On Open Air March 9, the Guide had a conversation with a practitioner who was going up against resistance to sitting. The Guide suggested to the caller that they play with sometimes tiptoeing up to the cushion slowly, sometimes racing up to the cushion and diving at it, or perhaps jumping on it. The Guide went on to offer: We could fill a day with that kind of fun presence, like life was like when we were kids, before life became about performing and doing and meeting standards.
And so, I’m practicing writing this by tiptoeing the fingers over to the keyboard. Practicing being in a process of play, not performance: a process of nothing-to-do-with-the-outcome innocence and joy. Energy sparks. Life force quickens. The energy that had been dampened and constrained by an identification with a serious performance of “me” “doing” is released back into dancing with Life.
And the dance starts to dance. Or maybe more accurately, I rejoin the dance. Intelligence dances with Intelligence, and I’m back at the party. The line from Oscar Wilde about life being too important to be taken seriously drops in. On the heels of that: the teachings offered by the Guide that ego is the only thing in the universe that takes itself seriously, and that if we are not Happy, we are identified with ego. As the Guide reminds us, the Happy of capital-H Happy is not necessarily a giddy, giggling kind of happy. It is not the world of opposites happy/unhappy. It is a deep, unshakeable, starch-in-the-spine, grounded, unconditional wellbeing Happy. With feet on the ground, aware of Life force animating, and a deep, felt sense that there is Nothing Wrong.
The conditioning that welds ego seriousness together with caring is strong. In “feels really real” egoland, caring and approaching life as important seem to mean being tense, worried, focused on “me” at the center of the universe, dutifully submitting to beatings by messages of “not doing enough,” “should be doing more”, “not doing it right.” Furrowed brow. Shoulders scrunched up to the ears. Attention on conditioned mind. Serious, serious, serious. A small-s self-importance. The greed, hatred and delusion of greedily clinging to being right about greed, hatred, and delusion being wrong, and hating them. Greedily clinging to knowing-and-doing in order to fix it “out there.” Any movement towards relaxation, any shift of attention away from ego and to Here is met with screams of “YOU DON’T CARE!”
Practice and Sangha give me the tools, and feed the courage and the clarity, to go up against this. As the Guide went on to encourage on the Open Air call: “We can have that same kind of alive-and-enjoying as adults. The fact that we’re engaged in life doesn’t mean we have to enjoy it less.” The dancing of Intelligence with Intelligence is kind and fun. It’s on my side. It laughs and embraces and shows me the difference between the Love in Action that I am and ego seriousness.
To play with Oscar Wilde’s line: Life is far too important to go through it indulging identification with an illusion. What better way to show our gratitude to Life than to be with it, no matter what. My experience of that being with Life is an enjoyment and fun that are the realm of capital-H Happy -- not dependent on content, not conditional on circumstances. The enjoyment of being in communion with, aware of being animated by, Love.
The Guide ended the conversation on OpenAir with, “We can’t let ego take the fun out of our lives.”
Engaged, enjoying, fun. In this way, I do most deeply vow to train myself!
In gasshō,
anna l
Practice Corner
Stay in Touch