When I was a teenager, I used to spend hours in my room doing nothing but listening to music.

I’d slip on a pair of headphones, and spend the rest of the evening thinking about the world…what it meant, who I am, and where I belong. I’d think about my past, my present, and my future.

Sometimes I’d get excited…sometimes I’d sob.

Music touched me in a way that nothing else could, and it was some of the best “me time,” I’ve ever spent.

The World Barges In

And then something happened…

I got caught up in trying to earn a living.

I got caught up trying to be there for my friends and family.

I got caught up trying to plan a perfect future.

Soon, I’m not spending any more time in the corner of my room with the headphones on, and I’m losing touch with the deeper aspects of life.

Don’t Forget

Death catches us all, and he who is least prepared is most distressed when it comes.

I’m not trying to bring you down, but the truth is…we only have a finite time to spend in this existence…why not make it count?

Making money is great. Being a great husband, wife, father, or mother is great. But don’t forget the rest. Don’t forget that spiritual part of you that is always the last to be fed and the first to be neglected.

I forgot, and it took a long time before I realized why I was unhappy. So you know what I did to fix it?

I put on a pair of headphones.

Image Credit

Life throws a lot of curveballs at us. We plan on going one way, and somehow end up on a different path. We get lost before we’re found, and sometimes we don’t get found at all.

That’s when a new journey begins, and, what I really believe, is the start of pursuing our true path.

No amount of planning, goal setting, or clinging can stop you from living your life the way it was meant to be lived…it’s inevitable.

No, I’m not saying that you aren’t in control…instead I’m saying that sometimes where you think you need to be is not always where you truly need to be.

The Door That Wouldn’t Open

Have you ever noticed that some doors just won’t open? Many of them are those closed long ago, but others are doors that look really shiny and new. They look special…and we want to turn the handle and walk in.

There were times when I would turn that doorknob over and over again, waiting for it to finally turn. I’d set up camp, and stay on guard for the minute that door opened. In the process…I’m watching other people open their doors, and that makes me even more antsy…I can’t stand it!

And then suddenly, I would notice another door just around the corner, one that entered the same room, but I couldn’t see because I wouldn’t stop and take a look around to look at other options. I was so fixated on that one door, that it never occured to me to try another.

Take Your Time Choosing a Door

I’ve learned now to always expect the winds to move my sails in the opposite direction of where I was going, and instead of trying to fight it…I simply use it to help me find another way there.

You can’t control everything, and honestly…it feels good to leave a little room for the unexpected. Anything else is boring.

Image Credit

Courtesy of LadyVivian

Who I am today is nothing like the man from yesterday, let alone the man from years ago. If I had an opportunity to meet my future self, I might not even recognize him.

There’s no hiding the fact that the decisions you make today are impacted by the experiences of the past. It’s part of what makes this journey so fascinating and so unpredictable. Have you ever noticed that no matter how many goals you set for yourself, there is always something that gets in the way of most? I call this my Dharma, and although I think I see the path in front of me, I have no assurances that I’m the one in control of that path.

So what does this mean for you and I?

Let’s start with who we are…we are made of building blocks. Some blocks are more firm than others, but by and large, our identity is sealed into place by the bricks of our experiences and the mortar of our feelings toward them. Notice I said that the mortar is made of your emotional reaction towards your experiences. I firmly believe that if you allow every experience to be a teacher, a reminder that you are working your way towards living your Dharma, then no matter what happens…you will be able to take it in stride.

Conversely, if you continue to react adversely to situations that don’t feel like they were meant to be, then you are only cementing more pain and suffering into your life. That is an extremely unpleasant way to live.

I was reading the book Zen Shorts, by Jon Muth, with my children, and I was fascinated by the manner in which the storyteller (in this case a panda), was able to take life as it flowed. It isn’t an easy frame of mind to obtain, but there is merit to be had from seeing each experience as a building block rather than a stumbling block.

Now, as for following your path…try to remember that you aren’t in control and no matter how hard you try, there will be twists and turns that you didn’t expect. Rather than fight the current of change, why not embrace it and see where you wind up? Sometimes it isn’t the plan that’s important…it’s the journey. Try to enjoy it.

Tags: dharma, experience, life

Image Credit: Stuck in Customs

Lately I have been thinking a lot about the motivations behind my behaviors…I’m trying to get to the root of what really makes me happy and what causes me grief. Although this process is never complete, I think this period of introspection has led me to some interesting insight that I’d like to pass on. Keep in mind that some of this might be difficult to hear, some of this might annoy you, and some of this might not fit your behavior, but I can’t do much about that.

As I continue to achieve many of the goals I’ve set out for myself, I’m finding that achieving the goal doesn’t lead to anything more than a brief moment of contentment. As soon as one goal is completed, another, more difficult one, replaces it. At first I thought this was due to my never ending quest for self-improvement, but I realized that this was only part of the equation.

Seeking happiness leads to emptiness?

More pressing than any desire to achieve, is the desire to be happy. I used to think that happiness would come from self-actualization, but now I realize that it doesn’t come from achieving a state of mind, but from fleeing states of mind.

What I mean by this is that many of my quests have, at the root, a motivation that is self-serving. I want to write words that people will like because when I receive feedback, it makes me happy. The problem is that it doesn’t make me happy and I believe that this is because I attach an expectation to my action. As a result, I set myself up to be disappointed, time and time again. And so this is true for all of my dreams, goals, and achievements. I think they will make me happy because I will finally have cracked the code or unlocked a new door in my quest, unfortunately it is because I want a result that I am become less happy.

As you succeed in achieving these goals and finding that happiness doesn’t meet you there, you start to feel a sense of despair. Why can’t I be happy? Is something wrong with me?

Planting the seed of truth

The truth is that as long as you seek to be happy, you never will be. And so I’ve finally realized how important the teachings of the Buddha have become, not because they enlightened me at the time, but because they planted a seed that would blossom exactly when I needed it to. Had I not studied Buddhist and Zen teachings prior to now, I wouldn’t have the frame-set to understand what I am going through. Since I have read these teachings, I can look back and say “Aha! Now I know what he meant!”

For years I wondered if I would ever fully grasp these teachings…I wondered if my faith would grow or shrivel into the dust from which it came. Looking back, I’m amazed at how the pieces fall in to place, even though at the time I thought “what the hell is going on with my life?”

So where do we go from here? Well, I’m starting to think that attaching any expectation from an action is going to lead you down a path you don’t want to follow. For instance, recently I helped treat someone suffering from dehydration and anemia. She was in a state in which she needed someone to take care of her. I enjoyed the feeling of helping and I didn’t even think about why or how I was going to do it. I just reacted and helped her. However, as I was driving later that day I wondered if maybe I should have been a doctor or work at a hospital so that I could help people. But…when I got to the truth of why I wanted to do that, I realized that helping people made me feel important, which felt good at the time, but still leaves you empty because the feeling doesn’t last. Helping people is great, but doing it for selfish reasons is only going to produce sorrow.

Feelings don’t last

The reason that it leads to sorrow is because feelings don’t last and as soon as the “happiness” fades, you instantly feel a void and search for more happiness to replace it. As a result, you are constantly in a state of searching, hunting, and desperately seeking a “happiness” fix. Eventually, you get so caught up in this trap that you lose site of what you were doing in the first place. This is how searching for happiness leads to despair.

The truth is that happiness doesn’t exist until you cease looking for it. When you do, without expectation or attachment, then you will learn what it is to truly find peace. This is what it means to chop wood and carry water. Let the Tao guide you in your actions…follow the middle way. This is what I’ve learned, how do you feel?

Tags: buddha, buddhism, dreams, goals, happiness, motivation, zen

Courtesy of L.Shadrack

What makes us human?

Is it our heart, opening…closing, like the windows of God’s eyes.

Is it our brains, constantly scanning, searching, hoping, thinking about what comes next.

Is it our emotions, feeling a single high for every low, always keeping us on our toes.

Is it our ability to recognize suffering? Is it our ability to acknowledge it?

Are we as unique as we think we are…will the journey continue to unfold after death?

In my opinion, none of this is what makes us human. The difference between a rock and an animal is that the rock accepts its fate. The rock knows it has no place to be and needs nothing to survive…now or ever. An animal is driven by instinct, it is always trying to survive. An animal is anxiety, movement, panic. A rock is stoicism, stability, and patience.

Humans are animals, but there is one difference that differentiates us. What makes us human, is that we are connected, we are alive, we are one. We feel the patience hiding inside of the rock. We feel the constant struggle in an animal’s instinct. We are both the rock and the animal.

We are aware of those around us. We know how our actions affect others, but there’s one problem.

We try to forget…

During your daily struggles, don’t become the animal. Remember that you have no place to be, except where you are. Remember that your place is not in your individuality, but in your connection with others.

We are human, but we are so much more. Become more.

Tags: animals, awareness, humanity

I’m proud to be who I am. I am thankful to God, The Creator, The Divine…for giving me a chance to take on this shell and learn what it was like to be human once.

There are some that teach us to feel guilty for being born in this skin. Others will have you believe we are less than perfect. All of that may be true, but I refuse to believe it.

We’ve been given a gift of seeing what it is truly like to live. We struggle, sometimes alone and sometimes together. We suffer, we laugh, we cry…we love. We spend our lives hoping, searching, and sacrificing our lives for love. We all feel deeply tied to each other, even though we try to forget.
Sometimes the suffering is too much and we quietly return to our shells…hoping that our luck will change. We often feel alone, but we know that we are not. Somewhere, someplace, there is a being or a spirit that lives within us.

We should not feel guilty, for we are born to be exactly as we are. Perfectly formed beings filled with the intention of our creator. Whether or not you believe in a god is irrelevant. We are the very act of a nature so great and powerful that we do not understand.

Universes bent to the will of fate…by the hand of nature herself, in order for this miracle of life to take place. By chance or by fate, it has happened and the likelihood of it happening anywhere else or at any other time is virtually nonexistent.

Celebrate who you are, even if your times are dire. Someday we will all realize that we are in this together. Someday the consciousness of man will shift further toward the divine and when we all wake up what a glorious day that will be.

Don’t feel guilty in your own skin, be thankful for the chance to shine. Be grateful that you’ve been able to see what it was like to suffer, for now you understand joy. Be thankful for war, for now you know peace.

In the end, whether our souls move on our perish forever, our memories will be imprinted on the very space we inhabit. We will remain forever on the fabric of time.

Although future generations may not know us, the universe will forever keep us in her memory. That my friends, is why we do matter. Just as we learn from the universe, the universe learns from us. Let us cherish that.

Tags: human, love, soul, space, suffering, universe

Image by slack12

How many of you find yourself worrying about things that are beyond your control? I know I am guilty of this all the time, even though I realize the futility of the effort.

What about feelings like jealousy, angst, or even malice? Have you ever found yourself caught up in a torrent of emotion that seems to take control of your mind without you even realizing it?

I only say this because I experience it too, and what I’ve come to realize during my meditation is that for some reason, people love to give themselves up to their emotions. Now, this works with both positive and negative emotions, but what I want to talk about here are the negative ones.

It happens so quickly and before we know it we are overcome with a poisonous mindset. It almost seems as if we are addicted to emotion…almost as if we thrive on it. As we feed our minds with these poisonous thoughts, we start to crave them more and more. We start to create an appetite that is insatiable and cannot be conquered. Over time, our lives become a permanent state of jealousy, angst, hate, rage, depression, or bigotry. We start to isolate ourselves from others, and as we do this we feel more and more disconnected from the world. Yet, we don’t experience it in this context…we think the world is disconnecting from us.

We create enemies out of friends and fighters out of lovers. We start to withdraw further into our mental delusions and eventually we forget where we are or who we are.

These poisons that we fill our mind with are one of the quickest ways to cutting ourselves off from our spirit. If you find yourself experiencing these feelings, try to remember to sit back and observe as your mind sparks with senseless fury. It will conjure these feelings from thin air, yet expect you to believe they are real. These emotions are nothing more than a thought process that we invest in. If you stop investing in the thought process, you stop feeding the beast that keeps you from your path.

The true path of the Dharma is one of peace and compassion, not of jealousy and rage. Your ego is a wonderful trickster and is always finding new ways to lure you off of your path. Stay focused on living your dharma and do not be distracted by useless emotional patterns. Let go of your hate, your rage, and your jealousy. Realize that these negative emotions will only lead you onto a path of despair – a state of hell.

Accept things that you cannot change and work to improve those that you can. Remember, we are all dying and regardless of how you try to cover it up, one day you too will fade away. Use this time to hone your meditation and your contemplative spirit. Withdraw from the world of Samsara and retreat into your inner being. Only there will you find your true self.

Tags: compassion, dharma, emotion, hell

Would You Take the Red Pill?

Image by Happy Tinfoil Cat

You claim freedom and free will, but how far are you willing to go to back that up? Given the choice, would you take the red pill and risk everything to gain it all, or would you be afraid to leave your “quasi” life behind and cower behind the blue pill?

Many people say that they want freedom, but I’m willing to be that they simply tell themselves that to mask the fact that they don’t have the strength or courage to do what they know must be done.

You have a choice…you can forsake everything you have for the sake of a spiritual journey, or you can remain in place, stuck to a body that will die and a life that will fade away.

How Much Control are

You Willing to Give Up?

The question isn’t so much, how much control do you have – the question is how much are you willing to give up? The true measure of control is the amount that we are willing to let go of and I’m willing to be that given the choice, many of use would retreat to our comfort zone.

You see, I know you feel it somewhere deep inside of you, that urge to break free of your cocoon and live the life of a butterfly. I bet that every day that passes where you haven’t shed a layer has resulted in another layer being added. Every day you feel the emotional energy build up inside of you, but you are afraid. You can’t take the pain of separation, of change.

So where does that leave us? You aren’t alone. We are all tied to our social and physical bonds. However, if we just realize that eventually, everything is going to fade away regardless, then we can accept our life as a butterfly much easier.

The truth is, once you face death and conquer it, you fear nothing. Doesn’t that sound like a wonderful way to live?

Tags: control, freedom, Impermanence, Reality

Image by Younglings

Do you live with a panic deep inside of you? You might not even know it is there, but you can probably feel it. It drives you to continually find new ways to improve yourself and to better your life. It drives you to eat more, drink more, or spend more money. You keep trying to find a new rush to fill up the gaps in your life, but you keep ending up in the same position.

The panic I’m talking about is a hole that doesn’t seem to fill up no matter what you try to fill it with. Some people think money will fill it, some think that family will fill it, while others think that helping others will fill it. However, every time that you do something that you see as the peak experience, every time that you reach a goal, this feeling doesn’t go away. In fact, you start to get more desperate…you try and try until it begins to eat you alive. Then it hit you, maybe like it hit me: no matter what I do, I am never going to fill the hole…ever.

You see, the hole I am talking about is a hole in your spirit that keeps telling you there is something wrong in your life. The problem is that in most people, it manifests in material ways, rather than spiritual ways. You think that becoming a millionaire, helping the poor, or finding love will all help to fill the hole. The problem is that it doesn’t work…none of it does.

I thought that money would help me, but it didn’t. Then I started running, but I kept wanting more. I started competing, but just competing wasn’t good enough. I wanted to win…then I wanted to always win…can you see the pattern? Every time we reach what we think is the “peak experience,” we realize that the experience wasn’t what we expected at all. I was thinking about my personal goals and I kept noticing that every time I thought I’d found the true path to happiness, it never came.

That’s when it hit me – like a ton of bricks actually, that no matter what pursuits I go after or achieve, I will never find a physical way to fill that hole. All my striving, all of my hope, was based in a physical world that relies on that hope and striving to pull you deeper into it. You see, that is the trap that binds us to suffering. This ego creature is so masterful that it will find any way that it can to trick you into thinking you are on the right path. Only when you realize that you’ve lost your way will it give up and try something else.

This is what happened to me. I thought I was on my path, but I was being tricked into thinking that. I was never going to fill that hole, instead I would just be travelling further and further down the rabbit hole until I reached a point of no return.

The only true way to fill that hole is by spiritual experiences. Even those are fleeting, but they are much more real then the physical experience. I don’t care what religion you follow, but the truth is that if you want to stop striving then you have to find a way to satisfy your spirit. For me, I know exactly what I must do, and it is something I find a way to avoid every day – meditation. I know that I must withdraw myself from the world of Mara and go inward, but I keep getting tricked into giving up. Realize that when you are tricked into physical pursuits, that even should you accomplish them your cravings will still go unsatisfied. This monster is never full and it will devour every part of you that it can. Stop feeding the monster and go inward, toward the spirit. Only then can you find your true path and only then can you fill the hole.

Don’t live a life of quiet desperation where you feel a panic inside of you every day. You know the way to happiness and you know it is the right thing to do. Escape the trap of suffering and follow the way…live your Dharma.

Tags: dharma, ego, goals, suffering

What I Learned from Fasting

Image by hcchoo

We live in a world that makes every possible attempt to control us. There are pysical, social, psychological, and even spiritual mechanisms in place to force our actions down a certain path. Those that are able to break free from these mechanisms of control are those you don’t see on the heavily travelled path. These people forge a path of their own through the jungle and because of this freedom they do not fear failure.

In my opinion, finding and maintaining a relationship with God is a personal journey that must be undertaken alone. You may meet others along your journey to help you find your way, but in the end the choice is up to you to Live Your Dharma.

They say that every guru you meet is nothing more than a physical manifestion of your own inner guru, and I can “feel” the truth in that statement. So, if the journey is a solo path that requires us to voyage inward, then how do we do it? Well, I view this journey as a parallel to an ascent back into the womb. I know it sounds strange, but try and remember the Matrix when Neo “woke up.” When he went through the process of awakening, he journeyed inward and beyond…out of the vortex and into the real world. I believe our spiritual journey to living our Dharma is very similar to that experience.

So you might be asking, what does this have to do with fasting? Well the answer is this:

Recently, as a result of a personal feeling of being too attached to certain emotions and experiences, I decided to go on a 3 day fast to break the chain binding me to some of these attachments. I also felt that there was something that God was trying to tell me, and I thought that if I tuned out and focuses solely on God, then I might hear what needed to be heard.

Although fasting can be difficult at times, during most of this experience I felt physically and emotionally detached from this existence. In otherwords, I felt good. The hunger tried to reach through and cause pain, but it felt outside of my body and I realized that there does exist a “watcher” within that is not attached to my body at all. Trying to tune in with that detachment allowed me to see myself as a spirit trapped inside of a dying body. I felt as if I was confronting death face to face…and I was not afraid. It was liberating to free myself from the bondage of physical attachment as things I normally used to gratify my ego became unimportant alltogether.

I also tried to remain silent and conserve my energy as much as possible. During this time I realized that words are nothing more than an escape from the “now” that Ram Dass talked so often about in his book Remember, Be Here Now. We use words too often and more often than not, they only convolude the actual experience. I often get agitated at long winded conversations and those that feel an attachment to talking, and I believe that was a progression towards the lesson I learned during my fast.

I’m not going to claim that I had a profound religious experience, but I do believe that I learned some very important lessons about myself and my nature that provided me with clues to eventually break free from Samsara. If we can start breaking these chains of attachment and mechanisms of control, then eventually we will see the world for what it really is – a mystical experience designed to lead us towards our Enlightenment and our final journey home.

Listen to the teacher inside of you. Listen to the voice that tells you where to go no matter how many physical, social, psychological, or spiritual boundaries you feel are in the way. Those that find a way to free themselves and start exploring their own path through the woods, usually end up right where they belong.