There was a calling for less. I minimized until my life was reduced to one backpack for three and a half years of travel. It was two countries in this time period instead of twelve. It was primarily solitude instead of visiting my ten best friends. It was one meal a day instead of three. It was nudity and naturalism. I relinquished all prior luxury and materialism. The contents of my life underwent a profound reduction.
Prior, it was bursting at the seams with excess. I was a sugar baby with three lovers. I was a corporate strategist and a non profit director. I was in a different country every month. I was bisexual and open. I was milking life for all I could.
The spiritual path became about reducing myself to the most essential part of my being. All the thoughts and frenzied activities were just the persona, the Latin etymology means mask. It's spot on. It was all a play, some perverse theater where no words reached truth. There was something pressing inside, that wanted to be made contact with. It happened when I settled into stillness and silence.
This was the awakening. There was a place inside of me that the world could not put its hands on. There was a place inside me that was unmoving and unchanging. There was a place inside of me that was timeless. It was a sanctuary I had never realized existed, and it existed inside me. It was almost painful to me that I had put such a focus on outside of myself. It's like that corny but sweet ending to The Alchemist, the treasure was in the main character's backyard all along. The treasure was never out there.
In this irreducible self, happiness was a self generative substrate. I no longer needed to manipulate my environment and spastically escape the country to be okay. I let go of feeling like there was something more to achieve outside of myself. I didn’t need to beg my boyfriend to love me. I didn’t need to prove how intellectually astute I was to my parents.
Peace was my innermost nature, and joy was a birthright. I knew in my body, that our deepest desire as humans is what we already are. The greatest hindrance in connecting with this happiness is relying on the world to hand it to us, and demand things to change in the way we wish it to be.
How many times had I believed happiness hinged upon making a sufficient income, securing a loyal boyfriend, or acquiring a home? How often had I anchored my happiness to some future acquisition? How many times did I make my peace dependent on a future object?
Joy is now. The desires that stem from this space of happiness are pure, it is overflowing. Desire that stems from fear or lack only reaffirms the initial feeling. I have no home, no stable income, and I am not afraid. I am in the risky edges of life in some sense, but it's invigorating to travel the world and live by my own rules. The rules are less, less, less.
In the simplest state I can rest in, there is nothing I force out of life, and in this new mind, the world becomes a heaven. It is not always this way, but for the most part, I am aware of life's beauty. It's difficult to express how much goodness things contain. I have much less than before, but I feel more than I’ve ever known. Life is richer the simpler I become.
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