One of my students was standing at the register at a grocery store the other day. They were training the cashier, so it was taking a while, and he had this thought: Do I look annoyed? Maybe I do.
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.