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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