Transformation Begins Right Where We Are
One of my dear teachers liked to emphasize that healing and transformation never happen without chaos.
I am finding how essential it is to orient towards the potential of humanity to awaken to the truth of our non-separateness and interdependence—and to notice how the chaos unfolding in the world is a symptom of our growing pains towards that, our resistance to letting our fear-based egos dissolve.
This notion of moving towards a more awake and evolved version of ourselves helps me keep hope alive more of the time, whether I get to see the fruition of this or not, and I hope that’s true for you, too.
I like to think our actions—small and large—can help to usher our wounded and reactive world towards a more healed and loving one.
What I know deeply is that lasting, reliable transformation within ourselves is possible. This is not a maybe type of thing. As the Thai Forest teacher Ajahn Chah once said, “If this were not possible, the Buddha would not have bothered to talk about it.”
Where does this transformation begin? Always right where we are. Where else can anything happen? Where else can we do anything?
Finding stillness in the midst of chaos may seem counterintuitive, yet it is a portal to our deeper intelligences and a bridge to a kind of freedom we had no idea we were seeking—and had no idea the world needed.
To find stillness—or to engage in what some have called the sacred pause—is not to leave the world but to express our availability towards ourselves and the entirety of the universe.
We make ourselves available to the reality of our inner experience, which for many of us has been unnoticed, unpleasant, and something we have been unconsciously trying to avoid or control away.
When we move towards presence and embodiment, there is a sense of “I will be with this doorway of tension moment by moment, and I have no interest in it changing.”
As we orient towards life in this way, we learn to have a more devotional relationship towards the truth of our experience, whatever that is—from mild irritation or frustration to something greater, like anger or grief. We don’t just meditate this way, we walk this way and talk this way.
We can ask, What would it be like to not need to manipulate, add to, or subtract from this moment? Through our practice we start to become available for this question in daily life as well. Life becomes less about our demands for ourselves and more about living in curiosity.
This new moment of availability is a sacred doorway, our portal to awakening to our truer selves, where the difficulties of being human can be metabolized and the beauty and potential of being human can appear.
None of this is intellectual, conceptual, idea-based, but rather is based on the universal human experience of struggle and our capacity to liberate ourselves from it through practice and community. This path, as best as I understand it, is not meant to be done alone.
