The most exciting experiences I ever had was not what you'd ordinarily expect.
It was not skiing down a mountainside in fresh powder,
Which I've done many times.
And it was not waking up on the first day of a holiday at the beach.
In fact,
It wasn't anything you'd outwardly see as exciting at all.
I'm talking about just simply meeting myself in an empty room on a cliffside on the Bay of St.
Lawrence in Cape Breton,
Nova Scotia in Canada.
That meeting was the beginning of a vision for how I could live in this life on this planet.
I had been sitting for many months with my retreat companions.
And one of the main threads of that experience was the difficulty of just being with myself day in and day out.
Supposedly I was practicing advanced meditation rituals and speeding towards the goal of enlightenment.
Six times a day I had to start a new meditation session,
Be with myself and practice some kind of concentration.
My experience was everything but holy.
And usually it was filled with all kinds of problems from morning to evening.
Everybody irritated me and I was not exactly the favorite of the group.
What I did understand during this period of retreat in isolation and confinement was that all the difficult experiences I had to endure were just in my mind.
I understood this much and I had the goal of working through them,
Processing them and ultimately being at peace with myself.
But my thoughts would never stop and there were many negative thoughts.
It wasn't exactly a five star hotel but there wasn't really anything in the environment that was a problem.
We lived on a cliff side overlooking the bay.
In the distance sometimes there were pods of whales which swam in circles.
Outside were occasional moose amid the dancing pines.
In the summer it was complete heaven with the scent of wild roses wafting on soft ocean breezes.
We were completely taken care of.
My retreat companions were irritating but they were reasonable.
Nature was so perfect and the weather dramatic so I lived in a perfect place with my mind.
Why is it so difficult to just be with ourselves?
This time of COVID-19 reminds me a lot of that period in retreat.
And it has presented many of us with an opportunity to completely reinvent ourselves and possibly even reinvent the world we live in.
We are pressed by extremely challenging circumstances and if we are fortunate we have enough resources to survive and use our repetitive days in isolation to some good use.
But we always have our minds and thoughts are everybody's problem.
When we were free of masks and we could travel anywhere we could lose our minds.
But now we are at home and pressed not only by the demands of isolation but also the seeming stress of having a thinking mind.
Ironically maybe this could be the time of unmasking.
If we have enough resources we are fortunate beyond anything that we could have imagined would happen in this lifetime.
We have been forced to be with ourselves much more than usual.
This is actually a luxury we could enjoy.
In my way of thinking it is like our mother,
The earth and the environment has given us a gigantic feedback and is saying stop,
Stop everything.
When we stop everything including our wild and unruly minds we unmask and reveal ourselves,
Reveal our perfection and we reveal our potential.
Usually we hear that we are a part of nature and that we need to respect our planet.
But I don't quite agree with this statement.
I think it is more accurate to say that nature is a part of us and that our bodies extend to include the complete interconnectivity of all of nature on this planet and beyond.
And so we have a great responsibility to the earth.
We are the ones with the awareness that can know everything that is going on including our role in the destruction or safeguarding of the planet.
I have been watching Our Planet with David Attenborough and I feel a deep sense of pain and responsibility with every interdependent ecosystem he presents from the deep oceans to the deserts and forests.
So we are staying at home,
We are consuming less,
The air is cleaner and wild animals are entering the city somewhere.
We are practicing kindness by staying at home and not infecting anybody.
Oddly enough we are already practicing protecting the planet.
Planet Earth is seeking rebalance.
Its abundant,
Rich and its extraordinary variety from blue whales to butterflies is stunning and breathtaking.
How could such incredible beings come out of this planet?
Every breath we take is half coming from the oxygen of the ocean depths.
The animals live in complete symbiotic harmony with each other and Our Planet displays their beauty and harmony in all the environments.
But now it seems we are trying to get back to normal but I hear that many of us do not want to go back to normal.
My point is that our hope lies in learning to live in harmony with ourselves,
With our own minds.
Our minds that have the extraordinary ability to encompass and be aware of the whole planet.
This is how our magnificent world can continue.
We are born perfect even if we have defects.
We have to trace ourselves back,
Each one of us,
To our perfection,
Our innate harmony.
Take off the mask.
It's challenging but not all that difficult to do.
Insight Timer for example is creating a culture of deep appreciation for what truly matters.
Like the wildlife of our planet,
We humans have so many expressions of ourselves in spiritual systems,
In meditation,
In sound,
In music,
In ways of discovering our place.
It's amazing what comes out of the minds of humans.
And that which isn't destructive is harmonious,
Not only with ourselves but also with the inhabitants of the planet,
All of them.
We are creating a culture of harmony and this is exactly what the world needs to survive and flourish.
Our minds and the planet we live on are exquisitely beautiful and precious.
So finally on retreat on the beautiful highlands of Cape Breton Island,
I gave up.
I gave up giving myself a hard time.
I learned to relax and let go of the importance of myself and my thoughts,
My thinking mind.
At the same time I began to feel that innate perfection and harmony,
The same perfection and harmony that manifests in nature on this planet.
So we can see ourselves in this way,
Even with our defects.
To me this is the most important thing to learn in this life.
Human beings are built to evolve to the next level,
Which now means to come into harmony with the entire planet or something else.
So I ask myself,
What is it that I need to learn in this life?
Then I set out and do it.
There is excitement in sensing the possibilities from inside to outside,
In learning how to stop and in taking off the mask.
