The Gentleness that Tames the Ego

As soon as we start to force and push, our human nature closes down. When we practice with precision and gentleness, our mind, heart and body remain open. In the clarity and tenderness of this openness our deep inner wisdom can reveal itself.

Many people I know, including myself, took up a practice or some kind of therapy many years ago. We didn’t know it at the time, but what most of us really wanted was escape. We wanted to get away from life-to transcend it, fix it, improve it, make it conform to what we wanted. The last thing we imagined was this way of radical presence: learning how to show up and be fully available for life, as it is.

Now, I hear almost every day, about the despair and hopelessness people struggle with, after so much practice, after working on themselves for so long. As one friend of mine said recently, “Here I am, still crazy, after all these years.”

This doesn’t mean that we are tragically flawed, lacking willpower, or missing some essential capacity. This is what the mind tells us; and it’s not true. But in order to turn the corner we reach when we feel this way, we need to allow a deep turning inside us, a fundamental shift.

This turning, this fundamental shift, only happens when we really get clear. When we realize, deep in our bones, that our old way is based on an ongoing unfriendliness towards ourselves. We are still caught in trying to be better, trying to improve, trying to be more than we are. We want to change things inside ourselves before we have even made real contact with them. There is an energy of aggression running through our whole approach to spirituality or healing, or evolving.

Each one of us has to encounter this unfriendliness and aggression, and learn how to work with it. The work begins in our mind, and goes deep into the heart and body. It is moved by a new kind of clarity, an understanding that real kindness and gentleness are essential allies on my path of transformation. Without them, I’ll end up chasing my own tail, around and around.

There is no way of knowing when this shift will happen. Or how. When we finally realize that all of this struggle, this way of making myself wrong, is not working. Sometimes this change comes suddenly, sometimes it’s like a tiny droplet of clarity and ease. Often we need a lot of help, before we can begin to live with a growing sense of this other way, this new way, which allows us to be incredibly persistent, but with gentleness. The gentleness that tames the ego, that dissolves the mind.

Gentleness and kindness are what happen when I am truly willing to work with myself, just as I am, right in the middle of the messy, untameable reality of my life. Without this very soft and loving energy, I will keep struggling, striving, forcing, and pushing. Trying to change myself, trying to fix others. Hoping I can run away to a meditation retreat, or a yoga class, or somewhere that I don’t have to face the truth of my human nature.

In the work of real transformation, we start from a different place. We realize that our path is not just about going up into higher realms. It’s also about going down, into the dark, messy shadowy realm of our humanness.

Embracing ourselves in this way sounds good, until the moment comes when we need to actually do it. Staying present to all parts of ourselves with kindness and gentleness is not the way we usually operate. It’s not how we’ve been trained. It’s not even something we normally consider or value. Our whole egoic nature is constantly rejecting the way that we are and trying to be something else.

This gentleness, this deep friendliness can feel very disorienting. It is a profound spiritual practice, but not one in which we are trying to attain a higher state. We are not trying to be anything, on the path of kindness. As we fall into the space of the heart we find that we are totally okay with being quite ordinary.

What happens to me, to my life, when I finally decide to meet life with this softness, to relate to myself with this kind of respect and deep kindness? Often we are afraid that we will fall into a kind of passivity. The heart is not passive! Love is not passive either. Respecting and loving ourselves in this way empowers us, inspires us, and clears the way for us. What the mind doesn’t know, doesn’t even suspect, is that in this space of gentleness, I start to see everything very clearly. Without any judgement, without the movement to avoid or to change, I come face to face with the precise nature of my tendencies, habitual patterns and shadows. I cannot hide from myself anymore. This is when everything starts to change.

So when we rest in this open space of love and acceptance, and when we inquire, we are engaging in a very different approach to transformation, to evolution, to waking up. Things do change, we change, our life changes, but not in the way we thought it would happen. Real transformation is quite rare. Have you noticed this?

We can accumulate a lot of knowledge, but it’s this gentleness that allows that knowledge to transform itself into wisdom, into something we can live, every day of our lives.

This wisdom is like a deer in the forest, quietly waiting, until it’s safe to come out. In this open space we can receive life’s feedback, life’s natural intelligence, without needing to protect and defend ourselves.

In this openness I can begin to hear what is really calling me, what it is that matters to me, more than anything.

Just beginning to be like this: gentle, open, vulnerable, present, we are calling into existence a whole new world. A world that unfolds naturally, and unexpectedly, the way a river flows, the way a tree blossoms.

with love,
Shayla

 

photo credit: River of Light, Pat Fleming