I was working with a beautiful group of women this spring, exploring what it is to listen and express from the heart. We were opening to the simplicity of just being present for whatever shows up, without any agenda of our own. Of course it’s not so easy to just snap your fingers and make all your egoic agendas vanish, but with a lot of willingness, many of our habitual preoccupations were falling away.  At one point one of the women said to me, “But we do have agendas.”

“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)