Lifeletter #180: Your Unprecedented Life

You, who are reading these words, right now, you have never been here before. Not ever.

Do you know this? Can you feel the truth of this in your heart, in your body? Forget about past lives-even if you’ve had millions of them, you have never been here before, in this body-mind, with this particular DNA. Your life, as the Buddhist teacher Reggie Ray puts it, is unprecedented.

Unprecedented is defined as “unknown, new, novel, groundbreaking, revolutionary, pioneering, epoch-making.” Isn’t that remarkable? Your life, by its very nature, is groundbreaking. You, because you are here for the very first time, are a revolutionary, a pioneer. And so is everyone you know.

It’s very easy to fall asleep to the truth of this. To look outside myself for answers, for formulas, for clues about who I am, and how I should live my life. It’s not that I don’t need guidance, support and feedback-I do need these things, all the time. But what I receive from others should never become my final authority. My final authority lives inside me; my inner intelligence is the only thing that can guide me, in the end. Who else could know what my life is really about, what my next steps are?

Waking up to the truth that I have never been here before gives me a kind of freedom that can be frightening. When I follow the truth of my own heart, it will take me in directions that others cannot understand. When I left Nelson and my beloved community last year, some of my closest friends were bewildered. They asked me again and again to explain why I was leaving, and I could not do that, to their satisfaction. I had to follow my own inner knowing, which wasn’t easy. It was hard to leave my community, and all the safety, love, belonging and connection that I had experienced there. I tried for years to avoid hearing the whisper that said “It’s time to leave.” Until that whisper turned into a shout that could not be ignored any longer.

Our direction, the mysterious movement of our life, is revealed to us through the receptivity of our listening. That listening can happen in prayer, in meditation, in nature, sitting on the back porch, lying in the bath. If we are too busy, we won’t be able to really listen. And often, we don’t want to. Because our unprecedented life, our original, creative, courageous life, emerges from something much bigger than we are. Vaster than anything we can know. It flows from this unknown, open space, and returns back home to it. The guidance we really need comes to us when we open to the ground of our life and make ourselves available to it.

Does this mean, that if I keep listening, I’ll receive infallible guidance and discover how to live flawlessly, effortlessly and elegantly? That’s the dream we’d like to believe in. I know how much I have longed for this! The reality is very different. If I keep opening, if I keep bowing down to this greater life, if I keep listening, I start to see my mistakes more clearly. That’s what has happened to me.

I am not using the word ‘mistakes’ as a synonym for the word ‘sin,’ or as something that should be judged and condemned. A mistake is something that takes me away from my true nature; it separates me from the basic goodness and sanity of my being.  As I become quiet and learn to listen, I see and feel all of the places where I am out of alignment. Which allows me to choose something new, again and again.

 

When she makes a mistake, she realizes it.
Having realized it, she admits it.
Having admitted it, she corrects it immediately
She considers those who point out her faults
as her most benevolent teachers.
She thinks of her enemy
as the shadow that she herself casts.

-Tao Te Ching, by Lao-Tsu
From a translation by S. Mitchell

 

My unprecedented life asks a lot of me, and at the same time, it is infinitely forgiving. Because I have never been here before, I don’t have to be perfect. A pioneer, a revolutionary, is not flawless, not without shadows. He or she is on an adventure, and such an adventure asks for humility, and more and more clarity. If I have never been here before, I’ll need to find the willingness to turn and face myself, as I am, and take responsibility for this life, this precious, never-before life. Who knows how much longer I will be here?

 

with love,
Shayla