This morning as I was sitting in meditation, a beautiful insight came to me. In meditation, I welcome the inbreath and outbreath, the cycle of flowing that simply is what it is, day after day. In meditation, I welcome sounds to come and go, choosing to have no preference or reaction to them, neither to name them, but to merely witness them coming and going, like the breath. Too, thoughts come and go, and some pull me into their trance, and others don't, and I recognize them all as thoughts, coming and going, having no substance, only persistent stories. But what would my life be like if I truly carried this very same perspective into the happenings of my daily living? What would life be like if I was able to surrender my personal preferences and ideas and desires in the same way that I surrender to my breath, to the sounds around me, to the coming and going of my thoughts?
I am human. I have preferences and desires and ideas about how I'd like my life to be. I prefer silence to noise, I prefer a clean kitchen to a dirty one, I prefer slow days with little on the agenda to fast paced days with a hundred things to try to accomplish. I prefer clear communication to vague, I prefer flow over stagnation, I prefer love over fear, and I prefer peace over conflict. In the world I dream about, I would live in a state of perpetual love and peace with all the beings I love, and we would all communicate fearlessly and with clarity, and we would all understand each other from the heart. We wouldn't be raping the Earth, we would be honoring it, and doing all we could to live in harmony and equilibrium with the rest of the living world. We would all have free access to clean water, organic food, good education, alternative and allopathic medical care, and community support. We would all have nothing but love and peace in our lives, our communities, our towns and countries, and all unnecessary borders and barriers and boundaries would be naturally released because we would have evolved beyond the need for those things. We would spend our days with those we love, and spend our time doing what makes our hearts sing, and we wouldn't have to be involved in working for money just to survive in a world that doesn't make any sense at all. There would be no need for government because we would all hold enough personal responsibility to make choices that were for the good of all, and there would be no need for laws, because we would be in tune with the most basic natural laws of the universe. Conflict and war would vanish spontaneously because love would be our very basic nature, and no one would want to enforce his or her personal preferences on anyone else. The ego would dissolve, and we would all surrender into a life of utopian goodness. We would live our days and nights in a state of bliss, and would die happy without any hesitation, since we lived our lives with such joy and fearlessness. Yet here, too, in this utopian vision of life on Earth, I share my own personal preferences, which are clearly in direct conflict with the way the world is in this time. And because utopia is not reality, I suffer. I see the way the world is, and I am full of mourning, full of loss, and some days, full of anger. My own personal preferences add to the mix of multifarious conflicts that already fill this place, and instead of feeling more at peace from my rumination about the ideal world, I become filled with sadness.
What if I could cultivate a practice of sitting here, breathing into the moment, accepting whatever is happening, no matter what? What if I could hold the mantra "it's okay" in my heart, no matter what comes? This is the path of meditation, after all. And if I could truly take this practice into my life, I would be embodying my meditation in a much higher way. I'd be walking the walk, not just sitting on the cushion.
Truly, I see that my preferences send me into a state of tantrum sometimes. I want what I want, I want it for a good reason, and I want it now, damn it! I clearly know that I am right in wanting it, and I want it in spite of what may be coming my way instead. Anyone who gets in the way of what I want is public enemy number one, and I will do my best to get them out of my way. What is born in this kind of thinking? War, conflict, separation, hatred, judgment. Nothing that I want to feed in myself or breed in the world, and yet there it is. Now, most of the time, I feel like I rise above this kind of thinking in my actions. But this is the point of view of the ego, and whether I'm having a tantrum like a three year old child, or a highbrow battle of intellect in a real-life chess match, when the ego drives my living, I am in conflict with what truly *is* in my life. Sometimes it isn't about what I want, but instead about what I believe, what I know, or what I feel, but the result is much of the same thing: being in conflict with life. And I'm starting to see how I can let go of that a little more than I have been.
Easy? Hardly. As I sit present with a particular thing right now that is pushing me, triggering a lot of preferences within me, I feel like I am squirming in my own skin. But I want *this* and I know I deserve it! I am worthy of it! I will turn away from whatever is not it! I will feel angry with whoever doesn't fulfill my desires and expectations of life being like *this* and will slam the door on it all. I will sit in my own little world and wait for life to show up the way I want it to be, or I will wait forever. On and on it goes, this idea that I have created about how I want life to be, my personal preference in the matter creating a more and more elaborate vision and story. But the truth is that life is the way it is.
Yesterday, as I was walking from a school to my car, this idea came to me: "This is your life. Right now. Whether or not it's what you want it to be. This is your life right now." Indeed. My culture has taught me - and probably everyone else - that what we do here is create ideas about how we want life to be, and then we work forever to build that. Even though I feel like I have surrendered the materialistic view of how life should be, I am still caught in the trap. My own vision involves things that my ego considers far more evolved than materialistic gains - spiritual growth, personal evolution, cultivating creativity, creating community and deep relationships, natural/organic/ecocentric living, and allowing my life to serve as a contribution to things that matter to me. I care very much about these things, and I choose to invest my energy into cultivating a life of these things. But in truth, I have very little control over what happens in my daily living. And when I am in a state of surrender to whatever emerges, and when I can show up with my heart open no matter what, then I am truly living this life. Otherwise, I am refusing to live when life isn't what I want it to be, and the only one who suffers in that case is me.
Gratitude to my practice, and my guides, for offering me these bits of wisdom and guidance.
Om shanti, shanti, shanti.
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