If all we ever did was what is explained in the video below, we’d unveil enlightenment in this lifetime.
That’s a pretty big statement , isn’t it?
You might have seen this Louis C.K. snippet passed around online in the last week or so. After he goes into a bit about why his children don’t have cell phones, he launches into how distracted we are as human beings and how reaching for stimulation is keeping us away from our own happiness.
No secret there. Instagram, Facebook, twitter, Vine, Snap Chat, TV, video, advertisements wherever you look. I can’t enter a freaking taxi cab without need to immediately reach for the off button to turn off those pesky ads that follow us seemingly everywhere.
People go into a panic when they can’t get wifi or cell service. We have no idea how to sit still. When’s the last time you were waiting for a friend or on line and had some minutes to spare and just stood or sat there?… Didn’t reach for the smartphone to check out FB or catch up on emails or text someone? I’m going to guess in recent years it’s somewhere in the neighborhood of never. We are programmed to distract ourselves.
Awakening is the ability to always stay with what is. The ability to push or stuff or run or hide from our suffering, pain, boredom simply vanishes. When we awaken there is a freedom from the mind and in turn all of those suffering rise to the surface and the furnace of our hearts + divine minds thrust the pain to burn, baby, burn.
Until that time, we practice. We notice. We become aware when we reach for the booze, the sex, the smoke, the day-dreaming, the cronut, TV, even the meditation or yoga class, to distract us.
My teachers’ main teaching is: “Anything fully experienced turns into bliss.” I’ve seen this happen hundreds, if not thousands of times, with myself and others, and it is so spontaneously miraculous, it seems almost not possible. It feels like magic. And we cannot understand that until we experience it.
The brilliance is, that when we unravel these moments of boredom or pain, we sweep away our unconscious conditionings. We don’t pave a way to bliss. It’s already there; we are unearthing it. When we stay, the bliss that sweeps over us, the mind that clears and sparkles is so much more beautiful a life experience than any small boost we gleam from an inspirational quote on Instagram we might read in the meanwhile. And hey, I’m a gal who hearts Instagram, don’t get me wrong, but it’s time to embrace BOTH ways of being.
People always ask: how do I surrender? How do I let go? THIS IS HOW. This practice lays the foundation to be able to do it when the bigger stuffs surface.
The biggest question I get when I’m teaching is how to do this. And in my years, in dozens of analogies, examples and demonstrating, anything I might have ever explained falls ridiculously short of this brilliant, entertaining example from a fantastic comic. An unlikely source; love it when the Universe is cheeky like that. That’s my kind of Universe.
Please take 4 minutes, 51 seconds to watch this now. If you never held a pranayama, stretched into an Adho Mukha Svanasana, cycled your sweaty soul or meditated a day in your life ever again, but JUST. DID. THIS. you would be F O R E V E R changed. Promise.
Namaste, yo.
