Spring

This is inspired by the wonderful author (and my personal Guru) Elizabeth Gilbert. I wrote this back in July 2007.

One of my favorite books makes a reference to Zen masters…saying “You cannot see your reflection in running water, only in still water.” I lived such confusion for so long, something was telling me it would be spiritually negligent of me to continue going in circles as I was going.

“What I wanted to do, actually was to give myself a retreat of solitude and stillness. When I look back at the years before the day I finally decided to give myself this retreat…I see a detailed chronicle of confusion. And the moment when I came to this metaphorical island all by myself was the very worst of that entire dark journey. The bottom of the pain and the middle of it.

I didn’t even know what I was going to really do with the time. I just knew that I vowed to myself to stick with it until something inside of me changed. It was my ultimate truth and reconciliation hearing.

Everyday I would observe my thoughts, my emotions, my reactions. The yogic sages say that all the pain of a human life is caused by words, as is all the joy. We create words to define our experiences and those words bring attendant emotions that jerk us around like dogs on a leash. We get seduced by our own mantras (I’m a failure…I’m lonely….I’m confused….I’m a failure…) and we become monuments to them. To stop talking for a while, to take a break from those everyday mantras, then…is to attempt to strip away the power of words, to stop choking ourselves with words, to liberate ourselves from our suffocating mantras.

In that state of solitude and silence, there was room now for everything hateful, everything fearful, to run across my empty mind. I felt like a junkie in detox - a pitiful parade of all my failings, my lies, my selfishness, jealousy, arrogance. But this much I knew – I never didn’t want to be there, and I never wished that anyone were there with me. I knew that I needed to do this and that I needed to do it alone.

Self acceptance and self forgiveness takes courage, consciousness and an open heart. You need the courage to see yourself as an entire package - the light and the dark of you. You need to know who this person is you are trying to forgive and love unconditionally. And that's where the consciousness seeps in. Consciousness is the little skeleton key that opens the door to living with intention....the intention to live today differently than yesterday. The intention to replace
hurt, anger, sadness and fear with endless opportunity, limitless power, and infinite love.

So I left that dark place and started walking toward the light. I looked into my heart, at my own goodness, and I saw its capacity. I saw that my heart was not even nearly full, not even after having taken in and tended to all those calamitous urchins of sorrow and anger and shame; my heart could easily have received and forgiven even more. Its love was infinite.

I think the woman I am now, about the life that I am now living, and about how much I always wanted to be a strong person and live this life, liberated from fear, expectations, and the need for external acceptance. I think of everything I endured before getting here and wonder if it was me - I mean, this happier, more balanced, and stronger me, who is now paving a path of her own – who pulled the other, younger, more confused and more struggling me forward during the last few years. And maybe it was this present and fully actualized me who was hovering for the last few years over that young, confused girl who whispered lovingly on July 3rd, “It’s okay. Everything will be ok. Everything will eventually bring you to a better place. To right here. Right to this moment, where I was always waiting in peace and contentment, always waiting for her to arrive and join me.”

I still have a ways to go. I still have some things to work out on my own. I know that contentment and happiness are not a stroke of luck, some things that just descend upon you like fine weather if you’re fortunate enough. You fight for them, strive for them, insist upon them, and sometimes even travel on a journey all by yourself looking for them. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you’ve achieved a state (or even a glimmer) of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it; you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness, to stay afloat on top of it. If you don’t, you will leak away you innate contentment.

I also know that you can select your thoughts the same way you can select your clothes you’re going to wear every day. This is a power you can cultivate. This is a Yogic path about disentangling the built-in glitches of the human condition, which (simplifying it - is the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment. This is about recognizing a Self who is at peace - a supreme Self that is our true identity. Before you realize this true identity, say the Yogis, you will always be in despair, discontent, searching. They say that Yoga is the dedicated effort in self-mastery to haul your attention away from your brooding over the past and your nonstop worrying about the future so that you can seek, instead, a place of eternal presence from which you may regard yourself and your surroundings with poise and peace.

I know that this path that I chose, this little path on my island of discover, is leading me in the right direction – in the path of discovering peace, contentment, and love. I’m certain of that now. It took me a while but I’m beginning to trust this inner-self of mine.