Embark On Your Journey Back Home

The Zen Buddhist teacher, Alan Watts, once said, “No matter how many times you say the word water, it will never be wet.” I love that quote!  If you are reading this article, chances are you are doing so because you long for the wetness of Life. You long to actually experience Life rather than just thinking about it.

We are all homesick for an intimate, alive experience of Life. When we were young, we crawled into a conceptual world that was made out of spells, like “Life is not safe” or “I am not enough” or “I have to do it and do it right.” I call these fear-based beliefs “spells” because they are something that was laid over the top of us when we were young, they are not true, and they can be lifted. These spells keep us caught in ideas about Life rather than fully experiencing Life. 

You knew a full connection with Life when you were very young. There was a time when there were no thoughts in your head! You didn’t know your name or if you were a boy or a girl, and so you were fully here for this amazing unfolding called Life. Then, slowly and surely, the conceptual world began to fill up the spaciousness inside of you and by the time you were six, the foundations of your view of yourself and your life were formed. And if you are like most people, you have done a very good job of identifying with the storyteller in your head that struggles with little things and big things all day long, cutting you off from the joy of being fully alive!   

So, there is Life and then there is your story about Life. And whether you realize it or not, you long for an alive, intimate experience of Life without a story laid over the top of it. You, like most people, are homesick for the full experience of Life. You may not know it but you long to live inside your body again, with your mind curious and your heart open. How do you come back to Life? Not by trying to get here. That is just more struggle. It happens through seeing all of the spells you took on that your storyteller is talking about all day long. 

As you become curious about what your storyteller is talking about at any given moment (it has 65,000 thoughts a day, most of which are repeats from the day before!), you begin to see that it is based on fear and is glued together with judgment. It says, “This is good, that is bad, this is right, that is wrong. I am not good enough or smart enough.”  It also says, “If I can just get what I want, and get rid of what I don’t want, everything will be okay.”  On and on it goes all day long. It is an endless game and most people go to their deathbeds completely identified with what Eckhart Tolle calls “the mind-made me.”  I like to call it “the child-made me” because your storyteller was formed when you were a child.

There is a way out of this game of struggle, and it is through your aware heart. Your heart knows how to be curious about what your storyteller is talking about rather than being lost in its stories. When your minds says, “I am not good enough or smart enough” or “I am less than” or “I need to be different than I am,” your heart knows how to be with these spells rather than buying into them. For example, when you feel anxious,  your storyteller says “I am so anxious.”  Your aware heart knows how to say, “Anxiety is here.” 

In order to discover how to relate to your storyteller rather than being lost in it, I invite you to give your storyteller a name (be sure it is a kind name). I call mine “Little One.” By giving him/her a name, you are bearing witness to your storyteller rather than identifying with it. When you refer to your storyteller by its new name, for a moment here and a moment there you are relating to it rather than relating from it. And, you begin to realize that your storyteller is just a perception of Life that was formed through the conditioning you took on when you were very young. 

As you step back and realize you are not your storyteller, know that you have embarked on the most important journey you will ever take, the journey back to yourself and back to your heart, your true home. Life is bringing you home.

Image – Dancing into the Sunset by Artist Jeff Ferst  www.artfullivingbyjeffferst.com