Here You Are (Even If You Wish You Weren't)

This piece was initially published on my blog. The Dutch non-duality magazine, In Zicht, then published it with permission in 2019. You can read it in Dutch here.

Working in entertainment, and working with spiritual practitioners, I’ve found the same thing. Everyone thinks they’re supposed to be somewhere different, experiencing something different, and being different.

Where the hell do we all think we’re supposed to be? 

This is the malady that the Buddha spoke of as the cause of our suffering.

For people who are caught up in the world of form — thoughts, concepts, achievement, labels, things, situations – they look for something different on the outside, hoping to be different as a result. Perhaps they haven’t yet fully turned inward where the real jewels lie. 

For the spiritual seeker, this feeling that one should be “different” wears other clothes.

They have turned inward and upward toward the transcendent. And so they often reject this world of form with all its complications.

For the person on the spiritual path, they can begin to feel that their emotions or inner struggles are somehow other than the unfoldment of their spiritual birthright. They can hide out in platitudes or past spiritual experiences or ideas about what enlightened beings act like. They can cling to their realizations, not yet knowing that living a life in the trenches of being human is how that realization becomes made flesh and bone over time. 

So feel whatever arises. Meet your life. Be right where you are. Climb into the middle of whatever it is that’s coming up for you. Be curious. This life, with your job and relationships and situations that don’t work out are the fertile ground for awakening and wholeness. There is nowhere else to be but here. There is no better, more spiritual place. Just here at this moment in all its divine mess. 

Once you have had a deep glimpse of your absolute nature, every inch of your relative humanness will now be made fresh, new, more real by embracing both fully. A seeing-through, a hollowing out, a divine deconstruction is occurring.

And it actually accelerates once you accept – over and over and over again – that you are right where you are. It’s not where you’ll stay. All experiences fade and become new experiences. But if you keep pushing away at this one, its energy will rise up again and again as a confused child might throw a tantrum, yearning to be acknowledged. 

So do yourself a favor. Be in the shit. 

Maybe you’re messily sifting through some old patterns you’ve found yourself in again, or some raw feelings that didn’t get fully felt at some point in your life.  

Perhaps you’ve glimpsed the insubstantiality of all things and it’s as though the color has been drained from everything you once clung to or loved. Maybe you’re questioning why you’re even here. 

A certain facet of the diamond of reality is showing itself.  It may not be the whole diamond yet. But be with it right now. 

Maybe your grip is softening and you’re losing everything. 

Maybe you feel a pain, a sorrow that you didn’t get the loving family or committed lover or devoted dog you had hoped for at this point in life. 

Yet this is where you are, my love. Right here, with your tears and frustration and jagged, aching heart. Yes, here — even if you have met the infinite and felt its beauty. It’s not separate from this. 

And it serves nothing to tell yourself that the family, the lover, and the the dog are “illusions” and that you’re a bad spiritual person for feeling the rawness of life. 

Breathe into your fragile body. Breathe out. Your pain and the embracing of it is cracking you open. And take heart, as this path you walk has been tread by seekers who have been found throughout the centuries. 

Once you’ve had a profound seeing of the nature of reality, of the divine, of truth, this human life is being made translucent, so that the light of your being can shine through. Keep being curious, keep looking, keep feeling, keep resting right where you are.

This will be how the inside and outside collapse, leaving only a shimmering human being who might laugh while she cries.