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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

Dear ones,

The theme of support has been on my mind a lot over the last few days. Partly, it's because the spiritual support groups are starting this week and I'm reflecting on how people can be best supported in both their human experience and life and in their spiritual opening (not that these are truly separate). Partly, though, it's also an eternal theme, as old as humankind.

Spiritually, it's important because one of the main ways that we close off from spiritual opening is through contracting into a sense of separation and relying on personality and ego strength alone. We've all learnt this as children because we were told we had to 'get our act together', control ourselves or our impulses, or do or achieve what was demanded of us. In that we were left alone and had to cope by ourselves. As a result, the deeper the discomfort or pain, the more it tends to be closed off from any possibility of asking for help or support.

That's why the experience of sharing something and receiving support is so healing. That's how we open to the reality of Love in a very human way, how we can experience it directly and let it transform us. In that, the heart opens and separation gives way to a sense of connection or even oneness.

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,