The Freedom of Showing Up for What is Showing Up

I woke up this morning and I did not want to meditate. I have meditated every morning for years, and yet today, when I sat down and closed my eyes, the storyteller in my head resisted the idea of meditation, saying, “I can’t handle everything that is going on in my life right now.” It was steeped in deep fear, but I did not get upset with it or demand it quiet down. Rather, I closed my eyes and kept on saying to her, “I know what is going on in your life right now is really hard, and it’s okay to just rest here for now.” Each time I spoke to her, she would rest a little longer, and then off she would go again like a flock of birds. When she finally heard, “Just come home, sweetie, just come home,” she eventually let go and I was able to rest in the peace of my morning meditation.   

When there is something that your mind doesn’t want to experience, it runs away from your immediate experience. Why? Because when you were young, this whole system of your conditioned, struggling self actually survived by not letting go. It survived by holding on for dear life and trying to be what it thought it should be. As you get deeper into awakening, you finally come across the depth of that almost wordless fear, and it feels that if it opens up again and you let go, you will die. Many of us turn to our compulsions – like eating, drinking, drugging, shopping, or just plain busyness – to try to make the feelings go away, which, if you are honest with yourself, only works for a very short time. But no matter how difficult or painful your challenges are, you can discover that you will not die if you are willing to be with yourself rather than leaving yourself when you most need yourself. 

As author Stephen Levine once told me, “All you need for this journey is the willingness.” Why did he say that? Because we are not in charge. Life is in charge of life. We just need the openness and willingness to let life unfold, no matter what it brings. Life will bring pain, fear, grief, sadness and so much more. No matter what it looks like, tell yourself, “I am not this pain in my body. I am not this wave of fear. I am not this grief. I am not this no-way-out place. I am the place that can see it.”   

You can become the awareness that can see what you are experiencing rather than believing all the stories in your head. You are not the stories. You are that which can see the stories and recognize that they are only stories. They are not who you truly are. 

So, I invite you to thank the great challenges of your life. They are cracking open the armoring around your heart. Most of our lives we have resisted being opened, so we have done whatever we could to distract ourselves by whatever means so we can get as far away from the discomforts of life as possible. Freedom comes when you can show up for what is showing up, no matter what is going on in your life.   

If this speaks to you, and you want to learn more, consider joining my interactive online course, Being Healed by Our Compulsions. It will help you learn how to be present for what life is bringing to you. This new way is about listening rather than controlling, opening rather than closing and relating to your compulsion rather than being lost in it. Instead of seeing your compulsion as something that is wrong with you, you will discover that it is an ally on the journey back to a deep and trust-filled relationship with yourself and with your life.