The Life Beyond the Person You Think You Are
A student told me recently that she was finally ready to look at what was really going on inwardly. Doing really hard things with learning, work, athletics, relationships, she had taken on more than she ever had and was thriving, yet experiencing anxiety.
And her mind was having a field day with it.
You can’t do this. This is too much. You don’t have enough time. You’re going to get stressed.
Something wasn’t adding up. She was acing her hardest classes, doing things she hadn’t thought she could do. The evidence of her own life was beginning to contradict the person she thought she was.
She said, “I’m seeing how I’ve lived in a very certain idea of myself most of my life.”
That’s where things get interesting.
We have ideas about ourselves that are so old we don’t recognize them as ideas. This is who I am. This is what I’m good at. This is what I can’t do. This much is too much for me. I’m not that kind of person.
Then we meditate, open our hearts, work with our minds and life moves outside the lines.
The ego gets nervous.
One of the reasons I encourage students to take on difficult things is because you get to see what happens inside of you. Take hard classes. Try something that uses your mind in a different way. Do something that doesn’t fit the picture you’ve made of yourself.
You may discover that you’re capable of much more than you thought. That’s wonderful, but there’s another part of it that interests me even more.
You get to see the machinery.
The anxiety comes up. Fear comes up. All the reasons you shouldn’t do it come up. The voice that has been directing your life suddenly becomes audible.
She was beginning to hear it.
For a long time she had spun out with the anxiety when it appeared. Now she was starting to sit with it long enough to ask what was underneath. And she discovered:
Fear.
Then she looked at the fear and said something revealing: “It’s founded on nothing.” That’s a very different experience from somebody telling you not to be afraid. She found it herself.
This is what I want for students.
I don’t want them to replace one set of beliefs with another set of beliefs that I give them. I want them to become interested in what is actually happening inside themselves. To see the value system that they were prescribed since birth, that they’ve taken for granted and lived inside of as if it was reality. And to question that. To ask if there’s something outside of the bounds that have been setup for us.
That takes courage.
The ego makes looking at yourself sound terrifying. Don’t go in there. Something awful is waiting. You’re going to discover something terrible about yourself. Usually you find something much more ordinary. A fear. An attachment. An old idea. Something somebody told you when you were young that became part of the way you see yourself.
The student had recently gotten into an argument with her mother. In the middle of it, she suddenly saw the environment she had come from. She could see how much pressure there had been to become a particular kind of person.
And now she was doing things her parents hadn’t expected her to do.
She got into a prestigious university after hearing from them, there’s no way you could do that - you’ve always been too lazy. She was accepted into a research position that surprised them. She was succeeding in the technology classes that had never before been a prominent part of her personality, her usual. How could she succeed or be good at things that weren’t her proclivity?
Her life kept getting bigger than the identity she had inherited. She could also see that she had participated in keeping that old identity alive.
That’s harder.
It’s relatively easy to say, My parents imprinted me this way. It’s another thing to see the voice continuing inside of you long after your parents have left the room.
You can’t do this - This is too hard - Stay where you know yourself.
That’s where spiritual work becomes practical.
The word ego can sound very grand and spiritual. It isn’t. You can watch it operate on a Tuesday afternoon when you’re supposed to go to the gym and don’t go. You can watch it while doing homework and you don’t feel like it. You can watch it when your mother says something and your whole body reacts.
You can watch it when you’re succeeding, too.
Success has its own traps. Suddenly there’s a new identity available: I’m good at this. I’m impressive. I’m spiritual. I’m advanced.
In my personal experience, my teacher pushed me through numerous progressions as well as ego shatterings on the path. I began to see how easily identity reconstructs itself. You get through one thing and there it is again in another form.
So when this student told me she thought she might have a spiritual ego, I wasn’t alarmed. Of course.
She said, “I think my ego didn’t want to realize that I have so much growing to do.”
Now we’re getting somewhere.
You don’t have to be ashamed that you have an ego. We all get conditioned with a value system of what life is, what’s good, bad, right, wrong. Then we get behind our attractions and aversions with a big charge of energy. That’s attachment. When we like how things are going, we say life is good. When we don’t like how they’re going, we say life is bad. All the enlightened yogis and buddhas of yore have pointed out this value system and our attachments to these values as the source of all suffering.
You have to become able to see it, and then accept it, and then work with it. That takes courage. And you don’t have to uncover the whole thing today.
I told her not to worry about all the layers she hasn’t encountered yet. Life will bring them. Right now she’s seeing anxiety differently. She’s looking underneath it instead of automatically obeying it. She’s discovering that some of the limits she assumed were real aren’t real at all. Later there will be something else.
That’s why I trust life as much as I do.
I can give somebody a meditation. I can suggest a class. I can point something out. But life does most of the teaching.
It knows exactly where the attachment is.
So live. Try things. Make choices. Pay attention to what happens when you get what you want and when you don’t. Notice what happens when you’re stretched beyond the person you thought you were.
You don’t need to manufacture some enormous spiritual ordeal. Your life is already showing you. And little by little, you will begin to recognize the difference between the voice that has been defining you and something deeper that doesn’t need all those definitions.
We have ideas about enlightenment, but we can’t really know. It’s about being present with life - being in the moment, right here right now - with life.
What she knows right now is simpler: this feels true. Looking more deeply feels true. Becoming more real feels true.
We can just be - be in our natural state.
That’s enough.
The path can begin there.