After reconciling the dragon of worthiness and realizing we are all inherently worthy, one day, I was sitting again in meditation on my purple cushion on my crappy-ass beige carpet in front of my altar, and I realized with shock that I had no idea what it meant to be human. Everything I had associated with being human had come from old ideas, projections, or others’ ideas of being human. It came from a script that dictated, “This is what you do.” But the script was just a placeholder. It was what the ego needed and created to get through life. Without that… now what?
What is it like to live life without a mirage of what life is “supposed” to be? How do I live life as part of Oneness, and yet a unique expression of Source?
I had to get into this exploration in big ways and really simple, little ways. For instance, how or why does anything happen? Life doesn’t want to be a lump (at least most of the time), but in the absence of ego programming of driving or striving, how does action happen? What is motivation in this new terrain of living as Oneness?
The answer wasn’t simple. It didn’t come down in a lightning bolt of insight. It didn’t happen in a moment. I had to discover it in each moment by being present and connected with the Source that creates Life. I found that the ego is predictable; it follows patterns based on conditioning. Living life without conditioning means a new flavor of curiosity, authenticity, and spontaneity.
I discovered a few things on this journey. You know how the Buddhists teach to surrender all desire and attachment? It’s a great teaching, but I realized that the point isn’t that desire is bad; it’s that we can be free of the part of the ego that grasps onto it. Without ego grasping for things it thinks it wants, there is just desire for the sake of itself, as a movement of life and as a movement of love. It’s as simple as a seed in the soil desiring to sprout. It’s that clean and easy. I learned to tune into the simple, clean movements of desire.
After all the training on non-dual selflessness and “no self”, I learned to reclaim self-love. But now, rather than self-love coming from an attempt to fill an empty bucket, I learned to receive and be the love that’s already here. Love is for everything and everyone, whether we realize it or not. I saw that love is 360 degrees – not just a semi-circle of 180 degrees out into the world, but a full circle that includes the unique-experience-called-me.
I learned to follow a movement of life that felt like flow to me. It was kind of like paying attention to a river that was always moving. It might be moving towards sleep and rest, or stillness, but it is always moving, vital, and alive. I discovered quiet nudges that moved in one direction or another, and those nudges called me to a bigger flow.
What does this look like? My favorite book title is from Jack Kornfield, “After Enlightenment, the Laundry.” A day in my life might not look so extraordinary. Laundry, dishes, gardening, replying to emails, meeting with clients, playing with my cat, meditating, chi gong, exercise, etc. If I thought I was going to sit my butt on a giant golden lotus flower for the rest of my life, that is definitely not how desire or flow has moved.
And it’s not that life is magically easy. It’s easier. But challenges still happen, partially because that’s life, and partially because that’s how humans learn. The difference is that I’m not fighting the challenges the way I used to. I realized that the ego fights against life. It believes it’s in a battle of will with Creation to get what it thinks it wants. That fight makes the challenging stuff of life even harder. It’s like trying to fight a boxing match with an invisible opponent while hiking up a steep mountain at high altitude with a 70-pound backpack. I’m not in an inner boxing match, and my backpack only has the bare essentials. So, yeah, life might feel easier for me than I realize it does for most people. But that doesn’t mean life is free of challenges. I’ve had health issues and work changes and more. (Stay tuned for more on those.)
I say a lot to my spiritual clients, “Awakening doesn’t look like anything. It can look like lots of things.” It’s one of the hardest lessons to learn because our minds have all kinds of ideas and projections about what our lives will be like after enlightenment. The reality is that awakening will look exactly like how Life As The Uniqueness of You wants to show up. Nothing less and nothing more. And that rarely appears exactly as we expect.
There is tremendous empowerment in showing up as Presence and Life and meeting each moment. It’s not passive surrender. It’s intense engagement. It’s intensely living. It’s being willing to be surprised and go around the curve and come face to face with a whole new landscape of possibilities. Those possibilities include all kinds of flavors of the ebbs and flows of life. I’ve watched enough of my friends and clients go through this along with me that I’ve seen a brilliant variety of flavors, like Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans. Sometimes you get blueberry, sometimes you get earwax. And that’s life.
But from that moment on my cushion, when I realized I didn’t know how to be human, every single facet of my life had to upgrade in some way, now aligned with a new flow, Presence, spontaneity, and love. I now expect constant upgrades and am always curious when the next “software update” will appear.
