Lifeletter #123: Becoming Unpredictable

The Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron talks about spiritual practice as a way of becoming unpredictable. This is quite a revolutionary way to practice. It’s not about becoming a better person, developing spiritual capacities, uplifting the people in your world. It’s certainly not about pleasing anyone.

Perhaps some of the people in your world don’t want you to become unpredictable! To feel you stepping outside the circle of your habitual ways of being might be quite threatening for them. Families can be like this. I speak with a lot of people around Christmas time who find going home for the holidays to be a deadening experience. People in families forget how to surprise each other.

Learning how to surprise the people in your life can bring you great joy and vitality. But in order to surprise someone else, you have to surprise yourself as well. And that’s not so easy. It’s not something you can plan for, with your mind. Becoming unpredictable takes a certain kind of practice. You need to learn how to dip into a deeper stream inside your own being, to touch the flow of your untamed creative nature. You have to be willing to look at everything in your world with fresh eyes.

It’s edgy, in this place where real aliveness is. To connect with your creative energy can be disturbing and chaotic. This stream of fresh bright energy clears things away; it carries old detritus and fossilized ways of being out to the sea.

We are such complex creatures. We long for what is creative and wild in ourselves, and we cling to the familiar with great devotion. We want the people we care about to know us, and as soon as they do, we feel stifled and confined by that knowing.

I can’t make becoming unpredictable into a project. Learning to surprise myself is not a goal I can march towards, like a good soldier. That will just bring the aliveness of what I truly long for back inside the same old box.

Becoming unpredictable is more like a dance. It’s like learning to follow something I have been ignoring. Learning to hear music that has been drowned out by what has been in the foreground. Slowing down, softening, becoming very receptive and vulnerable to what is not known.

This has been happening for me a lot lately. I had to let myself feel how tired I was, deep in my bones, of carrying around the same identity, of being the same person. Letting myself sink into the truth of this cracked something open in my heart. The ice of winter began to move. I found myself becoming grateful for the small moments of surprise, of wonder, that appear out of nowhere. They don’t come when I demand them. They come when I am tender, open and willing. Ready to be surprised, ready to be wrong about what I thought I knew.

Leave the familiar for a while.
Let your senses and bodies stretch out
Onto the meadows, shores and hills

                                                       ~Hafiz

Happy New Year,
with love,
Shayla