December 20, 2023
Dear Lucy,
It seems I am always reaching outside myself to ease the turmoil within.
After deep meditations and breakthroughs, I often come up for air only to find the dust-up of old patterns and samskaras waiting to greet me.
Each transcendent opening seems to initiate its own housecleaning—sometimes physical, but mostly emotional. The glory days of deep inner exploration are often followed by hard landings.
Sometimes the landing is only a small knock or bump along the way, something easily absorbed. But at other times, hidden stress rises all at once and crashes into my serenity, leaving me gasping with unease and clutching.
Then I look outward for something to hold onto: a reading, a philosophy, a person. I focus on it, hoping it will soften the pain of not knowing—the swirl of tragedy unfolding within.
But it does not last.
Or perhaps I do not last with it: the philosophy, the person, the ideology.
For a while, the salve of understanding slows the bloodletting inside. Like offering a lollipop to a crying child, I reach for someone else’s sweetness because I cannot feel my own.
The saddest part is that I still imagine that, if I could really commit—I mean really, really commit—to walking a spiritual life as you have, the turmoil would finally abate and my inner life would blossom.
But perhaps that is not what commitment offers.
Perhaps commitment is not the end of the inner crazies. Perhaps it is the willingness to stop abandoning myself when they arrive.
Still, I find myself at another crossroads. I know the easier road well. It is the road that promises relief, then leads me, eventually, back to the same place where I am now standing.
And I am left with the terrible freedom to choose.
Free will is a bitch.
