New Year’s Day, 2021
For 20 years I offered an all-day program on the first day of the year to help participates develop intentions, experience community, and enter the new year prepared to learn and grow. Sadly, the pandemic has broken that tradition. In fact, 2020 was a terror in many different ways: the Australian and west coast wildfires, a record number of hurricanes, drought, heatwaves, loneliness, isolation, a bitter election, and a terrible disease.
So, instead of the regular gathering, I will offer here thoughts and reflections to help each reader create images and intentions to set in motion the best possible 2021.
One clear thought is that 2020 was a year of loss, of having to let go of many things. It was very difficult—physically, mentally, emotionally.
The pain and suffering are still very real, and we must not ignore or minimize them. After acknowledging them fully, however, we can set our hearts and minds on growing through the difficulties. Since we each had to let go of things during this past year, it is valuable to focus on the benefits of letting go. And the truth is, often growth and fulfillment do not come through getting things, but from letting go of the things that are keeping us from realizing who we really are.
The Tao Te Ching insists that fulfillment is not about adding things to your life, but subtracting things you are attached to that keep you from fulfillment. One Taoist practice consists of “subtracting” something every day, and a famous quote is, “If you doubt your ability to advance an inch, then retreat a foot.” Meister Eckhart famously said, ““God is not found in the soul by adding anything, but by a process of subtraction.”
Henry David Thoreau made a radical exploration of giving up things, and discovered that: “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.” The Buddha completely surrendered himself so he could awaken, first, leaving his life in the world, and then, under the bodhi tree, surrendering his attachment to living itself by saying he would either find what he was seeking or die there in the effort. That is complete surrender. And the story of Jesus is a painfully dramatic example of a complete letting go, for he felt called to surrender himself to being humiliated in the public eye, scourged, and, finally, to be crucified.
Most of us are perhaps not called to the extremes these great figures accepted as their mission. But their message, and that of all the wisdom traditions, is that we must each find the unique way in which we are called to let go of all that keeps us from fulfillment. As Rumi, the great 13th-century Sufi teacher, mystic, and poet said, the path forward is to:
Be ground.
Be crumbled, so wildflowers will come up where you are.
You’ve been stony for too many years.
Try something different. Surrender.
Another Rumi offering:
Take someone who doesn’t keep score,
who’s not looking to be richer, or afraid of losing,
who has not the slightest interest even
in his own personality: He’s free.
This, then, is the opportunity we each have during this time of trial—if we are willing to take it. We can use this time to take another step toward letting go of the burdens that are hindering our progress up the mountain toward greater peace, joy, and fulfillment. Some of the things you might consider letting go are:
ego expectations, ambitions, longings
images of what you want or think you need
desires, fears, attachments
judgments of yourself and others
numerous opinions
emotions that are no longer serving a healthy you
Exercise:
Think of something that is bothering you or worrying you
Then ask:
Why do I feel a need to hold on to this anxiety, fear, or worry?
(Most of the time we think we have no choice, but often we have much more
choice than we think.)
Now ask yourself: Am I willing to let this go?
If your sincere answer is yes, ask yourself:
When am I willing to let it go?
I am I willing to let it go Now?
The Power of Intentions
The way you will live your life from this moment forward depends dramatically on your intentions. Your life will unfold in close relation to your deep intentions, conscious and unconscious. Your intentions will determine:
How you will spend your time
Who you will spend your time with
What you will focus on
The practices you will undertake
The values you will live by
The kind of person you will attempt to become
Through our intentions each of us is continually transforming ourselves from who we have been to who we are becoming. For many, this process is mostly unconscious, happening out of the habits and ways of thinking we were enculturated to accept when young. But we can make this process more conscious, take a more active role in moving toward the person we wish to be. The stakes are high. As best-selling author and Jungian analyst Robert Johnson put it:
“Consciously or unconsciously, voluntarily or involuntarily, the inner world will claim us and exact its dues. If we go to that realm consciously, it is by our inner work: our prayers, meditations, dream work, ceremonies, and active imagination. If we try to ignore the inner world, as most of us do, the unconscious will find its way into our lives through pathology: our psychosomatic symptoms, compulsions, depressions, and neuroses.”
This sounds daunting—and it is. But the saving grace is that, although we will often fail in our efforts, failing does not mean ultimate failure. Each time we are able to regain our conscious awareness of what is going on, each failure becomes an opportunity. In fact, thinking you are supposed to be perfect is no help at all; it is a great hindrance. A Zen teacher was asked how he had made so much progress on his journey. His answer: “One mistake at a time.” Mistakes are not problems but “grist for the mill,” they are the way we learn and grow—if we acknowledge them and then make good use of them.
This journey of transformation is not easy, of course. The wisdom traditions are filled with stories of those who underwent great hardship, suffered despair, felt they would never make it, and endured “dark nights of the soul.” But all the traditions say the prize is worth the effort; it is the “pearl with great price”—the only prize worth having, the one for which everything else should be forfeited. How do we proceed in finding it? Rumi gave this suggestion:
“Little by little, wean yourself.
This is the gist of what I have to say.
From an embryo whose nourishment comes in the blood,
move to an infant drinking milk,
to a child on solid food,
to a searcher after wisdom,
to a hunter of more invisible game.”
You do not have to do everything at once. In fact, you can’t. Often the best way forward is “little by little.” But if you will make the effort, Thoreau offers great encouragement, saying that if you just begin, you will gradually “leave some things behind,” until eventually you will “pass an invisible boundary.” Then, at some point, “new, universal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within” you, and you will begin “to live with the license of a higher order of beings.” There is one condition, however. You have to give up some of the things you thought you needed. Carl Jung delivered the same message, saying we must “avoid fixing our attention on futilities” so as to discover the “essentials” that we are called to embody.
Some of the things each of us must leave behind are ideas about ourselves; conclusions about what the world is like; our certainties about the nature of reality. We crave certainties, yet they can easily become bars forming the walls of our personal prisons. At 16 I thought I knew a lot, at 25 I really thought I had it all figured out (arguing a lot and asserting what I thought was true), at 35 I was more reflective but still fairly confident in my beliefs. But the older I have gotten, the more I have realized how little I really understood back then. Yet I was confident in those beliefs. If I was so confident then, but now believe differently, perhaps my ideas will change again before this life is finished. As physicist David Bohm pointed out, in all of our theories there is a “lure of completeness,” the desire to think that we finally have it all figured out—at this present moment. Thus, one important lesson is that of humility. As T. S. Eliot said in the Four Quartets: “The only wisdom we can hope to acquire/ Is the wisdom of humility.”
A philosopher often thought of as figural in the development of existentialism, Martin Heidegger, came, late in life, to emphasize the importance of what he called “releasement.” He came to believe that life is a loving gift, and the way forward is to release into a thankful sense of being lifted up, to “let ourselves go” into something larger than our normal, ego selves. In releasement, we free ourselves from all sense of striving or attaining and open into “Being” itself. How? “By way of waiting.”
In his “Memorial Address” Heidegger says the primary reason we do not experience the full joy and peace that is the underlying nature of existence is our tendency to hold on rather than let go. He said the path forward is through “an openness to the mystery, a willingness to absolve one’s will, a sense of awe and wonder before the mysterious as well as the known, and an open waiting to be shaped by the Divine, the mystery of the world, and to experience the joy and peace possible in this existence.”
The Highest Possibilities of Life
Heidegger is pointing to the highest possibilities of life, a vision the saints and sages, prophets and enlightened ones through history have left to us. And the results they suggest are not simply to make us “10% happier” in our everyday lives. The rewards they offer are much, much greater than that. For instance, during the last months of St. Catherine of Genoa’s life, she was in great physical pain, yet continually manifested a spirit that was inspiring to those around her. Although still in a physical body, she was not centered there, but at a different level of her being, and the people around her experienced a beautiful energy radiating from her. How did she manage to do this? Catherine’s answer: “So clearly do I perceive thy goodness that I do not seem to walk by faith, but by a true and heartfelt experience.” She had opened into a direct experience of a higher level of being.
Similarly, in the last few years of her life St. Teresa of Avila experienced frequent raptures and joy in the face of great trials. Although in much physical pain, confined to her monastery by the Inquisition, being investigated for heresy, and with many of her closest followers undergoing terrible trials, Teresa gave off a palpable joy to all those around her, and during this time wrote one of the greatest pieces of mystical literature ever produced, the Interior Castle. Indicating the nature of her spirit during this time, when asked about the burdens her opponents were inflicting on her, Teresa wrote:
“Not only did this not distress me, but it made me so unexpectedly happy that I could not control myself. … I had no desire that they should do anything else than what they were doing, and my joy was so great that I did not know how to conceal it.”
The Medieval mystic Meister Eckhart goes even further, saying that the final result of a full realization of the highest possibility is “so great a joy and so great an unmeasurable light” that even to experience this for a moment turns all of one’s life, even all the struggles we have experienced, into a “joy and a pleasure.” The quote by Eckhart:
“I say it again: if there were a single human whose intelligence, were it only for an instant, could see according to the truth the delight and the joy which reign therein, all he may have suffered … would be a trifle, indeed a nothing; even more, it would be for him entirely a joy and a pleasure.”
Images from Buddhism
The Buddha counseled over and over that we should cease identifying with the things we habitually think are so important, that we should give up grasping for what we think we want and quit spending so much time and energy trying to avoid what we think we do not want. He said the cause of the unsatisfactoriness of life is our grasping for and aversion to illusory things. The only escape from this unsatisfactoriness, this dukkha, is to wake up and realize that your mind is creating the prison in which you are living. To escape this prison, simply wake up and see life as it truly is; let the full realization of who you really are sink in. To do this is to be liberated from the misguided views in which you are stuck, and so to fly free like a butterfly from the prison of your mind-created cocoon.
If you will but wake up and see that “life is just life,” the good and the bad of it; if you will accept “what is” fully, then who you really are—not your small self, but the Buddha in you—will be able to live without anger, fear, greed, anxiety, or judgment. This last word is important, because judgments and opinions are the source of so much suffering. The Buddha’s counsel was to let go of any views that made you want to cling, and all those that created aversion, so you can just be present with what is. If you can do this, without getting caught up in your stories and without projecting old wounds onto everything you see, you will be free, you will be peaceful and serene. Your identity will be, rather than with your small, ego self, absorbed in something greater.
What is this something greater? The Buddha said: “There is, oh monks, an Unborn; neither become nor created nor formed.” Your identity can be centered there. The Buddhist scholar and practitioner Edward Conze compiled from Buddhist texts a series of attributes great Buddhist teachers have applied to Nirvana (the ultimate possibility the Buddha described). Here are some of the many things they said about it:
It is permanent, stable, imperishable, immovable, ageless, deathless, unborn, and unbecome;
It is power, bliss and happiness, the secure refuge, the shelter, and the place of unassailable safety;
It is the real Truth and the supreme Reality;
It is the Good, the supreme goal, and the one and only consummation of life;
It is the eternal, hidden, and incomprehensible.
Delivering a similar message, Rumi said this:
In that moment you are drunk on yourself,
You lock yourself away in cloud after cloud of grief,
And in that moment you leap free of yourself,
The moon catches you and hugs you in its arms.
That moment you are drunk on yourself,
You are withered, withered like autumn leaves.
That moment you leap free of yourself,
Winter to you appears in the dazzling robes of spring.
All illnesses spring from the scavenging for delicacies.
Renounce delicacies, and poison itself will seem delicious to you.
All disappointments spring from your hunting for satisfactions.
If only you could stop—all imaginable joys
Would be rolled like pearls to your feet.”
Few people in history have been able to travel all the way to the final end the Buddha and St. Teresa and Mister Eckhart and Rumi describe. Perhaps very few ever will. But this does not matter. All that matters to you right now is:
1) start moving in the direction your clearest moments suggest you should go.
2) and keep moving, keep doing the work as best you can.
How far along the path up the mountain you will travel during the remainder of your life you cannot know, but you can commit to going as far as you possibly can. Who knows how far that might be? There are many, many examples of those who had great breakthroughs very close to the end of their lives. So, just keep going as best you can.
Exercise
Lie down or sit comfortably
Breathe fully and deeply for a few moments
Now, gently begin to feel yourself letting go
let go of the tension in your body, focusing on one area at a time
then begin to release old worries, fears, and anxieties
Don’t force or fight with them, just relax and release as gently as you can
Begin to let go of plans
of expectations
Let go of desires
of goals and ambitions
Gently release all your images of yourself
Gradually begin to realize that now, in this moment, you are just awareness
without judgment or opinions
Rest there
observe
Just be pure awareness
observe but don’t judge
let go of judging yourself, others, life
Just be
May you have a wonderful New Year!
David