Driving highway 24 to head into Berkeley, my friend called that our lunch at Café Gratitude would need to be delayed. I’ve spent a load of time in the Bay Area, but very little to none in unfamiliar Berkeley, and the first thought that popped into my head was:
Ok world, what adventure do you have for me?
Without a doubt, sans the blink of an eye, it was an automatic reroute to:
It’s gorgeous out. I have no idea where I am. I have a few hours to lollygag, and, this happened for a reason, so what’s new out there that I’m supposed to see?
Five or ten years ago, the instantaneous reaction might easily have been: miffed because “my plans” were thrown off course. Anxiety about where I was or what to do. Annoyance because I skipped yoga to get to lunch earlier, only to see I could have gone all along.
How we react to life governs how easily life flows to us. How quickly we can surrender to the present moment signals to the universe how much more beauty or challenge we can handle.
Over my Bay Area weekend, my bestie told me this story. His father is a highly successful attorney. His professional playing field could be designated as the top levels of where pressure, stress + gray areas concerning morality reside. When the sugar hits the pan, his father easily allows it to blow over, takes nothing personally, and states: that’s showbiz! ‘Showbiz’ to him is drama, conflict.
This play we look on as our lives is nothing but this:: showbiz. My bestie and I joked about how for all of our spiritual pursuits + study, his father might be the most Zen person around.
In rudimentary or sexily marketed spirituality or personal growth, peeps might cheerlead—reach for the adventure! Make a choice about how you perceive your life! And we can do this sometimes, to some extent, but the deeper work is when and where we can’t.
What holds us back from looking at our life as adventure or showbiz, is of course, our perception of past experience and conditioning. We continually clog from just allowing ourselves to be on the ride. We haul around hurts and resentments and truckloads of stories and identifications, when really, it’s all bullsh**.
Being able to move from hurt to adventure isn’t just a conscious choice. It’s excavation + awareness of delving into your unconscious.
So, how do we do this? It’s the same answer, always: be there, with it. Let it be.
Anytime you find yourself not seeing life as an adventure, or unable to smile at it as showbiz, you’re out of the flow. You don’t need to do anything to get back in the flow, because the Reality is, you can’t. When you’re open, the flow carries you. When you’re available (that is to say unattached to your version of what it should look like,) life comes to you.
Teachers call it spiritual practice in general, rather than, say, spiritual “winning,” because we don’t know HOW to let it be.
Students of the mind, probably anyone reading here will already practice allowing genuine emotion or an unpleasant experience, but part of letting it be also means being aware when we become attached to even our suffering. Just as easily as we can wall off and not want to experience pain, we can go to the other direction, delve so much into it that we get lost in it and it only becomes another story.
We all do it from time to time. This is why even the most experienced yogis will occasionally fall out of a balance. This is why gals have girlfriends—so that when we’re hibernating in jeggings, endlessly looping “The Prince of Tides,” after the break up with a guy we were only dating for two weeks, they come to snap us out of our wallowing.
Learning to deal with our past pain and suffering, emotional charges and current mind-stuffs that come up are tricky business. The mind is more than a bitch and a half. You have to embrace your pain the way you would an injured bird found on a curbside. You want to give it love, be gentle with it, pay attention to its needs, but you also don’t want to be crazy bird lady who ends up with 14 stray pigeons and cockatoos sh**ing all over her studio apartment.
In the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali the two sides of this principle are Abhyasa (practice) and Vairagya (non-attachment). Both partner together to unfold our Ultimate experience. We approach the mind, our pain and our stories with this delicate balance.
We cannot get rid of our mind or our suffering. Sucks, but it’s true. We can take leaps towards adventure, and of course we should, but one doesn’t go from seeing life from ‘victim’ to showbiz in a single bound, unfortunately. No matter how far you leap, you’re always taking yourself with you. So best to get all cozy with that straggly little bird of anxiety or fear or hurt. Get to know every inch of her– just don’t give her a bedazzled collar and a custom-made feeder in the prime real estate that is your heart.
Our job is awareness. Once you are consciously aware, once you learn to hold the bird gently (ok, precariously) and it hasn’t taken up coop in your heart or apartment, it just flies away. You can call that an organic process of nature, a metaphysical science of personal evolution, some would call it a blessing from God, let me call it evaporation by Grace.
The more we can sit with our reactions, hurts, fears, the faster they (thanks for sticking with me on and this super drawn out wounded bird metaphor…) fly away. Our nurturing attention releases the need for them to stick around. Soon all of life is showbiz, an adventure, our biography under the footlights. No more and no less. And we? Well, we’re just along for the ride, with magic in our wake.
