Lifeletters

Beyond living and dreaming
there is something more important:
waking up
(Antonio Machado)

A man I work with was telling me about how he spent the Christmas holidays with his family. He went back home to the big city to spend time with them. Before he arrived, he decided to try something new: he followed the impulses and desires of his heart, his authentic being, instead of going along with conventional expectations and traditions. While he was there, the connections he had with his family and friends were intimate, surprising, and deeply fulfilling. One morning he had a spontaneous and life-changing conversation with his mother.

I was feeling a lot of joy as I listened to him speak. Then he said this:

“It was wonderful, to be so present and open with these people I love. And there was a lot of anxiety. It wasn’t overwhelming, but I could feel my heart fluttering a lot. And it was not easy to sleep at night.”

The kind of anxiety that was arising for him is what I call sacred anxiety. I used to experience it when I was engaged in a lot of public speaking. I learned, after struggling with it for a while, to welcome that anxiety, to open to it and let it move through my body. During that time I discovered that the best talks I gave were when that anxiety was present at the beginning, not the talks where I was calm and sure of myself at the start.

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This is a story told to me by a dear friend. Her name is Jessica Adams. I asked her if I could use her real name and she said yes. I am passing her story along because it was of great benefit to me. When I listened and received it, it was no longer a story. It was more like a homeopathic dose of medicine. It spoke to something I have always been aware of, and enlivened that deep knowing, gave it power and clarity. I am writing the story as if Jessica herself is speaking, so that you can hear it just as I did.

“I was at home one evening,” she said, “when all of these different aspects of my mind arose from within. They just appeared without warning, so many of the different viewpoints I have: judgments, resentments, sorrows, and longings, all of them just displaying themselves before me. They continued to arise for quite a while, as I remained present. And then something happened. A clarity arose out of nowhere, a very profound and simple realization: that my life, just the way it is, gives me everything I need. It doesn’t need to be any other way. All of the beliefs I have held about how it could or should be different—if only this or that would happen, then I could be happy—they just dissolved. Without having to think about it, it was pefectly obvious that none of these ideas were true. What was I thinking? My well being does not depend on any of these things: a husband, a better place to live, a pefect job.”

“That must have been quite a relief,” I said to Jessica.

‘’Yes, “ she said, “but the most wonderful thing about it is that now I can really be happy when good things come to the people I know. There is no longer anything in me wondering why I don’t have that, or why that didn’t happen to me. So I can rejoice in their happiness, without any reservation.”

After I listened to Jessica, I remembered a time many years ago in India, when I was listening to a teacher reading a scripture. In this particular teaching there was a description of a realm called ‘heaven’ or ‘the god realm.’ All the wonders and beauties of this realm were vividly described. Then it went on to say, “This realm promises so much, but it is very difficult to be happy here for long. Because no matter where you are, no matter how much you have, the nature of the god realm is that there is always someone above you, someone who has more than you do—more fame, more prosperity, more intelligence, more insight, more friends, more lovers, more fun.” This being the nature of this place, it is often referred to as the realm of the jealous gods. In an instant I realized that this scripture was actually describing human life—we don’t have to go to heaven or to the god realm to see what it is pointing to.

That was the beginning for me of an insight that has been growing and deepening for many years. (I’m kind of a slow learner.) One afternoon a few years later, I came into my mother’s room. She was lying in bed reading a Buddhist teaching. She had just read something about karma, and how we gain merit through positive thoughts and actions. “ Guess what?” she said to me. “If we are kind and virtuous, we can accumulate merit, and end up in a really great place. We might even go to a god realm, a place like heaven! Isn’t that great? I never knew that I could actually go to a place like that.”

“I don’t know Mum,” I said to her. “I think the promise of a place like that is really overrated.” I explained to her what I understood about the nature of such happiness. She was not impressed. “You just want to be so free,” she said. “I don’t care about all that. I’ll just go to heaven and hang out there for as long as it works.”

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Oct. 18.09
Lifeletter #39

Divine Unease

There seems to be a kind of inner restlessness, a divine unease, bubbling up in all kinds of people these days, in relation to their work.

“I used to be okay with this job,” they say, “but now, it just doesn’t feel quite right. I feel like I should be doing something else, something different.”

“What do you want to do?” I ask

“I don’t know. That’s the hardest part. I just can’t imagine what it could be...I’d just like to participate in something, be a part of something, and be of benefit.”

“Ah yes,” I say, “that’s it, isn’t it? There’s something deep in the heart, something totally natural and uncontrived, that wants to fully participate in life, and be of benefit.”

“Yes,” they reply. “I can feel it, and it doesn’t go away. But what is it? I really don’t know.”

It amazes me how easily we can feel that not knowing is a terrible problem. We interpret it as a closed door, a sign of something wrong. That’s how we’ve been trained, almost all of us--to think that knowing is good, and that not knowing will get us into trouble. When we believe this perception, we create suffering for ourselves. We reject what we actually have, which is the space of not knowing. And when we reject what we have we do not empower ourselves. The only way to empower ourselves, to treat ourselves well, to respect ourselves, is to work with what we have.

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It’s summer, the time when family members come to stay. I live in a town that is full of tourists all summer, and I’ve seen quite a few of these moments--in restaurants, on the street, in the park--when conflicts erupt between family members, and a perfect holiday appears to be ruined. I’ve also had several clients call me this summer, saying, “My mother-in-law is here for 2 weeks and I thought I’d be fine but I need help now!” These are the moments when when we feel trapped, cornered, by our own reactivity. We find ourselves behaving in ways that we never would have chosen.

One client, Claire, has been telling me about a summer visitor who was expressing viewpoints about different races and religions that were extremely judgmental. Claire found herself smiling on the outside, and boiling inside with anger, unable to respond for fear of what she would say. These excruciating moments, no matter now unwelcome, are the fertile ground for our own evolution and transformation. And usually, in a situation where we feel bound and trapped, our thinking has created a world of polarities or extremes. Claire was like someone caught between a rock and a hard place. Her only two alternatives seemed to be a kind of false, smiling acquiescence, or a fierce confrontation.

Both of these are extreme positions, based on a sense that this person is totally ‘other’ and separate from us. And if we look a little deeper, we’ll see that it’s not really ever the other person that is disturbing us-- it’s our own reactions. We can’t find a way to be ourselves with them, and we don’t know how to deal with all of the conflicting thoughts and feelings that are arising.

In the Radiant Mind course, there is a great exercise, in which I consciously spend some time with a person who is outside my comfort zone. No matter how liberal or tolerant I imagine myself to be, there are usually certain kinds of people that I avoid. It appears that I avoid them because of who they are, but what I am really avoiding is my own experience when I’m with them.

Whenever I do this exercise, I end up picking the rowdy street people in our town. And when I spend time with them, I get to see a whole stream of conditioning that sounds like this: “What’s the matter with you? What are you doing-you are wasting your life! Clean yourself up, and go get a job.” I hear these voices inside my head and they sound like my grandfather, not me.

All I can do is just open to everything that is arising in the field of my awareness, without pushing any of it away, without trying to change any of my thoughts and feelings. Sometimes the voices and the feelings get more intense. But if I can just hang in there, without getting upset about how uncomfortable it is, they start to fade away. And I’m left with a clear and simple sense that this person has nothing to do with any of my judgments, and they have a perfect right to be exactly as they are.

Marshall Rosenberg, the founder of non-violent communication, speaks about an experience he had in an Indian rickshaw, listening to a diatribe of hatred coming from one of the other passengers. He got so angry and so hurt by what this man was saying that he had to remind himself many times about the principles of non-violent communication. He just wanted to tell that person that everything they were thinking and saying was totally wrong. Until he realized that he was becoming just like his fellow passenger.

That’s what we overlook, whenever we get caught in our own points of view. As soon as I deny you the right to be the way you are, as soon as I believe that you really need to be different, I have fallen into a belief structure that is based on judgment, separation and violence.

When Claire and I were speaking about her visitor, I said, “When you are simply present, fully aware, not avoiding or judging, then a space opens up in which you are both allowed to be just as you are. And in that space, you’ll find a way to be with her beyond the two extremes of stifling your own response, or jumping down her throat.”

“What would that be?” she asked. “I just can’t imagine how I could respond to her in a good way.”

“You won’t find out by thinking about it,” I said. “You’ll find out by allowing yourself to be fully present, exactly as you are, without trying to change any part of your own moment to moment experience.”

“Okay,” she said, “ but just give me an idea of another possible way to be here.”

“Well, “ I said, “You could listen to her, and then say, “I’m hearing that you have lots of strong viewpoints about certain kinds of people. I imagine you must have had some powerful experiences to support what you feel about these people. So these views are very real to you--I understand this. And yet I have dear friends who fit in these categories. How is it that we have such different experience with the very same people? Have you ever wondered about this?”

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Raising Windhorse
The abrupt and spontaneous process that brings authentic presence (Chogyam Trungpa)

Raising windhorse is a practice that comes from the Shambhala lineage of Chogyam Trungpa, a radical Tibetan spiritual teacher. In the Shambhala teaching, he began to open a view of our human nature and our spiritual nature as completely non-separate. We are no longer aspiring to attain some rare state of awakened magnificence. We just want to discover what it is to be fully human. And fully awakened. Because they are not two things.

Windhorse is an expression of our authentic being—the dynamic aspect of who we are, the energy that sails through obstacles. Connecting with windhorse is something we can all learn how to do. We can do this because windhorse is our birthright, this dynamic and powerful capacity to work with every situation life brings us, just as it is. Windhorse is who we are when we have not contracted into a limited and confined identity. Windhorse emerges when we are fully and freely being ourselves, without trying to please anyone, or get away from anything, or prove anything to anyone. In Shambhala, they describe windhorse as arising from an ‘abrupt and sponteous process that brings authentic presence.’

Why would this process be abrupt and spontaneous? Because windhorse is already who we are. Windhorse is our primordial energy—it is not an effect that is produced by a cause. Our authentic presence never abandons us-- we have just forgotten, we have abandoned our true nature, and picked up a whole lot of ideas about who we are. So this presence, this liberating energy, gets covered, hidden, locked away, and we want to do something to bring it back. But the place we left it is right here. And the minute we turn towards it, the moment we acknowledge it, this living energy begins to emerge, as bright and fresh and pure and open as ever. As if nothing ever happened to it.

This is very good news. And it flies in the face of many of our belief structures, those systems of thought that tell us, again and again, that we have to work hard, struggle, push, understand, attain, get somewhere, become someone else.

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I remember when I first heard one of my teachers, Adya Shanti, speak about the relationship between teacher and student.  “It is the teacher’s job to listen to the student, just as much as the student listens to the teacher, “ he said, “and the teacher learns from his students, all the time.” That was something I had not understood until that moment-- that wisdom does not belong to anyone, it’s a living force, an openness of being, that can emerge in anyone at any moment.

At this stage in my life, I find I am learning more and more from the people I work with.  One of my clients, a beautiful woman whom I will call Leila, has been exploring very deeply the nature of her whole relationship to suffering.  When we first began coaching a few months ago, she was in a very difficult time in her life. Old patterns and ways of being were falling away, with nothing to replace them. They were falling away because they were clearly no longer sustainable in any way, but the loss of everything she had been counting on for comfort and security was frightening to her, and her experience was, in her own words, “excruciating.” On one of our calls I said to her. “Do you think that suffering is wrong? Do you think you can actually live here on earth without suffering? Does it mean something about you is lacking, or not good enough, because you are in so much pain right now?”

She took those questions deep into her being and worked with them. That in itself is always a miracle to me. What is it that allows us to begin to question our deepest beliefs and assumptions? Where does that willingness come from? There are no answers to these questions, but they live inside my heart, and I celebrate every single time this willingness emerges, out of nowhere.

On our next call, Leila told me that she had discovered a whole world of resistance inside her—a “militant refusal” to feel the pain of human life. She realized it came from her mother, who decided at one point, with a kind of ferocity, not to suffer like Jesus did on the cross. It was amazing to speak with Leila about this war she had been fighting for her whole life. We were able to explore this part of her conditioning together, without judgment or blame. All she really did was shine the light of her awareness on this way of relating to life itself; and it all began to change. I asked her to spend some time exploring ‘radical acceptance’, to see what would happen if she let go of demanding that the moment be any different than it is. “Just this moment, Leila,” I said to her, “See what it feels like when you do not need it to be different than it is right now.” She had a lot of ideas about how her life should be, how she should be, and heavy feelings of disappointment and loss about how her life had turned out, how she had turned out.  To let go of those ideas, cherished and upheld for so long, seemed at first to her like caving in to a terrible sense of failure.

But just because we think something is true, doesn’t make it true. What actually happened for Leila was nothing like what she was imagining. As she let go of her ideals, ambitions and ‘shoulds’ a whole new sense of herself began to emerge. On one level she was able to open to a sense of herself as nobody, just an open empty space of presence. She has been carrying this sense of herself for a long time, and experienced it as a lack, a void, where other people had a self. But as she allowed herself to be with each moment, no matter how painful, her whole sense of this void inside her began to change. She saw that she was nobody and somebody at the same time, and that the more she allowed the nobody to be there, the more freely and fully she could be herself. We talked about this a lot together, and felt, over and over, how clear the experience was, and how impossible it was for the mind to understand.

As she released her battle with suffering, more and more of her human conditioning—all the ways in which she had been creating her own pain, revealed themselves. It felt like she was truly growing up, taking responsibility for her own life.

It also became clear that she had connected with a totally organic force inside her, an evolutionary movement that was unfolding all by itself, just like a river moves to the sea. Sometimes she would express fear to me about spiralling back into old patterns of helplessness, isolation and defeat. “I wonder,” I asked her one night, “if you are really making all this happen, if you are the one in charge here, or if something else is going on.. Do you think this force, this energy, this awakening, is going to leave you alone, let you go back to your old life now?” “No way, “ she said, “It’s true, I don’t have to make it all happen through a force of will-- now I know there’s no turning back.”

The last time I spoke to her she told me how ‘the great unravelling’ was continuing, and how it was challenging and uprooting so many of her habitual patterns and ways of being. “It’s not easy, “ she said, “but I’m really willing now to open, to be with all of it. I’m moving into a new life, and whatever it takes, that’s what it takes. If there is more pain and suffering, that’s okay too. I say, “Bring it on, I’m ready.”

That moment, when Leila said, “Bring it on,” had the power of a blessing for me.It carried me back to another moment with Adya Shanti, when an older woman in our community asked him how he feels about dying. “I want my death to my long and slow, “ Adya said, “so I can experience every single moment of it.” The whole room got very quiet when he said that. We all sat there, taking in the fact that there is no way to avoid anything, that there is actually a part of our being that does not even want to avoid anything, that has no need for life to be any different than the way it is. Sometimes I call this our unconditioned presence, or nondual awareness, but it doesn’t really matter what we call it. As soon as we begin to recognize it, an opportunity to relate to life in a radically different way emerges. We are no longer hiding from life, hoping that somehow we will be let off easy. We can actually stand on our own two feet and participate fully in whatever life brings to us, without desparately hoping that all the discomfort and suffering will go away and leave us alone. In the words of my daughter, “You can avoid things for a while, but eventually, whatever you are running from, it comes back to bite you in the ass. There is no way out but through.”

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My intention in writing these letters is to speak to you, my friends and readers, from a transparent and authentic place about what I am learning as we live here together on this planet--all of us, participating in this infinite web of life. And life on this planet is not easy. It’s not neat and tidy, and the lessons we are given are often overwhelming, heartbreaking and chaotic. That’s just the way it is. 

I’ll be 60 next year, and I’ve passed through some of the toughest  learning  in my whole life this year. I’m realizing that it actually takes a long time to really grow up, a long time to become capable of sharing genuine wisdom and compassion with others.  In the process life shakes us up, burns us, tenderizes us, until we are open enough, free enough, strong enough, to stand on our own two feet and see what  really moves us.

So if I speak to you honestly about what is unfolding for me, and for the people I work with, and the people I know and love, I have to say that I think we are all being pushed by some kind of evolutionary force right now. I really don’t know what this force is, but I feel it pushing us, calling us to move beyond all our safe and familiar places. It seems to be taking us, like a wild river, into a way of being that feels radically new, strange, disorienting, and very awkward at times. That’s all right, and it’s much easier to bear if we don’t take it too personally, if we realize it’s happening to a whole lot of us.  Whether we like it or not, whether we think we asked for it or not, it’s still happening.

A few months ago my daughter went to Kelowna, a city 5 hours by bus from our town. She went for a short visit, and was returning on the night bus, arriving the next morning. I went to pick her up at the bus station at 5:30 in the morning, and there was no sign of the bus. I waited for a while, not really concerned at all, because I knew that nothing much can happen to anyone on a Greyhound bus. While I was waiting, I called my partner Jonathan, to see if she had phoned him.

He told me about a story he had just seen on the news. It happened  the night before, the same night that my daughter was coming home, on a Greyhound bus travelling in Alberta,  the province right beside us.  A man who was on the bus walked to the back, pulled out a machete, and beheaded a young fellow who was asleep on the back seat.

I was shocked and horrified by this piece of news, and very glad to see the bus from Kelowna roll in a few minutes later, with my daughter on it safe and sound. But I couldn’t seem to shake whatever that story had stirred up in me. I realized that my thoughts about what could happen or not happen  anywhere in this world are just that-ideas that have nothing to do with reality.

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My intention in writing these letters is to speak to you, my friends and readers, from a transparent and authentic place about what I am learning as we live here together on this planet--all of us, participating in this infinite web of life. And life on this planet is not easy. It’s not neat and tidy, and the lessons we are given are often overwhelming, heartbreaking and chaotic. That’s just the way it is. 

I’ll be 60 next year, and I’ve passed through some of the toughest  learning  in my whole life this year. I’m realizing that it actually takes a long time to really grow up, a long time to become capable of sharing genuine wisdom and compassion with others.  In the process life shakes us up, burns us, tenderizes us, until we are open enough, free enough, strong enough, to stand on our own two feet and see what  really moves us.

So if I speak to you honestly about what is unfolding for me, and for the people I work with, and the people I know and love, I have to say that I think we are all being pushed by some kind of evolutionary force right now. I really don’t know what this force is, but I feel it pushing us, calling us to move beyond all our safe and familiar places. It seems to be taking us, like a wild river, into a way of being that feels radically new, strange, disorienting, and very awkward at times. That’s all right, and it’s much easier to bear if we don’t take it too personally, if we realize it’s happening to a whole lot of us.  Whether we like it or not, whether we think we asked for it or not, it’s still happening.

A few months ago my daughter went to Kelowna, a city 5 hours by bus from our town. She went for a short visit, and was returning on the night bus, arriving the next morning. I went to pick her up at the bus station at 5:30 in the morning, and there was no sign of the bus. I waited for a while, not really concerned at all, because I knew that nothing much can happen to anyone on a Greyhound bus. While I was waiting, I called my partner Jonathan, to see if she had phoned him.

He told me about a story he had just seen on the news. It happened  the night before, the same night that my daughter was coming home, on a Greyhound bus travelling in Alberta,  the province right beside us.  A man who was on the bus walked to the back, pulled out a machete, and beheaded a young fellow who was asleep on the back seat.

I was shocked and horrified by this piece of news, and very glad to see the bus from Kelowna roll in a few minutes later, with my daughter on it safe and sound. But I couldn’t seem to shake whatever that story had stirred up in me. I realized that my thoughts about what could happen or not happen  anywhere in this world are just that-ideas that have nothing to do with reality.

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