kiran trace

Already Is My Favorite Word

After these chats, I realized again how much I love the word already because it describes the essence of reality, of what IS. Truth, clarity, fulfillment, love, peace, information, innovation, solutions, insights, etc—these things are already right here. The word ‘already’ helps to cut the legs out from under the doer, the seeker, the achiever—i.e. the various separate selves—from heading out to get something, do something.

For a chronic doer like me, this realization is an immense relief.

The rule of ‘already’ goes for every little thing. We want a hot dog and a beer. Or a salad and a sunbath. The desire itself is already true by the time we notice it. It occurs TO us—popping into awareness, out of the moment. It just… IS. And then, right in the moment we want a hot dog, we remember the place down the street that has the best Chicago-style dogs . The hot dog place was already there. The memory was already there, the impulse was already there. We may even already be walking in that direction. 

What occurs is an increased awareness of what is already the case.

There Are No Nouns

Just try to inflict a noun, a separate self, onto this moment—try to be hungry before you actually are, or like that person whom you have visceral distaste for. Try to digest your food. Grow your hair and nails. Or not think that thought. Give it a go, separate self! 

Of course, we try this all the time. We insert a noun into everything. Even my last two sentences imply a noun. (It’s right there in our language, every time).

But where would that noun, that separate self be? Inside your head? Where, exactly? The prefrontal cortex? (the big contender in the world of neurobiology) Ok… how? How is it located there, exactly? And if it’s there inside your brain somewhere, is that spot not connected with the rest of your brain, body, and environment?

We get nowhere, attempting to find the noun, the cut-off.

Because there isn’t one. What there is is verb-ing.

So that’s where we can go with our awareness. To the verbing. The tao. The flow.

The Great Hack

So much of our current self help & wellness tools, medical & psychological interventions, spiritual practices, dating advice, business/financial coaching etc are, in their essence, big old system hacks. They are attempting to hack our programming—to tweak our physical, psychological, or financial systems to work better, to get us more.

And that’s cool.

Tweaks and hacks and new angles are great. Essential, even. Hackers are brilliant—they shake things up and help us see things differently. And we need that. Perhaps we especially need that now, in this topsy turvy world.

But hacks aren’t always sustainable; they don’t necessarily garner long term gains in and of themselves. Moreover, the tweaks aren’t necessarily in our favor—they are sometimes tricks, for another’s gain. Plus, a hack might not take you out of a corrupted system—many are the equivalent of rearranging deck furniture on a sinking ship.

The Party Line

So often, society’s ‘party line’ is completely backward, isn’t it? And we kinda know it.

We sense the Orwellian quality of, let’s say, our food system. Or our money system. Or our military-industrial-complex-mess-of-a-system. Here’s a few examples of recent party lines we’ve lived by, vs the realities we’ve later discovered (buried under the advertising for the party line).

Party line: GMOs are good; we can feed more people.

Truth: GMOs (& the pesticides used with them) increase soil toxicity and depletion, yielding less food & much more disease.

Party Line (a silly personal one here): Acne is caused by too much oil on the skin, so we should dry the skin out.

Which Card? What Game?

When a fear card is played it sounds abstract, hard to follow, and often dramatic. It might feel pressured and urgent (eg. Bush selling the Iraq war), or kind of hazy and hyped-up (Obama’s Hope). It might feel exciting, like a high. Or it might be syrupy sweet—like a cheap wine that leaves you with a headache. There can be a kind-of religious fervor (eg. evangelical self-help gurus & angry mobs) or a checked-out quality (eg. flat recitations of verse in church).

Fear doesn’t have solution in it. It isn’t built for that; it’s built as a zero-sum game—to zero out the identified enemy. So it stays in place. It often talks a lot. Frankly, a lot of therapy does this—lots of processing & ’coping mechanisms,’ but not much forward movement.

When truth is played it will sound clear, precise, non-personal, non-dramatic, and light. It will simply feel true—you already knew it. You won’t need to ‘try and understand’ what someone is saying.

The Flywheel

There is a flywheel underfoot. It is nature’s rhythm and pulse. It is God’s divine orchestra.

And you are less than a hair’s breadth away from it.

You just have to scooch …every so slightly …out of those old, rusty rhythms of your life. Move just to the left of those grooves—those ideas about what keeps your life in order. Maybe it’s a pattern in a relationship or at work, a meditation or workout regimen, a particular coffee in the morning (like me!). These are the controlled, mechanized aspects of your life.

For the Sake of Itself

We go for what is meaningful, versus what is true in our bodies, what is deep in our bones.

Meaning is in the land of the separate self. It exists in a mental landscape, in the story of me. But we are not this mental self. We are not a concept.

Meaning is conceptual, not actual. It isn’t here, on planet earth.

I do a lot of inquiry with clients—we question thoughts or drop words out of our vocabulary. I often ask this question, with regard to meaning (a variation of Byron Katie’s ‘The Work’):

‘If nothing that ever happened—nothing you did or didn’t do, nothing you’ve ever thought, felt or experienced—had any meaning whatsoever, what remains?’

I usually get a smile or a surprised look. Maybe a moment of panic. But then the client tastes a bit of freedom and says something like, “God, I don’t know!” And we just hang out in ‘I don’t know.’ We sit and feel. We see what arises. Invariably, something true (and utterly practical) comes up…

The Road to Hell

I’ve never much liked the word ‘intention.’ 

Like…

‘What are your intentions for this week/month/year?’  ‘Let’s set our intention for this meeting.’  ‘My intention is to be loving to my family this holiday.’ 

Blech.

But I’ve felt like an asshole for not liking the word, because it is such a part of psychology, spirituality and self help.

I’ve been reflecting on my dislike. Here is the crux of why I think we should toss this word out:  The word ‘intention’ is mental. It’s not embodied. 

And therefore it is a movement of fear.

The Strangest Pleasure

Pain’s got a bad reputation, no?

The worst, maybe.

No one wants this dude at the party; he’s the thief of pleasure, joy, & peace—not welcome to hang out, even for a little while.

But let’s—just for the length of this blog post—let’s consider that this bad reputation may be unfair. And let’s notice that we haven’t really found out for ourselves. We’ve just assumed pain was no good.

A Healing Estuary

This process, along with caterpillars turning into butterflies and frogs regrowing legs (and a billion other mysteries in our biological reality) doesn’t make sense from a materialist worldview—the worldview that says things are separate, operate themselves, and are disconnected from the rest of Life, with one DNA packet code per separate, solid life form. 

But major internal change—this kind of smoltification process—including completely new shapes & operating systems, is more the norm than the exception in Nature. And it is actually the norm for us humans (though we are taught the materialist worldview—that we are nouns instead of verbs). 

It is the natural process of evolution—a radical transformation in which our whole Being alters, finding a much bigger space to occupy, as we drop old constrictions (limiting beliefs) in our system. And this evolutionary process is built into us, just like the salmon. 

But it takes some healing, some time in the brackish waters—letting go of old patterns, old internal systems…eating some salt, as it were. 

When You Open

Recently, walking in the Tennessee mountains on retreat, a grasshopper leapt across my path and I exclaimed “You’re so pretty when you open!,” dazzled by the yellow & green of its wings.

And I thought—Isn’t this true about the natural world?  

Butterflies. Birds.

A full Lion’s mane. 

Every flower ever.

A puppy’s pink tongue. 

A luminous geode (looking like a dumb ol rock before it’s cracked open). 

Lolling cats, upside down with their underbellies showing. 

The more open, the more enticing.