crazy love words

I so, so strongly dislike the way the New Age world has taken tantric and Eastern philosophy and turned into a bunch of feel-good, love-and-light nonsense. Like that if you have bad things happening in your life, it must be because you are vibrating at the place of fear. It is the same thing as religious fundamentalism — if your life is hard, and mine is easy, and I make lots of money from giving talks, it’s because I realized my worth and put that into the universe. It couldn’t be because of chance, no no no.

Except, it is chance, it is grace, alone, that has me here, in a comfy warm bed, reading Tumblr, while other dedicated women walk five miles every morning to get clean water for their babies. They didn’t vibrate that into their lives. And, more importantly, our lives of needing to earn more money (make the money you deserve!) actually adds to many other’s life difficulties. And modern New Age thoughts basically allow you to ignore that thought.

And I can’t. I can’t ignore, when I look at all my blessings, that I have done nothing to deserve them. This is Life, twisting and twirling. They could all be gone, in an instant. It doesn’t make me pessimistic or brooding to realize that there is no way for me to understand the streams of grace, no way to control them, no way to know what’s ahead. To not know what the plan is, or even if there really is an ultimate plan or if it is just Life, dancing through the world, enacting the endless cycles of creation and destruction.

It actually just makes me all the more grateful.

When listening to a lecture from Hareesh this weekend, I realized that I’ve been making this whole search so damn complicated. Looking for the right teacher, the right path, the right mixture of things… So caught up in the seeking, and missing out on what’s here, now. So I thought to myself, what helps me connect with that space within, that ground of being? When does joy automatically spring forth? Because I think that giving ourselves more experiences of joy, more experiences of beauty —- it helps us see the joy and beauty that is available to us, all around. It generally makes us happier people, more in touch with our center. And when things go awry, we know how to better access that place of stillness. 

So, I asked myself, and heard: being on my yoga mat, hooping, sitting outside, listening to the birds call in the morning, sleeping on the ground, staring at the stars, feeling the rain on my skin on a summer day, laughing with a preschooler about something ridiculous, blowing bubbles in the green grass, watching my niece gaze at the world in wonderment, dancing in my pajamas to some happy song, hiking through the woods, watching water fall over rocks, hooping (oh, hooping!), reading a really great book (fiction, or not), listening to a lecture from Hareesh, being at the monastery, breathing, breathing, breathing…

All of which are spaces where I can, for a moment, get quiet. Leave the drama of this world behind, and just get quiet. And, amazingly, there are so many of them! There are so many places in my life where I am learning to tap in to that place inside, the quiet voice, the stillness. There are so many things that I can bring more into my life.

And isn’t that what the path is? Isn’t all the rest extraneous? When I think “I have to read X books, and by X date” or “I must see Y person and listen to all of Z’s lectures,” that’s making it too damn complicated. It’s not about all those outside things. Those things are just signs, and I’ve been getting caught up in finding the “right” signs… I’ve been caught up in trying to “capture” the “right” moment, where I’m totally present and aware and okay with all (yes, I get the irony of that statement.) Meanwhile, there’s the moon. Beautiful, full, waiting for me to look up and see that it’s always there, always.