After my father had passed, it was left to the three daughters to sift through the piles of paper and other stuff everywhere in his office: on his desk, on a table and two chairs, and almost everywhere on the floor. We all did our share of this gigantic task. Above all, my father was a very creative spirit, an engineer and a gardener, and always full of ideas and projects of what he wanted to do. Sorting out his overwhelming mess was one of those projects, but it always came last. It wasn’t something that was creative, so his attempts at tidying were always ended by other projects that were more urgent or more interesting to him.

One of the precious things I found when going through his creative mess is the skeleton of a little seahorse floating in plexiglass, yellowed with age. It’s been on my desk ever since, reminding me of him. I never really stopped to reflect on why it seemed meaningful to me, it just was. This morning it came to me why.

My father loved all things natural. This love was three things for him: an openness to perceiving the wondrousness of it, an intellectual curiosity that wanted to understand, and a belief in the essential goodness of what he called God’s creation. When I was on my own spiritual quest, my understanding of this love of his was skewed by what I rejected as his constant mind activity, telling us endlessly about what he saw or heard, as well as by my disaffection from his Christian beliefs. As a result, I wasn’t able to share fully his love with him.

Because I reacted so strongly to these two aspects, I also couldn’t appreciate the third one: his amazing openness and readiness to see the wonder of the world that surrounds us. It wasn’t that he wanted to be spiritual and aware, or that he was practicing mindfulness. For him, it was simply how he was.

So when I was looking at the intricate skeleton of the seahorse this morning, I found myself seeing with his eyes. Eyes of wonder. Eyes that were alive with taking in detail, the beauty of form and function, color and shape. Ears that came alive with listening. What came naturally to him, what was simply and very deeply part of his way of being, isn’t quite so natural to me.

What has always been part of my way of being is the deep need for, and movement into, silence. This came with a protective defensiveness against a world that seemed often too noisy, too chaotic, too suffering for me to be really open to it. So openness to the wonder of the world came much later in my spiritual unfolding.

As I reflect on my father’s spiritual gift to me, his openness to wonder, I am also struck by how we all naturally embody different aspects of Being. Some of us are naturally open and appreciative, some drawn to silence, or service, some are naturally inquisitive about Truth. These are the gifts that help us along on our path. In addition, though, we may feel we need to practice those aspects that don't come so naturally. Many spiritual traditions encourage such an approach.

Even better, though, is to discover these expressions of Being in ourselves, as abilities that are part of us. They may not have been there to start with, but as we merge into Being, they will come alive in us as part of our spiritual deepening. My father’s little seahorse spoke to me of this: a natural readiness in my father that has opened up in me over time. We can appreciate the natural gifts in ourselves and others without having to worry about what’s ‘not developed enough yet’. It will come, sooner or later. Our paths are all wondrously different, perfect for us in this lifetime.

There is so much habitual turning around this idea of who we are, and so much inner turmoil, that all this psychological weight gets projected onto the question of Who am I. It comes to be all about ME.

This is ironic, because self-inquiry is supposed to liberate us from all this self-concern. And it can, but in asking the question, Who am I, all that baggage that’s very personal, emotional and mental, often stands in the way of the question really guiding us. I’m not saying it can’t guide us, because it is a very powerful question. If it calls you, do use it. But if you use it, be aware of what you project onto it.

By contrast, a question that comes with a lot less baggage, and is much more direct, is: What is Here?

What is Here?

This is a much more open question. It’s not about ME and who I am, it just allows us to open to what is here. At various levels: there may be thoughts, there may be emotions, there may be physical sensations.

And there is also this reality that is vast and that is what we’re looking for. And that is also us. But when we’re looking for that, it’s best not to make it a personal thing about who I am.

It's much easier to simply open our awareness from the usual narrow focus on something to a quality that's much less focused, and ultimately totally unfocused, totally spacious. This is where you start tasting awareness: the spaciousness of the awareness that you are. It's an opening to what is, and what is, is this ability to receive everything just as it is. To allow everything to be part of what you're aware of. And then ultimately you can take into this open awareness the very quality of this awareness itself.

So let’s do this together. In this very moment, if you’re listening to my talk, you’re aware of sound, me speaking, aware of seeing me if you’re looking at your screen, and you may be aware of the others on your screen. Or, if you’re reading this blog, you’re aware of the visual impression of the screen, the squiggles of the letters that form words and sentences. You may also be aware of surrounding noises and things you see around you other than the screen. So that’s awareness at different sensory levels.

You may be aware of how you’re feeling emotionally. There may be a positive tone, or a neutral tone. Or there may be a very specific emotion, or a feeling that we usually call more ‘negative’. You can include that in your awareness. You can also notice your thoughts if there are thoughts going through your mind, questions you may have, reactions to what I’m saying.

You can be aware of how you’re feeling energetically: relaxed, tense, vital and thriving or tired and low, speedy or calm.

And then in this very moment, you can also become aware of this ability that is there to be aware. It’s not at all personal. But it is what makes everything possible, and from which everything else arises: sense perceptions, thoughts, feelings, emotions. So in this moment, right now, I invite you to let go of all the objects of your awareness, and turn your awareness back to itself, noticing its quality, tasting it, savoring it. And if you’re more of a heart person and your perception is more one of the heart that includes everything, you can turn your attention back to the essential open, receptive quality of the heart.

So what is here includes this ability to be aware, this open, spacious quality, open spacious being that you are. And that is who YOU are, not in a personal way, but in essence. This is what self-inquiry leads you to if you don’t get stuck in personal projections about ME. AND: you can also go there more directly, by using the question What is Here.

Maybe these glimpses came just once, maybe more often. Sometimes they last just a moment, or they may last longer. As you’re experiencing them, you think you’ve got it. But then the experience comes to an end, and you think you’ve lost it. And so the search continues. Or there may be a word, a concept, like enlightenment or awakening, and you just know that’s what you want.

But the end of the search is not getting what you’re looking for, because you’re searching from a perspective that’s slightly off. It’s a shift in perception and perspective.

The end of the search is a realization that what you were looking for is already here. It’s what you are.

Some teachers say what you’re looking for is yourself: Who am I, truly, really? Another way of talking about what you’re looking for is finding what has always been there, what you couldn’t possibly lose. While you’re searching, it may feel like there’s something missing, and that’s what you’re looking for. So the end of the search is realizing that you couldn’t possibly ever lose this, you couldn’t not be that.

This is huge, and yet it’s also such a tiny shift. It’s a shift that takes you out of an inner misalignment into alignment: yes, that’s what is here, that’s who I am, truly.
Another way of conceiving of it is to think of it as a taste: of peace, of love, of bliss, of truth, of stillness. If you taste this, you know that it’s real. And maybe your perception is still slightly off, because you’ve tasted it and then you think you’ve lost it. But when you let yourself experience that taste, over and over, you will come to know that it can’t be lost.

The shift is like the difference between two ways of tasting. One is tasting and thinking, wow, that was a special experience, I have to have that again, and I want it to be permanent. That’s the perspective of searching. The other is tasting and realizing this is real. I’ve always known this, and it’s always available. That’s when the search stops.

And even after this shift, there may be a back and forth between the two perspectives. Sometimes you may feel like yes, I’ve really stopped looking, I know what it is. And even then you might seemingly lose it again. The point is you can always come back, because it’s always here. It’s who and what you are. It’s what shines in and as us. It cannot be lost.

The true end of the search is realizing, ever more deeply and fully, that I couldn’t have lost this in the first place. It’s just that I thought I lost it, I thought it wasn’t available to me. But here you are, and it is available. You can taste it any time you let yourself be still enough to taste it. Any time you let go of the distractions of thoughts or feelings, the events happening, the people around you. Any time you let go of that, here it is, that same taste, that same beauty, that simple essence of who you are.

Here is a question that invites you into the open heart: “In my experience right now, in this moment, am I excluding anything?”

Is there anything I want to get rid of, that I feel doesn’t belong, is not ok, or should stop? And if there is such a thing, is there any way that I can include it? For example, by saying to myself: “Ok, this is here right now. I don’t have to like it, I don’t have to agree with it, I don’t have to find it ok. But: can I let it be what it is and how it is?”

These questions invite you into the open heart when it’s closed off in relation to something, whether it is an experience, a thought, or an inner image or memory. “Can I include this? Can I let this be part of my inner experience?”

And it’s also ok to disagree, to say no I don’t think this should be here. But at the same time, when it is here, it is, and then it needs to be included. AND: you can do everything within your means to make it stop. That’s ok. It doesn’t mean everything is always good.

Asking this question leads us to dealing with reality at two different levels. At the level of loving awareness, everything is included. At the human level, you don't have to become an unfeeling zombie or put your head in the sand.

Take the war in Ukraine. It is happening right now. When it is included, even if it breaks your heart, there can be compassion for the people suffering from its danger and destruction, from the pain and loss it has caused them. There can be compassion even with the people who have caused this suffering, who destroy and kill, because at some level this must be a terrible way to live. We’re lucky not to have to destroy or kill anybody.

It is ultimately a mystery why there is so much suffering in our world. And yet here it is, and as long as it’s here, it can be included. We can open our heart to it. And at the same time, we can do all we can to help it stop, or help it be alleviated.

When we take action from an open heart, it is very different from action that is taken from a closed heart, from anger, or fear, or shut down feelings. It touches others and invites them into an open heart, too, as they receive our help, our compassion, our dedication. Open-hearted action has a way of spreading open-heartedness, where close-hearted action will likely cause others to close their hearts, too.

It’s a choice we have in every moment. Do we include or exclude, say yes or no? Do we open our hearts, or close them? Do we let our hearts be broken open by all the suffering in this world, or do we close them? It’s a choice.

He didn’t say ‘Oh, I was totally blissful even though my thumb was hurting’. His answer was simple, and real. His report was that there was pain from the bee sting in his awareness as he was sitting that day. Other meditations may have been blissful or expansive, but on that day his thumb hurt.

It’s similar in our lives when things happen we don’t like, when we feel frustrated, hurt, or unhappy – whether that’s because of outer events, or our own illness, acute or chronic, or limits we run into due to aging. There are moments when we’re ok, and moments when we’re not ok, when there is pain and difficulty.

So where is the sweetness of Being in that?

The sweetness is that there can be both. There can be difficulty, and even resistance to it, and all that can be received in a way that doesn’t diminish what we are also aware of in being alive. There is a sweetness in being alive and aware, even if life totally sucks in this very moment.

These are two levels of being and experiencing. At the level we're usually aware of, there is the human condition, however that expresses in the moment, however frustrating, painful and difficult that may be. At the level of Being, there is an awareness that even as we’re fragile as human beings in a body, heart or mind that don’t always function as we’d like them to, that are prone to hurt and break down, even in the face of all that, we are sweetly alive.

All of this experience is held in Being, received in awareness. Being is not touched by the humanness of these states. It’s not even touched by the resistance to these states. It’s an openness to whatever is happening.

So we don’t need to be blissfully unaware of pain that’s in our body or heart. We’re human, so we will be aware of it, and we may even resist it. And yet there can be a sweet embrace of that, an openness. Maybe it won’t be sweet in the moment, maybe it will just be very factual. But even that factual receiving of it has a sweetness to it. It’s like a bowing to it, yes, here I am, I am hurting today. My body is hurting, my mind is racing, my heart feels broken.

All of that, and yet here we are, we’re still here. And that is sweet in itself. How can this be? It’s a mystery at the heart of our being.

And to some extent, all of these will work. They will help ease the agitation and stress felt in body, emotions and mind.

But when we do things to be calm, we’re not leaving the realm of what changes, what goes up and down. What goes down – gets calm – invariably will go up again. We’re forever oscillating between tension and relaxation, the nervous system being activated or not, speed or slowness of thoughts, intensity or quietness of emotions. All of these inner states and movements change over time.

Most of us are busy trying to influence or control them so we feel ok. It’s a losing battle, because invariably calmness will turn into agitation the moment something happens that we don’t like, are afraid of, or angry or sad about. So most people live their lives in varying states of agitation and stress, forever trying to do things to be less agitated, and ultimately forever failing.

True calm cannot be found in the world of change.

True calm comes from realizing that there is a part of you that is untouched by any agitation in your nervous system, your mind, or your emotions. There is a space in you that is calm and peaceful by its very nature.

You ARE this space, this calm, but to begin with, you can think of it as a space in you, or a part of you, that is calm and at peace no matter what. The good news is that it’s not difficult to find.

There are two ways of discovering it: through awareness, and through the heart.

Using awareness, you can ask yourself: who is perceiving that I am agitated? Or: what is perceiving this? In doing so, you move the focus of your attention away from the agitation towards that part or space in you which perceives it. And you’ll find out that that part is not agitated. It’s neutral. This is also called the witness.

Using your heart, you can ask yourself: can I open my heart to this agitation, or to the ‘me’ that got agitated? Can I be friendly and kind with this, with myself? If you do find kindness or heart opening in yourself, again you can check: is the part of me that feels kind, or the open heart, is that agitated? Is it touched by the agitation? Again you will find that there’s an open quality, usually tinged with friendliness or kindness, or a simple openness. A willingness to welcome whatever arises. This openness is not affected by any disturbance.

Both awareness and the heart are bridges that lead you from the ever changeful to the changeless. To that which is calm in the face of whatever states arise. Both are like gateways. Truth – and true calm – can be found by using either or both of them.

So to come back to where we started: the first impulse when we want to be calm is usually to try and control the agitation. But true calm is not about controlling, it’s about finding that in you which is not agitated. Either through the heart or through awareness.

And sometimes, when the disturbance is very strong, there is an intermediate step that can be helpful. It’s often used in trauma therapy. You can start by looking around and noticing things in your physical environment that are not moving: walls, ceiling, floor, furniture. Noticing the chair you’re sitting on that’s holding your body. So even as there is agitation in you, there are also things that are not moving, not agitated. In taking this in, you can let that calm your nervous system.

This can be an intermediate step for those moments when your nervous system is just too agitated. In those moments, looking for what isn’t agitated can be like a big jump. So using your environment as a bridge that allows the nervous system to calm down can be useful – just as other calming techniques can be useful – until you feel ready to turn the question towards yourself and towards finding what isn’t agitated in you.

So that’s how you find the deeper calm. The calm that doesn’t disappear with agitation. That doesn’t need the nervous system to calm down for it to be calm. If you’ve looked enough times, and you’re starting to trust that this calm is always here, you don’t need agitation to stop. You can start resting in this calm. Even if there is some disturbance, as the agitation is received by calm, it calms down quite easily by itself. You don’t need to do anything other than let yourself land on what is already calm, what has not been touched by the agitation.

This is very real. The calm is very real in its soothing effects on the nervous system. And it’s very possible to find that. It’s there in all of us, just waiting to be discovered. And may you discover it for yourself, for your own wellbeing, and for the sake of those whose lives are touched by you.

Often, in spiritual teachings, what we find is just an emphasis on the divine, on that which isn’t human, which doesn’t come and go, which is not the body, which is not the thoughts, not the emotions. And this pointing has its very important place. It’s very clear, and it’s much easier to talk about just that than to include our humanity. It’s easier because there can then be a very clear distinction between who we are and who we aren’t. As one of the traditional Eastern teachings puts it, we are not our body, not our thoughts, not our emotions.

And this IS true. Who and what we truly are is not to be found in anything that arises and passes. What we are is the awareness of all of that, the space in which all arises and passes. It’s a space that has no judgment, and that meets suffering with compassion and love. In this space, our humanity is welcome.

If it is welcome, though, it can become confusing as to what really happens in this space.

Is this a form of therapy, then, in which we are either received by an other (therapist, friend, loved one, compassionate other), or by ourselves, within ourselves? Therapy can be purely psychological, and insofar as it is, it is different. The receiving or welcoming that I’m talking about, comes from a space that is beyond the psychological. It’s a sacred meeting of our true selves, of Being, of Love, with our humanity: thoughts, feelings, sensations, emotions.

The confusion happens because this space is most needed when painful or difficult states arise. It’s always our humanity that faces us with suffering. When we rest in Being we simply are in this space, we are this space. It’s the particular combination of our conditioning, our current preoccupations and events that have caused certain states to be triggered in us, that causes the problems. It’s that that makes us suffer.

The easy, and often repeated, spiritual answer is: well, that’s just thought, that’s just feelings, just let that go. But as we all know, it isn’t that easy to let go. And what’s even worse: if you are a spiritual seeker who follows this advice, you turn against yourself. You reject your own humanity, the very thing that makes you you in this particular way, in this very individual way. You judge what arose instead of receiving or even welcoming it.

When the distinction between human and divine is used in this way, against our humanity, it becomes pernicious. It creates a hardness in us, and an unbridgeable division between what’s spiritual and what isn’t. It recreates those two categories in a way that makes us lose touch with the divinity of all of who we are. We lose touch with the sacredness of that, the beauty of it. We can’t be open to that anymore because it gets rejected. And in that rejection, there is a hardening and a closing of the heart, to ourselves, and to others.

That’s why the opening of the heart to absolutely everything is so important. Why it is a true and sacred path to awakening. Because that’s where we come home to ourselves as both divine and capable of a love that’s totally unlimited and open to everything. Not disturbed by anything that may arise, and yet also disturbed in the very human ways that we have.

For me, the ultimate realization is that our humanity does not stand in the way of our divinity. It can be a path to that when it’s an opportunity to open and to include, to welcome. In this gesture of opening it brings us right back to our divinity because divine love is that: it’s an opening, a receiving, a welcoming of everything just as it is. And a devotion to include that in the spaciousness, and the appreciation of the beauty of whatever is.

That‘s how the human and the divine come together. They may be distinct, yes. But they are also one. The distinction between them has had way too much weight in the history of spiritual teachings, compared with the sacred merging of them when the human is received by the divine. Let your heart open to your humanity, and let that be your path to awakening. Let the peace and the love in that opening take you all the way home to yourself, because that IS your true home, your true self.

I love doing water colors, but I’m not an artist and my water color skills are not all that good. You can see for yourself in this extract from a water color that I did recently. It’s a goldfinch sitting on a tulip leaf looking at a tulip… but it sure doesn’t look like a goldfinch! The shape isn’t quite right, and the blue from the sky bled into the beautiful yellow of the bird.

When I looked at it, it struck me that this image captures the nature of our human existence very fittingly. When we come into life we’re pure light, untainted, and when we leave we merge back into this purity. But as we’re living, our life circumstances bleed into us, becoming part of who we are. We are conditioned in so many ways, by our families, the culture around us, the collective human psyche. Trauma and pain cause defensive patterns that become part of our psyche. Our light gets obscured, our shape distorted.

The spiritual search leads us back to where we come from, the purity of our original nature. The question is: how do we understand and live the darker forces, the mess that human life tends to be and create? Knowing that we are indeed goldfinches, how do we respond? By rejecting and trying to escape everything that is not light-filled? By claiming that’s not really us? Or are we open to finding out what this human mess is all about? Are we willing to experience it for what it is, fully, completely, without any disclaimer? What gold could be found in that?

I’ve often reflected on the contribution of the Western psyche to human awakening. Many Eastern teachers, the Dalai Lama and Amma among them, have commented on how deeply wounded and scarred the Western psyche is. It looks like Western goldfinches are even more distorted than Eastern ones. So it’s not surprising that Westerners look to the East for its spiritual teachings. But these tend to be the teachings that instruct us to focus on the purity of true nature, often at the exclusion of everything else.

Maybe one of the contributions of Western spiritual teachings is about how to find gold in the distortions and contractions, the pain and discomfort, in the very messiness that we’re usually trying to escape. When spaciousness meets contraction, when light meets darkness, love and compassion arise. In this true meeting, nothing is excluded, all is received as it is. Distortion, purity, light, darkness, even these dualities melt in the loving embrace of Being. We are the goldfinches we are, golden, bled into, distorted. We come in all kinds of shapes, goldfinches no less.

I’ve been reflecting recently on why I feel including the very personal aspects of our experience and lives is so important, especially for spiritual people who yearn to awaken to true Being. I don’t feel I have any ultimate answers, but I have some sense of the pitfalls that can be avoided.

For the longest time, I thought that the personal aspect that stood most in the way of my awakening was the mind. I hated my mind for being so incessantly noisy. All I wanted was for it to shut up. Which it did only very rarely, in exquisite moments of bliss or emptiness during retreats or meditation. It calmed down over time, for sure, but it never really stopped. Even when I was inquiring into who I was, the mind wasn’t always empty, even if I had an increasingly solid and unquestionable sense of who I am. (If you are more of an emotional type you can substitute emotions for the mind).
 
We all have ideas of what awakening means. None of them are true,

as all of them are ultimately projections based on whatever self-assessment we have of ourselves and what is wrong with us. Or they are projections based on what we have read or heard others say about awakening that we then connect in some way to our own lived experience.
 
Ultimately, it is the stress, unease, and suffering in our lives that we hope to solve through awakening. This is what mostly pushes our search. Even if you think you just love the exquisite beauty of Truth or Love or God, the reason why you love that so much is because during the moments when you’re in the appreciation of that beauty, suffering – tension, agitation, pain and contraction -- has stopped. It’s always the ‘negative’ and the dark, the suffering, that pushes our search. The problem is: from that arise projections about what awakening is, namely an absence of these painful aspects of our lives.
 
In trying to get away from the suffering, we end up looking for something that doesn’t exist. Permanent ease, beauty and peace are not what human nature is made to be. This human nature moves eternally between opposites of ease and contraction, peace and struggle, beauty and ugliness, well-being and pain. This is what, in the yogic tradition, is called the play of leela. In Rumi’s poem The Guesthouse (see below), it is the coming and going of all sorts of agreeable and disagreeable visitors.
 
Trying to get away from, or to get rid of, the disagreeable visitors is setting yourself up to fail. It’s like imagining that you can move to a house where only agreeable, enlightened visitors knock at the door. This neighborhood does not exist in the human realm. Or it's like imagining that you can shut the door permanently to the ones you don’t like. Instead, if you learn how to welcome and entertain them, to accept their visit and appreciate what they bring, humbly and with a willingness to be taught, or even joyfully in your willingness to be emptied out – then you come to realize that you are the house, the space in which all of this happens.
 
This space does not need to close the door to anything or anybody. And it will be kind and compassionate to the visitors that are ugly and distorted by pain and suffering. Yet there will also be a clarity that these visitors are just visitors. They’re not who you are. When you try to shut the door or throw them out if they managed to sneak in, you’re locked in a struggle that keeps you away from the very ease and peace you’re looking for. When you throw open the doors and let Life bring you what it will, including your own reactions, then you’re much closer to Life, to Love, to Being as it plays out in every moment.
 
And this, too, is just an image and ultimately false. But it’s closer to Truth than those that come from projections based on opposites of experience, on our yearning for a life free from pain and suffering.
 
If you know the painfulness of the struggle with the ‘negative’ visitors, and if you’re ready to try opening the doors instead, you may find help in a psycho-spiritual form of therapy, or in the spiritual support groups or the sangha gatherings that I’m offering online. Opening the doors takes you on a challenging but rewarding journey navigating between the hard rocks of suffering and the arid dryness of awakeness without love. It’s a voyage into the wondrous aliveness of the human Heart.