Life has a way of becoming very intense just when we’re starting to discover something new about ourselves. There’s school, work, relationships, family, responsibilities, and all the things that seem to be swirling around us, demanding our attention. And yet, through the stillness of meditation, we begin to experience a level of presence that we’ve never known before, even in the midst of all the activity. Things start to feel different. We begin to see things that we couldn’t see before, and there’s a sense that something inside us is shifting, even though the outer circumstances of our lives may be more demanding than ever. It’s a cool thing to discover that we can actually become more present as life becomes more intense.
That’s how we learn what we’re capable of. That’s how we learn how strong we are, how smart we are, and how much we can bring ourselves to life in these moments. Sometimes there’s an intensity that accompanies this process, an almost physical sensation of energy moving through us. It might feel warm or hot, powerful, concentrated somewhere in the center of our being. And that’s power. The question is what we’re going to do with it, because energy can move in many different directions. It can go into our lives, our work, our creativity, our meditation, and everything we’re learning to become. Or it can burrow into our ego, our attachments, our fears, and the stories we tell ourselves about other people or ourselves. That’s why this is such an important time to pay attention. Where your mind goes is where the energy goes.
I had tremendous amounts of energy running through me during my years as Rama’s student, and I wasn’t always smart about what I did with it. Sometimes I was very smart, and sometimes I wasn’t. Having access to lots of spiritual energy doesn’t automatically mean that we know how to direct it. That’s something we learn through living, through making mistakes, through paying attention, and through becoming increasingly aware of the subtle movements of our own minds. The more energy we have, the more important that discrimination becomes, because the same power that can bring amazing things into our lives can also intensify our entanglements if we’re not paying attention.
The Lines We Draw to Other People
One of the most interesting discoveries we can make is how much our sense of security has been based on our relationships with other people. We become accustomed to feeling secure because someone loves us, because a friendship is there, because our parents approve of us, or because the people we care about are behaving in ways that make us feel comfortable. That’s how humans roll. We build lines of attachment to other people, and without realizing it, we begin to base our own state of being on what happens across those lines. When someone pulls away, becomes unavailable, changes their behavior, or simply doesn’t give us what we’ve come to expect, we can go way off balance. Our sense of security was never really coming from within us. It was coming from outside ourselves, from something that could change at any moment.
And think about how much energy goes into maintaining all those lines. When our attention is constantly moving outward, wondering what someone is thinking, how they’re feeling, whether they’re upset with us, whether they still love us, whether they’re going to be there for us, there’s very little energy left for our own lives. We may not even realize how much of ourselves we’ve been giving away until we begin to pull those lines back. Suddenly there’s energy for things we never thought we could do. We have more capacity, more enthusiasm, more strength, and a greater ability to meet the demands of our lives. It’s not that we stop caring about people. It’s that we’re no longer using our relationships as the foundation of our own existence. We stop relying on people’s view of us to give us a sense of security and confidence.
And here’s something beautiful about that. When we’re no longer attached to someone in that way, we can actually experience them more fully. We can be present with them, enjoy them, love them, and share moments together without all the ideas and expectations that we’ve built around the relationship. Even the most intimate moments can become entirely different experiences when we’re simply there, rather than experiencing everything through our ideas about what intimacy is supposed to be. There’s a freedom in that, and a tremendous amount of love. We’re not trying to get something from the other person or make the experience fit some image we’ve carried around in our minds. We’re simply there together, and the experience is what it is.
We unconsciously grow a whole idea of how life is from past experiences, how we are, how the other person is, and how everything is supposed to work. We keep building on ideas from the past. When we let all that go, life is simply what it is, and we can experience it fully for what it is. But when we have so many lines going out to people, we’re not only losing our own presence, we’re also absorbing everything that’s coming across those lines from them. Their fears, expectations, judgments, insecurities, confusion, all of it becomes mixed up with our own. And here we are, working so hard to clear these things out of our lives, while we’re simultaneously soaking them in from everybody we’re attached to.
This doesn’t mean that we stop loving people or withdraw from relationships. Quite the opposite. When we’re unattached but loving freely, we can experience people for who they are and bring our totality to them. We don’t have to become entangled in everything they’re experiencing. We can be with someone who’s anxious without becoming anxious ourselves. We can recognize that someone is afraid without making their fear our own. And we can love someone deeply without needing them to validate us or give us a particular kind of experience. That’s freedom, and it’s something we learn over and over again, through all the different situations and relationships that life brings us.
The Family Rule Book
Of course, some of the trickiest entanglements are the ones we have with our families, because those connections were built into us long before we had any awareness of what was happening. Imagine a building being constructed, and there’s a tunnel through which all the materials arrive. Everything that goes into that building comes through the tunnel. The walls, the floors, the structure, everything that eventually makes the building what it is. That’s very much how our parents build us. Their beliefs, their fears, their expectations, their judgments, their ways of interpreting life, all of it comes across that connection and becomes part of the structure of who we think we are.
Then perhaps we grow up and begin to discover that we don’t necessarily want to live inside the structure that got designed and configured for us anymore. We love our parents, and that love doesn’t have to change. But the tunnel through which all that conditioning came into us is something we need to understand. We don’t need that tunnel to love them. We can offer our love directly, freely, in the moment, without having to absorb everything that’s coming from the other side. That’s the tricky part, because those connections are so deeply embedded in us. We were built from them, and learning to disentangle ourselves from the conditioning while continuing to love the people who gave it to us can become one of the most interesting koans of our lives.
Families have these extraordinary rule books, and most of the rules aren’t even spoken. There are subjects nobody talks about, feelings nobody is supposed to express, people we’re supposed to treat in particular ways, and entire areas of family history that we’re expected to avoid. Someone might innocently ask a question about a relative and suddenly find themselves being told that they’ve done something wrong because the subject is painful for someone else. But what’s wrong with being curious? What’s wrong with asking a question? The question itself may be perfectly innocent, yet an entire family system of repression and emotional protection can come crashing down around it.
What’s fascinating is how these rules get passed from one person to another. One family member has a painful relationship with someone, another person adopts that person’s perspective, and before long everyone is expected to live according to the same set of assumptions. Nobody necessarily examines whether those assumptions are true or whether they have anything to do with their own experience. They’re simply part of the family reality. And if you don’t participate in that reality, you may be made to feel guilty, ashamed, or somehow disloyal. That’s what gets called family values sometimes, but what does it actually mean? Does being a family mean that everyone has to believe the same things, carry the same fears, and avoid the same subjects? Why can’t people love one another and still have their own understanding of life?
And the rule book is enormous. It’s not just a few overarching ideas about how we’re supposed to behave. It’s particularized to every person, every situation, every age, every relationship, and every little nuance of family history. There are rules about how to behave around grandma, how to speak to dad, what not to mention around an aunt, what somebody thinks about a cousin, and how we’re supposed to respond when someone is upset. The whole thing becomes an incredibly intricate system of conditioned responses. As children, we learn to navigate it because we want to be okay. We don’t understand why certain things are forbidden or why the hammer comes down when we say something perfectly innocent. We just learn to be careful, to stay quiet, to anticipate reactions, and to avoid doing anything that might bring down that hammer. Or maybe we learn the opposite - to argue, upset the cart, to rebel and hate the expectations. That can create an even more intense conditioned response.
And then we wonder why people grow up afraid of their own feelings, afraid of being honest, afraid of disappointing someone, and afraid of simply being themselves. We haven’t learned how to be real with ourselves because we’ve been so busy learning how to behave according to or against everyone else’s rules. My own father grew up in a generation that rarely spoke about anything emotional or deeply personal. He had experienced tremendous hardship as a child and later witnessed the horrors of war, but he almost never talked about those things. He had a charming personality, and yet beneath the charm there was an entire world of experiences and feelings that rarely came to the surface except when the leakage of anger or depression appeared. Those things don’t simply disappear because nobody talks about them. They become part of the atmosphere of a family, and children absorb them without necessarily understanding what they’re absorbing.
This is why the path involves so much more than sitting quietly and having beautiful experiences in meditation. We’re learning to see the conditioning that has shaped our entire way of being. We’re learning to recognize the guilt, the shame, the fear, the anger and the expectations that have been woven into our personalities. And as we begin to see those things, we don’t have to be upset with our parents or make them wrong. They’re living according to their own conditioning, their own experiences, and their own understanding of life. They’re on their own journey, and that deserves respect. But we don’t have to live inside their reality simply because it’s the reality they gave us. The reality they were given.
The more we understand these things, the less reactive we become. When we’re children, we don’t understand what’s happening, so we simply react. We’re like little amoebas responding to whatever comes at us. But as we grow in awareness, we can become intelligent beings who actually understand what’s happening inside ourselves and around us. We can look at our conditioning with curiosity instead of being completely controlled by it. We can begin to recognize the subtle ways we approach situations because of something we learned twenty years ago. And with each thing we see, each layer we peel back, there’s more freedom, more movement, more openness. The barriers we’ve built around our hearts come down. It’s a beautiful process, even when the things we’re discovering aren’t particularly beautiful.
Love, Guilt, and the Freedom to Choose
As we become independent, another interesting thing happens. Our parents begin to need us in ways they may never have needed us before. They miss us, they want to see us, they may feel lonely, and suddenly we’re confronted with this whole new sense of responsibility for their happiness. We love them, and of course we want them to be okay. But where does love end and guilt begin? If a parent is lonely during the holidays, does that mean we have to rearrange our lives to make sure they’re not lonely? If someone is disappointed because we can’t visit, does that mean we’ve done something wrong? These are tricky questions, especially when we’ve spent our entire lives being conditioned to feel responsible for other people’s emotions.
There’s something very peculiar about the way families can become places where everyone expects everyone else to provide a sense of security. People have families partly because they don’t want to feel alone, and then when loneliness arises, they reach for the people they’re attached to and expect them to make it go away. If those people aren’t available, suddenly there’s disappointment, guilt, sadness, and sometimes resentment. But what about each person’s freedom? What about learning how to live independently, how to find our own strength, and how to be okay within ourselves? These are things that every human being has to discover, and yet our family structures often work against that discovery.
There’s no simple rule for how to handle these situations. Sometimes we visit, sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we make sacrifices because we love someone, and sometimes we recognize that doing something out of guilt isn’t going to be good for anyone. The important thing is to understand what’s actually moving us. Are we acting from love, or are we reacting to someone’s expectation? Are we freely choosing to give something, or are we trying to escape the discomfort of feeling responsible for another person’s feelings? Those distinctions become clearer as we develop greater integrity of being. We begin to understand that we don’t have to key off anyone else to be valued or validated, and we don’t have to live our lives in a way that makes everybody comfortable.
Our parents are part of our karma. The conditioning, the attachments, the expectations, the love, the guilt, all of it becomes part of what we’re here to understand. And the way we release ourselves from that karma isn’t by avoiding our relationships or getting other people to behave differently. It’s through our own understanding, our own love, our connection to life, and our growing sense of freedom and independence. This is where we begin to discover what it means to live as a spiritual being in the middle of the human condition, rather than simply living according to the instruction manual we were given.
How Karma Begins to Unravel
How do we let go of karma? We begin by seeing it. We acknowledge what’s happening, and we learn to step outside of our reactions long enough to understand them. As we go deeper into meditation and begin to experience the truth of existence in ways that aren’t merely intellectual, our understanding of karma changes. We start to see the workings of things in ways that are difficult to explain verbally. It’s not simply that we figure out why we behave a certain way or trace a reaction back to something that happened in childhood. Those understandings are useful, but there’s something much deeper that begins to open as our awareness expands.
My first fifteen years on the path were incredibly dynamic. There was so much happening, so much energy, so many experiences, and a commitment of wanting to keep up with Rama and everything that was opening through our practice. I was having constant insights and experiences, but in some ways those years were almost a blur. Ups and downs, learnings and avoidances. Then, after a profound shattering of my ego, something shifted. I began to understand karma from an entirely different perspective. Before that, I thought I understood karma, but afterward I realized how little I had understood. There were moments when existence seemed to open up and reveal the workings of karma in vast, universal ways. And from that understanding, I could begin to look at the situations in my own life with a depth and clarity that hadn’t been available to me before.
But the early years are important because that’s when we’re being prepared. We’re loosening the entanglements, little by little. Imagine an enormous ball of tangled threads, and then light shines on one part of it. Suddenly we see something we couldn’t see before, and a few of those threads begin to loosen. Then another situation comes along, another part of the ball becomes illuminated, and something else begins to unravel. Over time, the whole thing becomes less dense, less rigid, and much more movable. We begin to understand things in a fluid way rather than trying to force our way through everything with the solidity of our thinking minds.
Eventually we learn that we don’t have to think about everything so much. We don’t have to constantly determine, assess, analyze, and wrangle with our thoughts in order to understand what’s happening. Sometimes we simply let something be. We plant a seed somewhere inside ourselves. We go on with our lives, meditate, work, wash the dishes, do whatever we’re doing, and then suddenly something opens. An insight comes through that we weren’t even consciously looking for. We see something from an entirely different perspective, and what had seemed so complicated becomes very simple. Life has a way of opening doorways when we’re willing to stay present and let things unfold.
And this is where the difficult experiences become so valuable. When someone hurts us, disappoints us, or behaves in a way that we don’t understand, we have an opportunity to see our karma in action. We can sit with the hurt, the sadness, the fear, the feeling of abandonment, or whatever is moving through us, without running away from it or trying to make somebody responsible for it. We can be friendly toward ourselves. We can allow ourselves to feel what we’re feeling without rejecting it or deciding that there’s something wrong with us for having those feelings. What a simple thing that is, and yet look at how much conditioning we have to get through before we can actually do it. The comfort, the addiction of old patterns.
When we’re willing to sit with ourselves in that way, something heart-opening can happen. We begin to recognize that these experiences are part of being human. Everyone knows what it’s like to feel hurt, afraid, lonely, or abandoned. And as we allow ourselves to experience those feelings without building a whole story around them, there’s a compassion that begins to open. We move from our own little experience into a much greater awareness of the human condition. That awareness can open into something vast, into the spaciousness of eternity itself. What a thing to be human, to be truly human, and not be afraid of it.
The Difference Between Hurt and Love
An example of a revealing situation to work with these things is in a friendship where someone we love has become absorbed in another relationship. Perhaps the friendship was once very close, and suddenly that person is barely available. They don’t reach out, they don’t seem interested in what’s happening in our lives, and the connection that once felt so important seems to have disappeared. Naturally, we may feel hurt. We may feel abandoned or unimportant, and our minds begin constructing all kinds of explanations for what has happened. But what if we could see the situation without making it about ourselves?
Sometimes people become completely swept up in another person’s life. They’re caught in the vortex of that relationship, and everything else becomes secondary. They may learn from that experience, or they may become even more entangled. But that’s the experience they’re having. It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with us, even though we’ve made it feel personal because we had a friendship and a great deal of love for them. If we can really understand that, then something changes. We can stop measuring our own value according to how much attention they’re giving us. We can recognize what’s happening in their life without having to make it a statement about ours.
But here’s where the practice becomes very subtle. Suppose we’ve already sat with our hurt, allowed ourselves to feel it, and watched it begin to dissipate. Then we see that person again. Are we going to meet them from the love we have for them, or are we going to bring the hurt back into the relationship? Because the ego can be very clever about holding on to pain. It wants the other person to know what they did to us. It wants them to understand how much we suffered. It may even want them to feel bad, because somewhere inside us there’s a sense that they owe us something. And if we’re not paying attention, we can take a hurt that was already beginning to dissolve and build an entirely new entanglement around it.
That doesn’t mean we have to pretend everything is wonderful. There’s no reason to be fake or to avoid being honest about what happened. But there’s a tremendous difference between being honest from a place of detachment and speaking from the pain of our ego. We can tell someone that their behavior had a real impact on us, that we had to let go of our expectations, and that we’re no longer going to arrange our lives around the friendship as it once existed. We can be clear about all of that without trying to punish them or make them feel guilty. We can continue to love them and wish them well, while recognizing that we don’t need to tie ourselves to their comings and goings anymore.
And this is a very real way of working with karma. When we react from our hurt and dump our pain onto another person, we create more entanglement. We give the situation another turn, another layer of resentment, another set of expectations and reactions that will have to be worked through. But when we can meet someone from love, with clarity and without attachment, we have an opportunity to let the karma dissolve rather than generating more of it. That’s not an easy thing to do. It’s extraordinarily difficult to distinguish the part of ourselves that genuinely loves someone from the part that wants something from them. But life gives us these opportunities, and each one can become a doorway into a much deeper understanding of what is real.
The question becomes very simple, although living it may be anything but simple. How are we going to be with this person from love? Not from pretending to love them, not from trying to be spiritually impressive, but from the actual love that’s there. If you love someone, then you truly love them. What does that mean? How does that love move? How does it behave when the other person isn’t giving you what you want? Can you love the being that they are, rather than loving what they bring to your life when they bring it in the way you want it? That’s where we begin to discover the difference between love and attachment, between what is real and what is not real.
Living Beyond the Instruction Manual
During my years with Rama, there were extraordinary experiences of consciousness where the mind became completely quiet, where identity disappeared, and awareness opened into eternity. Sometimes those states remained with me for long periods of time. In the early years, there were times when I could carry that awareness through my life for months. But as life became more demanding, as I worked and dealt with all the complexities of the world, I discovered how easily those states could become obscured. Sometimes the awareness lasted a week, sometimes a day, and sometimes it seemed to disappear almost as soon as I returned to ordinary life.
It was a strange experience, almost as though I was going backward. There I was, sitting with Rama, experiencing the real, and then I’d go out into my life and find myself caught up in the unreal. The old conditioning, the ego, the reactions, the attachments, all the things that had been built into me were still there. And I had to learn how to bring that extraordinary awareness into the actual moments of my life. Nobody was sitting with me and helping me sort through the intricacies of what was happening. Rama was giving us tremendous enlightenment energy, but we still had to discover how to live with it, how to bring it into our relationships, our work, our choices, and all the little situations that make up a human life.
That’s one of the beautiful things about being on a path where there’s guidance through very ordinary, very complicated human experiences. We can begin to recognize the movements of ego while they’re happening, rather than spending years entangled in them without knowing what we’re looking at. We can learn to distinguish between love and hurt, between freedom and attachment, between the reality of the moment and all the ideas we’ve accumulated about how life is supposed to be. It doesn’t mean that we suddenly become free of everything. There’s still tremendous work to do, and there are layers of conditioning that we may not even know exist yet. But we’re learning how to see, and that changes everything.
At some point, something begins to shift in a much deeper way. We’re no longer simply trying to apply spiritual teachings to our lives. We’re beginning to live from our connection to life itself, rather than from the old instruction manual that defined us. We become less interested in controlling everything, less compelled to explain everything, and less dependent on other people behaving according to our expectations. There’s a greater fluidity, a greater openness, and an increasing ability to meet life as it actually is. We can love without clinging, care without becoming entangled, and experience difficult emotions without turning them into huge dramas.
And through all of this, we have to remember to laugh. This is an intense path, and it’s very easy to become super serious about everything we’re learning. We can get so involved in examining our egos, our conditioning, our karma, and all the intricate movements of our minds that we forget how funny the whole thing can be. We have to learn to laugh at ourselves, to make fun of ourselves, to recognize the absurdity of some of the things we’ve believed and the strange petty dramas we’ve constructed around our lives. Laughter has a way of breaking us open into reality that nothing else quite does.
Life is an extraordinary thing. It’s full of beautiful, moving, colorful fractals of beingness, an endless kaleidoscope of experiences that keeps revealing itself when we’re present enough to see it. And yet we can spend so much of our lives trapped inside the tiny rule books we’ve inherited, struggling with things that exist almost entirely in our own minds. The path is about discovering that we don’t have to live that way. We can be curious, we can be open, we can love, we can learn, and we can work our asses off without making everything into a big deal. We can be with life in all its intensity and still find the spaciousness, the joy, and the freedom that have always been there.
And the more we discover that freedom, the more life opens. There’s always another layer to see, another doorway to walk through, another opportunity to let go of something we didn’t even know we were holding. We don’t have to figure it all out today. We just have to keep showing up, keep paying attention, and be willing to meet whatever comes with as much awareness and love as we can bring to it. And have fun. Because what an extraordinary thing it is to be alive and to have the opportunity to discover what life really is. The divine nature of it all.