I’m back from being away on vacation, so there’s lots to be done this week. The emails that need answering, loads of laundry, phone calls, weeding, harvesting, work-related projects and more.

As I’m setting up for my morning practice on the first day back, though it’s early, I already have a load of laundry going. So as I start to settle into meditation, I can hear the spin cycle on the washer humming away. The sound presses in on me; reminding me of all that needs doing. With this reminder comes a kind of tension to hurry up and “get things done.”

It makes it hard to settle in and to give myself this time. But then something occurs to me. The fix is obvious. All I have to do is to close the door between the spaces so that it’s easier to turn towards myself. Easier to settle into a time I count on to set myself straight. So simple.

But simple is not always easy. Especially in a world that loves to obfuscate and complicate what is most essential to us and to our lives here. Not to mention a mind that loves to list out all the reasons why we cannot possibly carve out time for ourselves and the deeper experiences of Life.

All of this is noise. Pure and simple. Life-depleting, soul-sucking noise. If it weren’t so devastating, it might be funny how absolutely ineffectual we can be when it comes to carving out time for ourselves. But it’s not funny because of how many of us don’t have a clue about what is being lost.

Without time on our own, without the space to have a thought free of what’s coming across a screen, without the room to get clear about whether or not your life is working for you, you will be taken down the wrong road. Every single time. This will leave you with no other option than to agree to and settle for all the wrong things. A kind of saying “Yes” by default to those things in Life without meaning or substance.

Time on your own, free from what the world demands of you is not a luxury. It is foundational and non-negotiable if you have any hope of hearing what your body is telling you, along with the call of your own soul. It is an inner demand if you have any chance of making daily choices that line up with what you value most.

Making time for yourself regularly is the antidote to succumbing to the madness and the falsehoods of a world intent on distracting you from yourself. Ready for something else? Learn to close some door every single day to give yourself the chance to hear how things are going and you just might find yourself spending some of the most satisfying and course-correcting time you will spend all day.

My yoga teacher would often talk of the spiritual path as a great battle, and how there was a far greater peace to be had on the other side of that battle. What he meant of course, was the value in meeting our challenges head on. That rather then collapsing in defeat, or trying to sidestep whatever was in front of us, we instead go heads up and bravely towards that battle. That we go right through the center of it, until we come out on the other side.

The image of a battle is frightening. It’s bloody. There’s collateral damage. It is unlike the civility of every day life. Though you want a particular outcome, there is no guarantee. And you never know what will be asked of you.

No wonder so many of us could never imagine going straight through anything that intense or unpredictable. More to the point, that potentially deadly. No wonder we would want to fall down. Or slink away. The problem being, if we do that, the battle still rages on. Only now we are at the mercy of something that will have its way with us whether we participate or not.

The battle to which I refer is the call of your own soul and the fight for your own sovereignty and authenticity. This formidable call from within is hard to answer in a world that pushes for the inauthentic where we are taught to people-please, diminish our own light and medicate ourselves into oblivion. The greatness that resides within being kept from the very difficult challenges it requires to emerge intact.

When we refuse the call of meeting our lives head on, we never develop the skills to be with what is difficult. This sets up a domino effect of more avoidance on our part of what is hard, which then means we actually cannot meet the next hardness that comes our way with anything but fear and anxiety. This sets up more exaggerated beliefs that it’s all too difficult, and that we just don’t have it in us; leaving us alienated from the very thing we most yearn for.

The good news is, this is precisely where we begin. Right at that place in our life that feels like a battleground we are not capable of meeting. Only, this time, instead of turning away, we run towards it. We say to ourselves, “I see you and I honor you as the honing I require to emerge fully myself.”

Maybe this means sitting for one minute, or even ten seconds, with an uncomfortable feeling before you distract yourself or project it onto another. And then, you build from there. Before you know it, after many, many moments like this, you have taught yourself how to be brave and how to stand in your place when the going gets tough. Before you know it, what used to feel like more than you could do, is now something that strengthens you.

This is where the courage of the warrior is born. The one who can be with what is frightening. The one who can step out of their comfort zone, by allowing what needs to die to go in order to re-imagine their life outside of the limited view of themselves they have been given. The one who asks for nothing other than to know the truth of who they are and why they are here.

“This is nothing I ever wanted, and everything I ever needed.”

This phrase drops in recently in the midst of a roller coaster ride inside my own mind in response to the outer circumstances happening in my life. In case you haven’t already gathered, I didn’t want what was happening to be happening. But it was. Hearing these words softened the experience though; reminding me I do not always know what is best for me. But that the Universe does.

On this particular day, I had the grace to see the blessing that was being offered to me, despite experiencing something I did not want. Of course, it hasn’t been like that every day. Some days, I am like a fish on a line; fighting against “what is” with every ounce of strength I have.

And therein lies the suffering. The misery. The struggle. And the blame. All centered around the fact that things are not other than what they are. That life and other people are not doing what I want them to do. Or to be.

We all know this place. We all know the internal battle that gets waged when we do not want what is happening to be happening. Maybe it’s an illness. Or the ways of the world. Or a relationship not working out. It can be any manner of things. And if we’re paying attention, we can find examples in our lives large and small, of all the things we do not want to be happening, but that are. Of the nearly continuous stream of suffering we experience daily over all the things we want to be other than as they are.

Like the weather. Or the traffic. Or what someone else is doing, believing or saying. On and on it goes. We make the mistake that our suffering will end when that thing or that person outside of us is different. Or goes away. Or just somehow lines up with our version. We can spend our lives like this. Victimized by what is outside of us. Hoping, praying, pushing, cajoling, fighting. All in an effort to get Life to line up with our very own narrative.

But if we were willing to wise up, we would see that it has never worked out. That even when we feel as though it has worked in one situation, another will arise in its place that will not respond to our efforts. It stands to reason then, that we need another way. Another approach to being in a world that will always being doing something other than what we want it to be doing.

Best I have come up with is something I once heard. “This is not being done against you, it’s being done for you.” What if we took that attitude? Of course, it would mean we would have to own up to the fact we do not always know what is best for us. That we cannot see the larger picture to know how what is happening is somehow perfect for us.

Meaning? A whole lot of surrender. A deep and abiding trust that we are are part of Something Greater. And a willingness to shift our perception away from fighting “what is,” and instead, learn to say “Yes” to What Is.

Recently, my husband and I are talking about how in his golf league one Tuesday, he noticed fear around making a certain shot. We went on to talk about how bizarre it is that we make things like a golf game a matter of life and death just by the thoughts we create.

Obviously, a bad shot is not dangerous to one’s survival or well-being, but how often do we behave as if it is? How often do we use our mind and all of the thinking we do, to generate a real experience in the body of threat, when no real threat exists?

For starters, your body does not know the difference between real and imagined thoughts. We’ve all had the experience of whipping ourselves up by thoughts of worry and anticipation; enough to create an experience of unease in the body. And even illness. We can keep ourselves from sleeping with our made-up thoughts. Thought patterns can impact our mood, how we eat and how we relate.

As they say, “Perception is everything.” Interestingly enough, we can perceive what is real and true. Or we can perceive made-up stuff.

That’s why I spend so much time being mindful of what I am thinking. I have seen the direct link between my thoughts, my health and how it feels to be alive. Which is why, after the conversation with my husband, I started to watch my own mind even closer; paying attention to where I was creating self-generated fears. All of the ways, on a daily basis, that I make something feel life-threatening just by thought alone.

It can be so small and so mundane, so familiar and so conditioned, that we don’t even notice ourselves doing it. Like fretting about things we cannot control. Like what the weather is going to do when we have plans to be outside. Like imagining worse case scenarios in a difficult conversation. Like wanting something to go a certain way so badly that we feel as though if it doesn’t, something really bad is going to happen.

The day after my husband and I had this conversation, I found myself in one of those loops. Creating fears over whether something went this way or not. In the midst of the fear barrage, I heard:

“Stop making things a problem, that are not a problem.”

There are so many reasons why we make up problems. It gives us a rush to fix them. It’s how we were raised. It’s how we have consciously or unconsciously convinced ourselves that we will be safe. It’s part of living in a culture that pathologizes everything. We are marketed to in this way to get us to buy someone else’s solution. On and on it goes.

But maybe we don’t always need to know the origins of our problem-making tendencies. That alone is never the fix anyway. Maybe we just need to train ourselves to be present enough to notice when we are making something up and then to ask ourselves, “Am I pretending this is a problem when there is not even a problem here?” And then see where that takes us.

I wake recently with a knot in my stomach. I take a moment to wonder about it. I realize it’s linked to the fact that I’m subbing a yoga class for a beloved yoga teacher and I’m worried about how I’m going to be received.

As I stay with the sensation in my gut, all the thoughts related to the knot start to show up, and they all boil down to one theme: If someone doesn’t like what I am offering or what I am doing, it means something bad about me. I didn’t do it right. I’m not competent. What I offer is not valued.  

I think you get the picture.

Miraculously, in the midst of all this going on, and all the techniques I am using to try and make this feeling go away, I hear the words, “The greatest cause of all your suffering, as well as the confusion you create in the world, is believing that someone else’s reaction to you, is who you are.”

In an instant, this Truth cuts right through to the very heart of it. Who needs techniques to try and make something go away when you don’t even believe in the so-called problem to begin with? Like a sharp blade this knowing cuts through all the mental, physical, and emotional attachments I have to the story that in order to be here, I have to make sure others never think ill of me.

Let’s hope it can last.

This personal experience reflects what I see when I look out into the world; especially since the times of co-vid, and especially since the inception of social media where our relationships have been commandeered by a kind of “false presentation, tell-all and then risk annihilation by the mob if they don’t like your brand,” set of rules. I see a life-depleting and dangerous arrangement that has risen up between us based on some fundamentally destructive agreements, tacit though they may be.

Specifically around, Do as I say, Do as I want you to. Or else. Or else you will be cancelled. Or else you will lose your job and the right to be with your family. Or else you will be labeled as a…(fill in the blank). There is a real sickness between us now that has got many of us walking on eggshells; fearing we will be banished, attacked or deemed uncaring if we choose to go another way.

To be sure our social connections can reflect back to us important codes of conduct that help inform us about how to behave with one another. But somewhere along the way a grotesque mob mentality has taken over with the mandate being to suppress and make wrong the full and unique expression of each one of us.

Our social groups lose more than can be counted when we are afraid to be ourselves. Afraid to express an opinion not in line with the ideology du jour. Afraid to act on our own behalf when the group has gone mad.

If you doubt this in yourself, if you don’t see the way you will diminish yourself to belong or the way you will confuse who you are with another’s opinion of you, watch yourself as you move through your day. How often do you say or agree to something that you do not believe in? How often do you smile, as if in agreement, when you definitely do not agree? How many of us took a shot we did not want because we felt pressured by the group?

And how many of us are seeing all kinds of things in the world that are pathological, but keep our mouths shut for fear of social retribution?

Who you are can never be reduced down to what another thinks of you. To spend your life adjusting yourself to keep anyone from ever not liking you or what you’re doing is to add more confusion to an already very confused world.