Life doesn't always feel great. My Mom continues to undergo grave challenges to being here. A friend just called whose health challenges have presented impediments, she feels, to living the life she would like.
As far as my limited knowledge goes, the key to these situations begins with intense compassion, compassion most of all beginning with yourself.
Remember what Lao-Tzu said? "If you could truly have compassion for yourself, you would reconcile all beings in the world."
To truly have compassion on ourselves means to fully embrace our experience of the moment and our situation of the moment and who we are at the moment.
It's just a metaphor, but suppose God came down to you and said, "If I asked to live your life just as it is right now, letting it change however it does, like a leaf in the wind—would you do that for me?" In effect, that is what we are being asked.
The choice isn't between who we are and some improved model of ourselves. It's between being who we are and never having shown up at all.
The only way you could have shown up is this way. You've never made any mistakes, ever. You've never made a wrong decision. Everything had to go the way it did.
Given your genes and your conditioning and the exact influence of everything in the universe in each moment, you had to make whatever decision you did in each moment, you've had to follow whatever path you've followed. And so has everybody else. And so has the world.
The Buddha called this "codependent origination," and he meant the way that everything influences and leads to and creates everything else, moment to moment, everything creating every thing, each moment.
It's like a giant river flowing. And one way of realizing our already-existing-in-tune-ness-with-it is by "following our inner guide."
But how to do that? How to follow our inner guide?
The thing I realized finally about the inner guide is that it's basically a "Yes" monster. It speaks in the words "Yes, yes, yes"; and when it isn't saying "Yes," when it's just being quiet, that is its way of saying "No."
This is so because the inner guide moves with total energy. It has no half-way feeling about it. If we're feeling half-way about something, the inner guide is not speaking yet. Or in other words it is saying, "No, this isn't right, at least not yet."
So if you're asking yourself, for instance, "Should I marry John?" the answer is "No," at least right now, because the energy isn't total yet. If the inner guide were saying "Yes" here, you wouldn't be asking the question.
When the inner guide isn't saying "Yes" to something, it seems best just to wait. Let the energy accumulate inside so that when the "Yes" does come, we have great energy to move with.
Following our inner guide is part of having compassion on ourselves. Instead of listening to the vagaries of our mind, we just listen to that clear small voice within that always knows and that is indistinguishable from the heart.
If there's any doubt at all about what the inner guide is saying, I've found it's best to just stop and ask directly, "What is my inner guide saying now?" And then just take whatever comes up and follow it, without going back and forth mentally about whether it's desirable or not.
To just follow it, to just surrender to it. As Adyashanti puts it, "We become a slave to freedom." To just surrender to Life, just as it is, just as the Energy moves, knowing that it must be as it is each moment.
Which comes back to compassion. Our hearts don't open when everything is going hunky-dory. Our hearts open when things feel like a mess, and we can open to that "mess." That's when the heart muscle stretches.
Then we embrace the mess, personal, planetary, whatever, just as it is, in great compassion. Then, in that silent embrace, we're vastly more likely to be able to hear the inner guide, our inner heart, beating relentlessly.
—jim sloman, 3/28/01 for Mar 28
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