A man passed away and was admitted to Heaven. Reading from a ledger, the gatekeeper said, "It says that you were an actor." "Yes," the man replied. "Isn't it so that you were, in fact, a comedian?" the gatekeeper asked. "Only when they laughed," the man replied. What makes us laugh? We see the absurdity of a situation or we see our predicament in life: our winnings and losings, our strivings, the difficulties we encounter, the obstacles in our way. Then, at some point, we burst into laughter: like seeing the Three Stooges or The Marx Brothers or a Peter Sellers movie----- everybody trying so hard to get it right. Laughter is healing because it releases us from our frustration at not being perfect. When we take ourselves and our lot in life too seriously, we need to break the tension by finding our way to laughter. Spiritual maturity is being willing and able to see the humor of our predicament. Self-laughter is our freedom to transcend and transform the moment of pain or hurt. So laugh often and laugh well at your own Peter Sellers-ness or Three Stoogieness. 

A telephone conversation once began as follows: "Hello, Ma, this is Shirley." "Shirley, my dar-ling, how are you?" "Ma, things are really bad; the kids both have the flu, the refrigerator just quit working and I'm having myT'ai-chi group over here for lunch." "Shirley, don't worry. I'll take a bus downtown. Then I'll catch the bus to the suburbs. I'll walk the two miles from the bus stop to your house. When I get there, I'll take care of the kids. I'll fix the refrigerator. Then I'll make a nice lunch for your T'ai-chi group. And then I'll even make a nice dinner for Barry." "For Barry? Who's Barry?" "Why, your husband Barry." "My husband? My husband's name is Steven. Isn't this 897-3035?" "No, this is 897-3030." After a long pause, "Does this mean you're not coming?" Sometimes in life we seem to have missed the right connection. We may be asking the wrong person for help. We may need to relax, release and let go until the right way opens up for us. 

Don't push, don't panic; it's OK. Sometimes, as we rush around town shopping, doing errands or driving to or from work, we feel so anxious. We can't face another long line at the bank or the store— how will we cope? Calm down— take a deep breath, relax— it's OK. There's a story about a young man waiting in a long line in a grocery store with a crying baby in his shopping cart. The young man says, "It's OK Tommy; we can make it Tommy; calm down—we'll get through this Tommy." A lady standing behind him says, "Oh, it's so wonderful the way you're trying to soothe little Tommy." "Lady, I'm Tommy!" the young man says. When we feel stressed out, we all need to say to the little Tommy inside ourselves, "It's OK, just relax. We can make it." 

When we are first learning to swim, we tend to struggle and fight with the water. After awhile, and sometimes almost by accident, we discover that if we just absolutely let go and relax into the water, that miraculously, the water itself carries us. We have discovered a vital spiritual principle: when we let go to the water— we float. We are carried, supported and sustained by the water. As with the water, so with our life. When we quit struggling with our life, our life begins to carry us. When we let go, we realize that our life loves to support us. We are not here to support our life; we are here to let our life support us. 

Robert Creeley has a poem about the Dutch boy who kept his finger in the dike all night to keep the waters of the ocean from overwhelming the town. In the morning, the boy is found and is rewarded with honors for his heroism. But, as Creeley's poem goes, during that long night with his finger holding back the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, the Dutch boy is filled with terror at his awesome responsibility. We all feel like the Dutch boy at times. We feel that we are so totally responsible for holding it all together. And even when we receive rewards for our achievements, still there is that ever-present sense of personal responsibility for keeping our world in order. Yet there is another way of seeing our role in life. We've all seen the laughing Buddha, Hotei, holding his arms in the air and laughing. When we come to see that the world will continue whether we hold it up or not, we can relax, and, like Hotei, see the humor of our predicament. 
 

We have, at times, this incredible urge to pin everything down in our life. We want to know exactly how things are going for us. Are we winning? Who's in charge? Should we or shouldn't we? We ask these questions when we want everything finally straightened-out and put in its right place. We can, to some extent, do this with things in our life. We can put our house in order, clean out our closets, cabinets and garage. But it's a little more complicated with states of mind. Sometimes things are happening in a very fluid and unfixed way, and, if we try too hard to pin them down, we may close off possibilities of growth for ourselves. Sometimes when we don't quite know what is going on, the wisest course is to relax our need to control or figure everything out. Just let go. Let people and situations come and go without needing to sort them out. Let them come into agreement and right relationship with us without fuss or feud. Let it be. 

Once when I was in Chama, New Mexico, I watched a small squirrel trying to come to grips with a huge peanut. The peanut was almost as big as the squirrel itself. No matter how hard it tried, it couldn't get a grip on the peanut to lift it or drag it to its hole. Finally I thought the squirrel had given up in despair—for it laid down and rolled over on its back. But then this clever squirrel began to nestle its paws around the huge peanut. It leveraged the peanut onto its stomach and slid along the ground until it got the peanut into the hole. So with us in life. Sometimes we just can't seem to get a grip on our problem— we can't seem to grasp how to deal with some dilemma that we are struggling with. Then, one day, we suddenly quit trying to grasp the situation in our usual way. Like the squirrel, we relax our grip and let go to an entirely different approach that gives us our solution. So when we can't force the situation, let's try sliding it along until it resolves itself. 

There's an old Zen saying, "The nature of distress will disappear of itself." In any situation, we always have a choice about our response or reaction. We can fret and feel anxious and out of control, or we can relax, let go and let the situation or circumstance come into harmony and peace. Thoreau once said, "When a dog runs at you, whistle at him." Two women were once walking along a mountain trail, when a pack of wild dogs came running up to them. The two women stopped for a moment, then they took each other's hand, started singing a song and continued their walk. The dogs looked at them for a moment and then ran off in another direction. Someone once asked Papa Joe, a Taos Pueblo spiritual leader, "Papa Joe, if I meet a bear on my path, should I talk to the bear, should I send it thoughts of love?" Papa Joe responded, "Don't talk to bear. Talk to God." As when we walk into a dark room and turn on the light, so the darkness disappears, when we take our attention off a distressing situation, so does the distress disappear. 

A young man once sent his intended date two roses with the attached note: "If there is hope that my love for you is reciprocated, please wear the red rose in your corsage tonight; however, if my love is hopeless of fulfillment, please wear the white rose." That evening, the young lady wore a yellow rose. Our minds tend to work in an either/or fashion. Either this will happen or that— we'll either succeed or we'll fail; we'll be happy or unhappy, rich or poor, loved or unloved, enlightened or unenlightened. Yet much of our life is actually none of the above— life is quicksilver, so fast that when we try to catch hold of it, it has already changed into something else. Rather than try to capture life in the web of our thought structure, perhaps we can learn to relax our struggle and let life reveal itself to us. A child or a flower or a tree will teach us its secrets only in proportion to our letting go and letting it show us. 

Many of us live complex, multi-faceted lives on this earth. We wear different and, at times, conflicting hats throughout our days: family, job, friends, social and professional activities all demand and receive our attention. We can go through our changes each day in a stressful and harried way, or we can learn the great secret of relaxing into our day. We don't have to wait for a vacation or time off to relax. Right now, each of us can just relax, let go, let things be. Relax our bodies. Relax our minds. Relax our hearts. Now that we are relaxed— relax even more. Let go of the tiny anxious thought, the worried, tired frown, the painful feeling of pressure; just relax, be open, be gentle, be still, let go. Ah— there's only peace. Let's rest in this peace for a little while. 

Where is our center? Where is the place of peace for us? When we look to the outer world for our peace, we seem to be continually disappointed. We thought that surely peace would come with the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and Russia. But this collapse has ushered in a whole new set of conflicts. We try to find peace through our relationships. Yet we find that people change, that sometimes we grow in different directions from people who were once fellow travelers with us. We finally realize at some point that peace is something that we discover deep within ourselves. We don't make peace happen; we relax our struggle and discover that peace is always there, right at the center of our being. Who we are is peace. And we realize our peace-filled nature so simply when we just let go. 

U.G. Krishnamurti once said, "How can we find world peace when we can't even get along with our family members, our friends or our close associates?" To carry this even further, many of us at times don't even feel at peace with ourselves. What is it that keeps us from peace? I think that fear gets in the way of peace. We argue or fight when we are afraid that we are not going to get the good we seek. We fear that there is not enough good to go around, and we need to get ours before it's all gone. The opposite of this fear is trust. At some point, we learn to trust life to take care of us. We are each an integral part of the totality of life on this earth; we belong here; this life grew us into who we are right now— why wouldn't this life continue to nurture and nourish our growth? When we realize that we are connected to each other and to everything else, a tremendous burden is lifted from us— we quit straining and struggling to get our way because we realize our way is already assured. We relax and let ourselves be at peace with our world. 

I was once in New York City on a visit. After a few days, I was completely caught up in the fast-paced whirl of life in that mega-city. One day, as I was entering a bookstore through a revolving door, through the glass I saw a book on sale on the counter— the price looked so low that I pushed the revolving door faster; in my anxiety to get into the store to get the low-priced book, I stubbed my toe in the revolving door. When I finally got to the book counter, my toe aching with pain, I found that I had misread the price of the book. It was actually $2.00 higher than I had seen it priced in Albuquerque! Sometimes we get caught up in trying to get somewhere so fast that we stub our toe, if not literally, then metaphorically. When we feel out of control, remember that we can slow down; we can go slowly and remind ourselves that the good we seek will never elude us. 

A friend of mine called her spiritual mentor with a serious problem for which she had no solution. None of the perceived options seemed workable. After five tries, she finally got her mentor on the phone and explained the situation and her anxiety and her fear about the possible outcome. Instead of offering a specific answer or rehearsing the various options, her mentor said simply, "Just take it easy." And my friend felt an immediate relief and release from all the heaviness of her situation. Sometimes, when we are faced with troublesome situations or difficult decisions, what we need, above all else, is the light touch. We need to let our fears and anxiety be dissolved by the innermost conviction that all will turn out well regardless. We need to take our situation not so hard, not so seriously, but to take it easy—to relax enough so that we can see calmly and clearly our solution. 

William Blake said, "If the sun and moon should doubt, they would immediately go out," meaning that trust is a basic component of life. We do trust that things will work out for us each day pretty much as we planned. We expect the newspaper to be delivered, the mail to come, the trash to be picked up and, in general, people to do what they say they will do. Indeed, it's always a shock when something doesn't work out as we expect it to. If we really stop to think about it, most of our life is based on trust. We trust that we will wake up tomorrow, that daylight will come, that the world will still exist and that everything and everyone will more or less be as we expect them to be. We trust that our bodies won't forget to breathe and somehow they will digest and assimilate our food for us. Since we really trust this life in so many ways to take care of us, why not relax and trust that things are working out for us now and will work out for us in all the areas of life— what else can we do but trust? 

Pascal, the 17th century French philosopher, once defined the "Error of Stoicism" as "thinking we can do always what we can do sometimes." We've all experienced times of high energy, momentum and enthusiasm in which we are flowing in seemingly perfect harmony with ourselves and our world. It's as if we can't miss, our timing is so perfect; everything is working together for our own good, inwardly and outwardly. During these peak times, it's easy to be positive, self-assured and to radiate well-being and joy. Yet there are other times, when we are going through a more gradual unfoldment, and things don't seem to come together so quickly or easily. Yet we have a tendency to expect ourselves to be just as we were when things were flowing with such ease and speed. We tend to become frustrated and impatient with ourselves for it not all working out as well as it did before. Yet these are precisely the times when we need to be most gentle and patient with ourselves. When things are working, it's easy to like ourselves; when things aren't working, let's also like ourselves. 
 

Sometimes we envy others' apparent ease or success in this life compared to our own. Others sometimes seem to have it so much better than we do that we can tend to devalue our own achievements or place in this life. There was once a man who bought the latest underwater diving equipment. As he tried out his equipment in forty feet of water, he saw another man who had no equipment at all. Filled with envy, he walked over to the other man and wrote with his underwater pen and notepad: "How can you stay under water without equipment?" The man grabbed the pen and pad and wrote, "I'm drowning, you idiot!" We don't need to compare ourselves—we just need to let ourselves be OK. 

Someone once said that the nice thing about pain is that you feel so good when it goes away. It's true. We've all felt the incredible relief when we are released from physical or emotional pain. Someone once said that pain pushes and pleasure pulls. It's interesting to think that pain can be an ally, helping us with our breakthrough experiences in life. We learn not to push too hard when we have pain in doing physical exercises; we learn to back off and ease up; the pain itself becomes our guide. So, too, with relationships— if there is too much pain, we learn to ease up, to not try to force things. We learn by pain (and other ways too) to be easier and kinder to ourselves and to others. Pain is really a kind of intelligence that keeps us on track or helps us to get back on track when we lose our way. We don't always have to resist pain or fight it with drugs; we can also let pain be a teacher guiding us to our freedom. 

We can develop an inner reservoir of strength, courage and peace— a spiritual bank account— by setting aside time each day to turn within, become quiet, relaxed, calm and let go to the oneness of all life. Just as we add to our financial well-being by setting aside money in a savings account or certificate of deposit, so can we add to our spiritual, mental and emotional well-being by setting aside time, energy and intention to allow our inner being to be nourished and replenished. Whether we call this quiet time prayer, meditation, contemplation, reflection or simply sitting still doesn't matter. The important thing is to take the time out of our busy schedules to get still and let go and let ourselves be at peace. 

The medieval symbol for worry was a wolf. If we think of a wolf in the zoo, pacing back and forth, always seeming to be agitated, we can see the appropriateness of the image. The Hasidic mystics say: Don't worry. The only permissible worry is to worry only when you find yourself worrying so that you will stop. During this summer, we can choose to observe an inner fast from worry itself. Let's keep in mind that worry is a fleeting state of mind, not our permanent condition. We can't really change anything by worrying about it. We exhaust ourselves and diffuse our energy when we spend time needlessly worrying about situations over which we have little or no control. When we relax and let go of our worry, we begin to trust the universe to take care of its own. We are each a part of the cosmic scheme of things. We can feel a deep sense of peace and rapport within ourselves as we let go and let this life itself support and nourish us.