Peter said, “Of course that happens. It happens to all of us. No matter how skillful we become at accessing that place of unconditioned awareness, we can lose it in a second. It’s nothing to feel bad about. It’s just the way things are, until you evolve to a whole different level of consciousness.” I realized in that moment that I had been feeling bad about that one thing for 30 years! That I had actually used my spiritual practice to torture myself about the fact that I couldn’t stay in the state I wanted to be in. Isn’t that amazing? And somewhat ridiculous?

My feeling is that self-acceptance and self-love are usually the focus for psychological work, and that this aspect of our no-practice is often left out of spiritual work. We might talk about it, but there is often a feeling of “Let’s get on to what really matters-realizing that I don’t exist, that I’m not separate. So why should I waste time on self-acceptance. This self is the one that has brought me all this suffering. I want to get beyond it.”

Now I’m understanding something profoundly simple: one of the foundations for this work, or any spiritual practice, is to build a field of complete tolerance and acceptance for the way we are in each moment. No matter what. Because we can’t change the way we are by fighting against it. This moment cannot be any different than the way it is. I cannot be different in this moment than the way I am; otherwise I would be.

I cannot believe how much I have resisted opening to this whole way of being, and how radically simple it is. I think sometimes that the most profound and life-changing insights are the most obvious. My daughter Coco keeps saying that these days:” All of these things were staring me in the face all along, but I wasn’t ready to see them.” It’s been staring me in the face for 30 years that I can’t hold on to my so called “higher” or “more expanded” states. But I didn’t want to face it, because I wanted what I wanted.

So the minute I try to live this moment according to any ideal, I create the same struggle in myself, the same gap. Over and over, until I finally get to the point where I’m willing to be with myself as I am.

with love
Shayla

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.”

I heard something very close to this when I was listening to a coach called Michael Bungay Stanier recently. He spoke about the difference between good work and great work. He described good work as the work we do when we are inside the area of our competence, functioning consistently, and with confidence and surety.

Great work takes us into another universe. When we do great work we venture out into the unknown. We have no clue how it will turn out. There are no guarantees. We don‘t know what we are doing. There is often fear in this place, and a lot of aliveness and presence. But we keep going, because we have learned to trust something, even if we are not quite sure what it is.

I would describe great work as something that comes when we are living on our creative edge. I’m reminded of something that happened when I was in India, with my teacher, Swami Shyam. One day, a few hundred of us were all sitting together, listening to him and other learned teachers and scholars speak about life, oneness and consciousness. Right in the middle of someone’s talk, a small child from the audience wandered right out into the middle of the stage and dropped his diapers. Immediately the whole place dissolved into wild laughter, and the speaker was totally forgotten. And even after he resumed his speech, we all remained captivated by everything this tiny human was doing.

My teacher said something that day that I have never forgotten. “Just look,” he said, “how all of your love and attention naturally flows toward that small child. What does he know compared to the speaker? He has no skill of that kind at all. But his innocence, his spontaneity, that’s what we all love, more than anything, because that is our inner nature, our real self. There is no speaker on earth, no matter how famous, no matter how skilled, who can compete with a one year old child losing his pants on stage.”

What a mysterious thing to consider - that who you are when you are not trying to be anybody is the most beautiful way you could ever be. You at your most natural, most free, is the way your basic goodness and sanity will flow out into the world. What an amazing piece of good news. And what a radical departure from most of what we have been taught. It takes a great deal of courage to live life with that level of trust. What would it take for you to begin to trust yourself in that way?

with love
Shayla

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?
I put my car on the market and started walking everywhere, in preparation for the time when it would be gone. It is six blocks down from our house to town. It was very hot walking up the hill in July and August, and I was not fit enough to do anything except huff and puff my way home. But in a very short time, I got a lot stronger. I watched myself almost trotting up those six steep blocks, and realized I was actually starting to enjoy it.

I sold my car, and we went to France for the teacher training course. I returned home at the beginning of November. In Nelson it’s a dark, cold time that many
people find quite difficult. Now I was really missing my beautiful little Honda. I would remember great trips I had taken in it, and even started dreaming about it at night- the world whizzing by outside my window as I listened to Adya Shanti on my CD player. I was full of regrets, and complained a lot to my partner Jonathan about the prospect of walking up and down that hill in the winter. “It’s going to be awful,” I moaned. “Icy, slippery, freezing cold.”

Jonathan was not even slightly interested in catering to my mind. “You have no idea what it’s going to be like.” he would say. How I love him for that response!

“Yes, I do!” I argued. I know what winter is like here, and I hate it!” I could feel the negativity bubbling around inside me, and this feeling of being deprived, left out in the cold by myself.

“You are making this whole thing up,” he replied. “Just let go and see how it is. You might really surprise yourself.” So I did. Only because I had no choice.  It’s truly liberating to be choiceless sometimes, even though this six year old inside me was having a major temper tantrum.

I just kept walking, and the more I walked the more I liked it. The poison was turning to nectar. Winter came, dark came, and I walked- in snow, in rain, in sun, in fog, and in moonlight. I started to notice how different I felt, how much more vital and alive. Sometimes Jonathan or my daughter would offer me a ride, and I would say no. I didn’t want to miss the walk.

Before I began what I now call ‘my walking life’ I was convinced that I could never afford all that extra time. Now I laugh about that. I feel like something inside me has slowed down; my whole relationship to time has transformed.

“This is really strange,” I said to friends over Christmas. “Now I’m even liking winter! It’s so different when you’re out in it, instead of looking at it through a pane of glass. The sound of the wind, the snow on the trees, the way the clouds move over the mountains-all of this was lost to me when I had my car.”

So that’s how I came to understand how nectar and poison can change places with each other.  Now I would never exchange my walking time for the warm and cozy interior of a car.  And if you had told me a few short months ago that a steep walk up the hill in the middle of winter would be one of my favourite things, I would have laughed at you. This was not the way I knew myself.

with love
Shayla

“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!”

Even after all these years of listening, practicing and inquiring in this way, I am still amazed to see how the mind creates so many layers of suffering.  And how the suffering begins to dissolve as soon I am truly willing to just be open and present. Instead of running away, or judging, or fixing, or analyzing, I can allow myself to be with this feeling, this thought, this aversion, this belief, that feels so painful, so wrong, perhaps totally unacceptable. The radical simplicity of this presence is the root of all healing, awakening and transformation.  And everything in the stream of our human conditioning seems to be persuading us to be some other way.

I notice this when people ask me about my coaching, yoga, and group work. I speak about learning to be present, and they often give me a puzzled look as if to say, “Is that all? It can’t be that simple.” Or sometimes someone will say, “Okay, I’m present, now what?” But most of the time we aren’t really present. To be fully present is something quite ordinary and at the same time very profound. It’s as if all the scattered atoms in our being come into full alignment, and our whole field of consciousness starts to vibrate in harmony with something vast, universal, and radiant.

Of course there is work to be done, steps to be taken, evolution wanting to happen. When our actions flow from presence, they are full of creativity, love, freedom and courage. So presence is the foundation, the place we never need to leave, even when life makes enormous demands on us. This soft and fluid openness is so easy to deny, pass over, or fail to acknowledge, because we are focused on our problems, or our tomorrows, or any other agenda that seems more important than the spaciousness of who we really are.

We certainly hear a lot of talk in our world right now about living in the now. It’s a great thing to understand this principle with our minds. But it’s not enough. That understanding needs to become part of our whole emotional body, and then our physical body. Then it’s no longer something we need to remember, it’s something we are living and breathing.

How would it feel in your body right now, if your cells, if your muscles, if your bones could open to the light and simplicity of being? What story are you telling yourself about why you can’t let go into this openness now, just as you are?

with love
Shayla

A lot of the time people respond by wanting to know how, how to do whatever follows the word ‘willing.’ But that’s not the question. We really don’t have to know how. All we have to do is touch into the willingness.

About six years ago, on retreat, I discovered the power of willingness. Our facilitator had asked us to open right up and directly contact our inner experience, the whole spectrum of our feelings and thoughts, without holding back. He asked us to find out how willing we were to do that. I was in a lot of emotional pain at the time, and I realized, when he asked the question, that I wasn’t very willing at all to contact myself in that way. I was deeply discouraged by this, because I could see that without that willingness, I was stuck in a contracted place. I walked around for a while, contemplating my unhappy state, and wondering where I would find the willingness I was looking for. Then I realized something. I saw that I was willing to be unwilling. It seemed so simple, almost like nothing at the time. I simply saw that I was in a place of unwillingness because I was willing to be there.

It reminds me of Jon de Ruiter, a spiritual teacher, who talks about the liberating power of tenderness. He says that all you need to start with is a tiny droplet of tenderness. That’s what happened to me that day-I found a tiny droplet of willingness. And once I found it, it expanded and filled the whole universe. It turned into something much bigger and more potent that I had ever imagined. I realized that willingness is not something my mind produces. It’s an unconditioned quality that comes from the ground of my being.

It’s not always easy to be willing. That doesn’t mean that willingness takes effort and struggle. It just means it’s not something our minds can construct, or even understand. Willingness only exists right now. And its nature is without judgment or manipulation. Sometimes I’ll ask a client or student, “ Are you willing to let go of your resistance to this experience?” They reply, “But I don’t want this experience!” It’s easy to confuse wanting and willingness. But they are not the same. Our unconditioned being, our real heart, is always willing to experience life as it is, this moment as it arises. That is our true nature-just this wide openness that doesn’t even know how to resist. When we call on our willingness, that is what we are accessing-this unconditioned presence that is always here- accepting, welcoming everything.

Wanting and not wanting are movements of our conditioned mind. We can actually be willing to open to something we do not want to acknowledge at all. We’ve all had experiences of this.  It’s really not some mystical, esoteric thing, reserved for special, very advanced people! It happened to me this week. I was talking to my coach on the phone and he said something to me that my mind did not like. It was a bit too close to the bone. It revealed a conditioned pattern of mine that I did not want to look at. But was I willing to look at it? Oh yes. And for the next few days I experienced both sides of me-the mind that wanted to turn away and distract itself, and the willingness which just stayed right there and kept looking.

Eventually the willingness got stronger, and the not wanting just dropped away. That’s what happens with willingness. It’s not static-it’s dynamic and alive. And it’s so easy to overlook, because it’s with us all the time. Willingness doesn’t feel like much- it’s not exciting or dramatic. It’s very much like our unconditioned awareness. Most of the time we ignore it and take it for granted. But when we make the simple choice to acknowledge it, recognize it, open to it, we receive far more than we were expecting.

The very nature of willingness is not conditional. It has nothing to do with belief. It’s not about struggle or manipulation. You cannot ‘try’ to be willing. Have you noticed this?

Willingness is all about showing up, and letting go of our unending struggle to make life behave the way we want it to. As long as we believe that we can control our experience, we will not be willing to open to this moment. We’ll be involved in avoiding our experience, moving from this moment to a better one. And then we never contact ourselves or this moment directly. We see everything through the filter of what ‘should ‘ be or ‘could be’, like Paul expressed it in the New Testament: ‘For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face.’

The mind only knows how to resist and avoid. Our heart, our essence is always willing to meet this moment, face to face. All it takes is a tiny droplet of willingness.

with love
Shayla

I began to contemplate this many years ago in India, after having a conversation with my teacher one day. We were standing on a mountain road, looking down at the great river Vyas, roaring through our valley. I was asking him to help me deal with a situation in my life. “I can’t help you in that way,” he told me, “that’s not the way human beings are. What you are now calling your greatest strength, will one day be your greatest weakness. And what you call your greatest weakness, you will recognize as your greatest strength.” I was stunned by that, and spent many years exploring the depth of it. But it wasn’t until I left India that it really came home to me. Then I started to hear it everywhere: “ Find your true weakness and surrender to it. Therein lies the path to genius. Most people spend their lives using their strengths to overcome or cover up their weaknesses. Those few who use their strengths to incorporate their weaknesses, who don’t divide themselves, those people are very rare. In any generation there are a few and they lead their generation.”
- Moshe Feldenkrais

It was like waking up from a dream, realizing that I had been living in a black and white world. At first it was confusing and frightening to leave that world behind. Then I began to appreciate the depth, complexity and richness of life when I was not putting everything into those boxes of human/divine, good/bad, strong/weak, matter/spirit. In the non-dual understanding, your true nature is something that embraces everything as it is. As long as we live in a world of polarities, we cling to one side and try and push the other side away. Life becomes an endless struggle.
There is a myriad of ways to explore this. One of the most powerful for me is around our notions of love. We’ve been conditioned in our society to think of love and relationship in an either/or way. If I love you I want to live with you forever. If I want to leave, it means I no longer love you. We ignore the possibility that I could leave you and love you at the same time. This misunderstanding creates enormous pain in the field of relationship. It takes us back to the days when we were teenagers, struggling to define ourselves in relation to our parents. It seemed the only way to do that was to decide that our parents were total jerks, instead of fallible human beings.
The very way we think of love itself is usually very narrow: love is kind, generous, compassionate. All of this is true, but we forget that love is much vaster than our little black and white concepts. Love is fierce as well. Love is wild. Love does not play by the rules.

I give sessions in something called ‘Human Design,’ which is a combination of astrology and the 64 hexagrams of the I-Ching. (I know it sounds strange and complex, but it actually provides a very clear mirror of our human nature-our gifts, challenges, turning points, and opportunities.) Each person has specific hexagrams that express the inner qualities of their being. I was preparing a reading for someone a while ago, and discovered her two main hexagrams:
The shocking and arousing force of thunder was the first one, and the soft and gentle penetrating power of wind and water was the second. It became clear as we worked together that the mind experiences these as total opposites. She realized that her essential being was vast enough to embrace them both.

The non-dual understanding is not intellectual- it’s a living thing that transforms the whole way we live. It allows us to be compassionate and forgiving with ourselves and others, because our dualistic judgments no longer make sense. How can I call myself ‘stupid’ when my wisdom is hidden within my so-called stupidity? How can I call you weak, when I know that strength is not the opposite of weakness?

Ultimately, either/or, black and white thinking is the basis for all fundamentalism. Most of the conflicts, war and terror being waged on our planet right now are based on this way of thinking. My enemy is bad and I am good, your way is wrong, my way is right. It takes a great mind and a vast heart like Mahatma Gandhi or Nelson Mandela, to lead people into another way of looking at things. And it’s never too late for each one of us to open to this way of being. In each moment that you are willing to stop dividing, you call the sweet fragrance of peace into this world.

Try this:
You can approach this in a very simple way. Whenever you find yourself in conflict or struggle of any kind, get curious about what is going on in your mind. Are you engaging in either/or thinking? Are you seeing something (either inside you or outside you) as an enemy? Would you be willing to let this way of thinking go, just for now, and see what happens? If it seems too difficult, sit down with someone you trust and respect, and explore this possibility with them.

“Now?” we asked her, looking around at the soft snowy night. “Yes, now!” she said, offering a hand to her mother, “Let’s go!” Her mother, who is quite extraordinary, laughed, took her hand, and walked down the road with her, into the night. I went back inside, according to my schedule. But the moment continued to haunt me. My heart recognized a lost opportunity.

Whenever I’m with Ruby, I remember when I was young, and my mother would wake me in the morning for school. I never wanted to get up. I would do this thing I called ‘slipping inside the moment.’ As I lay in bed, I would let myself fall inside each moment, until it stretched out, became elastic, and seemed to last far longer than what the clock was telling me.

During the last few years that I have been coaching, there is one thing that more of my clients have expressed than any other. And that is a great longing to be free of the tyranny of time. Some of them speak about the place of ‘just being’ or ‘being in the flow,’ and how that slips away and disappears when the day’s activities take over. One client of mine spoke last week about ‘that Sunday feeling,’ when there is nothing structured or planned-just a wide open space before you, ‘where you don’t have to be anybody.’ She said that was more important to her than anything.

I often invite my friends and students to take a whole day off each week. Dan Sullivan, one of Canada’s most famous coaches, has designed his whole program around this idea-that we access our deepest resources in that kind of unstructured time. In our community in India, we left every Monday free, and after a few years of empty Mondays, we couldn’t imagine how we had survived without them.

Most of the people I’ve suggested ‘one day off’ to have not been able to do it. It seems like a great speed and urgency have taken us over. Our world is on the edge of enormous, exponential change. Our collective response to it is a kind of manic busyness, and an inability or unwillingness to just stop and rest. Our very survival is threatened at this point, and the anxiety we feel has managed to deeply distract us with endless activity.

The feeling of urgency is kind of like a drug. It separates us from that which is truly important to us, from that which really matters. It doesn’t even give us time to contemplate what that might be. We forget, every time we say, “I have so much to do-there’s no time for me to stop.” that this is a choice we are making. Our whole relationship to time is a choice, something we can open up and inquire into. Time is not this solid reality we imagine it to be.

In India, they have one word, ‘kal’’ for yesterday and tomorrow. So do many indigenous societies. I remember, when I first arrived there, how annoyed I was by that word ‘kal.’ It seemed ridiculous that a whole country could function with one word that meant two completely different things. I thought it would lead to endless confusion. But I was wrong. What I discovered was that it was always perfectly clear, in the context of the moment, whether we were talking about yesterday or tomorrow. And one day, walking down the street, it finally dawned on me, what that little word ‘kal’ meant. It meant ‘not now.’ Whether it is tomorrow, or yesterday, is less important that the fact that it is not now.

How precious is this present moment, and how easily it slips through our hands. How many hours or days of unstructured time can we give ourselves? What would we discover about ourselves in those open spaces? What are the reasons we tell ourselves we cannot stop? How can we discover another way of relating to time?

I heard about a man who was getting older, and realizing how precious his Saturdays were-his days of doing nothing special. He figured out that he had about a thousand Saturdays left, if he lived to be eighty. He took a large jar, filled it with a thousand marbles, and put it on his window sill. Every Saturday, he removed one of the marbles. When they were all gone, he lived every single Saturday as if it were grace, an unexpected gift.

You can go to Peter Russell’s website (http://www.peterrussell.com) and calculate how old you are in days, instead of years.

The indigenous people of our world knew that in order to stay connected with what is whole and true inside them, retreat was essential. They found a time to be quiet each day, a bit longer time each week, longer than that once a season, and a full retreat once a year. If you look at their faces you can feel the silence that held them, nourished them. They lived their lives in the context of that which is unborn, unstructured, and eternal. I was watching a small group of people having a cigarette break the other day, and realized that this is one of the great secrets about the tobacco habit. It allows us to stop for a few minutes, and just do nothing. The Marlboro man, riding silent and alone on the range, called to a whole generation of smokers.

I’ve decided to call my workshops and courses ‘retreats’ from now on. I want to create a container, a circle, a place where we can meet ‘at the still point of the turning world.’
‘Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.’ (T.S. Elliott)

Then we start thinking, once we’re a bit older, that our learning should proceed in an entirely different manner. Sometimes it does, but there is still a lot of falling down and getting up that is an essential part of human life. Have you noticed this? Learning to accept this aspect of life as a given and work with it in a good way can release a lot of our suffering. Molly Gordon, a wonderful coach I have worked with, speaks about learning how to “bow to failure.” When we bow to our failures, we look a little deeper than how things first appear. We get curious enough about the nature of life to consider that perhaps failure is not something to be shunned and avoided at all costs. What if our failures bring us something just as valuable as our successes? This has been a big learning for me, and I’d like to share some of it here.

Those of us brought up in a Western culture have been given a worldview, an understanding about life, that is very different from our ancient indigenous cultures. One of these differences lies in our idea of progress. In the West, we tend to think very much in straight lines. Time, life and our own achievements move in a straight line that takes us from where we are to something better. In a post-modern technological culture, we live far removed from the curving, streaming, trembling shapes of nature.  I remember being quite stunned when I realized that there are many people who do not experience life in a linear way at all. In Zen, they talk about life being a great circle. And in India, time does not go from past to future in one long line- it unfolds in enormous cycles that never stop moving and changing.

How does this understanding impact our day to day lives? I feel a space of great freedom begin to open when I envision life moving in cycles instead of lines. In a circle, ‘everything that goes around, comes around.’ Success turns into failure, turns into success. Joy turns into sorrow and back into joy. There are seasons in our lives, just as there are in nature. Nothing really stands still. Everything that I accomplish as a result of my actions is going to change. If it works out well, that will eventually change. If it doesn’t work out, that will change too, just like night turns into day, as the great circle turns.

When we first get a glimpse of all this, it can be very disorienting. We are so used to thinking we can control everything, push the obstacles out of our way, and get to where we want to be.  If we look honestly at our lives we will see the pain and struggle that happens when we believe that kind of control is possible.

How do we live when we really open to the truth of all this? That’s a question each one of us answers with our whole way of being. As human beings, we will continue to feel joy and sorrow, pain and pleasure, contentment and loss.  There is nothing about life that we need to avoid. In fact, there is nothing about life that we really can avoid!  Life is the way it is. If we can really say yes to it, then our way of life becomes one of non-violence, of flowing with the way things are, rather than fighting to change them. It’s an extraordinary thing to actually engage in life wholeheartedly, without holding back, and at the same time, let go of our desperate attachment to unchanging results.

What do you sense about your successes and failures, triumphs and defeats? What would happen if you were to truly bow down to your failures, accept them with love, gratitude, and wonder, as part of the great cycle of life?

Yes is a world
& in this world of
yes, live
(skillfully curled)
all worlds

(eecummings)

“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?

For me, this is a sign of how out of touch we are with our authentic being. What we relate to as our self is our conceptual self- the ideas, memories and images we have of who we are. There is really nothing wrong with this, but it has nothing to do with our living experience. If we open to the alive and present sense of who we are, we notice that everything is fluid, and unfixed, even our own identity.  As Bucky Fuller put it, “You are not a noun, you’re a verb.” In Buddhism they refer to it as our mind stream. This stream is who we are, not this solid, separate identity.

What happens when we really allow ourselves to be in touch with this flowing, unfixed experience of ourselves? At first it can be bewildering, disorienting. But after a while, a clarity, a brightness begins to shine. Whenever we stay with our own experience, the natural intelligence within us starts to reveal itself. Insights, flashes of deep wisdom and compassion appear out of nowhere. And we know what it is that we want. We know it in the same simple obvious way that we know we are hungry.

No one else can ever tell us when are hungry, I could read a thousand books about hunger, take a course, get a degree in hunger management, and I still wouldn’t know. It’s the same with our genuine longings. People often look so disappointed when I let them know this truth: no one can tell you what you really want. I feel them thinking, “You were supposed to help me and you’re not giving me a damn thing.” This is what happens when we lose touch with who we really are. We forget that there is something deep inside us that we can trust, without imposing rules, standards and ‘shoulds’ on ourselves.

We live our life according to our parents, or our society, or the experts, or according to what was meaningful and alive for us last year, not now. All we have is this little shining moment. And in every single moment, we have access to this natural movement in us, this homing instinct, this basic sanity.

“Everyone has inside them, what can I call it?
A piece of good news.” (Ugo Betti)