How Did I Get Here?: Navigating the unexpected turns in love and life. Barbara Angelis De

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ treasures, excavated from the depths of your being, priceless gems of understanding and clarity that, once revealed, will change you forever.

       Digging deep for wisdom means being willing to unearth anything and everything you find inside yourself. It means digging until you discover precious treasures of insight, revelation and awakening, that which transforms you, that which you could have never known was there unless you were forced to dig.

      In my first year of college, I began practicing daily meditation, and soon after I attended a six-month meditation intensive with a renowned spiritual master in order to become a meditation teacher myself. The course consisted of some lectures, studies and yoga, but the core of the process was meditating for up to twelve hours a day. I’d always had profound experiences meditating for twenty minutes at a time and never found it challenging, but this was different. Sitting in meditation for this many hours was like taking the biggest shovel in existence and digging deep, deep, deep within myself. I would be fine for the first half-hour, but then I would hit a roadblock of thoughts and emotions that seemed to prevent me from going deeper. “I must be doing this wrong,” I would think to myself in a panic. “Maybe I should get up for a while, and then start over when I am more relaxed.” The truth was that I was terrified to go deeper. What if I found out something about myself I didn’t like? What if I didn’t have a core of peace and happiness inside?

      My teacher was a wonderful storyteller with a compassionate, joyful presence. He took great delight in the tales he told us, as if he himself had never heard them before. Every evening after our long day of meditation and study, he would gather us together to sit with him, and for several hours he would share his wisdom, answer questions, and of course tell marvelous stories.

      One night a young man stood up and complained that he had been feeling restless and distracted during meditation, as I had, and he confessed that whenever this happened, he would get up, walk to the store in the nearby village, read through some magazines, and then when he felt less agitated, he would walk back and sit down again to meditate. When my teacher heard this, he laughed and laughed as if he’d never heard anything so amusing in his life. When he finally stopped laughing, he shared this story with us, his version of a classic ancient parable. Here it is as I remember it:

      Once there was a farmer who was in desperate need of water to save his crops from dying. The drought had lasted for several years, and so with no hope of rain, he decided to dig a well. He began digging, and hour by hour the hole got deeper and deeper, but still no there was no water to be found. “I must be digging in the wrong spot,” he concluded at the end of the day, “for all I’ve discovered in this hole are rocks and tree roots.” Exhausted and discouraged, he returned home.

      The next morning, shovel in hand, the farmer began digging again, this time in a different spot. As the sun blazed overhead and he dug deeper, again he found no water. “This second hole is as bad as the first,” he muttered to himself as he climbed out of the dry hole as the sun was setting.

      Day after day the farmer dug one hole after another, and each time he would get the same results—no water. And as he laid down his shovel and walked home, head hung low, he would wonder if he was crazy to believe there was any water to be found. “Am I doomed to spend my life digging and finding nothing?” he moaned to himself. “I must be cursed in some way.”

      One day a traveling wise man was passing by the farmer’s plot of land. To his surprise, he saw the farmer, shovel in hand, digging a hole surrounded by twenty similar holes.

      “What are you doing, my friend?” the wise man asked the farmer, who was knee-deep in dirt.

      “I’m digging a well—at least, I’m trying to.” the farmer replied in a forlorn voice. “But so far, I have only had horrible luck, for I keep hitting rocks and roots—everything but water.”

      “Dear sir, you will never find water digging that way!” the wise man said kindly.

      “What other way is there?” asked the farmer.

      “Your efforts at digging are valiant, but they are not working,” explained the wise man. “You start digging in one place, and after ten feet when you don’t find water, you stop, go to another place, and start to dig all over again. However, the water table in this village starts at least twenty feet below the surface.”

      “Unless you dig longer and deeper, you won’t find what you are searching for. Stay in one place, dig down deep and don’t stop when you get discouraged. Be patient and just keep digging, even when you hit the hard rock-filled soil. If you persist, I promise you will find the water you seek.”

      Again and again throughout my life, I have returned to the important lesson contained in this story. Digging deep for wisdom means not giving up when you hit the rocks of discomfort and frustration within yourself. It means being patient and persistent, not stopping at the first insight, the first revelation, the first breakthrough, but going even deeper. It means having trust—that beneath all of your questions and confusion there are answers, there is clarity, there is awakening.

      Most of all, digging deep for wisdom means having faith—faith that beyond the hard roots of your fear, your doubts and your disappointments, you will discover a wellspring of wisdom and illumination more powerful and more exquisite than anything you could ever have imagined.

      Together, we will dig.

       2 Turning Points, Transitions and Wake-up Calls

      The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their rightful names. —Chinese proverb

       When what was once predictable is nowhere to be found …

       When what you thought you knew to be certain now appears blurred and distorted …

       When what you were holding that seemed solid now dissolves as dust in your hand …

       Then you have arrived at a place on your journey whose name you need to know.

      Each of us is offered powerful moments when life invites us, or perhaps quite dramatically forces us, to stop and pay attention to who we are, where we are, how we arrived there, and where we need to go next. Sometimes these moments of awakening manifest as the coming to a crossroads on our path, when we are presented with a choice to turn this way or that. Sometimes, rather than a distinct moment of recognition, we experience these changes as a gradual transition that we slowly or suddenly become aware of, even though it may have been happening for a while. And sometimes there is nothing at all subtle or gradual about these moments—they reveal themselves to us in the form of dramatic wake-up calls, emotional or spiritual emergencies, events or circumstances that force us, ready or not, to face a reality we would rather not face.

      No matter how we encounter these periods of intense questioning or difficulty, one theme is the same: our world, which was comfortable, safe and familiar, now seems foreign and even frightening as events, either from inside or outside us, shake up our old beliefs, our usual ways of existing, relating and behaving. We look at the challenges stacked up before us and suspect that we will not be able to survive this time with our “old self” intact, that we will not be able to find our way through the dizzying maze of emotions with anything less than total, brutally honest self-reflection.

      “What is happening to me?” we wonder. СКАЧАТЬ