“After meditating for some years, I began to see the patterns of my own behavior. As you quiet your mind, you begin to see the nature of your own resistance more clearly, struggles, inner dialogues, the way in which you procrastinate and develop passive resistance against life. As you cultivate the witness, things change. You don’t have to change them. Things just change.” ~Ram Dass
I’ve had a lot of incredible teachers over the years, and Ram Dass is one of the greatest. He has a way of articulating the experience so clearly without a lot of spiritual mumbo-jumbo that you find so common in today’s teachings.
If you’ve never watched the documentary on him, called “Becoming Nobody,” I highly recommend it.
This quote from him is so beautiful, because it aligns with the nature of things, and the truth of who we are, and the idea that we don’t have to try and become something in order to then be someone worth loving (the basis of the self-help movement in a nutshell). Instead, all we have to do is become aware - to allow ourselves to see honestly and clearly what’s going on inside our minds, to witness our actions, and to question our motives. Becoming this witness to what is, in a self loving and self-compassionate way, allows us to grow naturally out of the things that keep us stuck. Although I admit to a few last things that were difficult to give up that I was clinging to, in the end, by trusting and allowing, I can now see more clearly how I was deluding myself. I’ll explore more of these, so you can see what it looks like in future posts.
And here’s the clincher, and why this work is so difficult - just like somebody dealing with addiction, you have to want to change, and you have to want to allow those things to drop away that aren't serving us.
Once we drop our attachment, need or craving to the things that are keeping us stuck, and allow our experience to simply be, we are free. Simple but not easy. And this is why I think so many of us don’t come to this work until we are pressed up against the wall and we have no other option. You do not have to wait for that day, is all I’m saying.