One of the most beautiful things that can happen on the path is that somewhere along the way you realize you’re happy. You’re just happy. It’s not because something wonderful happened that day. You didn’t get the thing you wanted or fall in love or have some fabulous experience. You’re walking around and suddenly you notice that the ground underneath your life has changed. There can still be things that jag you off. There can be things that are hard. There can be sadness, frustration, disappointment. But those things are moving through something larger now. The ground is joy. That is a very different way to proceed in your life.
A student was describing this to me recently. She said that for most of her life she had lived with worry, sadness, anxiety, or just some kind of baseline depression, and then occasionally she would enter a beautiful state in meditation. Now she was noticing something very different. She was realigning herself with the light, with her new-found awareness, throughout the day. She would stop, come back, reset, and gradually the state that used to appear occasionally in meditation had become much closer to where she lived. She said something that I found incredibly beautiful: I’m kind of happy for no reason all the time. She would stop sometimes just to feel grateful because she had never known that before.
The Emotion Without the Story
She had also discovered something about difficult emotions. When sadness or anxiety came up, instead of immediately going into the story of it, she would locate where she felt it in her body. Maybe it was in her chest. Maybe her head. She would put her attention there and stop feeding it with thought. Sometimes within thirty seconds or a minute, the intensity was gone. She might have to do it again later, of course. This isn’t some magic trick where you do something once and become permanently serene. But she was beginning to see the difference between the original feeling and everything the mind piles onto the feeling afterward.
That’s a huge discovery. We have an emotion, and then the ego grabs it and starts explaining it. Why am I feeling this? What does it mean? Who did this to me? What does it say about my life? What’s going to happen next? Pretty soon we’re not experiencing the original energy anymore. We’re experiencing the world we constructed around it. If instead, you can feel what is actually happening without immediately building the architecture around it, something else becomes possible. The energy moves. You experience it. You stay with it. And sometimes it simply leaves.
This is mindfulness. This is taking the teachings and integrating them into your day-to-day life, which is what they’re meant for. These teachings are ancient. They’ve always been around. Ultimately they are about how to be a true human. Why are we born into these human bodies? So that we can experience our Buddha nature. We get to experience existence moving through this particular human life, ours, in this completely unique and beautiful way, while gradually recognizing that the separateness we take so seriously isn’t what we thought it was. One of my students recently referenced it as the primordial soup of consciousness. I like that. We are all part of the what-is-ness.
The House Where You Got Karmically Cooked
But there was another part of this student’s happiness that I wanted her to see. She was away from home.
This matters. We tend to think of conditioning as an intellectual concept. Yes, yes, my parents conditioned me. Society conditioned me. Childhood affected me. Fine. But conditioning is much more visceral than that. You were a little kid sitting inside an energy field every day. You didn’t have any choice about it. You didn’t know there were other ways to live. Whatever the adults around you were afraid of, whatever made them angry, however they reacted to life, however much anxiety was running through the house, you absorbed it. Children take it all in because there is nothing else to compare it to.
Sometimes you go home later and you are sitting in the house where you got karmically cooked. You’re sitting in the place where you got shaped and molded. And even if everybody has changed, even if relationships have improved, even if there is enormous love between you, there can still be something incredibly sticky about that field. Sometimes it’s like mud. Sometimes it’s like quicksand. You think you’re going home as the person you are now, and before long you’re feeling things you haven’t felt in months. Old reactions are suddenly right there. Old fears come back online. The body remembers things the intellect thought it had already figured out. There are lots of Thanksgiving comedies about this phenomenon.
There doesn’t have to be blame in any of this. Your parents were conditioned too. Their parents conditioned them. People are trying to survive, trying to pay the bills, trying to deal with their fear, trying to raise children while carrying around their own unexamined pain. There is no sense, most of the time of - what am I infusing this child with? Parents are just trying to live. They’re trying to love their kids too. Love can be completely real while fear, anger and anxiety are also being transmitted. Both things can exist in the same house.
Finding Out What You Feel Like
Then you get out of that field. Maybe you go to college. Maybe you move away. Maybe you find meditation. Maybe you find a teacher or a practice that finally gives you enough internal spaciousness to notice what is actually going on. And for the first time you begin to discover: Oh. This is what I feel like when I’m in my own energy.
That can be a startling discovery when you start to meditate and become more aware. The person who thought she was anxious discovers that anxiety may not be her fundamental nature at all. The person who thought she was sad discovers that sadness may have been the atmosphere she learned to breathe. The person who was always emotionally reactive starts to discover an enormous stillness underneath the reactions. You sit in meditation and for a little while all that conditioning falls away. You feel who you truly are. You feel your authentic self. And then you start learning how to sustain it.
This doesn’t mean you run away from everybody who has difficult energy. That would be its own kind of bondage. The point is to become conscious enough that you can see what is yours and what isn’t, what brings you into clarity and what pulls you into an old karmic groove. You begin to develop discrimination. That’s Jnana Yoga - the Yoga of Wisdom. You learn what happens to your consciousness around certain people, certain environments, certain habits. You learn where you lose energy. You learn where you become stronger. Eventually you can stand in much stronger winds without losing yourself, but there’s nothing particularly enlightened about repeatedly walking into a hurricane when you’re still a learning who you are.
Owning Your Own Energy
This student also talked about changing her hair back toward its natural color. On the surface, who cares? It’s hair. But it wasn’t insignificant to her at all. She had been very attached to looking a certain way. There had been anxiety around changing it because attractiveness had become mixed up with identity, self-esteem and how she imagined other people would perceive her. Then something shifted. She wanted to look more like herself. She wanted her life to be less about how others viewed her and more about being her truest self. She was owning her power. She was saying, I’m going to be who I actually am. I’m going to live there. I don’t need to keep pushing out an image of myself and then living inside the reactions that image produces in everybody else.
Women in particular are trained very early to pull attention toward themselves through attractiveness. We barely even notice we’re doing it because it’s woven so deeply into the culture. Then you begin becoming conscious and realize how much energy can be spent managing how you are perceived. Am I pretty enough? Attractive enough? Desirable enough? What is everybody thinking when they look at me? At some point you can decide that you would rather have your energy back. That doesn’t mean becoming unattractive or pretending beauty doesn’t exist. It means the center of gravity changes. You are no longer constructing yourself around being perceived. You start living from inside yourself.
The People Closest to Us Affect the Whole Field
The same wisdom and discrimination becomes necessary in relationships. Somebody can affect your entire life without standing in front of you at that moment. If you are deeply connected to someone who continually drains you, mistreats you, destabilizes you or pulls you into illusion, you can be sitting alone in another room and still carrying the relationship around in your consciousness.
This is why the Jnana Yoga matters. It’s the yoga of discriminating between what is real and what is unreal, the measurement being, that which is transitory is unreal (your car, your wardrobe, your body), and that which is eternal is real (love, awareness, beingness). In practical terms, it starts with asking what things actually do to your consciousness. What happens when I spend time here? What happens around this person? What happens when I give my energy to this relationship? What happens when I live in this environment? Do I become clearer? Do I become more open? Am I stronger? Can I feel my own being? Or do I become cloudy, depleted and confused?
Some people are in our lives and they’re staying there. Our families, our partners, our dearest friends. You may love them enormously. The question is how to love someone without surrendering your consciousness to the state they live in. That is a very different kind of love. It has room in it. It has wisdom. Eventually it has compassion because you can see the suffering inside another person without having to crawl inside the suffering with them.
What Is Life Trying to Grow in You?
There are things about our parents we may never understand. You can spend years asking why somebody couldn’t give you something that seems incredibly obvious to you. Why couldn’t they help? Why couldn’t they accept me for who I am? Why couldn’t they see what they were doing? Why would somebody who had the capacity to give simply refuse to give? Or why is it that when they give, it’s always conditional, heavy with expectations. Sometimes you’re not going to get a satisfying answer. At a certain point you can step outside of it and say: This is what life gave me. What am I going to do with it?
That question changes things. If somebody won’t support you, perhaps life is forcing you to discover your independence. If somebody is chronically self-absorbed, you get a close-up view of what self-absorption does to a human being. If you grew up around fear, you have an extraordinary opportunity to discover what life feels like without fear running the show. If they don’t accept you for who you are then maybe it’s time to learn who you are and accept yourself. None of this means that painful things were secretly wonderful or that we need to make some spiritual fairy tale out of them. Some things hurt. Some things are unfair. Some people really fail each other. But once it has happened, it is part of the material of your life. You can use it.
And you can still see the love. That was one of the most beautiful things this student did. In looking at what she hadn’t received from one parent, she suddenly saw more deeply what the other had given her. She remembered the stronger parent as one who would share when there was almost nothing to share, who worked incredibly hard, who found ways to create experiences for their children even when money was scarce. Suddenly something painful became an opening into gratitude. The past didn’t have to be rewritten. She could see more of it.
Freedom in the Physical and Freedom Inside
There’s a very practical side to all of this too. Spiritual freedom while being completely dependent in the physical world is a difficult combination. This is where many college students who are trying to find truth and independence find themselves. So, you can learn things. Develop skills. Become capable. Understand money. Build a career. Get your credit together. Find an internship. Learn how to support yourself. Become mobile. Become free.
Meditation should make you more capable of living, not less. Training the mind to focus will impact everything. You become more intelligent in how you use your attention. You become more impeccable. You start noticing opportunities, doorways that you would not have seen without your newly expanding awareness. You have more energy available for the things you actually want to create. Your inner life and your outer life begin supporting each other.
It’s all about freedom in the physical and freedom inwardly. Don Juan from Castaneda’s books calls focus on the physical The Tonál: that is, how you live, how you conduct yourself, what you do with the ordinary circumstances of being alive. It’s important to be impeccable on that count. To be present, sharp, kind and open-hearted. To develop your abilities. To let the barriers between you and life come down. And notice what becomes possible when you’re no longer spending enormous amounts of energy surviving in the world, dealing with confusion inwardly: you stop allowing the ego to fight and resist the natural flow of life. You connect to life directly. That’s inner freedom.
Breaking the Karmic Pattern
Our families are fascinating because we are dropped into a karmic stew pot. There are similarities, affinities, old patterns, old connections. We get conditioned because on some level we have to be conditioned to survive in this world. Then somewhere along the way, if we are fortunate, we discover a path that gives us the possibility of going beyond the conditioning.
Breaking a karmic tie doesn’t mean getting mad at somebody and throwing them out of your life. That can karmically tie you to them even more tightly. Real freedom takes depth, neutrality, love and wisdom. You start being able to see the pattern without being run by it. You can love somebody without becoming them. You can understand what happened without having to continue it. You can feel compassion for somebody’s suffering without accepting their suffering as your reality.
And eventually you begin coming into your own in a way that is hard to describe. The scripts change first. You upgrade them. You learn better ways of responding, better ways of thinking, better ways of using your energy. One day, much farther along, you throw the scripts away altogether.
For now, though, pay attention when joy starts becoming the ground. Protect it. Learn what allows it to flourish. Learn what collapses it. Meditation will take you deeper because meditation proactively releases the energy, intelligence and love of eternity into your body, mind and heart. Then mindfulness lets you keep returning to it in the middle of your actual life.
You start discovering that you can trust life. You take your classes. You develop your abilities. You rest when you need to rest. You work. You meditate. You go outside. You find the people who are real for you. You learn when to say yes and when to walk away. You become stronger, and then life gives you stronger things to handle because you can handle them.
And little by little you become a free bird on a planet that is incredibly entrenched in illusion. That’s the path.