Your Reactive Mind Can Show You What’s in the Way

The pool where I used to swim several times a week taught me so much about life. One day, when I arrived at my usual time, I was the only person there and as I was getting in the water, I felt such a sense of peace and contentment. But life is a setup to bring up what has been bound up… (as I say in my book, What’s in the Way Is the Way).  After I completed a few laps, a man got into the pool in the lane next to mine. I didn’t give it much thought until I saw that he was swimming like an octopus, hitting me every time we passed, even though I tried to get out of his way.

Of course, my mind started to get upset but I was not interested in having ‘reaction’ be in charge of my life. Instead, I suggested to my mind that every time we touched, it was just God touching God and my mind settled down. At one point, we were both at the end of the pool at the same time and I kindly suggested that if he would follow the blue line at the bottom of the pool, he would be able to stay in his lane and we wouldn’t hit one another. He smiled at me and said, “Oh, thank you, this is my first time here.” He continued to swim into my lane, but I didn’t let it ruffle my feathers.

However, life was not done with me yet. As I was getting ready to begin another lap, I saw a second man coming toward me in my lane. The pool etiquette is that if the pool is very busy, a third person can enter, but he or she should give the ‘right-of-way’ to the people who are already swimming. This man evidently didn’t know how to share a lane, and he simply took over my lane and I had to swim around him. Now my mind was really upset. The reaction was so strong that I wanted to yell at him.  But there was a vulnerable part of me that felt some resistance to saying anything because he was a very large man. Instead, I worked with my own mind. It didn’t let go like with the first man, but I was able to respond to my reaction rather than letting it take over. As I got out of the pool, I silently thanked these two men for helping me to ‘look and unhook’ from that part of the mind that loves to be right and to attack and defend.

As I drove home, I thought about reading Grist for the Mill by Ram Dass (co-authored years ago with Stephen Levine). I can still remember it clearly because it was the first time I had read the words, “all of your life is for you.” The book opened me up to the idea that our challenges, including what I had just experienced in the pool, are all grist for the mill of awakening. In his book, Ram Dass tells us, “It’s very hard for a being who is totally attached and identified with his intellect to imagine that the universe could be so perfectly designed that every act, every experience is perfectly within the lawful harmony of the universe — including all of the paradoxes.” What this says to me is, if I had identified with my mind that didn’t like what was happening in the pool, I would have stayed caught in the ego that loves to attack, defend and be right and I might have even said something hurtful or disrespectful. Not only that, I would have created more disturbance inside of me by following the reactions of my mind.

So, the next time someone does something that causes your mind to become reactive and upset, take a few deep breaths, step back and be the observer of your mind rather than being identified with it. As you detach from your egoic mind, be grateful that life is unfolding perfectly, and know that all of your challenges are grist for your mill.

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