This morning I took a solo hike and I noticed something enlightening: where the trail seemed to fade off into nothing and disappear altogether, if I just kept taking steps, a previously hidden switchback or some other continuation of the path would become visible. If I stood in one place and looked for the trail, I couldn’t find it. Ah, I thought, just like life!
Sometimes it’s unclear which way to go. Things may feel hopeless, a clear path nowhere to be found.
If we try to find a solution from where we stand in an attempt to end the discomfort of feeling lost and clutch for clarity—it often goes nowhere or becomes even more of a conundrum. The old trope, “the way out is through” comes to mind. “Through”, however, often becomes apparent only as we’re moving forward whichever way we know how—sometimes that just means being in silence, being still, being with our experience no matter how uncomfortable or distasteful, and listening.
I seem to be listening a lot lately, and then the doing does itself. The path appears—how did I not see it before? I often wonder. Just listening and being with. With my feelings, the sensations in my body, whatever my mind is doing, with whatever seems to be happening outside.
I trust this listening, it seems to know the truth when it shows up.
As David Hawkins clarifies, we are aware of the body through the mind, of the mind through consciousness, and of consciousness through awareness. It is this awareness that seems to know. I wait for this awareness to speak its knowing.
I used to try to talk myself out of my uncomfortable or “unacceptable” feelings—often pretty successfully—by “looking on the bright side” and focusing on something else. But they just come around the back door. So. I don’t do this anymore. Life seems to have slowed down a bit with this shift. And nothing is too uncomfortable or unacceptable now. At times, it takes a moment to relinquish the story the mind is spinning around in to return to awareness and simply listen and be with the physical sensations, sometimes quite a few moments. But it gets there.
The mind and the body are working hard trying to keep us alive. Always. They need our compassionate awareness.
Thich Nhat Hanh, in Calming the Fearful Mind: A Zen Response to Terrorism, suggests a team of grounded folks serving as a council to simply listen to the grievances of citizens and heads of governments, for example, to heal the pain of the world. This is something I recall quite often.
Offering a space of absolute presence and compassion (having zero to do with approval) is what we’re all looking for—in our partners, friends, relatives… but primarily (and often unbeknownst to us) in ourselves.
To become this still, compassionate presence of hearing and being with ourselves is the healing we hope for, request and sometimes angrily demand from others in our lives. It’s nice when it’s there. Perhaps in some cases it’s even critical to a certain type of intimacy—it’s what every romance story is about: “finally, someone who gets me—who sees me at my worst and loves me anyway.” But if we can’t be this for ourselves, eventually things go south. No one can provide this for us all of the time; we all have our stuff and a right and need to follow our own flow within our own bodies and experience.
At the end of the day, it's really our responsibility to learn to come back to awareness and be our own soft place to land.
If we are this loving presence for ourselves via the awareness rather than the mind, not only can we be that for others, but we can be more clearly discerning in our lives and discerning of the path that appears. Not screaming internally (or externally) for this loving presence from others (which often doesn’t go over well) and instead first providing this for ourselves—allows us to really be there with What Is and notice the path through more quickly and easily, without so much noise.
If our early conditioning didn’t acknowledge and allow and be with whatever appeared in us in a loving way, we have to unlearn and reparent ourselves. That’s been mine and many others’ path. But it can be done by a willingness to be with pain, with discomfort, with judgements and overwhelming feelings, and just listening. Moving forward in whatever way calls to us in the moment, be that to rest in silence and listening or in action. Not getting too caught up in the story. Being there for our own experience. And then the awareness speaks and the path, unapparent as it may have been to us a moment ago, magically appears.