Lifeletters

There was a phrase from one of the scriptures that we heard a lot in India. It would get inside my head and make my mind itch. “What is poison for you in the beginning,” it said, “will be nectar for you at the end. And what is nectar at the beginning, will become poison for you at the end.” I’ve been connecting with the
meaning of this lately, in a whole new way. Somehow this experience has lifted me up, encouraged me, and awakened me to new possibilities for our future.

How we know ourselves, how we imagine ourselves, can feel so solid and static. And how quickly it can change. Our whole identity can open and expand in a moment, no matter how much resistance we are feeling.

About a year and a half ago I came to a turning point in relationship to Mother Earth and my willingness to live a sustainable life. I realized that prayers, recycling and emails to our government were not going to do it for me. I felt this longing, deep in my heart, to take a big step forward. And I kept wondering why we humans so often wait until things are totally desperate before we are willing to do things differently.

Gradually it became clear to me that I wanted to learn to live without my car. I was quite surprised by this, as I was very attached to my car. It was a Honda Accord I inherited from my mother, after 25 years of living in India without one. It represented freedom, mobility, and the spirit of adventure. I would think about letting go of it and feel a lot of resistance.

But the longing was even stronger than my resistance- I knew that to be true. I was preparing to go to a Radiant Mind teacher training course in France this fall, and in July it became obvious that the only way I would be able to afford the trip was by selling my car. Isn’t it strange how the universe conspires to help you evolve and grow, even when you think you are not ready?

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“Only the unexpected is real.” Nisargadatta Maharaj

Did you ever notice how certain themes run through your life, rising up and falling away, only to appear again sometime later, maybe in a slightly different form?  For me, over the last while, it’s been about creativity, spontaneity, the flow of life which is unstructured and unrehearsed.

We had a great discussion about it one evening in my ‘Alchemy of Writing’ group. I’ve been offering to my students a vision of creativity as something that is innate and universal, because it is our true nature. It’s not something that belongs to anyone, and especially not to a privileged or special group of people. Creativity is how the whole universe emerges into form- over and over it demonstrates this spontaneous power of expression at the very heart of life.

When I really allow my heart to open to the sense of this vast field of creative energy, I realize that each one of us was born to discover ourselves through this process of free expression- to experience directly that who we are is not a fixed and static thing, but a flow of energy that is always new and dynamic.

As we explored this way of looking at things in my class, we realized that a lot of confusion happens when we equate creativity with skill. They are not the same. Skill is a learned thing, something acquired through practice and intention. We can practice creativity too, but only in the sense of learning how to open, to surrender to something that we can never control.  Rumi was pointing to this when he said, “The more skill you have, the further you are from what your deepest love wants.”

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Last night my partner Jonathan and I had a very simple and powerful conversation. As we were preparing dinner he said, “I’m really struggling inside myself.”

“What’s going on?” I asked him.

“I’m experiencing a global feeling of resentment, and I don’t like it at all.”

“Can you change it? “ I asked him. “Can you actually choose the feelings that arise in you, moment to moment?”

“Well, I’m telling myself that I should be able to, that I should be able to choose something else right now, other than this resentment.”

“But is that true?” I asked him. “If you ask the part of you that really knows, can you actually exercise that kind of control over your experience?”

He paused for a moment and dropped inside himself. “No,” he said, “I can’t. The only thing I have control over is how I respond to what arises.”

“And what happens,” I asked him, “when you focus on not liking that feeling and wanting it to go away?”

“It gets worse.” he said, “It feels solid and compacted.”

“And for me, “ I said, “ in relation to difficult feelings, I often get caught in wanting to know why-why am I feeling like this, what is this really about? But as long as I am resisting what is, there is no insight, just suffering.  When I finally stop struggling, and open to whatever is here-then directly out of the experience itself, insights begin to flow.”

“Yes, “ he said, dropping his shoulders, and taking a deep breath, “that’s just how it is. When I decide that I can’t stand my present experience, I end up being resentful about being resentful!”

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I’ve been in love with inquiry for long time. Whenever someone asks me a real question, a question from the depths of their being, it’s just like receiving a priceless gift.

I received such a gift when I was speaking on the phone last week with a dear friend. He asked me if I was familiar with the work of Byron Katie.  I said I was, and that I have engaged in what she calls ‘The Work,’ her particular form of inquiry.

“Well, “ he said, ‘I enjoy listening to her very much, but there’s one thing she keeps saying that I just can’t go along with. It does make sense when I listen to her interacting with people. But afterwards I really wonder about it.”
“About what?” I asked him.
“It’s when she says that reality is always benevolent,” he said.
“Oh yes, “ I said. “I’ve heard her say, “In the face of everything that appears to be real, only kindness remains.”
“I understand,” replied my friend, “ that to say things are bad is just the mind making up a story about what is. But it also seems like a story to say that life is kind. Let’s face it, life can be very cruel sometimes.”

I realized in that moment what a big question that is : Is Reality kind?
Is the Universe benevolent? Some people might think it ridiculous to try and answer such a question, or that we should leave such questions to the philosophers. The truth is, we are all philosophers, and many of us have experienced the answers to these deep questions emerging out of our whole experience of life. Sometimes we’re not conscious of what we assume or believe about life, but our answers to such questions affect every aspect of how we live and experience the world.

I watched this week, as this question from my friend came alive in me, crawled deep into my heart, and would not let me alone.

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Dear Shayla,

Thanks for sending these wonderful Lifeletters.  I always enjoy them.  I thought you might like this description of the ego by Baba Hari Dass:

“ The Self is the sovereign;
nature is its kingdom;
mind and intellect are ministers;
and ego is the governor,
which rules for its own self-interest.”

Love,
Michael

Dear Shayla,
re: ‘The ego is like a mini-corporation, driven by its own addictions..’
In support of your original letter, I thought this was an excellent sentence. Since all human behaviour rests on the ego, to transform large negative-impact corporations, we should be looking at our own addictions. We vote to add to their power every time we open our wallet in their direction.
I take your friend’s point that there are good corporations, but, heck, the bad ones have such huge negative impact this needs naming and addressing.
Perhaps there should be another word created for ‘good corporations.’
Kaia

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Dear readers and friends:

As soon as I sent out my lifeletter today, I realized there was one sentence I wanted to change: ‘The ego is like a mini-corporation, driven by its own addictions..’ My use of the word corporation was a generalization, and therefore a distortion of the way things actually are. I want to make it very clear that there are some wonderful corporations on our planet.

One of my readers, Trevor Giles, noticed the same thing. A copy of his email is below.

Shayla,

Thanks for this. I really enjoy these. I did want to make a comment about the following line “every ego is a mini-corporation, driven by its own addictions, endlessly moving away from the feeling at the core”.

I hear a lot of less than positive comments from people in Nelson about
“corporations” and the comment above seems to fall into that category. I really wish we could all move away from this idea that corporations are souless empty creatures. Corporations are two things. The first being a taxation structure on paper and the second being a collection of people with a common business goal.

I will not delve into the taxation issue except to say that there is no such thing as a tax write-off that did not cost money in some shape or form and that for a corporation to not pay any taxes simply meant they did not make any money or that they lost money in a previous year.

As for the collection of people, this is what makes or breaks a Corporation. No different than it makes or breaks a church, a non-profit society, or any other collection of individuals with a common goal, business or not. There are many Corporations that have very deep souls and are very in touch with their people, their world, and their customers, and their core ideals. Take Patagonia, the clothing maker and the many other positive examples that exist. I believe it is not fair to broad brush Corporations in the manner above.

Corporations are typically a reflection of their leadership and the people who ultimately work for them, no different than the Catholic Church is a function of its Leader and its preists. There are always good and bad examples of every form of organization. That is just the nature of the world.

Respectfully,

Trevor Giles

Please print this lifeletter if you can. It is meant to be held in your hand.

Enough

Enough. These few words are enough.
If not these words, this breath.
If not this breath, this sitting here.

This opening to the life
we have refused
again and again
until now.

Until now.

(David Whyte)

These days it seems to me that this tiny word ‘enough’ is like a mantra, a power packed seed syllable, a doorway into another universe, if we are willing to contemplate and work with it. A while ago I was talking to my daughter about the endless greed and destruction of the global corporations. “What’s driving them?” I asked her. “How come a billion dollars isn’t enough?”

“Don’t you get it?” she said. (Thank you Coco) “It’s an addiction. When is there enough cocaine? Enough alcohol? Enough sugar?”

Those bright cool moments of clarity. How sweet they are, and how they continue to blossom and deepen. Since then I’ve realized that every ego is a mini-corporation, driven by its own addictions, endlessly moving away from the feeling at the core: “I’m not enough. This moment is not enough. Something is missing.”

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I was working with a beautiful group of women this spring, exploring what it is to listen and express from the heart. We were opening to the simplicity of just being present for whatever shows up, without any agenda of our own. Of course it’s not so easy to just snap your fingers and make all your egoic agendas vanish, but with a lot of willingness, many of our habitual preoccupations were falling away.  At one point one of the women said to me, “But we do have agendas.”

“Of course, “ I said, “sometimes agendas are appropriate.”
“Then what to do?” she asked, “Try to get rid of them, one by one?”
“No,” I said, “that kind of practice will only create conflict. What you can do is just keep noticing, not with your mind, but with your whole being- heart, body and breath. Notice how it feels when you have an agenda, an expectation, a demand, and notice how it feels when you don’t.”

After saying that, my own awareness seemed to open to a deeper level. I began to notice in such a simple way how my body feels when I am holding any kind of agenda. There’s a tightness, a hardness, a solidity. When I am simply present, everything softens, expands. Without making any kind of value judgment in the mind, my body simply recognizes the basic sanity of being present. It feels good. The more I noticed, the more I could feel my deeper being returning to presence, again and again, all by itself. In some spiritual teachings, this natural movement is called ‘the homing instinct.’ (I first heard it expressed this way in ‘The Radiant Mind’ course with Peter Fenner.)

Without a sense of this natural movement inside us, life can be quite bewildering. I was talking to a brilliant young woman in France last week. When I asked her what she wanted, she replied with great candor, “Shayla, that is the most terrifying question of all.” Her response was so genuine that it stayed with me, and I pondered it for days. I realized that the vast majority of the people I work with do not have a clear sense of what they really want. Isn’t that amazing? There is often a sense of shame or helplessness that comes along with this, as if this not knowing is a sign of something wrong, a flaw or weakness. In my heart I know that this is not true, that there is another way to look at this phenomenon. How could so many people not know what they really want?

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