So I’ve started to bring more curiosity and openness to how I wake up. What thoughts am I first aware of? Do they come with or cause any emotional affect in the body? Or am I driven to thoughts to distract myself from some emotional discomfort already present in the body? And whatever I notice, can I meet it with equanimity, just allow it without any resistance, agenda, or need for it to go away or be other than it is?
Why do I feel so desperately lonely?
Because “I am” is now invisible: it is ungraspable, uncertain, unstable, perpetually withheld from my reach. “I am” is always becoming and persists at the end of time. “I am” is inexhaustible movement, relationship, fluxing transition between states. But “I am” is breathing me when “I think” I am breathing it. It is an affirmation of my existence. It is Change. Always changing (thank God, always changing).
Freedom, as they say, is an inside job. Turns out, we don’t need to free ourselves from everything if we can expand the field so wide that nothing’s left out. The inside job is less spa day, more hanging out with the full cast of your inner sitcom without needing anyone to shut up.
And yet, it’s not only an inside job. My ability to even consider “inner freedom” has always been propped up by outer freedoms that rely on—surprise!—other people. A room of my own. Patient, brilliant teachers. Cats that sit in my lap when I meditate so I don’t dare get up.
Anyone who knows the wondrous zoo of spiritual practices in this world already understands something about neurodiversity. Not to be reductive of course. Spiritual work need not be reduced to brain activity for us to consider that the incredible variation in wisdom practices may be, in part, a reflection of the stunningly diverse ways that human brains function.
I am a student of the late Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, affectionately known as “Thay” (teacher). During the Vietnam War, he took part in peace marches in New York. He saw a lot of anger in the marchers, and he told them “if you want peace, be peace.” He knew that if you want peace in the world, you must cultivate peace in yourself.