From Doing to Being

My favorite metaphor lately is the ocean of being. In your mind’s eye, see the most beautiful ocean you can imagine. It represents who you truly are, being itself. We were all born from that ocean, and we were at one with it for a while when we were very young. But floating on that ocean is a small opaque bubble, which I call the bubble of struggle and as we grew up, we all crawled into it, (into thinking about life rather than experiencing it), losing sight of the ocean—of our true essence, which is being.

When we were very little, we were a verb. We were pure ‘amness’, a living process. And slowly, over time, we became a noun – I am a boy or a girl, I am this and not that; I am right, and I am wrong. And the grief we carry from becoming a human doing rather than a human being permeates our whole self and influences us from underneath our everyday awareness.

You are reading this blog because there is something calling to you, a longing deep inside to open again into simply being. Many years ago, I was deeply moved by the movie Labyrinth, made by Jim Henson, the creator of the Muppets. The whole movie is a metaphor for the journey from doing to being, from struggle to ease. The theme is a child, who represents our innocence, our ability to simply be, that is taken by the Goblin King who represents our minds. A girl, the heroine of the story, has to journey through a labyrinth that represents her mind, meeting all sorts of challenges on the way. She eventually reclaims the child and as the goblin King confronts her, she says, with great conviction, “You no longer have any control over me!”

How do we unhook from the kind of mind that is addicted to doing – thinking our way through our lives – so we can come back into being? How do we learn how to use our minds for the exquisite tools they are rather than being lost in them? How do we learn how to say to our struggling mind, “You no longer have any control over me!” The key is in what much-beloved teacher Eckhart Tolle says:

“To welcome whatever arises in this moment is the ultimate spiritual practice. If you practice just this one thing you won’t need to read any more books or learn any other meditation techniques. To welcome whatever arises in this moment outside or inside of you brings freedom. The conditioned mind will tell you don’t do this for it believes that by resisting, it will become free. The opposite is true. By resisting you become even more stuck. When you no longer believe what the mind is saying, you realize the quickest way for transformation to happen is to welcome what is. In that moment life is free to move through you. The conditioned mind is no longer obstructing life.”

“Welcoming is the ultimate spiritual practice.” Wow! That truly simplifies it unless you get confused about what welcoming means. It doesn’t mean you sit down by the side of the road and let life roll over you. It means that your foundational relationship with life is that it is for you. It means that whatever breathes you, heals the cuts on your skin, and keeps the planet spinning as they do, is giving you the exact set of experiences you need in order to come home into being.

It means that you learn how to soften when you contract, remembering, as Eckhart says, that when you resist you become even more stuck. You also discover how to not hold on when things are easy and spacious (‘I have made it and it’s always going to be this way!’).  Life is a process of opening and closing and you can see this in the tides, the seasons, your heart and lungs, and in your life. When you can relax into this wild adventure called life then, as Eckhart states, life is free to move through you. You’re doing mind is no longer obstructing life and you know more and more moments of purely being. And if action is needed in thoughts, words, or deeds, it comes from a foundation of trust so that you are far more likely to respond rather than react.

So the invitation is to weave these two statements into your life: “What am I experiencing right now?” And “You are welcome here.” Bring these statements to your pain, your health, your relationships, a traffic jam, a noisy neighbor and on and on. And rediscover more and more the joy of simply being.