condition and how much it controls and drives people. Now there can be compassion. You can breathe in that fear and breathe out love. Breathe in fear and breathe out the richness of being. You don’t even have to decide that fear is bad. It’s here. Let it be here. Let it open you. How crazy is that? Fear itself can become a stepping stone into love.
This starts changing the way you experience everything. Achievement doesn’t have to mean what you thought it meant. Relationships don’t have to mean what you thought they meant. You don’t have to clutch another person and try to make them the ground beneath your feet. They spin too. You can love someone without jumping into their vortex with them. You can enjoy a relationship without deciding that it has to become the pinnacle of your life. You can notice what you want and what you don’t want without immediately consulting some invisible instruction manual about what you’re supposed to want. There is a wonderful moment when you begin to realize, life is not the ideas I’ve been given about life. Maybe I can actually feel into where life is taking me instead of always following where my conditioned expectations are taking me.
Life Starts to Open
That’s when things get really interesting because there is so much more going on here than our ideas about what a human life is supposed to be. We’re given a random set of instructions about success, relationships, gender, sex, money, achievement, what matters, what doesn’t matter, how we’re supposed to behave, even what we’re supposed to desire. We absorb so much of it before we’re old enough to question any of it. Then we walk around inside this man-made reality as though somebody proved that this is what life is. But what if it isn’t? What if life is much bigger, stranger, more intelligent and more beautiful than the little structure we’ve put around it?
This is why meditation matters so much. You sit in silence and begin to discover what is there before all the ideas. You don’t need to figure life out. You let life reveal itself. You begin to feel the difference between fear and truth, between conditioning and something that is actually moving through you, between what you’ve been told to want and what your being is showing you. Your life starts streaming again. There is more room for creativity, love, intelligence, energy, otherworldly experience, laughter, surprise. You begin getting the barriers out of the way and letting life breathe you a little bit. Where is it taking you? What does it want to reveal today? You don’t know. That’s the beauty of it.
To me, that’s the premise of the path to enlightenment. You learn how to be yourself. You’re not learning to map to somebody else. You’re not taking your directions for life from anyone. You’re learning how to take your directions from life itself. You meditate, you become still, and then you get up and live. Life teaches you through everything. It teaches you through your fear and your joy, through the places where your ego gets caught, through the people you love, through the things that don’t work out, through the things that unexpectedly do. You start discovering that life really does seem to give you what you need to learn.
And you start laughing more. That’s part of it too. What’s so funny about being human is how seriously we take ourselves. We’re here for this incredibly brief period of time, a little blip, a little raindrop. The cloud lets us go and here we go. This is our life. And then it’s gone. So maybe we don’t need to spend the whole thing desperately trying to get everything right. Trying to be a projection of an image. Maybe we can be curious. Maybe we can let ourselves be surprised. Maybe we can become quiet enough to experience this dynamic intelligence moving through everything and see where it takes us. The most beautiful possibility of being human may simply be to learn what life truly is through life teaching us.