“You can’t half catch a wave,” he said. “You have to commit to it, and then once you’ve caught the wave, you have to surrender. If you try to control it, you’ll never make it.”

That image contained something for me, something that just kept working away inside, like sand in an oyster. In the nondual coaching I do with people, we learn how to ride the waves of our feelings in a very similar way. There’s an edge, right at the heart of this practice, where I am no longer controlling my feeling, no matter how intense it is. But I’m not allowing the feeling to take me over. I’m meeting that feeling without any resistance at all, just like when I paddle up to that huge wave. It looks terrifying if I’m separate from it, trying to control it. How can I manage it? One little movement away from that wave, the contraction, the self- protective curl, and I’m lost in struggle and fear and dismay. I have to enter the wave, become one with it, or else it becomes my foe, my enemy.

It’s quite an obvious thing when it comes to surfing, not so obvious when it comes to the chaos that life brings to us, and the feelings that emerge when we are being tumbled around in that wild unpredictable flow. It could be something small, like a computer that crashes. Or it could be something bigger: a house that burns down, a diagnosis of cancer, the loss of a job.

So much of what we are taught in our culture is about being on top of things. We don’t want to break down, lose control. That’s like the ultimate humiliation-something to be avoided at all costs. But the surfer isn’t on top of the wave. He or she is one with it.

A dear friend who is a teacher, a therapist and a Vietnam vet, told me about a time during the Vietnam war when he and his group of men had to cross a field. It was just a few hundred yards of rocks and grass and mud, with the Viet Cong camped on the other side, not far away. If they could make it across without being seen or heard, they could escape down the river on the far side of the field. Travelling with them were some men from the villages, simple and very wise. One of these men helped my friend prepare for crossing the field. He was slapping mud all over his face, arms, hands, and neck, as camouflage.

As he did this, he was talking to my friend. “There’s just one thing you have to do, if you want to cross this field and come out at the river alive, ” he said.

“What’s that?” asked my friend.

“Become one with the field,” the villager replied.

It took them a long time to cross that field. Every single moment was the moment of surrender, of silent life-and-death practice. A gust of wind, a movement of grass, the sound of mud or rock or breath- these were not things to be argued with. There was no room for negotiation–that would have cost these men their lives. Resistance and refusal had no relevance in that crossing, during those endless hours in that muddy field. Each man had to discover, over and over again, what it was to be so one with that field that they were invisible to the Viet Cong.

When they finally made it across, and partway down the river, they stopped and had some conversation. The villager said something to my friend, something that took him a long time to understand. “Being one with the field, ” he said. “That’s not just how you made it out of there alive. Being one with the field is the only way we will ever put an end to war.”

The war inside and the war outside are not so different. When I can soften, when I can be the space, the open field in which my most desparate thoughts and feelings are arising, I end the war inside me. When life throws me into deep water, I want to kick and thrash around and scream about how unfair it is. “Why did this happen to me?” Then I’m lost, like the tiny sufer on his board, trying to negotiate with an enormous wave.

When I’m floundering around in big ocean waves, when my life is at stake, there is a lot of natural clarity about letting go. Somehow, in the middle of our more ordinary days, we forget that surrender is not a luxury. It’s the only way to be fully alive. It’s the only way to stop complaining, to heal the inner bitterness, to open the heart to the unconditional goodness of life.
It doesn’t mean that I’m stuck where I am, like a big lump on a log. It’s strange how often we confuse the openness of non-resistance with passivity, with being stuck and helpless. We think change can only happen through hardness, through gritting our teeth and pitting ourseves against what is.

If we keep struggling, fighting, resisting, then our life becomes a kind of unending complaint. We look as if we are grown up, but it’s only the body that has grown up. Inside we are living what I sometimes call a ‘tantrum incarnation.‘ We forget, sometimes for a very long time, that we could live like the clouds live, floating on the mountain. Not passive, but just one, moving with the great flow of life, no longer needing to hold on, to prove ourselves, to dig in and take a position.

When everything seems to be lost, when chaos and darkness take over, we have, as a coach of mine puts it, a great opportunity to ‘discover the gold.’ The gold is always here, the possibility of receiving this moment as it is. So simple.
My human nature, my conditioned mind keeps asking, “Why can’t it be my way?” Life seems to be asking us another question. We can only live our way into the answer.
“I think, finally, one must take one’s life in one’s arms.”  (Arthur Miller)
with love

Shayla

Growing up has tremendous appeal for me, at this stage in my life. I notice however, that some of my students and clients get a glazed look in their eyes when they hear these words. The idea of ‘growing up’ seems to be taking them somewhere they don’t want to be, probably into the realm of their own half-alive, highly conditioned parents. The way many of our parents were is not grown up. They just got stuck, and didn’t know how to keep moving.

Being grown up is something else. It’s showing up, letting ourselves be seen and heard, just as we are. It’s learning to live without hiding, without making excuses for ourselves. It’s giving up the safety of what we think we know for the vastness of what we don’t, what we can never really know. It’s trusting that we really do have the resources to meet the immense challenges that life brings us, and that these resources include our friends, our community, and our reaching out to ask them for help. And growing up means taking responsibility for our lives.

The circumstances of my own life have forced me, over the last few years, to learn a whole lot about ‘radical responsibility.’ I’ve had to inquire into what this actually means, and how I can embody it, really live it, every day of my life. Now I’m hearing about it everywhere I turn. It feels like a wave that is building, in the ocean of our collective consciousness.

This summer we explored it quite deeply, in a 5 day retreat I gave. The recurring question that arose for most of the people there was this: “What is the difference between radical responsibility and blaming myself for what happens?” I know that I struggled with this question for years.

In order to engage in this inquiry, we need to begin by coming back to the simplicity of our own moment to moment experience. Who creates this experience? Is anyone else the source of my experience? Can I, in all honesty, hold you accountable for what I am experiencing?

In all the years I have been teaching, not a single person has been able to answer ‘Yes’ to this question. So we all know, when we drop into a space of simply being present, open and clear, that we are responsible for our own experience. In each moment, whatever I receive from the world, from my relationships, from the circumstances of my life, comes through the filter of my own conditioning.

It’s really not so difficult to understand this. Look at Nelson Madela’s experience in prison for 26 years, and ponder for a moment what someone else, with a whole different stream of conditioning, might have made from that situation. Someone who interviewed him asked, “How did you endure all those years in prision?”
His answer was, “I wasn’t enduring. I was preparing myself, for the possibility of leading my people, when I was released.” That is radical responsibility.

If I want to access my own power, clarity and awakeness in the field of my relationships, I have to take 100% responsibility for those relationships. And this is where most people, including myself, want to back off.

“How can that be?” they wonder. “Surely the other person has some responsibility too? If I take all of the responsibility on myself, isn’t that too much? Won’t I be blaming myself for everything that isn’t working?” These questions and doubts are very natural. Let’s have a look at them.

It is true that the nature of our relationships is co-creative. How you are, how I am, impacts and affects the other person. That is undeniable. But to be aware of the impact is not the same as saying, “You made me feel like this.” As soon as I try to wiggle out of taking 100% responsibility, I start to give my power away. I cannot change you, I cannot demand that you be different than you are. The only place I have any power at all is with myself, my own willingness to work with my own conditioning.

As soon as I start to think that you need to do something, to be different than you are, I have left the place of the grown up, the adult. I am no longer standing on my own two feet. My well being depends on you. I need you to change so that I can feel better. This is how a child perceives the world.

Does this mean that I should tolerate abuse or neglect or repeated acts of unkindness from you? Of course not. That’s going much too far. When I try to imagine what this kind of responsibility would be like, instead of living it and experiencing it directly, all I have is an idea. The idea is a pale shadow, next to the reality. When I simply stand in the place of radical responsibility, it is very clear what I am no longer willing to tolerate. When I take responsibility for being the source of my own love, my own unconditioned respect, then I do not get entangled in all of these complications. Everything changes, when I am willing to see myself as the source of my own experience.

At our retreat there was a woman who has given me permission to speak of her in this lifeletter. I’ll call her Tara. She had just been through a painful separation with her husband of many years, the father of her children. Tara’s husband had an affair with another woman and then left the marriage. She was suffering quite a bit, and also very interested in radical responsibility. Sometimes our own pain can propel us in a new direction, open us to possibilities we would not have considered before.

One day we did some long written inquiries, in which Tara focused on what had happened with her husband. Her main inquiry was about how she had participated in the breakup of this relationship. Instead of blaming him for his irresponsible behaviour, for his lack of integrity, she really wanted to see how she had contributed to everything that occurred.

We gathered in the evening to share what we had written during our inquiries. Tara read hers out, and it was long and very thorough. Over the course of a few hours, she had been investigating these questions deeply. As she read out what she had written, the clarity and honesty of her answers were self evident. Her willingness, which was raw and tender, to be open and see everything, created a strong and vibrant energy, which everyone could feel. She described in detail the thoughts, the feelings, the actions and the non actions that had contributed to how her husband behaved. In her voice, in her energy, in the whole field of her consciousness, I could not find any blame or self-judgment, only clarity.

I checked with the other people in the room, asking each one if they heard any blame in what she had written and taken responsibility for. Each person answered ‘No.’

“So here it is,” I said, “thanks to Tara, we have a very tangible demonstration of what it is to take radical responsibility for your life, without any blame or negativity.”

“What is your experience now,” I asked Tara, “after reading to us what you discovered through your inquiry?”

There was a lot of radiance in Tara’s face, in her whole being. “I feel like I’ve been just washed clean,” she said.

When the regret and the blame and the guilt and the confusion about the past fall away, we find ourselves, right here, in this moment. Our relationship with everything is updated–with ourselves, with the other person, with life itself. When we have nothing to hide, and nothing to prove, we are wide open and very alive.

Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt-marvelous error!-
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures                 Antonio Machado

with love
Shayla

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?”
We explored this question together, for a few minutes. At one point I said to her, “When you are resting in awareness, thoughts and feelings arise, and there is no attempt to label them, so they pass right through you, without leaving a trace.” She replied, “Oh yes, I know how that is—and I have a feeling of it right now—there is no separate identity there, just a spaciousness.” “Yes, “ I replied, “and when we do not pull back from our experience and try to witness it, then we recognize everything that arises as inseparable from awareness, all flowing in the same stream, without needing to say what any of it is.”

After she hung up, I realized that this is one very simple response to her question:
“When I am hanging out, it’s usually me that is hanging out. When I am just sitting, there is a very gentle invitation I am offering to myself, or a possibility I am opening to: the recognition of identitylessness, the direct experience that if I try to find this person I call myself, I won’t be able to do it.”

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.

All of our defenses, the way we harden ourselves and try to protect our self-image, fall away when we no longer take ourselves seriously. Without a fixed and solid self-image, there is nothing to protect, nothing to defend. But we are trained, in some very powerful ways, to believe that there is no other way to be, that we need a solid and fixed identity, just to survive. How strange, when we were not born like that-we had to learn this whole constructed way of being. And now, we don’t even notice, unless we really take a good look, that our sense of self is a very fluid thing-it comes and goes, it rises and falls, and that’s the way it has always been.

Clowns can fall down and roll around without hurting themselves. When an acrobat falls, it’s a terrifying thing-they are so high off the ground. Our ideas of ourselves are like that-they keep us a long long way from the simple, authentic ground of our being. Who we are when we are not trying to be anyone special at all.

The lightness of being that a clown displays is full of humility. And that humility is transparent, open, with no need at all to put ourselves above or below another human being. That’s when love starts to flow, not when I think you are better than me, not when I secretly hold myself above you, but when we can both rest in the space of complete equality. We may not know how to get there, because all of our training is in the other direction, climbing up the ladder, needing to be better, terrified of being wrong, of making a fool of ourselves.

Here’s the good news: we don’t have to know how to reach the space of equality-it’s who we already are, right at the core of our being. Everybody knows it, if they are completely honest, that all of our pretensions are just a bunch of made-up stuff. Sometimes we carry these ideas, this made-up stuff around for a very long time. Until life brings us to a point where the burden of it is just too much, and something in us longs desperately to be real, to be authentic, to stop pretending.

All we need at this point is the willingness to open, to allow the rawness of what it is to be a human being to be here, without pushing it away. In that awkward, raw, deeply uncomfortable place, there is something so free, so beautiful, and so ordinary. We don’t even have to give it a name. It shines by itself.

Adya Shanti, a nondual teacher, has a picture of a clown, sitting by a pond, meditating. Deep in the water, shining back at him, is a reflection of the Buddha, his true nature. But you can turn the picture upside down and look at it the other way too. Then you see the Buddha, sitting by the pond meditating. And what looks out at him from the water is his true nature, the clown.

We could stumble into this freedom, this innocence any time. We could find this willingness to trust something that isn’t about how we appear, that isn’t about being together, and on top of life. Down underneath all of our efforting is this other thing: call it faith, or trust, or letting go.

Let this then, my small poem,
like a new moon, slender and barely open,
be the first prayer that opens me to faith.
David Whyte

with love
Shayla

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)

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?

I had ten long days to notice that having no bathroom was very inconvenient, way outside of my comfort zone. When I was absolutely honest with myself, I saw that it no impact on my intrinsic well being. This was not something I had to think about-it was quite obvious in the moment. When the pipe was finally fixed, and we had running water again, I felt such gratitude. Entitlement shuts gratitude right down, like a knot in a hose. I made many prayers that week, for all of my fellow human beings who live without running water, and for all of us who think we are entitled to our conditional happiness and our suffering.

One day I was standing at the window, thinking about all of the things in my life right now that are not so easy for me to deal with, opening to the feelings that come up in relation to them. In a moment of clear seeing, it came to me that there is nothing right or wrong with any of these feelings, they are simply irrelevant. What feels relevant is gratitude. Gratitude emerges when the entitlement falls away. It’s not something I can produce, it’s not like a new age affirmation I can grind into my heart. It’s simply who I am, my natural state, when I’m willing to be here, in the utter nakedness and unpredictability of the moment.

I realized that I had confused many things with genuine happiness. When things go my way, I feel relief, sometimes a sense of victory, but not the natural unconditioned happiness of my being, not the gratitude that doesn’t depend on anything.

Do I think I’m even entitled to be alive? Who gives me my next breath? I can’t even ask these questions if comfort is a priority. They are like medicine, like clean water:

“Are you coming to me,
water of a new life
that I have never drunk?” (Antonio Machado)

with love
Shayla

I never know what I’m going to say in response to that question. In that moment, I replied, “A lot of the Radiant Mind work is about learning how to be with what is.”

“Really?” he responded. ” Just being with what is? It sounds so simple.”

“Yes,” I said, “It’s incredibly simple, and our willingness to be with what is lies at the heart of our capacity to access non-dual or unconditioned awareness.”

Later on that day, my daughter came over after school. She is taking a program that has nothing to do with non-dual awareness. “What are you learning right now, in your course?” I asked her. “Oh, she said, “It’s amazing what we are doing. We’re learning how to be with what is.”

That was quite a moment for me, because my daughter, up until now, has not been at all interested in any kind of spiritual practice. I realized that ‘being with what is’ is at the heart, not only of non-dual awakening, but  of all healing and transformation. Until we can be with what is, we live in a state of conflict, struggle, and sometimes, violence.

After that moment with my daughter, a question bubbled up inside me and wouldn’t go away. I started to wonder about willingness. Where do we find the willingness to be with what is, when what is can be so uncomfortable, terrifying, and painful? Our whole survival system is designed to move us away from pain. It seems so counter- intuitive to just rest in what we have been trying to avoid, suppress and deny. Where do we find the willingness to be here, just as we are?

I was working with a woman recently who was really struggling with anxiety. I’ll call her Sara. The first time we met I asked her what she had already tried. “Well,” she said,  “Here we go: I’ve tried meditation,  I’ve tried hypnosis, I’ve tried therapy, I’ve tried medication, I’ve tried past-life regression, I’ve tried Emotional Freedom Therapy, I’ve tried yoga and deep breathing, and I’ve tried alcohol and cocaine.”

“What a  great list, ” I said. “How did all of those things work for you?”
“They didn’t” she said, “They worked for a while, and then they stopped working.”

“Now you know.” I said. “You don’t need a book or an expert to tell you this–you can speak from your own experience. This is the secret that most people don’t want to know: we cannot control our experience in the way we would like to. We can’t get rid of things that way. It’s not that there’s something wrong with us-it just isn’t possible. The more you try to control anxiety, the worse it gets.”

“Then what do I do?” Sara asked. She was a  beautiful young woman, a singer, who wanted to be able to sing in front of people without being crippled by anxiety.

“You stay with what you already know, ” I told her. “Your anxiety is not going away, and neither, obviously, is your desire to sing. So you have one possibility before you: learn how to get up in front of these people, and be with your fear. Change the demand that you are carrying, the part of you that says I have to be in a perfect state before I do what I really want to do. You’ll wait forever if you believe that part of your mind. ”

We spent a few months together, working with her willingness to be with her anxiety, not to push it away, but to welcome it, and allow it to move, flow and vibrate as she sang. Again and again she bumped up against a place of hopelessness in relation to her anxiety, a feeling that she should really be able to control this thing, get a handle on her fear. Whenever she reached that hopeless place, we would sit there together.  It was clear to me that this hopelessness was not a bad thing. It was a potent reminder that everything she had already tried has not really worked. She would encounter the hopelessness, and then move through it to a place where she was once again willing to be with her fear.

I noticed how much easier it was for me to work with her whenever she remembered that controlling and managing her own experience had not helped at all. I started to feel this living, breathing energy emerging through the hopelessness. It was as if some part of her was emerging, some aspect of her being that was truly willing to be with herself, just as she was, without fighting and struggling to get rid of anything.

Along with this rising energy, I noticed a lot more kindness, a tenderness in the way she was relating to herself. Whenever we are focused on changing what we feel, there is a basic antagonism in the whole field of our energy, because we are at war with our own experience. For Sara, anxiety had been the enemy for a long time. Now she was learning how to welcome it, in spite of everthing her conditioned mind was trained to do.

I started to experience this hopelessness as something creative, authentic and empowering. It’s an edge that we all meet, in our learning and evolution-a place we normally want to avoid. But until I can really see what is not working, until I can allow myself to feel the cost of what I have been unsuccessfully trying to do, I’ll keep on doing what I’ve always done.

When Sara finally gave her performance, it was the best one of her life. She spoke of what is was like to be up there in front of a group of people,  knowing that she could be fully present and sing from her heart, without having to make the fear disappear.

When we start to recognize in our bones, in our hearts and bodies, that there are no enemies within us, everything starts to change.  We can pull out the white flag and wave it, we can release our ongoing need to fight and struggle and judge. We actually start to trust the healing, liberating power of awareness.

This is good news. Another way is possible. A way of gentleness, non-violence and deep friendliness.

When I was much younger, living  in an ashram in the Himalayas, I put myself through all sorts of austerities and self-torture in the name of  awakening and healing. I really believed that’s what I had to do. I probably would have slept on a bed of nails, if I could have found one.

After many many years of this, I encountered a great deal of hopelessness and defeat. And I realized there was another approach. In those days I called it “The Soft Way.” I didn’t really know what it was, but I could feel it calling to me. I couldn’t open to it for a long time.  It took a lot of defeat and hopelessness before I could really enter the soft way.  It stills feels like a miracle to me, after so many years of the hard way.  I’m so grateful that I discovered this way, even though it took me most of my life. Some of us are slow learners. I’ve had students and clients who were much quicker than I was to fall into the soft way.

Of course we still slip back into struggle and control, but that’s okay. In every moment, the possibility is born again: to remember the truth– I am not in control, and all of my power and freedom lies with my willingness to be with what is.

love
Shayla

Every year I have clients who speak to me about their challenges at this time of year. My daughter often says about birthdays, Christmas and New Years, “It’s a set-up, a perfect way to make yourself miserable. Any other day of the year, you’d be happy just to have an ordinary day. But on these days, you’re supposed to be having an incredible time, and often, it doesn’t measure up to what you had hoped for.” I have a few friends who have been bold and brave enough to declare, “no presents this year” and stick to it. I know people who have even tried ignoring Christmas and birthdays altogether. But I sense there’s something here the human heart longs for.  I think these times are really about community and celebration.

And this is what we often call celebration: herd us all together into one space, turn up the music, pass out the drinks and the drugs, and leave us to drift-lost, isolated, occasionally making brief contact before we sink even deeper into the collective coma.

When did we forget how to celebrate, really? What is it to celebrate? How do I celebrate you, us, our life together?
I learned a few years ago that for the Mayans, every single day was unique and sacred, like a musical note with its own vibratory meaning. They woke up each morning ready to celebrate that particular day, as an acknowledgment of the depth, richness and glory of this universe we float in together.

How would you celebrate today? How would I? I’m remembering in India that they have eight seasons instead of four.  I look out the window. Today is warmer, cloudy, the end of fall, but not the very end- many of the trees still have leaves clinging to the branches. In my garden, the last flowers still bloom. Leaves cover the sidewalk-the sound of them is in the air. People walk by with window plastic in their arms; and snow tires are dragged out of storage. Snow could fall at any time-the body knows this.

I celebrate this as the time of the out-breath, the season of the long exhale. Can’t you hear it- that soft aaaah, as a leaf sails downward through the gray sky? Some leaves take a long time to fall. I see faces looking sad and lonely as winter comes close; but I want to rejoice, celebrate the quiet. No more lawn mowers, outdoor radios, motorboats and street parties. I feel my body drinking in the silence. It’s a time to lie down with a loved one, a time of fire, and chocolate, and things bubbling on the stove. It’s a time to be grateful for the roof over my head, for my quilt, my long poncho, and hot baths.  It’s a time to sit still and listen to the sound of my own breath. It’s a time to open to the mystery within-to look into your eyes and not know who is looking back. It’s a time of letting go, of going back to the root. Whenever the sun comes out, the whole body wants to reach out for that last soft warm kiss.

I celebrate all of this: that which I can see, feel, hear and smell, and that which is invisible and unseen.

There’s nothing to hold onto in the last part of autumn. Every falling leaf speaks of this, of the great unending stream of change at the heart of each life. We share so many things as human beings, but this is one of the deepest. We are here on earth for a brief visit only-no permanent visas are issued here. If we want to celebrate in a real way, we need to come to terms with this-otherwise our merry- making has a frantic quality to it. I remember a moment on retreat a few years ago, when my whole being finally opened to the truth of impermanence. Instead of fighting it, I just let go, and realized that it makes each moment unspeakably precious.

One of my teachers had a wonderful way of contemplating the preciousness of time: imagine for a moment how much time you spend just taking care of this body-working, driving, cleaning, cooking, eating and sleeping. If you take two minutes to brush your teeth, and you live until you are 75, by the end of your life you will have spent 76 days just brushing your teeth! How much time does that leave you to celebrate life, the mystery of being human, of being alive as this body? And what about your unconditioned being, your awake, alive core- that which is much more than a body, a fleeting form? How much time do you spend celebrating that? How would it be if we could celebrate it all?

Let’s take a moment now, to lie down in the grass with Walt Whitman, one of the great masters of celebration, and listen to him sing a few words from his ‘Song of Myself’:

‘I celebrate myself;
And what I assume you shall assume;
For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.

…And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
I have no mockings or arguments—I witness and wait.

I believe in you, my Soul..
Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?  I hasten to inform him or her, it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.’

When she was about eleven, my daughter said something to me that stayed with me for years:
“There are two kinds of pain,” she said, ” the pain of being frozen and stuck, and the pain that happens when we are open, feeling something deeply, when things are flowing and moving through us.” I felt the wisdom in that statement drop into me like a seed. That seed sprouted slowly into an ongoing sense of wonder about all the ways in which we try to protect ourselves. And why not? Human life is so incredibly uncertain, delicate, unpredictable. A woman spoke to me this morning about a huge challenge that came into her life: ” I never saw it coming… I think most of the time, that’s how it is. We don’t see things coming–they just appear.”

Anything can happen to us: things we would never ask for. Sometimes these events, these losses and defeats, take years for us to pass through. This is how it is for all of us– the kind of security we dream about, the kind of control we imagine, is not really possible. Since the stock market crashed, I’ve had people calling me and telling me about how long they have stayed at a job that meant nothing to them, in the hopes of building up some financial security. “I thought it was important, ” one man said to me, “and now I realize, there’s nowhere I can put what’s left of my money where it will be safe. What was I thinking? And what have I been doing all these years?”

Great question, a heartbreaking one. Sometimes those questions feel like sharp arrows that pierce us, and reach to our core. Like a splinter in the the foot that you can’t reach. I told this man that I think we can find out how to open to the “whole catastrophe” as Zorba the Greek called it, that it’s never too late for this. We cannot discover what it is to be fully human without being willing to experience loss, over and over again. If we are not willing, if we cling to one side of life, and reject the other, then grief and pain get frozen inside us. It’s so easy to lean into the glory, and refuse the difficulty.

I’ve listened to people speaking to me recently about how hard it is for them to be around their aging parents. They feel the rigidity, the brittleness that happens when we keep retreating, hiding, resisting the wild, chaotic flow of life. “I don’t want to end up like that,” one of them said. “I want to keep flowing, letting go, welcoming what life brings to me.” In the Radiant Mind work, we call this “broadening the river of life,” opening to more and more, protecting ourselves less and less, releasing our attachment to a solid, fixed identity. And sometimes it just feels like too much, and the mind wants to shut everything down. We can let ourselves experience that as well: what it feels like when we defend, protect, and try to hide from what seems to be threatening us.

Last night I went up to our hospital, where the daughter of a dear friend of mine was giving birth. I walked in the doors of that hospital and remembered dear ones who had died there, had miscarriages, gone through detox, struggled with cancer. I wandered around for a while, stunned by the depth and power of all that had happened in that small building.

I remembered sitting at the side of a dying friend last March. And Brooke sitting across from me– both of us watching, breathing, listening, as our friend slowly passed away. One night he said to me, “I don’t think we know what we are doing here. How can we know? All we have is our own ideas, the things that make us feel more comfortable. We don’t really know how to help her.” So we just sat together, in that unknowing. There was nothing else to do.

Malidoma Some, the African indigenous teacher and shaman, talks about life in his community: “We were a large village,” he says, ” but we all knew each other. Almost every week, someone would die, or give birth, or get married. Celebration and grieving were part of our everyday lives.” Sometimes, in our technological society,  it feels as if we have flattened everything out, in an effort to find some comfort, some ease. We flee from the intensity of the moment to the company of our machines– our cell phones, computers, ipods, cars, TV’s. Machines don’t feel anything. They offer us a refuge, or so it seems.

Malidoma tells a powerful story about how our western world relates to grief. He was invited a few years ago to a global cermony at Arlington Cemetery in Washington, a collective mourning for all the people lost in war. Teachers, artists, statesmen and leaders from all over the world came to bear witness to the kind of suffering that war brings to us all.

Malidoma described the long evening, and how he waited, as speeches were made, as candlelit processions passed by, and as songs were sung, for some genuine expression of grief. He assumed that it was all building up to that-that this outpouring of grief would be the climax of the whole ceremony. As the evening progressed, he realized it was ending, and he had only seen a few people weeping. “My God,” he thought, “these people really do not know how to sob their guts out.”
“No Malidoma, ” I thought when I read that, “we do not. We’ve been taught, mostly, how to keep it together, to be strong, not to let grief have it’s way with us.”

I understand, with all the chaos and destruction happening on our planet right now, that the idea of feeling our grief might be overwhelming. But the idea of it and the experience of it are so very different. If we honour the grief that we carry, simply because it is here, we can begin to relate to the experience of our sorrow directly, without concluding that something is wrong, just because there is suffering. So much of our pain comes from the belief that something should have been different, that something should or should not have happened.  If we allow ourselves to release these beliefs, just for a while, we can open to what we are feeling  without judgment or resistance.

Sometimes we are not ready to open to all of it, but when we allow ourselves to be fully present, something softens deep inside our heart.

We can simply sit down for ten minutes, and listen, without interfering, to the song that is being sung this moment, in the space of our own being. Perhaps it’s a song of sorrow, of aloneness, of being lost, confused and bewildered. This is not about moping around and indulging in all sorts of sad stories about how hard it is when we don’t get what we want. That’s not grief, that’s depression, bitterness. Depression leaves no room for the birth of compassion.

Grief is different. It’s not frozen– it’s fluid and alive. It starts, like a small stream, deep in our personal lives. If we open to it, it carries us into a huge river, where we all move together, through birth and death, loss and celebration, without much control over any of it.

The things you struggle with are part of my life too. I am not above or beyond or separate from anything that comes to challenge and shake you up. In this raw, vulnerable place, the last place we would ever choose to be, there is tremendous kindness and gentleness. From that place, we do not strike out, or punish or blame. We are able to simply be where we are, without struggling to change anything. In that place, which is open and without boundaries, it becomes clear that judgment, cruelty and violence are what happen when we just don’t know what to do with our own suffering.

love
Shayla

A man I work with was telling me about how he spent the Christmas holidays with his family. He went back home to the big city to spend time with them. Before he arrived, he decided to try something new: he followed the impulses and desires of his heart, his authentic being, instead of going along with conventional expectations and traditions. While he was there, the connections he had with his family and friends were intimate, surprising, and deeply fulfilling. One morning he had a spontaneous and life-changing conversation with his mother.

I was feeling a lot of joy as I listened to him speak. Then he said this:
“It was wonderful, to be so present and open with these people I love. And there was a lot of anxiety. It wasn’t overwhelming, but I could feel my heart fluttering a lot. And it was not easy to sleep at night.”
The kind of anxiety that was arising for him is what I call sacred anxiety. I used to experience it when I was engaged in a lot of public speaking. I learned, after struggling with it for a while, to welcome that anxiety, to open to it and let it move through my body. During that time I discovered that the best talks I gave were when that anxiety was present at the beginning, not the talks where I was calm and sure of myself at the start.

This was very surprising to me, but the evidence was in my face. It happened again and again-when I was trembling, tender and vulnerable, I was able to connect with the audience and myself in a way that was palpable. I realized that the anxiety penetrated through the facade I was hoping to present to the audience-that there was actually something about it that was awakening and enlivening for me.
In my work as a coach and teacher, I’ve seen more and more people trying to deal with anxiety over the last few years. They speak to me of sleeplessness, sweating hands, churning stomachs, fluttering hearts, feelings of dread and helplessness. I also have more and more people coming to me and saying, “I want to do something different. I want to break out of my old life, contribute something, give of myself. But I don’t know what to do, and I am afraid.”

I really wonder how we can support each other, at this stage in our collective evolution, when this kind of anxiety appears in the middle of our lives. A student said to me recently, “Life seems so different now. It feels wild and unpredictable. I feel nervous and uncertain a great deal of the time. Has life really always been this way, and we just didn’t want to see?”   What a great question!

Whenever we take a risk, when we come out of our little cozy cocoon and allow ourselves to do something new, or spontaneous, when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable, to let go of an old way of being, anxiety can arise. And the nature of our conditioning tells us that this anxiety means something is wrong. It’s not so easy to question this assumption. We go right along with it, a great deal of the time. We try to avoid the anxiety, change it, fix it, transcend it. We treat it as an enemy. We know how we want to be: strong, confident, self-assured, someone who knows what they are doing! Then our anxiety becomes toxic, an obstacle, something we need to eliminate so we can get on with our lives and our fixed agendas.

When I am willing to meet life as it is, not as I want it to be, I begin to see how unpredictable and out of control it truly is. I think I know what’s going to happen, and I don’t. I think I know who you are, how you will behave, and I don’t–I am clinging to images and ideas that live in the past, that have nothing to do with right now. The truth is– anything can happen. How unsettling and disturbing it can be to face right into this. And my attempts to create a life that is safe and calm and free from anything wild or chaotic do not result in the peace I am looking for. What I get, when I retreat into my cocoon, is deadness, numbness and claustrophobia.

Terry Dobson, the great akido master, was speaking about his practice in an interview. “Don’t you get afraid, even now, when you step onto the mat and face your opponent?” he was asked.
“Of course, ” he said. “Of course I feel fear. I am a human being. But I am very accustomed to my fear.”

How easy it is to get locked into an idea of how we want to be, of how life should be. And then anything that threatens these ideas is something we need to avoid: the fluttering heart, the trembling in the knees. Instead of recognizing the sacred nature of what is arising, we turn against it and it becomes toxic. It’s the very same thing, but our whole experience of it depends on how we relate to it. If we open to it, welcome it, our anxiety becomes a doorway, an awakening, a sign that we are right at the edge of something new, alive and creative. If we push it away, it becomes a wolf at our door, something we keep running from, even in our dreams.

Candice Pert talks about the nature of our physical heart in her book, ‘The Molecules of Emotion.’ Many people suffer from anxiety when they notice their heart-beat becoming erratic and irregular. ‘The fluttering heart’ feels like a bad sign. She confronts all of our assumptions about a healthy heart: that it functions in a way that is always calm, predictable, steady and reliable. If the nature of life is chaotic and totally unpredictable,  then our heart, which is intimately connected with our aliveness, functions in the same way. She wonders how it could be otherwise. A healthy heart skips beats, slows down, speeds up and jumps around, because it is pulsating with the flow of life.

Laurie Knox, a remarkably gifted healer that I work with, has helped me a great deal in opening to my own anxiety. She spoke to me one day about our conditioned reactions in the face of a crisis or emergency. “When something happens to our child, or our partner, or a parent, we think we need to be strong for them, a source of stability and comfort. We push our anxiety away, so that we can be more solid and present. But how can we really be present for them, if we are not willing to be present for our own experience?”

I remember when she asked me that question. It was one of those blessed moments when everything stopped. I lay there, on her table, thinking about how many times I had tried to hide from my daughter the intense anxiety I was feeling about her. I realized that it had never worked, and that I needed to try something radically different.

My whole life has changed since I made that decision. And it wasn’t really a decision, it was simply something that became so totally clear I could no longer avoid or deny it.

That’s my prayer right now, that we can learn to open and welcome this anxiety, and in welcoming it, discover that no part of us needs to be left out.