One of the participants at my ‘Effortless Being’ retreat asked me to write this down for him. Since it’s about all of us, about our human condition, here it is.

One evening at the retreat they were showing a video of ‘Le Cirque de Soleil’ on a full size screen. This particular video had many long shots of the audience, so you could really get a feeling for what was going on with them. The first ninety minutes were the acrobats-probably some of the best acrobats in the world--tumbling, whirling, jumping and swooping around, like fantastic birds in flight. Their costumes were stunning, the music was amazing, and their performances were impeccable. It was beyond impeccable, it seemed almost superhuman. The audience sat, with heads craned and mouths open, oohing and aahing in wonder.

And then out came the clowns-each clown, in his or her own way, trying to duplicate the feats we had already witnessed. Their costumes were ridiculous, and their antics were absurd. They tripped over each other, pushed each other out of the way and down trap doors in the floor, and pranced around together like a bunch of complete lunatics.

What really got to me was the audience. They were all laughing ecstatically-laughing until they cried. The clowns were very good, and they just went on and on, new ones appearing out of a hole in the floor every few minutes. In the audience, total strangers were passing kleenex around, slapping themselves on the legs, and children were throwing themselves in their parents’ laps with total abandon and glee.

It became apparent to me that our laughter, this overflowing joy and freedom, was a spontaneous recognition of the human condition, even if that recognition was not conscious. Who can identify with the acrobats? Impossible, they are the perfect ones, the ones who never fall, who never make mistakes. But the clowns are us, stumbling around, falling flat on our faces, wondering what happened, and why we can’t be those perfect acrobats.

What a great relief it would be if we knew, from the beginning, that to be human is to be a kind of clown. How seriously we take ourselves, how hard we try to get everything right. Who taught us that we are so important, that every thought we think is so important? Why have we never learned to laugh at ourselves? To release our grip on our terrible self-preoccupation?

I remember when I was first learning how to speak in public, many years ago. It was in India, and the audiences I was speaking to were sometimes quite large. One day I asked my teacher for help. “What should I do?” I asked him, “when I first walk out in front of that huge sea of faces? It can be pretty scary.”

“It’s simple,” he told me, “All you have to do is remind yourself that you are no more significant than a spider.” You might regard this as a strange kind of comfort, but it was one of best things anyone ever said to me. It released me from my self-importance, and allowed me to be myself up there, without any fixed ideas of how I was supposed to be. Sometimes I would walk out in front of the audience, and just repeat that to myself, “I am no more significant than a spider.” I would feel my whole being expand, and relax into the ‘unbearable lightness of being.’ The lightness of being that knows that the harder I try to impress you, the less authentic will be our connection.

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One of the Radiant Mind students from Germany asked me a wonderful question today, on the phone. We were talking about the practice of ‘just sitting’ and allowing everything to be as it is, which is one of the foundations of most nondual work, or the training in awakening to unconditioned awareness.

Just sitting is not the same as meditation. Meditation usually has some kind of focus, like the breath, or a mantra, and a goal as well, some kind of state we are trying to reach. Just sitting begins with the end, it begins with the recognition that there is nowhere to go, nothing to achieve, and nobody to achieve it. Our natural state, the openness of awareness itself, is not an object, not something I can find, grasp, or get any closer to than I already am.

The woman I was working with told me that the Radiant Mind course has ‘ruined her meditation practice.’ She was laughing as she said this. Then she asked me something, which I experienced as a kind of spontaneous koan, a question that arose from within her that cannot be answered by the mind. This was her question: If I am not even watching, not trying to witness, then what is the difference between just sitting and hanging around?”

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Often, when my students or clients are struggling with deep places of contraction and isolation, they will tell me they feel like a worm. This seems to be some kind of collective image for a place where we feel small, helpless and cut off from the nourishment bubbling up from inside.  Rumi refers to it here:

There is a worm addicted to eating grape leaves.
Suddenly, he wakes up,
call it Grace, whatever,
something wakes him, and he is no longer a worm.
He is the entire vineyard, and the orchard too,
the fruit, the trunks,
a growing wisdom and joy
that does not need to devour.

Rumi

This is what I am offering you, if you come to ‘The Yoga of Effortless Being’ 5 day retreat-- a chance to discover for yourself what this deep wellspring within is--how to connect with it, and how to receive this nourishment in your body, in your heart, and in your mind.

For more information about this reatreat, or to register, click here: http://tinyurl.com/343b7zk

with love
Shayla

Dear friends:

I encourage you to consider this possibility:  spending 5 days in a beautiful place, where you can look with clarity, courage, and compassion at yourself, your life, and what you really want.

In my work work with people all over the world, I am seeing that we have entered a time of great movement, a time when structures of thought, belief, and perception are breaking down. This is a time of great possibility, and it is also a time when we need support, a strong container to hold us as we learn to inquire, to express ourselves without defence or blame, and to discover what it means to be fully human.

Our bodies are not separate from the land, from the water, from the trees. When we spend time in a place where the silence is deep and the beauty profound, something opens up inside our cells. We breathe differently, we move more slowly, and we have a real chance to become truly intimate with ourselves. We will be exploring what it is to be fully present--to open to the living stream of our body, our feelings and our authentic being. We’ll learn how to move through the instincts for control and security to another way of being that is undefended, tender and deeply alive.

This is not an experience that will feel good for five days and then be gone. It is a genuine opportunity to take responsibility for yourself and your life, to find out what it means to come out of isolation and live a life of integrity and love.

Please call me or email if you have questions about this retreat.  For more information about registration and the retreat, click here:  http://tinyurl.com/343b7zk

with love
Shayla

Contrary to what many people assume, there is actually a big difference between the practice of learning to recognize and rest in awareness, and the practice of mindfulness. People often assume they are the same, and they are not. In mindfulness practice, we are focusing on the content of our moment to moment experience. In awareness, we are not really concerned with the contents--not focusing on them, and not trying to block them out either. Just letting them be as they are. Our focus is the open space, the boundless field of awareness, in which everything is happening. And of course we can’t really focus on this awareness in the way we focus on an object, like our breath, or our feelings.

So awareness practice is much more about letting go of the impulse to grasp, to understand, to fixate on anything, and just relaxing into the openness of our own being, which is always here, as soon as we are willing to let go.

love
Shayla

We are in the middle of a very powerful time, as we approach the Solstice.  I’m noticing that something potent and challenging is happening with a great many people right now. We are being pushed to our edge, right up against our deepest patterns and core conditioning. The abundance of light on an outer level corresponds to an abundance of awareness that is awakening on an inner level. So we have an opportunity to see many things about our patterns and the way we live, that we may never have seen before, or even wanted to!

How to respond to such an opportunity? It’s crucial that we align with a deep willingness to take full responsibility for our lives, our conditioning, and for the power of awareness to illuminate and dissolve what is obstructing and limiting us.

There are 2 key questions that we can use for self-inquiry, very simple questions that we can take with us into our daily lives.

1)Am I willing to give up the right to be a victim to both outer and inner circumstances? Am I willing to give up the right to be a victim to the moods and thoughts that arise in the field of my awareness?
2)Am I willing to give up the right to not take care of myself? Or to put it another way: Am I willing to do what I need to do to create a good environment for myself, one that really nourishes and sustains me?

If we are really willing to work with these questions, we can tap into the fluidity of this time, the power that all this light has to liberate us from outmoded structures of thought, belief, and behaviour.

May we all find ways to support ourselves and each other in healing, transforming and awakening.

love
Shayla

Sometimes, when I’m speaking or working with a group of people, I fall into a deep bodily sense of being held by a current of energy. This current is not like anything I could imagine with my mind. It’s not just flowing in one direction—it seems to be muti-directional, so that everyone in the group is giving and receiving all at once. And the more I am able to allow this energy to flow, the more I feel the circle of giving and receiving expand and open.

I know this is true in my writing work. When I am doing any kind of writing or ‘ written inquiry’ work with people, there is a often a sense that once a certain amount has been written, there is no more left to write. My experience is that the exact opposite is true. The more I write, the more there is to write. I have seen this again and again in my workshops. The unhindered flow of the writing opens a deep space inside, and out of that space, things emerge, with less and less effort. Sometimes it feels like a well—the more water you draw out, the more the deep pure spring water bubbles up from below. The conditioned mind has no idea what wants to come forth. It is living in a very narrow realm, cut off from the natural abundance of this source, this ground, that belongs to us all.

This is why it’s so important not to hold back, to let ourselves be naturally generous, and expressive. If we have not been encouraged and supported in this direction, we need help. Everyone needs this kind of help in their lives, at certain times. We hit walls of self-doubt-- fear and trembling take us over, and we can’t find the confidence to be fully ourselves, to speak up, to find our voice, our natural way of being in the world.

At these times it really seems like we are lacking, that we have nothing to give, that we are powerless and deficient. How suprising to discover that when we stop holding back, when we reconnect with the flow of our own being, none of this is true. “Everyone has inside them, what can I call it? A piece of good news.” (Ugo Betti)

love
Shayla

A friend of mine is taking a big step in her life, leaving her home town and all that is familiar to her. “I’m really scared,” she said to me, “It’s so hard to leave my comfort zone.”
I heard myself saying to her, “Your comfort zone is killing you.” For the next few days, that sentence came alive inside me, and inserted itself into many different situations, local and global. I knew from experience that it would most likely come back home to me, like a boomerang, so that I could live more fully into what is behind the words. It didn’t take long.

We started renovating our house a few years ago, in stages. The most recent stage stopped at the bathroom. We’ve been living for quite a while with a functioning, but quite un-beautiful bathroom. I simply lived with it, resting in the knowledge that my well being does not depend on the state of my bathroom. This spring, however, as work on the bathroom recommenced, my mind started spinning all sorts of fantasies about how great it was going to be when the bathroom was done, how much better everything would be then. I could see, bit by bit, my natural preferences becoming demands-- a perfect recipe for suffering. Instead of trying to intervene and change my mind, I just watched this happening, until life, in its wickedly graceful way, intervened. One of the pipes in the wall was dislodged during the work, and for ten days we ended up with no bathroom at all. I felt myself, all of a sudden, thrown into another reality, connected all day long to the millions of people all over our planet who have never had plumbing at all. And comfort, the familiar comfort of having my own bathroom, was nowhere to be found.

Having lived in India for a long time, this way of life was not unknown to me. But even in India, I had always had a working bathroom. For many years I heated water up in a bucket, but I was never in the situation I found myself in this month. The whole scenario felt like a slap in the face, a very loving slap, that helped me see how spoiled we are in our part of the world. When I looked into it more deeply, I saw a sense of entitlement, one that runs so deep I don’t even see it, until something like this happens. The more I allowed myself to be present, the more entitlement revealed itself. And on a deeper level, I saw the entitlement we carry in relationship to both suffering and happiness.

What is this? When I ask about this, from deep in my heart, I find a strange belief that things should really be going my way, that I shouldn’t be deprived, that my basic rights as a human being are undeniable, and that they involve my relationship to ‘stuff’ like bathrooms. How can this be? Do I really believe that the universe was designed to suit me? And that if things don’t go my way, that I am entitled to suffer?

This whole view of life feels like something that belongs to a small child, something we could all naturally grow out of, instead of continuing to function at the two year old stage. I had a lovely young neigbor a while ago who demonstrated this way of being to me one afternoon, so perfectly. She was two years old at the time, and she had just had a haircut. I was sitting on my front steps, admiring it, when a breeze came along and started blowing her hair around. A look of great pain darkened her face, and she pointed her finger at me saying “Tell the wind to stop! I don’t want it to blow my hair.” I told her gently, and very clearly, that not only could I not do that for her, but it was never going to happen. She was not persuaded. I’m hoping, now that she is six or so, that the level of her insistence has eased up a bit.

This is what growing up is supposed to be about. But I wonder, really wonder these days, how many of us are really grown up. When I feel entitled to suffer, because I’m not getting what I want, or when I think life should deliver to me whatever I imagine I need for my happiness, how old am I?

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