The gateway to freedom

If you expect your life to be up and down, your mind will be much more peaceful.

Lama Thubten Yeshe

We live most of our lives in constant reaction to the ever-changing realities of our conditioned existence. We speak about our problems as though they shouldn’t be happening. “What’s wrong?” we wonder. “Why is this happening to me?”
How often do we think, “I’m not meant to be doing this,” about our work and family obligations. I know an Indian doctor who works day and night, seven days a week, at a tiny clinic treating impoverished villagers for routine complaints and more serious conditions such as malnutrition. Yet he’s always joyful, passionate, and appreciative. Why? One of the reasons is that he isn’t thinking that it isn’t fair, or that he should be doing something else. He fully accepts and owns his circumstances. He doesn’t indulge thoughts or conversations such as, “This isn’t the right line of work for me. I’m meant to be doing something easier and less demanding. I should move on to a different calling.”

We habitually resist the reality of our experience. It can be difficult to take a trip across town, or spend a day in our office, or an evening at home, without someone or something disturbing our peace and serenity. We reject the volume of music in a restaurant, the actions of our politicians, our own and other’s appearance, the quality of the produce in our supermarket, the way people speak to us, the time we have to wait in line.

This constant denial saps our energy and demoralizes us because we’re engaged in a losing battle with a reality that simply isn’t interested in our existence. Nearly everyone participates in this denial.
In the affluent West it’s easy to take pleasure and satisfaction to be our birthright and live with a profound denial and rejection of pain and discomfort. Often we seem to share the insane belief that we shouldn’t suffer at all! Yet, we all suffer and will probably continue to do so until we die. Problems and difficulties are a natural part of life. Only a fully enlightened person—a buddha—ceases to create problems.
Even though unpleasant experiences continue to manifest, year after year, we continue to operate as though our rejection would deenergize a negative experience. If this was how things worked surely we would be able to remove unpleasant experiences expeditiously and with ease. The energy in denial or resistance is always wasted. Not one ounce of our energy makes a productive contribution to changing our experience. The source of our suffering lies not in the circumstances of our lives, but in our resistance.

When we resist reality, we tighten up. Our bodies become tense, we feel paralyzed or agitated. You might like to flash through some of the times you’ve powerfully resisted what’s happening to you, in order to connect with how resistance shows up in your body. Don’t try to interpret the experiences. Just scan your body for how denial manifests in your chest, belly, groin, shoulders, arms, hands, neck, throat, face, mouth, brow, and scalp. Where are the feelings located in your body? Is the energy stable or moving? Is it solid, like a constriction, or vacuous, like an absence or a gaping hole?

The solution to our predicament is to cultivate of a more expanded, inclusive and realistic relationship to life. I call this “broadening the river of life.” We have ups and downs; great times when life flows smoothly, and difficult times when things get heavy and intense and don’t necessarily work out well. That’s life. If we act as though life shouldn’t be like this, we deny a fundamental aspect of our existence.
By acknowledging that we do suffer we aren’t committing ourselves to suffering. We accept our circumstances without becoming resigned to our lot in life. Instead, we may think: “At this point in my evolution, I suffer from time to time because I’m still controlled by judgments and preferences. Even so, I don’t feel resigned. I’m definitely not committed to the inevitability of this situation. I’m working with my reactive emotions so that, over time, the situation will definitely change. I can even accept the fact that I get resigned from time to time.”
By broadening the river of life, we increase our capacity to be present to the whole range of human experience. We welcome what is, and this welcoming becomes a gateway into the nondual state. When we welcome what is, our suffering dissipates. We let what is happening happen, and don’t object to it. There may still be pain, but it no longer causes suffering.

Ultimately, the only way to break our obsession with resistance, denial and suffering is by getting real and accepting the nature of our conditioned lives. We acknowledge and accept that suffering still happens for us at this point on our path. We cut through the fantasy that something is wrong when we suffer, and we stop making a problem out of having problems! We accept the basic structure and patterning of our experience, our life circumstances, not in a defeatist way, but with dignity and grace, because we know that “welcoming what is” is the gateway to freedom and liberation.

Peter Fenner