The How of Being!

In my last blog, I mentioned that the cure for our constant feeling of being overwhelmed was to be wherever we happened to be.

I heard back from a reader who said she had lots of demands on her – children, work, social, family, self-care and so on. Children need to be fed and nurtured with time and attention. Work commitments have to be met. Family also demands time. How can one practice ‘being’ while ‘doing’ all the things that need to ‘be done’?

Think back to the first time you fell in love. Do you remember how uplifted you felt? The thought of your beloved was constantly with you and raised the tone of your life. The sun shone brighter. The flowers had a deeper, richer hue. Even the panhandler on the street had a nobility of demeanor.

The cynic will say that it is impossible to live in the glow of youth’s first love. But it is possible and is your only way out of the sorrows of this material world.

Know that you do nothing. Your accomplishments are not your own. All that you have achieved, all that you have done, has been done through you. Not by you.

If you are a person of faith, imagine that Jesus, or Krishna, or Allah, or Baháʼu'lláh, or Guru Nanak, or whoever inspires you from the wisdom tradition you follow, is acting through you. If you are atheist/agnostic, imagine that a benevolent universe is acting through you to accomplish whatever it needs to.

You are merely the passenger on the bus. Your job is to enjoy the ride. The driving is being done by someone else.

Your only job is to feel your connection with this universal force and then it will always be with you as your beloved was with you when you first fell in love.

The way to ‘get there’ is to practice, practice, practice, practice, practice. This is a “rest of your life” journey.

And then you find that you are indeed just being. You are resting in this feeling of deep joy and all that needs to be done is getting done. There is no stress. There is no anxiety.

I describe this in the syllabus of my course Creativity and Personal Mastery.

You wake up in the morning suffused with an ineffable feeling of joy, a deep sense of well-being. You go to work, to a job you love so much that you would pay for the privilege of doing it. You labor intently but are so focused that time flies by unnoticed. At the end of the day you are invigorated, brimming with more energy than when you started. You have a penetrating awareness of the course you are charting, a clear knowledge of your place in the scheme of the universe. Your work feeds this, is congruent with it and brings great contentment and peace.

You face obstacles, big ones and small ones, perhaps more than your fair share of them. You understand very clearly that their purpose is to test your mettle, to bring out the best in you even as the abrasive whetting stone serves to finely hone the knife. So you plow on indomitably, sure of what you want to achieve and yet unconcerned about results.

At times it seems as if you are riding on the crest of a powerful tidal wave, as if the universe itself is helping you, working with you and through you. Locked doors open mysteriously. Incredibly fortuitous coincidences occur. You accomplish prodigious feats, feats you would never have imagined yourself capable of. Yet it would have been perfectly okay if you had not accomplished them.

You accept accolades gracefully but are not swayed by them because you march to the beat of your own drummer. Your personal life is intensely fulfilling. You are active in a variety of civic, charitable and political causes and successful in all of them. Your spouse is perfectly compatible with you, a true helpmate in every sense of the word.

You beget progeny and your offspring bring great satisfaction. You have a sense of trusteeship towards them and intuit what Gibran articulated:

“Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself.
They come through you, not from you.
And though they are with you, they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit,
not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but strive not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and he bends you with his
might that the arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as he loves the arrow that flies, so he loves the bow that is stable.”

So it goes on year after year, each day more perfect than the one before. Your gratitude is so intense that at times it is like a physical ache. Your heart bursts as you thank the universe. What have you done to deserve such good fortune? And when the time comes for you to depart, you do so joyfully and in peace, achieving identification with the Cosmic Principle, that incredible merging which has been called many things by many peoples but is ultimately indescribable, far beyond the feeble capabilities of language.

A life such as described above is your birthright. You have to reach out and claim it. Will you succeed? I do not know. I do know that the first step towards getting there is recognizing that you want to get there. It is very important that you desperately want to reach the goal. It is equally important that you not particularly care whether you do or not.

If this sounds like a paradox to you, you are correct.

It is.

Remember that all paradoxes are resolved as you reach higher levels of understanding, even the ultimate paradox of all - that which we call life.

Peace!

If this column resonates with you and you would like to begin your journey into the space described, you may wish to join my Meaningful Living Mastery Program. Please email [email protected] for more information.