The Crucible of Letting Go

I’m so amazed by people. I feel so blessed to work with these sincere people truly looking at themselves. In these classes, retreats, month-long immersions, we use these practices to see how we hold ourselves, how we are stuck, and we see that this way of being extends to everything we do.  Today after class someone was talking about how they have come to realize that they have to change the way they interact with everything and everyone.  They’ve been chewing on this for a few years, and they realized that they have been putting this equanimity control onto their lives for a long time, maybe forever. The need to be someone who is calm and who people view as calm and collected, not moved around by things has led them to interacting with life in a controlled way, if even very subtly.  

As we go deeper in our practice, it becomes clear in our very cells when we are in the heart of the matter. This is what it means to be truly centered. We are meeting what is happening and becoming it. We are hitting the true spot with our experience. We are right in the middle of reality. When we do this, from our internal practice, we know this experience to be authentic. This is not an idea but something we feel with our entire being.

As we know this authentic one pointedness, this meeting reality, when we are not doing that begins to feel terrible, icky. We leave an interaction and we feel like we misrepresented the situation. Maybe this is waiting for something at the deli, or even being in a music concert of immense connection and yet feeling like we could have met it more honestly, more seamlessly. Or maybe it was being intimate with our partner or family. We were not true. We were not naked to our fresh awareness, but our subtle manipulative games or unconscious way of being hijacked us and took over.  This is very common among people really getting a sense of their practice, and knowing in their bones what it is to be real.  For me, my joke was that I needed an oil change after many of my interactions. I felt kind of dirty or fake.  Knowing what it is to be right in the middle of what is happening, in the most sincere way, makes it very obvious when we have stepped out of this.  And our internal process makes this process something we feel with our bodies, something we get better and better at sensing, like a fabric of life we either meet and meld with or block life, like some dense piece of darkness in a field of light.

People who have had a real experience of practice encounter this need to touch everything from this place of truth.  It becomes a necessity. It is not an idea.  This is the heart of the sincerity which naturally bubbles out of real practice.  It is as if we have this internal compass or stoplight. We see when we are putting a red light up against reality, and it feels wrong.  This we feel in our cells.  I can say that I felt like I was misrepresenting the truth for several years after my time in Japan. It took many years of ripening to feel pretty good in most situations, like I was a vector for this true nature to furtively grow through me and relate to others.  

Some people unfortunately are not completely sincere in their practice, not willing to be truly honest, and so begin to use the gifts they have received from their practice for manipulation.  They begin to use charisma or intellect or charm or sexuality to get what they want.  And unfortunately they often become spiritual teachers.  This is such a shame, really.

But a true practitioner will see through this, because they have gone through the process. They’ve laid bare their experience, been through the crucible process of not knowing necessary to truly let go and be reborn in this new fresh way.  There is sublimity in them, and true prajna is born out of this laying bare of life to this truth. This is a wild process to go through!  We’ve spent our entire lives playing it safe, creating ways to interact with people and life that seems effective. And we have to let all of that go. We have to drop the facade and walk out into the open.  We feel like a fool. We feel unskillful. We have emotions which rush forward as we drop the guard and let our experience become natural. It is incredibly intimate, as we begin to feel everyone and everything more and more. This is not for the faint of heart, as it takes incredible courage to let go of our control on our experience. That’s why these classes are so powerful. They give us, in an extremely simple way, permission to explore letting go and explore.  

I am so impressed to be working with some amazing humans who have been through the truth grinder or just embarking on it and know in their bones this process has to happen. There is no turning back. There is no convincing these people as the universe has paved their way. Their cells are calling them like an arrow in flight. Life now is about learning creatively to allow this bigger process through them.  In the middle of this process, they are like little children just learning to walk, bumping into things, clueless, fresh, curious… I am so impressed and bow down to them and their sincerity.  It is so incredibly beautiful to see.

Often they will have to spend some time outside of religion or structured community to make this process intimately personal. To know it from the inside out, and then they will have a power and clarity that will be unmistakable and extremely useful for society. Just as the red light shows us when we are blocking life, so will the green light be more and more clear from our hard won grass roots experience.

So what are we doing…? We’re all dancing around, being molded, becoming God’s fool.  

Thank you very much for reading. Please take a chance and be truly honest and see if the universe does not begin to come to you and reveal a new world of light trying to happen.