Journey to the Mountain of Being 1

In the next four weeks, I am going to share parts of the new book I have been writing this summer. Its working title is A Journey to the Mountain of Being where the Heart Resides. It is what I offer to the world in story form. It begins with the main character getting lost in the Valley of Forgetting, and eventually locking themselves in the Fort called Mind. But the Mountain of Being is calling and as they learn how to not get seduced into the struggles in their mind, they continue their journey home to the joy of simply being, reconnecting with the safety and trust of becoming available to life exactly as it is.

I don’t give the character a name so you can use your own name as you read. I also invite people to use the pronoun that works best for them. The book is now being edited and I will send it to my publisher when that is done. We will let you know when it is available for purchase. But as with all books, this is going to be awhile.

This excerpt, from her time in the Fort, happens when she is beginning to become smarter than struggle, discovering how to not be lost in the stories in her head.

“One morning while drinking her favorite tea in the central gathering place inside the fort, she looks at the people there and she sees two people playing chess, a family gathered around a table eating their lunch and laughing, a sports team celebrating a win, a woman sitting by herself reading a book, two lovers in the corner holding hands and gazing lovingly at each other.

Now that meditation has made her much more alert to her own inner conversations, it astounds her to realize that everybody else has inner conversations too as their minds flutter in the face of reality. The storyteller in their heads is always checking things out to make sure that they are doing life right and everything is okay. On the surface, it looks like they are having a wonderful time, and on some level that may be true. But it is also true that their running commentaries create a quiet but very powerful sense of unease.

She begins to see speech bubbles above their heads containing their comments about life. She watches people’s minds chatter as they try to be liked, critique how they’re doing, plan what they’re going to say, become frozen because they don’t know what to say, try to present themselves in the ‘right’ way so they can feel accepted, be run by the fear of missing out, and judge the other person.

As she watches, she sees everybody thinks the stories in their head are reality, not seeing they instead are just clouds that cover over true reality – what is right now.  Now that she sees that everybody has taken on storytellers in their heads that are always trying to do life right, she knows it is going to be easier in the future to be simply present for other people, catching her mind when it starts to comment, and then simply bringing her attention back to the person in front of her.

Her heart opens to all the sisters and brothers in this gathering place who, just like her, have taken on the kind of mind that struggles with life, cutting themselves off from the joy of being present for life. But it doesn’t stop there. For this moment she opens her heart to all the beings in the fort and even in the world itself.

As she opens, she lets go of thinking about life and instead simply becomes present for this gathering place and all the people in it, feeling what is here, seeing it, hearing it, smelling it and her heart expands with the joy of simply being here with life. She opens so deeply to this moment that she knows this is the only moment that matters in her whole life.”