There are certain times when you can feel energy moving in life. Solstices and equinoxes can be like that. Birthdays can be like that. There’s a sense of one cycle turning into another, and you can use the force of that movement to move yourself in a direction you want to go. You begin sensing things in your life: what you want to do, where you want to go, what needs to change. You can align yourself with that energy and let it give you some momentum.
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.