The less your resist your suffering, the sooner it passes.
A simple truth, but a profoundly liberating one. Non-resistance forms the basis of the first step in the practice of freedom I teach. You have to accept what is happening if you want to be free of it. Ultimately, you have to welcome it because it is showing you where you are not yet free.
If you avoid, reject, or try to deny your suffering—whether it is anxiety, fear, resentment, anger, guilt, loneliness, or something else—you only make it worse. Or, as the old saying goes: “If you run away from a ghost it will chase you and haunt you for the rest of your life, but if you stop and turn and face it, it will disappear, because ghosts aren’t real.”
As an example of what I mean by non-resistance, I want to share an excerpt from a new book I am writing. I kept a meditation journal 28 years ago, at a time when I was in the process of selling my chiropractic practice in Santa Rosa, and getting ready for an extended trip through South East Asia, which was really spiritual journey for me. It was a time for me of great uncertainty, anxiety, and insecurity. I was still many years away from realizing my true nature,
The book’s tentative title is Before and After Awakening: An Old Meditation Journal and my Experience Now. This excerpt is from April 26, 1983. The journal itself is enclosed in quotation marks, and my comments today are in italics.
“Barb and I fought last night, a “you’re wrong and I’m right” clash as all fights are. I think I was the wrong one though, the instigator. My inner voice always tells me what’s so and yet I still persist in ignoring it, in being “right” anyway. Sometimes I just don’t want to hear the truth about myself. Sitting as I am now, just being here, feeling ever more light and free, all I feel is love for Barb. Now it doesn’t matter what she says or does. What happens at those other times then, when one or both of us falls apart?”
*
“Falling apart is the clue, perhaps? Here, now, I am not falling apart. On the contrary I am coming more and more together.”
*
“This is the quality of energy—whole, intact, indestructible—I want to experience more of in my daily life. Not just when I am sitting.”
*
I was still very attached to feeling good, whole, at ease in those days (as opposed to feeling contracted, uncomfortable, lousy), and it wasn’t till I let go of the attachment to how I felt, in my body and my psyche, that I finally began to taste true freedom. Of course, this is the ego at work, the “I” that wants to feel this particular way (whatever makes it feel “good”), and resists feeling that way (whatever makes it feel “bad”).
Basically, the ego is a judging machine. It is forever judging what is in its best interests—and the physical body that it deems an extension of “it.” But when the truth is realized—that we have an ego, but we are not our ego—then the whole body/mind relaxes, and we find ourselves in the natural state.
We are always, for the most part, relaxed, at ease, and in the flow. And when there is discomfort, or even a major health crisis, like the strokes I had at the end of 2003, we just deal with what’s so, and flow with it as best we can. But we always remain calm, clear, and present.
*
“When I am very still, as I am right now, there is an extraordinary sense of lightness and my awareness is unobstructed, translucent. There is nothing in the way. It is as if every cobweb of memory, every trace of thought, has been blown or swept away and there is just this refreshing clarity. How easy it is to “lose” it though, to drop back into the mind state with all its needs, desires, fears, regrets, hopes, doubts, obsessions. It that what the “fall from grace” really means?”
*
The “fall from grace” is actually the descent back into the ego, the “I” or “me.” The problem, I would eventually realize, is not the mind which, left to itself, is an amazingly brilliant instrument for reflection, creativity (everything made by humans began as an idea in someone’s mind!), and communication.
But it’s as “we,” as the ego-self, get identified with the mind that all “our” problems—and all suffering—begins. Freedom is seeing that we’re not this “I,” this “me,” but rather this ever-present, aware being that gives birth to the idea of “I” and “me.” This has to be seen again and again until we get it, realize it.
