Sometimes life breaks an illusion so cleanly that for a moment you can actually see the machinery underneath it. A friendship changes. Someone falls in love and disappears into a new relationship. A person you thought you knew begins behaving in ways that don’t fit your picture of them. At first it hurts because we think we are losing the person, but often what is really being lost is our idea of the person. We had a place for them in our lives. We had a story about who they were, who we were to them, and how the relationship was supposed to work. Then life moves, the story stops matching reality, and suddenly there is nothing solid to stand on.
A student of mine recently went through this with a close friend. The friendship had been important to her, and when her friend became absorbed in a new relationship and largely disappeared, she was devastated. But instead of immediately trying to repair the friendship, she stayed with what was happening. She meditated. She looked at her attachment. She let herself feel the loss without rushing to turn it into a story about betrayal or abandonment. By the time the two of them finally spent a day together and talked, something had changed. She wasn’t trying nearly as hard to get the friendship back. She was interested in seeing what was actually there.
When the Story Stops Working
What she saw was fascinating. Her friend would say something, hear how it sounded, and then retract it. She would describe my student as judgmental, then almost immediately insist that she knew she could never really be judgmental because she was such an accepting person. The story kept changing based on what sounded best to her. If her friend (my student) was judgmental, what would that make her? She needed her friend to be accepting in her mind so that it defined her as a person who has accepting friends. But my student was beginning to see something about herself too. She had been judgmental. Why pretend otherwise? Being able to admit that didn’t destroy her. In fact, it freed her from having to maintain the identity of being a certain kind of person. She could simply look at what had happened.
This is where self-honesty begins to cut through illusion. Most of us carry around ideas of being good, loving, accepting, loyal, independent, kind, whatever our preferred identity happens to be. Then reality contradicts us and we scramble to repair the story. We edit what happened. We reinterpret what somebody meant. We rearrange the pieces until we can once again feel secure inside our idea of ourselves. It can happen so quickly that we don’t even notice we’re doing it. One story replaces another, then another, each one giving us somewhere temporary to stand, temporary being the key word.
But what if you don’t do that? What if you allow yourself to see something without immediately deciding what it means about you or the other person? What if you don’t need your friend to be who you thought she was, and you don’t need yourself to be who she thinks you are? Suddenly there is a strange openness. It can feel uncomfortable because there is nothing to grab onto, but that discomfort is very revealing. You are coming into contact with the groundless nature of human existence.
Looking for Something to Hold Onto
We are constantly trying to escape that groundlessness. We use relationships to define ourselves. We use families, careers, appearances, accomplishments and other people’s opinions. We send lines outward, hoping something will come back and tell us who we are. If you think I am good, maybe I can believe I am good. If someone desirable loves me, maybe I am desirable. If my parents approve of me, perhaps I am okay. If enough people pay attention to me, maybe I exist in the way I want to exist, in the way that others will accept me. The problem is that everything we’re attaching those lines to is moving too. Our illusions are attaching to their illusions. Groundlessness is the actual transitory nature of human life.
This became even clearer for my student a few days later at her uncle’s memorial. She found herself watching family dynamics she had grown up inside of, but she wasn’t quite inside them in the same way anymore. She could feel how insecure everyone was, how much of human interaction was being driven by the need to be seen correctly, treated correctly, validated correctly. Even at a gathering centered around death, people were still caught in the familiar roles and tensions of their lives. Death was right there, announcing as clearly as possible that none of this can be held onto, and still the human mind was trying to arrange everything into something familiar.
There comes a point in practice when you begin seeing how primal this insecurity is. Years ago, I remember sitting at the Cheesecake Factory are the Marina in Los Angeles on a Friday afternoon watching extraordinarily beautiful women walking past. They were beautifully dressed, beautifully made up, everything seemingly in place. But what struck me wasn’t their beauty. It was the insecurity underneath it. I could feel the attention going outward: Who is looking at me? How am I being seen? Am I still desirable? Am I enough? Beauty itself wasn’t the problem. The vulnerability came from needing the world to answer those questions.
Moving With Life
We do this in a thousand forms, but the mechanism is the same. We look outside ourselves for something stable enough to make us feel stable. Then the world changes, because that’s what the world does. Somebody leaves. Somebody dies. We age. A friendship changes. A relationship ends. A career disappears. The person who adored us yesterday is angry with us today. We experience this as the rug being pulled out from underneath us, but perhaps there never was a rug. We were standing on an idea and calling it reality.
Once you begin to understand that life moves, you can move with it. It’s more like skiing or surfing. If you stay fluid, you can respond to what is actually happening. The trouble begins when the ego insists that life hold still. We stiffen around an expectation, a relationship or an identity, and then the movement of life feels like an assault. The very thing we thought would make us secure becomes the source of our anxiety because now we have to protect it.
Attachment Is Not Love
This is especially vivid in love. Human beings build enormous structures of expectation around relationships and then call those structures love. We become attached to how often someone calls, how they express affection, whether they want what we want, where the relationship is going and what it means about us. When both people are constructing compatible stories, the relationship feels wonderful. When the stories diverge, suddenly everything feels terrible. We say love has gone wrong, when often what has actually broken down is the agreement between two sets of expectations.
My student put it beautifully: if I’m grabbing onto someone, I can’t love them freely. That is the heart of it. Attachment binds. Detachment doesn’t mean you don’t care. It doesn’t mean you become cold or indifferent. Quite the opposite. When you stop requiring another person to stabilize your identity, there is finally room to encounter them as they are. You can love them without making them responsible for holding your world together.
This doesn’t make relationships wrong. Relationships can be extraordinary places to learn because they expose attachment so quickly. They reveal need, projection, fear, desire and the endless ways the ego tries to secure itself through another person. For someone seriously pursuing awareness, that can be valuable territory, but it can also be enormously entangling. Each person has to discover that for themselves. There is no rule here about whether to be in a relationship or not. The question is whether you can see what is happening while you’re in it.
When the Illusion Breaks
Sometimes heartbreak itself is the teaching. We think our heart is breaking because love has been destroyed. But often an illusion about love is being destroyed. Something we believed was permanent turns out not to be. Someone we believed belonged in a particular place in our life moves somewhere else. It hurts terribly because the ego experiences the destruction of its made up reality as a kind of death. Yet if we don’t immediately rebuild the illusion, the breaking can open us to something much larger. One layer of armor around the heart comes down.
There are other layers of conditioning that become visible as this happens. My student noticed, for example, how much less energy she was spending thinking about whether she was attractive to men. She had recently been criticized by her mother for arriving at a family gathering without being dressed up enough, and she could suddenly see an old cultural expectation underneath it. Women learn very early that being pleasing, desirable and visually acceptable has value. Mothers can pass this to daughters without ever consciously choosing it because it was passed to them. Then women spend extraordinary amounts of energy monitoring themselves through imagined eyes outside themselves.
The freedom isn’t in rebelling against appearance or relationships or any particular social convention. That can become another identity just as quickly. The freedom is in seeing the conditioning clearly enough that it no longer unconsciously commands you. You can dress beautifully because you feel like it. You can show up in ordinary clothes because you feel like it. You can love someone without needing that relationship to prove your worth. You can enjoy attention without requiring it. The point isn’t to construct a new correct way of being. It is to stop being moved around by forces you haven’t examined.
The Fast Path
This is why meditation matters so much. Meditation isn’t another story we add to the collection. It is where we begin to experience awareness without having to attach it to shifting definitions. The mind still moves. The body still has desires and fears. People still come and go. Nothing about being human stops changing. But slowly there is a different center of beingness. Instead of demanding that life kowtow to our ideas, we begin to align ourselves around life.
And that changes love too. Goodness stops being about trying to be a good person. Love stops being about convincing ourselves that we are loving. You open, get yourself out of the way as much as you can, and allow the goodness of life to move through you. It becomes something lived through the body, through choices, through how you meet another person, through how quickly you recognize when your mind has begun constructing another elaborate fake reality and how willing you are to release it.
There is something enormously freeing about discovering that you don’t need to know exactly who everybody is, including yourself. You don’t have to keep fixing people into positions so that the world makes sense. You can look. You can learn. You can be wrong. You can change. Someone else can change. A relationship can change. Something can end. Something entirely unexpected can begin.
Life becomes much more interesting when you stop demanding that it stay put.