Follow your heart

Back to the blog. I haven't written for a while. My thoughts are on freedom, and getting stuck. I return again and again to the awareness that the freedom is in letting go. When I am holding on, I lose my sense of humor. I become a serious and uncreative old fart and have nothing original to say. I lose perspective and see things in a single minded, obsessive and neurotic way. If I can see where I am stuck, then I start to move again. By movement, I mean a psychological movement, and that means fun, laughter, meaning and joy.

The freedom is in letting go. I have been spending time with a friend from Los Angeles the last two weeks. She will leave in a week and I will have to let go of her and practice my freedom. Compassionate Exchange meditation is great for these situations. I simply let my sadness be my connection to all the people in the world who are separated from the ones they love, and I breathe in the longing, and practice releasing the longing into Big Heart. This practice always works. It stops the recoil from suffering, it brings acceptance to the pain and releases the grasping, and I get to give myself what I think I want from others.

My friend J is in a difficult situation. She is almost 30 years old and is in a relationship with a young doctor from a wealthy family, who can offer her a wonderful life. J wants the safety and security of wealth and a professional husband. She feels like time is ticking and she wants to get married and have children. She has a developing career as an artist. The problem is, she gets stoned every night. She doesn't really talk to her boyfriend. She is not excited by him, but feels comfortable with him. She wants excitement and adventure and growth. She doesn't feel understood by her boyfriend, and feels an emptiness and alienation in the relationship. From the outside, she looks like she has the ideal life. From the inside, she is not happy. Her family feels she should get married and settle for what she has, and that life is about sacrifice. She feels she will find fulfillment in traveling and financial security. She wants to have it all. She is suffering and in conflict.

I can only speak from my experience. Suffering needs to be turned to and understood. Right View is the first step in the Buddhist 8-fold path, and with it a clear seeing of reality emerges. Reality has three characteristics.

• All things are impermanent.
• The manifest world is undependable.
• One is not able to locate a lasting, solid, permanent abiding for a separate self in the world of conditions.

The Buddha taught four Noble truths.

1. There is suffering which needs to be understood, turned to and contemplated.

• Suffering of inherent pain.
• Suffering of decay of the pleasant.
• Suffering due to deluded grasping of conditions.

2. Suffering arises from the three forms of desire.

• The thirst and craving and to find sensual fulfillment.
• The desire to get rid of things, to ‘not exist'.
• The desire to become and seek solidity for the self through a strong identification with views, ambitions, goals, desires, etc.

3. Suffering can cease.

• If the grasping of the separate self sense can be relaxed, then the underlying peaceful ‘being or suchness' of existence can be realized and opened, resulting in a wonderful life.

4. The 8-fold path can be cultivated, and when suffering ceases, a wonderful existence opens.

• Right view
• Right intention
• Right speech
• Right action
• Right livelihood
• Right effort
• Right concentration
• Right mindfulness.

I have followed a path of transformation, influenced heavily by but not limited to the Buddhist perspective. The work of Ken Wilber was the greatest influence and support in the path. I have been through a process of transformation and awakening and have ever increasing levels of peace, unreasonable happiness, humor and love. It took about seven intense years, and the last two years have been dominated by a kundalini awakening which seems to be stabilizing.

My friend speaks about security through wealth. I remember last year when I tangibly realized what liberation meant, and I stood on a sidewalk weeping with gratitude when I realized that what I had meant more than the biggest fortune in the world. In the inner world, freedom is the greatest prize. Freedom is not an idealized inner state. Freedom is more a continual noticing of where I get lost in fears, fantasies, plans, dreams and goals, and with that noticing, freedom is relaxed into, again and again, easier and easier.

To reach this state, my dreams have had to be shattered. I feel Grace has always worked Its secret loving hand in my life, and I have always turned towards God and hungered towards God. I pursued some of my dearest dreams with everything I had, with all my rescources, and I failed when it mattered most. Thank God I failed. I realized the suffering in trying to hold onto a dream, and in trying to control the world to make myself feel good. In letting go of the dreams, I have increasingly opened to freedom, to the peaceful existence of this moment. It hurt like hell at the time and I was forced to confront my darkest fears, but the dark night was the necessary passageway to freedom. Along the way I surrendered to God and gave up the illusion I was in control of everything. My world fell apart for a while. I am now happier than I ever thought possible.

My friend and her friend seem to think that money is not important. This is simply not true. I have been blessed to have the time and the rescources to commit to practice. I made sacrifices. I left a professional career and took a part time job in another country to free up time for transformation. I recognized in my twenties, when contemplating what it meant to be happy, that awakening was the fundamental solution to the problem of suffering and happiness. Turning that recognition into reality has been tough. However, as one sage once put it "Enlightenment. Better you don't start. And if you do start, better you don't stop."

Back to money. Money is important. However, awakening means fleeing the world, finding the One, and then returning as the One to the many. So, for a while, the sense that money will provide the separate self sense with security and a permanent home has to be given up. Money itself does not have to be abandoned. Just the attachment to it. Money needs to be transcended and included, which means there must be a temporary dying to the fact that money holds any key to salvation.

My path now is trying to add value to the world. I wish to create a beautiful life for myself and others. Money is one of the reflections of how well I will be able to do that. We live in a world of money, and money must be turned to and understood.

My friend feels that she must sacrifice some parts of herself if she wants the marriage and financial security. I speak from my experience. I never did denial very well. What I did do was make sacrifices so that I could pursue my highest potential, and I didn't pursue that highest potential for anyone else. I did it for myself. It was often difficult to do that as I was often deeply alone. I had a commitment to myself. I would not let fear and anxiety control my decisions, no matter how tempting it seemed. Sure, I got into a mess a few times repressing my emotions, but I have learned to be more authentic with myself now. When I pursued my highest potentials, I often came to crossroads in the journey, where my fear and anxiety and goals were in conflict with the call of my soul. Sometimes I took the wrong turn, but I have learned to increasingly trust my higher calling.

I dated a very wealthy and beautiful Chinese woman for a few years. She wanted to marry me and have my children. The relationship just wasn't right, yet I was driven by fear. "What if I don't find anyone else?" "What if I give up the possibility of wealth?" "Maybe I just gotto settle for this situation and learn to love her." I was caught in a knot. We finally separated when I went meditating in Thailand once too often and she left me. It was right that we separated. We didn't share a vision that was fundamentally important to both of us. Our interiors didn't resonate, and we did not really understand each other. I had to ignore all the calls for safety that my fear put into me, such as ‘its time to marry', and ‘you are getting older'. Committing to her would have meant a conflict with pursuing my highest potential, and it would have been tough staying in relationship as I got thrown around and went through tremendous change and confusion on the path of awakening.

Now I know what is most important to me, and I see reaching my goals and sharing in current and future relationships as actions of joy and blessings. I can pursue what is fundamentally good for me, and what is good for the world, without conflict. My connection to others becomes a loving and creative sharing of my truest self which adds value to others, and that is my dream, which is to embody my highest potential and to live that potential to benefit the world.

I have another good friend. A couple of years ago he was a few days away from getting married. I went to spend time with him just before his wedding. He was getting married because he felt it was about time, he had spent a few years with his fiancée, he had a dream of a family, and that they could work through their problems. I watched him interact with his fiancée. It wasn't healthy and there was a deep undercurrent of dissatisfaction between them. I repeatedly asked him if this was what he really, most deeply, wanted? A string of co-incidences bought a woman he had had a crush on for years into his life as well in those few days, and he ended up canceling the wedding, losing a lot of money, inconveniencing many people, having a fling with his fantasy crush until she dumped him a few weeks later, and he was left alone and angry. Now he is in a healthy and satisfying relationship with a beautiful woman and he has learned what it means to get real. He says that getting out of that situation was the best thing he did, and he thanks God for me and for his fantasy crush and he saw the difficulty as necessary. He needed a big push to escape his unhealthy trap.

My point is that I need to find the connections that awaken and enliven us. I need to let go of connections that seem to repress my spirit, and I let go of them by understanding why they are important to me and seeing how relationships are my mirrors. Sometimes the relationships continue after I transform, and sometimes they don't. Increasingly, I see successful relationships as a place where there is a shared vision that brings forth the highest potentials of all people involved, as well as a commitment to understanding oneself and each other and supporting each others growth. (oh, and a healthy sense of fun and humor thrown in..). This vision and commitment enables difficult times to be worked through. It takes courage to live like this, and it requires a deep trust in life to follow the individual calling of your soul and trust that life will provide you and support you as you pursue the good, the beautiful and the true.

My advice for my friend is to begin to contemplate the Buddhist truths and to follow her heart. That's tough. If she follows her heart, then, just like the Buddha, she may be lead into the wilderness of her darkness and fear and the depths of her soul. That is an unpleasant journey for most people, as they step out of the safety of the world and begin the arduous journey of finding the light that shines behind all things. There are no guarantees that the journey will be successful. Still, it's the only advice I have, because on the other shore lies the cessation of suffering.