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What’s In the Way Is the Way

I am beginning a class next week on my book What’s in the Way Is the Way, and I am having a delightful time reconnecting with it.  For me, one of the most important parts of the book is the metaphor in the first chapter.  It describes how we got cut off from Life and how to become fully present for Life again, as we were when we were very young.

It begins with a beautiful meadow representing the magnificence, the majesty and the mystery of Life that shows up in a continuous, creative flow.  We all lived in full connection with Life when we were very young (the meadow). There was no past or future in our minds, so we were here for Life.  Slowly, as we grew up, the clouds in the sky (which represent our conditioned self that talks in our heads all day long and is very busy trying to do Life rather than be Life) lowered, surrounding us and cutting us off from being present for Life.

The key to this metaphor is that we have never left Life (the meadow). We just think we have. It is all around us, but we can’t connect with it through the clouds of struggle. And trying to get back to the meadow – the present moment of Life – is just more struggle.  The key is discovering how to relate to the struggle that is happening in our heads all day long rather than from it.  For it is this struggle that cuts us off from the joy of being fully alive, available to Life right here, right now.

I would like to share with you a few paragraphs from the last chapter:

Everything we have been exploring together – the truth of the meadow of your being, how the cloud bank of your mind keeps you separate from what is truly going on here, and that you can live from the meadow when you notice and see through the spells you took on – is all opening you again to the creative flow of Life.  This is about saying “Yes” to Life.  That doesn’t mean that you sit down by the side of the road and let it run you over.  It means that at your core you know everything in your Life is for you – it is not just a random series of events.  Life is an intelligent process; it knows what it is doing and it is safe to open to it.

This brings you into full engagement with what is happening rather than staying caught in a conversation about Life.  We could call it ‘surrender,’ but this doesn’t mean being defeated.  It is about finally giving up your war with Life!  We could also call it ‘humility,’ but the dictionary misses its full meaning when it defines it as ‘lowliness, meekness, submissiveness.’ True humility is a state of great availability, and from this kind of openness you can finally reconnect with the joy of being fully alive.

Can Life be trusted? Alan Watts, the celebrated philosopher, author and teacher once said, “… it appears as a vivid and overwhelming certainty that the universe, precisely as it is at this moment, as a whole and in every one of its parts, is so completely right, as to need no explanation or justification, beyond what it simply is.” In other words, it is safe to open to Life!

To open to the way things actually are, rather than always trying to make Life be what you think it should be, is the most courageous and healing thing you can do. When you see through the game of struggle enough so that the veils between you and this living moment lift – this miraculous, incandescent moment – you become a healing presence in the world. Moments of full connection with Life matter. In fact, they matter more than you can possibly know.  They are what will heal our world!

So I invite you to contemplate the possibility that the chronic, low-grade struggle you have lived in most of your Life can be lifted just like the early morning clouds can be lifted by the sun.  I also invite you to open to the radical notion that in your Life, whatever you perceive to be in the way IS the way.  In other words, your challenges are tailor-made to help you see your particular brand of struggle and help you unhook from it so you can again know the joy of being fully alive.

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