"Let what comes come. Let what goes go. Find our what remains." —Ramana Maharshi
"Your sacred space is where you can find yourself over and over again." —Joseph Campbell
Imagine standing at the ocean's edge with your bare feet planted securely on a stretch of firm, wet sand. As the waves lap onto the beach, your feet begin to sink into the shifting ground below you. What appeared to be a stable, reliable foundation is now washing away beneath you.
Just like the sand at the ocean's edge, everything in our perceptual world is continuously shifting, changing, and moving. Sights, sounds, tastes, and even thoughts are in unceasing motion; as impossible to secure as the sand beneath your feet. We couldn't hold our world in place if we wanted to.
And yet, there is a belief that we can somehow pin our security and OK-ness on things that are always in motion. Things like physical health, money, image, weight, relationships, and emotional states.
Our minds say, "I'll be OK when my children stop struggling, when the chemo ends, when the bills are paid, or when the anxiety abates."
Somehow we know not to trust the stability of the shifting sand, but we don't know not to trust our equally precarious thoughts and beliefs.
We fall for the myth of false relief—that fleeting, seductive feeling when a problem is resolved, your health improves, or a child finally gets back on track. For a moment, you feel a sense of relief, and exhale.
Thank God, this is resolved, you say.
But, that's the trap of the momentary resolution. The false relief.
You quickly realize there is a tension in the relief. There is a new condition that must be met. There is a need for the problem to never return, for the improved health to remain steady, and for the child to never go astray again. The relief is not real because there is a condition to it…a new set of golden handcuffs. A new belief in something needed in order to be OK. The resolution was never meant to bring true relief. It was always meant to solidify the mind's perceived relevance.
Like the shifting sand at the ocean's edge, this false relief is already falling away as soon as it is felt. Your mind will never let you stay in the story of this type of conditional relief for very long.
Why?
Because, to a normal, evolutionarily perfect human mind, enough is never enough.
The mind's fundamental job is to keep itself relevant. That voice-in-your-head, the one that narrates your day and makes meaning of everything, is designed to solve problems—even if it needs to create them.
Among the mind's favorite narratives, "I'll be OK when..." is one of its most compelling.
That little mind is so clever and so brilliant at its job that it always keeps you on the hook for just one more thing that needs to be better or different before you can really let go and relax.
And that compelling narrative doesn't want to end because that would be the end of the narrator—the end of thought masquerading as truth. It would be the death of that little voice-in-your-head whose whole job it is to keep its story of you relevant. And its best trick for doing that is to create problems and promise to solve them if you’ll just shower it with attention for a little bit longer.
But, there is GOOD NEWS in all of this.
That voice-in-your-head, the one that never stops talking, has no actual power. Its compelling stories SEEM true. They FEEL like they need to be paid close attention to.
But they don't.
The thoughts and stories are nothing more than a product of a lifetime of conditioning and circumstances, processed through what is basically an incredibly efficient computer. They don't belong to you. They are not at all what they seem to be. When you don’t identify with or shower those thought-movies with attention, they just pass on through and keep right on going. The urgent, scary stories about what you NEED in order to be OK just don’t really matter because they’re seen for what they are: a bunch of outdated drama pretending to be real and important.
Thankfully, when we DO innocently fall for those stories about what-I-need-in-order-to-be-OK, there is a BRILLIANT wake-up mechanism to bring us back to reality.
That brilliant mechanism is made of two fundamentally reliable and trustworthy components: raw emotions and visceral sensations. Together, these make up Life’s most efficient way to wake us up from the hypnosis of thought and bring us back to Presence. To reality. To peace.
They’re the perfect little tap on the shoulder that says, “Hey, you. You’re believing something that isn’t true. Come back home.”
When you’re not identified with that voice in your head, you are already home. You are free. YOU—that complete, uncontaminated, resilient bundle of aliveness that you were on the day you were born—are simply a space for all of the stories and thought-movies to pass through like clouds passing through a blue sky.
You are the timeless, stable, expansive space of Presence in which stories arise and dissolve. You get to watch the stories without becoming identified with them.
The story, "I'll be OK when..." is remarkably predictable and Universal, so it's simple to notice when it arises.
Just like your refrigerator predictably cools your food and your washing machine predictably washes your clothes—your mind can be counted on 100% of the time to tell you what you need in order to relax and be OK. It's just a machine doing its job.
When that meaning-making, problem-solving machine in your head tells you what you must have in order to be OK, you can simply NOTICE it. You can feel whatever raw emotions and brilliant visceral sensations want to be felt. And then, you can watch how quickly that story passes all on its own, allowing space for the next story to arrive on its heels. When each story is seen for what it is—a cloud passing through the sky— it loses its perceived power.
There is a small gap between thoughts, and that space is untouched—uncontaminated. It is here that you experience the truth of who-you-are—even for only brief seconds at a time. And it is here that you discover that, outside of thought, you are fundamentally, innately, unconditionally OK.