Meeting the Moment As It Is (Instead of How We Want It To Be)

   
A couple of months ago, a meditation and dharma student with whom I have been working privately for a number of years remarked during one of our meetings, "I just want to be free!" I gave the standard dharma teacher reply. "Who is keeping you in bondage?" It's a glib answer to a deep longing, and I knew it. So I followed up with another one. "What if you are already free, but it's just not how you imagined 'free' would be?" 

This question is useful in all aspects of our lives. What if this moment is perfect as it is, and it's just not the way we imagined "perfect" would be? What if this relationship is perfect, and just not how we imagined a relationship should be? What if this experience in the body is perfect, but it's just not how I thought my body experience would be? After all, this moment can only be the way it is right now. So since it can only be this way, isn't that the way this moment is supposed to be? Therefore, isn't this moment perfect just as it is?

The lineage of meditation that I have learned and which I teach is called vipassana, a word in the Pali language of the original Buddhist texts which means, basically, "seeing things clearly as they are." This is opposed to the tendency to experience things in life the way the mind tells us they are or tells us how they should be. Often there is a big difference between the two. What if we could see past what the mind is telling us the experience is and could see the experience as it actually is.

This is one of those "simple-but-not-easy" dharma lessons -- simple to understand and not easy to practice. It's not easy to grock because we are so conditioned to believe what our minds tell us that our vision of the world is obscured by a film of brain dust. We tend to believe that the mind is giving us an accurate picture of this moment. Is it?

What if we clean off the dust, even a little bit, and experience this moment as it actually is? Perhaps we could "see clearly" that this moment really is perfect just as it is, and that it is only our mind that is telling us otherwise. After all, this is the only way this moment can be. This adjustment -- reminding ourselves that this moment is perfect, except just not how the mind imagined it would be -- can lead to a strong sense of empowering freedom. We are no longer held in bondage by a mind that gives us its version of how things are or how things should be.

Experiment with this idea in your daily life. Keep asking, "What if this moment/emotion/predicament is actually perfect, but it's just not the way I imagined perfect should be?"

Much love,
Roger                                

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