If the Buddha Got Stuck_ A Handbook for Change on a Spiritual Path - Charlotte Sophia Kasl [85]
Lighten up.Remember, in the big picture it all matters—but it’s not serious. Whether you keep moving down the track, sit by the roadside, or even have your feet stuck in mud, it is just where you are at this moment—nothing is better or worse—it’s all part of the big cosmic dance, the One Energy. We take the steps to lower stress and bring ease to our lives so we can have more clarity of mind and peacefulness of body. Make your best effort, and watch the unfolding drama.
Imagine flying up in the sky and looking down at homes, hospitals, prisons, office buildings, bars, and movie theaters and watch the unfolding dramas of so many lives, very similar to yours. Not on the surface, perhaps, but at the heart everyone wants to be free of suffering, be cared for, know happiness, and find some form of peace. Above all, be kind and merciful with yourself.
STEP SEVEN
Let Go
I teach one thing and one thing only:
Suffering and the end of suffering.
—THE BUDDHA
51. Welcome Home
We have come to the final stage of our journey—letting go. It’s the ultimate step toward ending our suffering in which we feel an abiding happiness—a spacious, relaxed mind, body, and spirit, and a feeling of living in the heart of life. It doesn’t mean life is always easy, rather that we stop fighting against our experience and accept the natural changes and losses that life inevitably brings. Letting go is built on all of the steps that have come before: remembering to show up for life, step back from your minds, enter into your experience, reach out to others, live in reality, and commit to action that frees you.
We become unstuck when we cease grasping at that which is temporal—our minds, bodies, situations, and lifespan. We rest in the deeper awareness that life exists in the “I Am” and the unified field of One Indivisible Energy where we started from on this journey.
Stephen Wolinsky told the following story at one of his workshops; he called it “Go Back the Way You Came.” A young man traveled by boat from Europe to India seeking relief from his misery and disgust with himself. He asked the Indian guru Ramana Maharshi for advice. Maharshi responded, “Go back the way you came.” A longtime student who overheard his remark said, “That was mean. How can you tell him that, after he came all this way here to get your help?” Maharshi responded, “I meant it. Not to go back to Europe, but to go back to the beginning of that thought and ask, ‘From where did that thought arise?’ ” In other words, go back to that place in you that existed before your mind had thoughts.
To go back the way you came is to retrace your steps from your false core beliefs and compensating patterns of proving the impossible, namely that you are good, worthwhile, and lovable or bad, worthless, and unlovable to drop beneath your thoughts into the emptiness and quiet of “I Am.” You explore all the ways you got sidetracked and keep asking yourself, is my approach to life working? Are my beliefs and actions helping me feel at ease in the world or putting me on a treadmill?
You drop back to the time prior to taking on concepts and beliefs when you were free to resonate, touch, sense, and take delight in simple things with an open, relaxed mind. There is now, this moment, this feeling, this amazing breath, this mystery of creation. To return to the “I Am,” you give up the game of searching for a special answer, magic moments, or the seven secrets of enlightenment. Going toward freedom is to dismantle what’s in the way rather than looking for an answer outside yourself.
When Siddhartha Gautama left the ascetics