by Yaisha Vargas-Pérez, MA, CMT-P, certified mindfulness teacher, for the blog A Mystic Writer
We may believe that being free is to do what we want when we want without limits: eat what we want, have as much as we want… Doing this gives freedom to the ego and our compulsions to get as strong as they want, but it does not free us from suffering.
One of my spiritual teachers advised us about the habit of “spiritual shopping”: grasping at an image of what “being spiritual should be,” wearing certain clothes, certain jewelry, consuming certain “spiritual products.” Even more so, “spiritual shopping” can also be practiced by jumping from one philosophy to another trying to “fix” ourselves because we believe we are intrinsically broken.
We’re not broken!
What we experience is deep suffering, and the “self-structure” we have built around ourselves to survive, our coping mechanisms, do not work anymore.
It’s commendable to try to stop our suffering, and perhaps in that sense our intentions are skillful, but the approach may not lead us to liberation.
We need a shift, but if it comes from the outside instead of the inside, we’ll end up looking different but feeling and behaving in the same ways that originate our suffering.
Some of us also tried escaping suffering by aiming at a “material transformation”: getting a new car, a new career, selling our place and moving, leaving our significant other for another… We think this is true transformation, but it is only a “translation”, a change to a different form or appearance. We move horizontally, but not vertically.
Somewhere along the road, I had changed a lot of things and was still suffering. I had been practicing meditation for years but was still focused on “getting things” instead of on how to stop my suffering and the suffering of others. Because I was raised in a consumerist society, I thought that achieving spiritual liberation was about “getting stuff,” including reaching a status of “being spiritual” through knowledge, or states of mind through pushing myself in my meditation.
Then I began to change my thoughts and my attitudes and began practicing acceptance of my human condition and practicing “letting go” of what wasn’t needed. The parts of me that had protected me from pain in younger years had hardened on my skin and my mind. It was difficult to be kind to myself and others, and to love myself and others. Then I was able to see these parts of me—younger parts of myself who longed for love, acceptance, and affection—, and accept them and love them. They began to become integrated, to be at peace, to grow, to stop activating themselves automatically. As I became aware, I had a choice of what to do if they showed up. I didn’t need some of them anymore; I could begin began to feel as if parts of my old personality began to fall off from my armour.
By this time, I was no longer interested in “getting spiritual things.” I had begun to understand that, what I can skillfully do, is create the conditions around me and in me so my mind lets go of suffering and cultivates states of peace, tranquility, and balance. It is a path of patience, acceptance, compassion, kindness, and a lot of letting go: letting go of stress, of false beliefs about myself, of a false sense of self…
Then something else began to emerge. A new way of being. A new behavior toward myself, others, and the planet. I began to understand that liberation was about how I thought about myself and other beings, how I treated myself and other beings. I saw my own patterns of thought and behavior. Deep clear seeing (Insight Meditation) had revealed what was going on at the core of my sense of self. Then I could start letting go of the stress of my mind the same way I had learned to let go of the stress in my body; to let go of false beliefs; of what other people thought; of grasping to the future of suffering about the past; of the shoulds, of so many other things… and the process revealed this vast space, this vast presence … “I” was not any of the things on the surface. And even “I” could be let go of…
I also thought at one point that I had to reject people in my life to have more peace and be more spiritual. Now I understand there is a difference. It is true that with the shift described above comes a change in our relationships and the ways we relate to others. But rejecting people or letting go of them because they are not on our same “vibe” is not necessarily “spiritual” for me anymore. It is more “spiritual” accepting a variety of points of view, not putting myself above or below others, accepting others as they are, where they are in their process without my judgment that they “should be” more evolved has been an important part of my spiritual journey, cultivating more compassion… letting go of the arrogance that I know what other people need or what they should do.
I recently read a passage in a recovery book that said that one clear symptom that we are still affected by the suffering of our upbringing (maybe someone else’s alcoholism, addiction, or family dysfunction) is that we go through life telling others what they should do, giving unsolicited advice, while our own life is a mess. We try to get a sense of worth by telling others what they should do; by telling them that they don’t know how to manage their own lives; by basically turning into their deity. We try to cover our own suffering by doing this, because it would be too painful to look at our lives and go through the process of healing our pain and discovering who we really are. And before I went through all that recovery, I did exactly that. I knew “exactly” what you needed, but my life was unmanageable. I went around giving people unsolicited advice, and I had no idea why they rejected me or didn’t listen to me. I didn’t see my own arrogance.
So, a big shift on my spiritual path has been liberating others from my-self. Yes! Liberating others from me! From my expectations, my demands, my unsolicited advice, my perceptions, my opinions, my “shoulds” for them, my thinking of “if they would only listen to me!” It’s not been a perfect process, but I have released a big amount of stress. I have released myself from a habit that used to put me last on the list of people I cared about. I have freed myself to tend to my own suffering and care for the person with whom I will spend the rest of my life: me.
Liberation has not been about wanting, getting, or controlling. It’s been more about letting go. Including letting go of me… in some senses.
Now a disclaimer, because relationships can be complicated. Taking care of myself has also meant to teach others to treat me with respect and dignity when needed; to set healthy boundaries when it’s called for.
Sometimes liberation seems like the road less traveled. There’s a lot of temptations on the path of that could look like liberation (oooh, shiny!). How do I know which is which? Because liberation doesn’t “sell something” to “get something.” It’s more about seeing our suffering, seeing how we cling, and creating the conditions to let go… without grasping at the results…
It may sound difficult.
It’s totally worth it…
We’re totally worth it…
Photo by Kapu Ravindranath : https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-hawk-perched-on-a-branch-10778583/
#mindfulness #sati #metta #selfcompassion #lovingkindness #freedom #freedomfromsuffering #InsightMeditation #YaishaVargas #AMysticWriter
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