A Gift Beyond Compare

In my book Belonging to Life, I shared a wonderful metaphor that carries with it one of the most important shifts we make as we learn how to become smarter than the struggles in our mind:

Imagine a fierce lion, one that represents all we hate and fear inside of us. It has been chasing us our whole lives. At moments it gets so close that we can feel its breath on the back of our legs. The closer it gets, the faster we run.  If we are lucky, there will be a time when we can’t run anymore. We are just too tired. As we fall to the ground, ready to be devoured, the lion screeches to a halt beside us, and we find ourselves face to face with our pain. It opens its mouth (to eat us, we think) and instead, on its tongue, is a gift that it has been trying to bring to us for years! What we have run away from has waited our whole lives for us to be present for it.

I know how to run away from myself all too well. I had the kind of childhood I wouldn’t wish on anybody and so my mind was deeply conditioned into struggle, fear, crippling shame and helpless, hopeless despair. People could see that I was truly struggling even when I was very young and so they tried to fix me.  All I heard was that there was something wrong with me, so I endlessly tried to fix myself, which just got me more deeply enmeshed in the quicksand of struggle. When it got too much, one of my main coping mechanisms was to eat. If I stuffed myself enough, I had a few moments of relief from all of struggles inside of me but of course this would then make it worse.

When eating didn’t numb me enough, I added alcohol when I went away to college and then drugs. When that wasn’t enough, I tried to kill myself three times. All of this was done to try to get away from the deep pain I carried. I didn’t understand, until years later, that what I resisted I actually empowered.

When I met a teacher of Yana yoga when I was 27, he showed me that there was another way to heal, a way that leads you out of the world of struggle. The message I heard was nothing was wrong with me and nothing needed to be fixed. Instead, all these thoughts and the feelings and sensations they engendered needed to be seen and heard. Or, as he so beautifully said, “In the seeing is the movement.”

But I had an extremely mean, self-judging voice and for many years it said, “You are not doing this right!” When I met Stephen Levine 11 years later, I finally understood how to turn toward myself rather than away – and it happened in my heart. My heart was so locked down as I was growing up that I didn’t even begin to have access to it until I met Stephen in my late 30s.

We are not skilled at meeting ourselves in our own hearts. We are skilled, conditioned, and trained to leave ourselves when we most need ourselves. We will do almost anything to try to get away from what we deem uncomfortable and wrong inside of us. We will get overly busy, try to understand, and endlessly work on fixing ourselves (which is the ceaseless game of struggle), and when all of these are not enough, we go to the standard compulsions, which range all the way from biting our fingernails to screen time to heroin.

The lion story reminds us of something that is essential when beginning to cultivate the art of turning toward and that is that absolutely everything, we have turned away from has a gift embedded in. This is what Rumi was saying in his poem The Guest House:

“This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness.
Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they are a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honorably. He may be clearing you out for some new delight.”

It is my experience that the most challenging parts of our life are always here to clear us out for some new delight! Or, as I would say to my resistant mind when I came across another part of me that needed the light of my accepting attention, “Remember, this is where the good stuff is!”

We don’t learn the art of turning towards overnight. We have become entrenched in the art of turning away from ourselves. So, I invite you to start slowly. First, see that most the time you live in your head, tumbling from one thought to another but right outside the prison of your mind is a whole other world. It’s called home! Also, acknowledge how you turn away from yourself, without judging it – busyness, overeating, video games, trying to fix yourself, cigarettes, shopping, etc.  When you see that turning away from yourself has never brought you the healing you long for, this is when the willingness to meet yourself exactly as you are, with passion and compassion, arises inside of you.

Give yourself the gift, sprinkled throughout your day, of long, slow out-breaths, which calm the mind enough so, for a moment here and a moment there, you can make direct, living contact with the only moment that matters in your whole life – this moment!

And there is no better time to do this then right now!