Reclaiming liberty.

Liberty is a state of being free from oppressive restrictions over your way of life and having the power to pursue your own interests. 

Liberty is one of our society's core values, but do we enjoy it?

Are our own hearts and minds free from oppressive restrictions? What's holding us back? What is getting in the way of our ability to chart our own course and pursue our own happiness?

Our society is struggling with a mental health crisis. Opioid addiction is running rampant throughout the nation. Our communities are polarized, subject to extreme views and divisive actions. We are all busy, overworked and struggling to find meaning and purpose in our lives. Our attention is literally consumed by the vast amount of news and information barraging us each and every day.

Is this liberty? Is this what we stand for and aspire to?

We all aspire to have a healthy mind and an open heart. We want to embody sacred human values, we want to have composure, presence and a joyful mind. We want to feel a sense of balance and ease in our life. We also want to be prepared for action, ready to act when called on.

Being in a state of presence and preparedness, that is what it means to have a firm hold on liberty.

A life of liberty is lived in the pursuit of truth and serving humanity. It is a life centered on practice. Just as a soldier trains to be ready to fight, so too we all must train to be ready to act for the benefit of others. Training is our job. It's not easy. It's not always fun. It is our work, the most important work worth doing. We train to be present and ready, even if the battle never comes.

The challenge that we are faced with is to see the gap. Is there a gap between where we are and what we aspire to be? What are we striving for? What does doing it right look like? Does failure mean we lost or that we have room to improve? Where are you getting stuck- emotionally, physically, spiritually or mentally?

Change is possible. We can leave behind our small self. We can leave behind the self caged in the confines of its own limited self-talk. We can recognize our birth right, our innate potential, and follow that which is authentic and genuine.

The first step on this path of reclaiming our liberty starts with self-awareness. For too long we have been not listening, not seeing, not acknowledging and not understanding. We have been blinded by our indifference to our own oppressive restrictions. Self-awareness starts with seeing who we are, what do we value and how exactly do our actions align with those values?

Self-awareness leads to composure, to self-worth and to confidence. Self-awareness illuminates the nature of who we are and gives us a ground to stand on as we learn to adopt a posture of compassion.

With self-awareness we are able to manage our own thoughts and emotions. We are able to navigate the tension between how we feel and how we act. We can accept ourselves, which means we can start to accept others. We start to grow and change, and things start to make more sense.

This change won't happen overnight. It will ebb and flow, but through practice it will become more stable. A life centered on practice always moves through periods of learning, growth and change.

And this is enough. The challenge is to bring all situations onto the path. To be present and ready, to have the power to choose and the power to act.

This is how we reclaim our liberty.

FOMO.

Fear of missing out.

You might have heard this acronym being passed around lately. Fear of missing out can take many forms. It can relate to connections, recognition, accomplishments or any other form of worth and belonging. There is a very special form of FOMO that our culture tends to breed:

The fear of not doing something important or creating something meaningful. 

We are told to live our best life, to contribute something meaningful to the world. We all aspire to live a life of purpose and for our work to have an impact. However, most of us feel that what we are doing isn't good enough. We should be doing something more, we should be doing something better. We should be making more of an impact, changing the world in more meaningful ways.

This fear of missing out is based on a projected sense of self. A better version of you, Greg 2.0. The ideal you that lives a life of great meaning and purpose.

This fear really points to a deep conviction of unworthiness and a lack of perceived value or meaning. We are looking for confirmation or validation from others about our worth. Fundamentally, if we cannot recognize our own value and worth then no matter how much praise or acknowledgement others give us, it doesn't penetrate to our heart.

The fear of missing out confirms this sense of shame and inauthenticity. I have to do this thing in order to prove that I am worth it, that I belong and that I am important.

Follow the fear. The fear is in you, it is not out there in the world. It is in your own heart and in your own mind.

Learn to sit with that fear. Learn to extend your kindness and patience to it. As you learn to sit with fear, it will reveal its hidden layers- your self-contempt, insecurity and shame.

Learn to sit with these too. Extend your love and kindness to all of your shadows.

Your shadow follows you. But you are not your shadow.

As we continue to move through various layers of self-awareness, we eventually end up in completely open, transparent awareness- a state of equanimity and complete self-acceptance. When we discover this deep sense of self-acceptance, we simultaneously recognize our value and our worth. Appreciating our own value, we can recognize the value and worth of others. We no longer harbor any fear of missing out, because we are not incomplete. We are fulfilled, just as we are.

The foundation of compassion.

Compassion requires that we are present, that we remain open and responsive to others and the situations that we find ourselves in. A compassionate mind is engaged, connected and available. A compassionate heart hears, acknowledges and understands.

All of us have some measure of compassion. Often that circle is small and narrow, but we can train ourselves to develop great compassion. We can train in generating a mind that has compassion for all beings, everywhere, regardless of their circumstances.

The foundation for generating great compassion is self-awareness. If we can't be open and non-judgemental with ourselves, how can we remain open and present with others.

Self-awareness is a lens through which we see our own mind, thoughts, emotions, fears and neurosis. Self-awareness knows our present state. As we engage in meditation and strengthen our mindfulness and vigilant awareness, we start to see and appreciate the various levels of the self. We start to gain more agility in dealing with strong negative emotions and thoughts. Mindfulness and vigilant awareness deepen our self-awareness, which allows us to be more open and perceptive to who we are and who we are not.

As we train in compassion, we are really training in how to remain present, open and responsive. If we find ourselves shutting down, turning away or tuning out, then our practice of being compassionate has slipped into the mire of self-focus and our own agenda. Self-awareness allows us to assess and manage that process of shutting down and turning away, it allows us to see what we are averse to and to try to let go of our fixation.

A simple practice to work with this practice of self-awareness and compassion is tonglen, or giving and accepting. In this practice, we can see where we start to shut down to others pain and suffering. We can see what kind of situations we tend to turn away from. It might be easy to practice tonglen with a loved one in mind, but it might be very difficult when that person is a homeless man or someone who causes you a lot of trouble. It might also be easy if someone is suffering from certain mundane problems, but very difficult if that person has a debilitating cancer or illness.

Where do you start to shut down in your practice? In your daily life? Use the power of self-awareness to catch yourself as you start to tune out and turn away.

The practice of compassion extremely powerful and includes all aspects of the path. Everything is connected, and so are we.

Crossing the chasm.

Vipasyana is the practice of looking at the mind and the nature of the self. Once we have cultivated a mind that is calm and clear, we use it to look at the nature of mind and the nature of reality. Since birth we have taken this self to be truly existing. Our bodies change over time, our ideas and beliefs might fluctuate and change, but there is a conscious aspect of the mind that seems to continue throughout our whole life, that seems to be permanent and true.

This minds existence is never really challenged, we simply know it experientially to be true.

There is a great chasm that we need to cross in our practice of vipasyana. We need to cross over the threshold of believing and apprehending of the self as being permanent, real, unchanging and true. On the other side of that chasm is the conception of a self that is impermanent, interconnected, constantly changing and flexible. Those two seem irreconcilable.

Our conception of the self as being real and unchanging leads to us feeling stuck and powerless in situations. We often find ourselves searching for external relief and trying to manipulate external conditions. We languish in our efforts to prop up the self by controlling outer circumstances. Reifying the self, we simultaneously invest great importance in our material conditions and our experience of the world around us. We believe deep down that if we can just get everything right, that our sense of self and our place in the world will all be secured.

When a gap opens up in our meditation, look at that gap. 

Look at our habitual perception and our ingrained conception of the self. Is it true? Who are we? What is the nature of this self that we hold so dear?

If we look at the self through the lens of the first turning of the wheel of Dharma, we can start to appreciate how the self truly abides. We can start to see that the self is composed of many facets- our body, emotions, perceptions, thoughts and beliefs, and of course our consciousness- all those are connected. We can start to appreciate how our consciousness itself is composed of many facets. We have emotions and experience them in our mind, but we are not our emotions. We have thoughts and ideas, but we are not our thoughts and ideas. We experience various sense appearances like sights, sounds and smells, but none of those are who we are.

Simply looking at the mind through this lens of the Dharma, we start to see our false notions and beliefs in who we think we are. We start to see our limiting conceptions and how our emotional imbalance limits our capacity to act as we intend. Simply looking at the present condition of our mind and self, we can see all of the factors that brought us to the here and now.

Simply see. Witness this appearance of the self free from judgement or bias. This is the essence of self-awareness.

Having this insight into the self, we start to see more truly. We still conceive of a self, but that is interconnected with a larger whole. The outer world still exists, but we can see that it is constantly changing and dynamic. We can appreciate this newfound perspective of mindful awareness, but it also carries with it a deep and profound sense of responsibility. We see how much we contribute to our own suffering and the suffering of others. We see how we perpetuate negative mental states and unwanted emotions. We also see the potential for freedom and a path forward.

We see all of that. We see ourselves standing on both sides of the chasm, not quite embodying either.

We don't just cross the chasm in a single leap. We cross it, and then we fall back into habitual patterns of conception. We leap over it, only to realize we landed back where we started. We stand on the other side, enjoy the view, only to be pulled back once again.

The path of seeing is the start of a long path ahead. It doesn't happen all at once, and yet it does time and time again.

Crossing the chasm might just require that you turn awareness back on itself.