Sometimes life is going well and, strangely enough, we have trouble allowing it. An opportunity appears. We have enough money. We have choices. We’re doing well in school or work. Something opens that another person would desperately like to have, and instead of simply receiving what life has given us, we start looking around. Why do I get to have this when somebody else doesn’t? Why am I free when somebody else isn’t? There can be genuine compassion inside those questions, but there can also be guilt, and guilt doesn’t necessarily help anybody. It can become another way of making ourselves small.
This came up recently in a conversation with a young woman who had been noticing it in herself. She had taken a job that she didn’t absolutely need, and part of her wondered whether somebody else needed the opportunity more. At the same time, she was beginning to experience something much larger. She kept coming back to the sheer gratitude of being alive. I get to be here. I get to have this life. I get to listen to the music I want to hear. I get to experience things. I could die at any time, and right now I’m here. I loved that because it was so immediate. There was no philosophy needed. Life was becoming precious to her because she was actually noticing that she was living it.
There is a great freedom in allowing yourself to receive your own life. If you have choices, use them well. If you have resources, appreciate them. If you have intelligence or strength or love or opportunity, develop them. Making yourself smaller doesn’t make somebody else larger. Feeling guilty about your freedom doesn’t free another human being. The more interesting question is what you are going to do with the life you have been given.
Integrity of Being
We talked about something I call integrity of being. So much of our attention is continually shooting outward. Do they like me? What do they think of me? Am I doing the right thing? Do I deserve what I have? Does somebody else approve of my choices? She could see this very clearly in herself. There was an old fear that people might discover something about her and reject her, along with the constant little reach for reassurance: I want you to like me. I want you to like me. I want you to like me.
That’s an exhausting way to live because other people’s minds are moving all over the place. Somebody loves you on Tuesday and is annoyed with you on Wednesday. Somebody thinks you’re wonderful because of something going on in their own mind, and somebody else decides you’re terrible for exactly the same reason. If your sense of yourself is hooked into all those minds, you’re going to be dragged around by them. You never get to simply be where you are.
Meditation begins pulling those lines of attention back. You sit. You breathe. You notice the thoughts going by without having to become every thought. Eventually there are moments when you experience the extraordinary ordinariness of simply being here. You’re not performing yourself. You’re not explaining yourself. You’re not trying to become something in somebody else’s eyes. You are alive. There is a body breathing. There is awareness. There is life moving through you. The more familiar that becomes, the less necessary it is to continually leave yourself looking for confirmation somewhere else.
Caring About the World Without Carrying the World
There was another question underneath our conversation that I think many caring people wrestle with. If I become peaceful within myself, what about everybody who is suffering? If I accept life, am I somehow accepting injustice? If I stop feeling guilty about what I have, am I becoming indifferent to people who have less?
Of course not. Compassion is one of the most beautiful things that can awaken in a human being. If someone is hungry and you can feed them, feed them. If someone needs help and you can help, help. If your life calls you toward service, then serve. I have spent much of my own life trying to give what I have been given, and I can’t imagine living any other way. But there is a profound difference in what we bring to the world depending on what is happening inside us while we do it.
You can help someone because you love them. You can also help because you feel guilty, because you need to be needed, because you want to be one of the good people, because you’re furious at somebody you’ve decided is one of the bad people, or because fixing someone else’s life keeps you from looking too closely at your own. Human motivation is messy. Usually there is more than one thing happening at once. This is why inner work matters. It doesn’t replace service. It begins to purify what we bring to service.
I had something to see in this myself during our conversation. There were moments when I cared so much about communicating an understanding that I began giving the understanding too many words. That’s an old human tendency too. We can become attached even to something that we deeply care about. We want another person to see what we see. Yet sometimes the wiser thing is to leave more room. Listen. Allow another person to find her own language and make her own discoveries. If something is true, let people come to it as they will, in their own way, in their own time.
What Are You Before the World Tells You?
At one point this young woman came to something beautiful on her own. She began talking about all the identities and ideas that get placed upon us and then said, essentially, I’m just myself. I’m just here.
That’s it.
Before the world told you what you were supposed to be, who were you? Before somebody decided whether you were successful or unsuccessful, attractive or unattractive, important or unimportant, acceptable or unacceptable, who were you? Before you learned all the ideas that divide human beings into categories of greater and lesser value, what was actually here?
There is a tremendous amount of suffering built upon the belief that some human beings are inherently more valuable than others. We inherit these ideas so early that they can feel like reality itself. Then we turn them inward. We decide that we are inferior. Or we build ourselves up by deciding somebody else is inferior. Either way, we’ve entered the same game.
Meditation gives us the possibility of discovering something beneath that game. You begin to experience awareness before all the descriptions of awareness. There is something enormously freeing about realizing that the deepest part of you doesn’t need to become superior and doesn’t need to accept inferiority. It doesn’t have to win its existence. It already exists.
And once somebody begins to feel that, even for moments, something changes. You don’t have to fight every battle inside your own head anymore. You have more room. You can care tremendously about other people without making their lives your burden to carry. You can disagree with someone without needing to turn them into an enemy. You can be passionate without losing yourself inside the passion. You can help without needing the helping to prove who you are.
What Do I Bring Into the World?
I think this is where the conversation eventually landed for both of us. We can spend endless amounts of time thinking about how the world should be. Human beings have been doing that forever. Some of those ideas are beautiful and some are disastrous. Meanwhile, there is a much more immediate question available to each of us:
What am I bringing into the world today?
If I am carrying fear, I bring fear into my relationships. If I am living through judgment, I bring judgment. If I secretly believe I’m inferior, that belief shapes the way I move through everything. If I need to be superior, that shapes everything too. But if I begin to know something whole within myself, I bring that. If I become less frightened, less hooked, more compassionate and more present, other people encounter that when they encounter me.
This is why working on yourself is not a retreat from humanity. It can become one of the deepest ways of serving it. Then whatever you choose to do outwardly has a different quality. Become an activist. Become a teacher. Feed people. Make art. Raise children. Build something. Work at a women’s center. Sit beside somebody who is hurting. Go have a wonderful career. There isn’t one prescribed expression of an awakened life. The question is what you are bringing with you.
The young woman I was talking with began to see this herself. She could care deeply about people and still allow herself to have a beautiful life. She could recognize suffering without building her identity around suffering. She could work for change without having to be driven by guilt or fear. Most importantly, she could begin discovering that there was something inside her that the world hadn’t created and therefore couldn’t define her.
I came away clear that truth needs no force. If I see something, I can offer it. If the person in front of me sees something else, I can listen. That’s two people connecting and learning. Awareness doesn’t need to win an argument on its behalf. And perhaps that was the finest point in the entire conversation: the deeper the understanding, the more freely it can flow when we get out of the way.