There comes a point on the path when the circumstances that irritate you become some of your best material. The people who get on your nerves, the things that don’t go the way you want, the daily frustrations you would rather not have to deal with — all of it begins to show you something about your own mind. You can spend enormous amounts of energy wishing people were different, wishing life were easier, wishing the world would cooperate with your particular idea of how things should be. Or you can use what happens to see yourself more clearly.
Anything that triggers the ego is a golden opportunity to actually see the ego. Otherwise, it can remain strangely invisible. We tend to believe that we’re simply responding to what is happening, when often we’re responding to everything the mind has built around what is happening. Someone does something we don’t like, and within seconds there is a judgment, an emotion, a story, a history and perhaps even an imagined future. It seems as though the other person has created our unhappiness. But they don’t have to live inside our unhappy reactions. We do.
That doesn’t mean you never speak up, set a boundary or change a situation. There are plenty of practical ways to handle challenges. The deeper question is what happens inside you while you’re doing them. Can you take care of something without carrying it around afterward? Can you recognize irritation before it becomes a whole internal world? Can you see what the mind is doing without immediately believing everything it tells you?
Illusion of Maya Personalized as Ego
The things that trigger us aren’t really the source of the reaction. They’re the triggers, but the gun is in us. The ammunition is in us. The effect of it going off is in us. Something happens and suddenly we’ve exploded into anger, frustration, unhappiness, depression or whatever form the reaction takes. Once you see that, spiritual practice becomes much more interesting because now you have something real to work with.
That is Maya, and Maya gets customized to you as your ego. Everyone has a slightly different version. The circumstances that send one person spinning may hardly register for somebody else. The stories are different, the sensitivities are different, the attractions and aversions are different, but the underlying mechanism is similar. Something happens, the ego assigns meaning to it, emotion follows, thought feeds emotion, emotion feeds thought, and pretty soon we’re living inside a reality largely constructed by our own mind.
The practice is learning to see that process while it’s happening. You don’t have to make another person wrong, and you don’t have to make yourself wrong. You can simply become interested in what illusion looks like when it moves through you. What does it feel like when you get triggered? Where does the mind go? What story does it immediately want to tell? What happens to your energy? What happens to your perception? The more clearly you can see the process, the less power it has to carry you away.
Detachment Is Not Numbness
There is a trap in all of this. It’s possible to turn spiritual detachment into another way of escaping life. You can decide that nothing bothers you, nothing touches you, you’re above it all. That can look spiritual from the outside, but it may simply be another kind of numbness. You become dissociated from life and, more importantly, from what is actually happening inside you. That isn’t heightened awareness.
As awareness increases, sensitivity increases with it. You don’t become less alive. You become more alive, and possibly more wise. Wisdom allows you to feel what is happening without being battered around by it. You can dislike something. You can feel pain. You can recognize that a situation isn’t right for you. You can act. But you don’t have to give the experience the rest of your day, your week or your life.
There are also situations that are simply too much for where we are at a particular point on the path. Part of wisdom is knowing the difference. Sometimes the winds are strong enough that you need shelter. At other times, the wind is exactly what strengthens your roots. You have to become honest enough with yourself to know which is which. If a challenge is something you can genuinely handle, staying present with it can build a strength that works in parallel with going deeper in your meditations because you’ve got greater control over your chaotic mind.
What Makes an Experience Last?
When we get caught in reaction, life becomes strangely flat. Our attention contracts around one event, one person, one problem, one thought. We lose sight of everything else. The experience itself may have lasted five minutes, but we can keep it alive for hours, days or years through the thought forms, stories and narratives we build around it. At that point we’re no longer living what happened. We’re living inside the movie we made about what happened.
Presence changes that. When you stay present, life remains vivid and real, and you begin to see how transitory experience actually is. Something arises, changes and disappears. Another experience takes its place. The mind is often what keeps dragging the old experience forward, insisting that it continue long after life itself has moved on. There is enormous freedom in realizing that you don’t have to keep doing that.
This is a new kind of conditioning. You are retraining yourself to be strong, to remain with yourself rather than falling flat every time the ego gets crunched by circumstances it doesn’t like. Over time, you discover that you can go through difficult experiences without losing sight of yourself. The world can move, people can behave unpredictably, plans can fall apart, and you are still here holding your line, staying connected to life, to truth.
Being With Life on Its Own Terms
Silence helps enormously. There is something beautiful about driving without anything playing, walking without something plugged into your ears, hiking without filling the space with sound. I’ve cherished those times throughout my life. There is a kind of intimacy in simply listening to the birds, the trees, the wind and whatever else happens to be there. Music is wonderful, and there are times when it can uplift us tremendously. But there is also something beautiful about being with life on its own terms, without embellishment.
We spend so much time consuming that we can forget what it feels like simply to exist. When the constant input stops, something else becomes perceptible. Life begins to have a richness that is difficult to notice when every empty space is immediately filled. There is a sacredness to silence, but also a playfulness. You can become almost childlike again in the way you experience the world. A tree is interesting. The movement of an animal catches your attention. The sky becomes enormous. Ordinary things regain their wonder.
We tend to think in words, and then we begin to believe that thinking is what life is. It isn’t. Life is about living. It is about being. Life is always creating, unfolding and expressing itself in ways that don’t necessarily have words. When we become silent enough to meet it there, experience becomes rich and full and vibrant. We stop demanding that every moment explain itself.
Let life show you what it knows. Let it show you where to go next, what to be next, how to see next. There is much more intelligence in existence than the thinking mind generally allows itself to notice.
Walking Lightly
To be present in that way is to walk lightly in your world. When you walk lightly, life can lift you into beautiful vistas. It can open you into the sky of open mind and the endlessness of open heart. When you become heavy with judgments, expectations, grievances and all the things that have to happen according to your plans, you become solid. You can’t move very easily with life because you are carrying around an enormous structure of how life is supposed to be.
Life is fluid. We are the ones who keep trying to make it solid. We label experiences, assign values to them and then hold onto those values as though they were inherent in what happened. Good. Bad. Success. Failure. Beautiful. Ugly. Fair. Unfair. We know almost immediately where an experience belongs on our internal scale. Then we live inside the assessment instead of inside the experience itself.
There is another way to live that is much more open. You show up and let life become what it is. You don’t have to think of every move ahead of time. You can’t really dance if you’re trying to calculate the next ten steps. At some point you have to let yourself move. That is true in meditation, in relationships, in creativity, in working, in travel, and in the way you meet an ordinary day. You let it flow, and then it becomes a real dance.
Is Your Practice Real?
This is where challenge becomes valuable. It’s relatively easy to feel spiritual when circumstances support your spirituality. If everything is peaceful, everyone around you is considerate, your environment is beautiful and nobody is pressing your buttons, you may experience a very lovely state of mind. But what happens when circumstances are outside your control?
That is one of the things that makes Tantra - this path of American Buddhism, such an interesting path. You are practicing in the middle of life. The unexpected happens. People behave in ways you don’t understand. You encounter personalities that clash with yours. Things are messy. You get disappointed. You get challenged. And then you find out whether the practice is actually there for you or whether it was something that felt good because circumstances were clean and easy.
Can you maintain awareness during a crazy, surprising challenge? Can you see your own illusion playing out in your reactions and narratives? Can you feel emotions beginning to swirl you around and yet remain in your own center anyway? That is where the practice gets strong. You’re learning to be grounded in truth in the midst of the groundlessness of being human.
The Addiction to Comfort
Part of the human condition is an enormous attachment to comfort. We want ease. We want pleasure. We want circumstances to cooperate. We tend to regard challenge as evidence that something has gone wrong, when challenge is one of the primary ways we grow.
We have an elaborate value system for experience. Pleasure is good. Difficulty is bad. Pain is worse. Something we desperately wanted is wonderful. Something we desperately wanted and didn’t get is terrible. We’re continually measuring experience against that scale. Then, if something lands on the bad end, the mind starts working overtime. Why did it happen? Who caused it? How do I fix it? How do I make sure it never happens again? Why is it unfair? Why me?
All of our energy can disappear into that narrative. We become exhausted inside our own interpretation of events and lose sight of what it means simply to be a human being in the moment, staying with ourselves. We abandon ourselves into the thought forms of the judgment, and gradually those thought forms become the reality we inhabit.
Whatever you focus on, you become. That’s what is so powerful about mind. Whatever we continually think becomes what is for us. Once you begin to see that mechanism, you can work with it. You no longer have to take every judgment, attraction, aversion or fear as an instruction you are required to follow.
A Different Operating System
My teacher Rama used to talk about attraction and aversion as the human operating system. We’re drawn toward what we think will make us happy and recoil from what we think will make us unhappy, and enormous amounts of life gets consumed in that movement. We chase one experience and resist another. We acquire what we want and immediately begin wanting something else. We avoid one fear and another appears. The operating system keeps running.
There is another way of being that is infused with truth, wonder, magic, beauty and the grounded expression of creativity. You begin to discover that you can be whoever you want to be and play with life from your own power rather than being endlessly pushed and pulled by attraction and aversion. Life becomes much more interesting from a place of unattachment and living in the natural flow of the universe. It becomes joyful. It becomes a playground of possibility, while still remaining completely real. That’s why we meditate. To see life for what it truly is and to unhook from the illusion of solidity and the pushes and pulls of our attachments.
The funny part is how simple some of this becomes once you see it. When everything gets enormously complicated, you can be sure ego is in the mix. Cutting through the complication and seeing what actually is takes energy and personal power. You gain that through meditation. Then once you become clear, there it is: the light shining right in front of you, right inside of you. Spaciousness. Awareness. The innate wisdom of your own being. This human life happening right now.
The Practice Has to Come Home With You
We carry extraordinary amounts of weight that life itself is no longer asking us to carry. We hold what happened five minutes ago, yesterday, last year or decades ago. We carry what somebody did, what we think it meant, what should have happened instead, and all the judgments we formed around it. Then we wonder why we feel heavy and trapped.
The practice is learning to put that down, little by little. Sometimes that means sitting in silence and letting the world exist without needing anything from it. Sometimes it means speaking clearly about something that needs to change. Sometimes it means noticing your own anger and staying with yourself long enough to see what is underneath it. Sometimes the very situation you wish would disappear turns out to be the situation that shows you whether your practice has become real.
The world doesn’t have to arrange itself perfectly for you to become clear. Other people don’t have to meditate, understand you, agree with you or behave according to your values. Life will continue doing what life does. People will be people. Circumstances will change. The practice is learning to remain alive inside all of it: sensitive without being shattered, grounded without becoming rigid, open without becoming unmoored, and increasingly able to meet what comes without abandoning yourself into the story about it.
That’s when meditation becomes much larger than something you do sitting still with your eyes closed. The difficulties become part of it. The silence becomes part of it. The surprises, the beauty, the irritation, the laughter and the things you never would have chosen become part of it. You stop waiting for life to provide the perfect conditions for your practice.
Life itself becomes the practice.