Finding Inner Freedom and Peace

My Zoom friend, Nobi, shared the following journal entry from last year with me. It seemed to me a profound realization and I asked if I could share it on my blog. I would appreciate comments if anyone relates. 

"I woke up this morning and thought ... there is noting in life to wake up for, to get out of bed for … There is nothing fun to look for

I am stuck in Bangkok. No open green space, clean air, hills and mountains, ocean, organic food, music, art, free-ness, …

Nothing in life here in Bangkok gives me happiness, joy.

I give up 

…..

But wait! When I turn inward, there is happiness … definite, distinct, happiness … I can feel it.

• When I say “inward”, I am not talking about “happy thoughts”. I am taking about inner sensations.

Happiness that I feel inside me does not depend on the quality of what is outside — not at all.

Let’s step back and go over a list of “outside” happiness …

• Clean air, open space, etc. that I listed above, things exemplified by life in Berkeley.

• Money, power, high social status, health, youthfulness, good food, fancy car, house and garden, … excitement

• Education, good schools, intelligent conversation, good friends, good family upbringing, … quality life

I don’t have those “good things” in my life here. That is a fact!

So, I accept it. Everything in life here sucks! Nothing in my external life here in Bangkok gives me joy and happiness.

But … my inner space is … joy and happiness.

I have learned to take a small piece of “pain” and hold it in the Space, to micro-accept with micro-awareness (see my note on “Holding Space”); I have learned to come into my body, and do somatic pause. These practices and training seem to be culminating to this realization that I am experiencing now.

I am also starting to have a taste of this thought: when I experience joy and happiness inside me (because I have accepted that nothing outside makes me happy), strangely, things outside start to become good, attractive, meaningful, …

I just read this line from the Bible in a novel:

        'He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it        unto life eternal.' (John 12:25)

I am also starting to feel “love” inside me — the same area in my body where genuine happiness and joy are felt. This “love” has somewhat different quality from happiness and joy. It emirates toward both myself and outside, to others and other things. This is interesting.

I feel this inside happiness keeps growing, ever slowly but steadily. It grows deeper and wider inside my body, and I can see the possibility that it starts to oozes out of my body to outside. This is interesting."

When your spiritual teacher isn't called to teach anymore

 Recently I got an email from Adyashanti saying he was taking a break from teaching. It feels like an ending, even though he hasn't, in an active way, been my teacher for a long time. But he did change my life, or, as I think of it to myself, saved my life. I guess I mean that the way Christians mean it of Christ, or meant it in the early days of Christianity:  that I thought I was just this little being of skin and bones but discovered I am infinitely big. His retirement (because I suspect he won't come back to teaching, as least not full-time) doesn't change what he gifted me, of course, but it somehow finalizes it. The love of a student for her teacher is forever.