Be yourself into being
don't think yourself into it.
Beloved Friends,
Desires. One moment we think we’ve caught one, only to look inside our hands and find them empty. They’re elusive and yet we chase after them as if our perseverance equates to their certainty.
We live in a state of longing but not for what we once sought after...
Through the truth of our experience, we have awakened to the fact external attainments don’t intrinsically hold what we seek. We know a new career doesn’t come embedded with purpose, a new home doesn’t come with an innate sense of belonging, nor will a new partner come with unconditional love as a given.
We know inwards is our only certainty for real change and so we’re trying to fix that part of us that causes us the most conflict - our minds.
The problem with our desire to be free of our minds is the energy we give in turn to our incarceration. We seek to heal the mind using the mind and therefore perpetuate the existence of our ache.
By separating ourselves into parts we wish to better, we unknowingly identify with the egoic mind that sustains the very split we are trying to heal.
When we learn through meditation and spiritual practice to turn inward, we feel like we finally know where to look. And once we’ve realized this, we must too, bravely ask ourselves…
What part of me is seeking inwardly? Is my desire to become connected, confident, empowered, loving, at ease just another attainment for my mind to obsess over?
We are not here to silence our desires, but to relocate our identity from the fixing mind into the foundation of our Being so that we are guided, evolve, and heal from a place that embraces the Whole and not just betters the split.
Identifying with Being means finding our sense of Self in our quiet awareness, our spacious and flowing silence, the peace of our neutrality, our fertile darkness, our compassionate heart and our gratitude that senses the fullness of life where the mind can only see lack.
Healing the mind is only possible by stepping away from it. We no longer look to change ourselves but to change where we inhabit ourselves. Fear is then met from Being. Just as loneliness, anxiety, purposelessness, and doubt are met from the qualities of Being.
How we walk through life embodying the qualities of Being rather than mind will be very different. How does meeting and honouring our desire from patience look like to you? How does meeting and honouring our fear from wisdom look like to you? What about honouring our frustration from silence?
These intimate and tender qualities of Being are who we are, our most natural state when we are not finding our sense of self in the mind.
Let’s take a moment to invite either a physical thing we desire or the state of being we long for to see if we can disentangle them from our egoic minds to find the already-and-always freedom we are among it.
The meditation link can be found at the top of this newsletter.
What we desire ultimately is to be free of the mind’s incessant content and its emotional manifestations that cause us conflict and dis-ease. We desire to exist as the flow of life that neither grasps nor abandons love.
The harder the mind struggles to get rid of pain, the greater the pain. The mind can never find the solution, nor can it afford to allow you to find the solution because it's an intrinsic part of the problem. If we cease to derive our sense of self from the mind, then we will become what we are; medicine to ourselves and the world.
What are we left with when we embody our Being more in daily life? Often, we are left with the fear of who we will be without our goals, dreams, and emotions. But they were never the problem, only their control over us was.
If what we seek causes us deep sorrow or discontent, or persistently takes us away from what we have, perhaps there is another way to achieve change through the paradox of letting them go.
When we truly surrender the control we feel we need to have over our lives, we land up letting go of the part of our mind that perpetuates struggle. We find ourselves inhabiting a life different to the one we initially planned, but vastly more aligned with the deepest part of our Being who does not long for a perfect life but a Whole life, witnessed and lived through Love.
PS, I love responding to your comments and questions! Because I have a young family, it can sometimes take up to 1 week to get back to you but please know how much I love sitting down and taking the time to honor your words.
