Sometimes we are walking through a very crowded airport terminal like Dallas or Los Angeles or Chicago or New York. There are literally thousands of people all around us, each going to his or her destination. As we walk through this vast, teeming swirl of humanity, we keep our own destination clearly in mind; we don't allow ourselves to become distracted; we don't get confused and wind up in Pittsburgh when we were going to Cleveland. It's interesting that we don't get lost in the crowd— we keep our intention sharp and our focus clear. And we find ourselves arriving at our destination without mishap. So, too, with our life journey. We really don't need to get waylaid or detoured from our path in life. We can keep our intention clearly in mind, stay focused on our destination and we find that we will arrive at our journey's end without mishap.
ELECTRIC AUGUST
This time of year we sometimes begin to feel dazed and lethargic—we go though the August blahs, and we feel that nothing much is going to happen until September or October, so that we might as well kick back and rest on our prior attainments. We can feel this way in terms of our jobs, our relationships and even our spiritual life—everything gets put on hold. We'll just wait and see. Meanwhile the warm days and nights soothe our tired selves, and we are semi-content. Then, one day, we suddenly realize: why should we wait for anything? This is the time when we are alive, right now. The power of the universe is flowing through our nervous system this moment. The energies of the cosmos are vibrating in our every pulse. We are one with the oneness of all life everywhere. What are we waiting for? Let's get busy bringing the good we seek into manifestation now! Decide to act now, and this will be an electric August, filled with new and joyous possibilities for you.
HUMOR
Someone once said, "Dying is easy; it's comedy that's hard." Developing a sense of humor about our life seems to be beneficial not only spiritually, but it is also now considered good for our health and physical well-being. Norman Cousins and others have written on the healing and life-enhancing value of laughter. We really don't have to take our lives and ourselves so very seriously. There are lots of things to laugh at about our situation as human beings on this earth. Some days are so filled with ambiguities and absurdities, that the most healing thing we can do is see the humor in the midst of all the apparent chaos. As a Zen Master once said, "The final enlightenment may be so deep and profound that there is nothing to do but sit down and have a good laugh." Let yourself laugh often and well.
LETTING OURSELVES BE
When we are too strict and controlling with ourselves, we tend to rebel and not achieve what we set out to accomplish. When we are more allowing and self-accepting, we find it easier for our whole being to unite in changing some attitude or behavior. Carl Jung said, "I must accept myself before I can change." When we are very severe and self-scolding, just like with a small child or animal, we find that we are creating a stubborn resistance to change. Let's just let ourselves be without any need to be different until we are so at peace that we can afford the price of self-change.
LET OUR JOY BE UNCONTAINED
Ramakrishna said that a salt doll once went into the ocean to measure the depth of the water with a salt ruler. Now where is the measurer? The longer we live, the more we come to realize how vast and immeasurable is this universe. We are a part of the infinite interwovenness of this life. We don't need to reduce the wonder and awe and mystery of this world into compartmentalized pieces. Sometimes we tend to frame our life into little measured containers of rigidity. We have our containers of work, family, recreation, and social activities. But if we structure our lives too much, we miss the joy of spontaneity, the freedom that bursts the bounds of our mental containers.
RELAX
Sometimes when we're in a big hurry, we feel anxious and worried: what if we don't make it, what if we don't arrive on time. Rushing through life out of fear makes us a slave to time. At some point, we need to make our peace with the earth and come into agreement with a relaxed way of moving through time and space. There's a story of a man who is on a very slow moving train. The man becomes so upset at the slow pace of the train that he finally yells at the conductor, "Can't you go any faster!" The conductor says, "Yes, I can, but I'm not allowed to leave the train." We can probably all go faster, but will we be any happier? As Gandhi said, "There is more to life than increasing its speed."
FIRE IS WATER FALLING UPWARD
Alan Watts reminds us that fire is like water falling upward. There is a kind of flow to this life. Our lives really work in terms of things falling together, coming together, falling into place. Sometimes we are trying too hard to make something happen. We want so badly to feel some sense of progress, to feel that we are getting somewhere. We can be so anxious for results that we actually get in the way of the natural flow of things. When we relax our grip on needing to know how it's all going to work out, we can begin to see people and situations in our lives coming into harmony and order in an easy, effortless way.
FREEDOM FROM WORRY
In the Yoga tradition there are four kinds of busyness. The child is busy with play; the youth is busy with pleasure; the adult is busy with worry, and the yogi is busy with bliss, liberation or freedom. Why, as adults, do we spend so much of our time in worry? Perhaps it's because, again, as adults, we feel so much responsibility. We feel as if everything rests on our shoulders— that if we don't make things happen, nothing will happen, or if we don't hold everything together, it will all collapse. Yet the universe has been continuing for aeons of time and will continue for aeons of time, with or without our fierce concern. There's an old Senegalese saying, "If we worry, tomorrow will come; if we don't worry, tomorrow will come." The remedy for worry seems to be trust: trusting ourselves that we will do what we need to do when we need to do it: trusting others to do what they need to do when they need to do it: trusting the universe and life itself to do what it needs to do when it needs to do it. Since it's all running itself anyway (including us) perhaps we can release our worry and let it be.
LAUGHTER
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.
FINDING THE RIGHT CONNECTION
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.
CALM, COOL, COLLECTED
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."
LEARNING HOW TO FLOAT
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.
PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY
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.
RIGID OR FLEXIBLE
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.
TRY SLIDING
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.
LETTING OR FRETTING
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.
NONE OF THE ABOVE
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.
RELAX, RELAX, RELAX SOME MORE
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.
CENTERED IN PEACE
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.
PEACE WITH OUR WORLD
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.