I was speaking with a woman the other day about our fundamental nature-the openness of presence. This aliveness, where I am here without defences – simply, effortlessly, present. Without holding on to any fixed idea of who I am, because all such ideas come from the past.
“I feel so vulnerable,” she said, “when I allow this openness. There are feelings, which I don’t want people to see. I’m so used to another way of being.”
“Yes,” I said, “yes, we are so used to hiding, pretending to be much more together than we really are. We have so many ideas of how we like to appear, even to ourselves.”
To simply be ourselves,without any effort or agenda, is strangely unfamiliar. We slip into these moments sometimes, and this natural ease feels like grace, like a radical lightness, like slipping a heavy pack off our back. To be comfortable with who we are, to be unafraid of our feelings and our thoughts, gives us such freedom and deep confidence.
When I am anxious, troubled, when my thoughts keep me up at night, it can seem like a situation outside myself is the problem – another person, something lacking, something wrong with me. Something that should be very different from the way it is.
“What will I say to my boss in our meeting?” I wonder. “How will I deal with this friend, and what she says to me ?” “How will I pay my rent this month?” “How do I manage the intensity of my sexual desire?” or “What will I do if something happens to my child?”
If I look deeper, if I get some clarity, I find that it’s only ever myself that I’m afraid of: my thoughts, my feelings, my beliefs and perceptions. If I’m okay with what is going on in the field of my own being, I’ll be able to deal with anything. Okay doesn’t mean that my conditioned mind likes what is happening. It means I have the capacity to meet this moment without the judgements, the labels, and the reactions of my mind. To step out of what I know and into this startling freshness, this newness that is always arising.
This is what I am hearing, more and more clearly, from people in all walks of life. It’s time for something new. A way of being with ourselves and with each other that is transparent, authentic and natural. Where I am no longer at war with myself, no longer trying to jump out of the moment, into a better place.
A beautiful woman on a call today said, “When this anxiety comes, it’s so hard to be with it. I move away, I try to get rid of it, I want a band-aid, something to fix it with.” This is our training, this is how we have all been conditioned. We are all in the same boat. Trying to avoid, to control, to manage, instead of allowing everything to be as it is, in the openness of presence.
The nature of this presence, this aliveness, is unbounded, and unconditioned. We can call this our spiritual nature. But this word ‘spiritual’ is just a label, an idea, that points to something we cannot wrap our arms around. As soon as I hear the word ‘spiritual,’ it’s so easy to abandon my human nature, to move away from myself. As soon as I want to reach a ‘higher state’ I have rejected where I am and who I am right now.
I cannot open this way. What’s the good of being spiritual if I’ve thrown parts of myself away? It doesn’t make any sense at all. I know this because I tried all of this myself, for a very long time. I struggled, I tried so hard, I wanted to be who I thought I should be. I did all of the practices, until I was exhausted. I ended up in a very unhappy place. None of this is wrong – it’s just what we do as long as we do it, until we are ready for something else. Something so simple, so real, something that actually works.
What I didn’t know, all those years I was trying to be spiritual, trying to be evolved, was that our conscious presence, our natural awakeness, includes everything: the sensations running through the body, these feelings, and all the crazy thoughts that come and go. One minute I’m riding high, feeling great, feeling courageous, and full of appreciation; the next moment all that is here is a complaint, a bitterness, or a demand. Perhaps even despair. So what? This is how it is, to be a human being. If I open to what life brings me, I have access to this living energy, that takes the form of sadness, or anger, or confusion.
Here is what is possible: we can create, invoke, call forth a field in which we really come together, in which there is the unconditional freedom to be transparent, to be real, to discover what it is to be fully human.
Relaxing into the moment, being with everything that comes to me, opens up a whole new realm of possibilities. From this open space of presence, I can discover, for myself, what is really going on here, Nobody else can tell me this. I have to see, feel for myself, the nature of this conditioning, this resistance, this refusal, that traps and confines me, that limits me, and crushes all the joy and freedom right out of me.
There is so much natural pleasure, so much clarity, so much aliveness right here, in this recognition: we don’t have to fix each other, we don’t have to look for techniques, for information, for tools, for more understanding. We just have to learn to rest here, in this moment, and to inquire together, into what is really true.
We are explorers, adventurers, in this together. I don’t have to know exactly where I am going, or what I am doing. I can lay this need to know everything down, and begin to trust in another kind of intelligence, a natural wisdom that emerges, right out of the moment, when I show up, as I am.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin had a word for this; he called it ‘tatonne’. It’s the tapping sound that a blind person makes with their white stick, as they tap their way along.
We can do this, if we want to. We can discover another way, an openhearted, courageous and vulnerable way of being, together.
We cannot do this alone. But together, we can tap tap tap our way home.
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