The Unbound Self - Unravelling The Story Of Lack

Dear Beloved Being,

I know you are searching for something.

A sense of ease,

An unconditional kind of love.

A connectedness to life that flows in gentle bends,

True to the shape of your meandering heart.

If you are searching,

Even in the subtlest of ways,

Then this moment,

What is here,

Is not quite enough.

Who you are is not quite enough.

Subdued discontent as a way of making this moment feel like it is void of something,

An experience,

An embodiment,

A destination,

Perhaps,

You believe that you have not arrived yet at.

We assume that what we seek must be attained through a matter of addition.

If a complex concoction of medicine can heal the body,

Why should this not too be true for the wounds of the heart,

For rifts of the mind and aches of the soul?

And so we gather,

We forage for more,

We try new spiritual trends,

We inhale knowledge,

We even commit without question to extreme concepts in the hope that their potency will add ink to a life that has become colorless.

Through our compulsive spiritual stockpiling,

We assume life will become better,

More whole,

Complete.

Our practice then becomes about attaining freedom,

Our joy about material acquisition or gaining status,

And our healing becomes about obtaining certain states and experiences that validate our progress.

But where are we now?

Where in the woods are we now?

Rarely do we remember that the void we seek to fill is not empty,

But full of clutter and all manner of unnecessary things.

What you seek in truth is not actually an attainment of something new,

But a remembrance of something quite primordial,

Wildly ancient in its nature.

You seek something no one else will ever be able to give you,

And that is to know yourself.

Who you are beneath the shifting polarities of identity,

Desire,

Fear,

And uncertainty.

Every attainment you seek,

Whether it is love through another person,

Joy through a better job,

Freedom through a new state of being,

Is in fact a desire to unburden yourself of what is not yours to hold.

And in this courageous act of letting go,

Of simplifying,

You gain more than you ever thought possible.

This minimalist model of inner growth might seem counterintuitive,

But when we look at everything in nature,

We cannot find an economic growth system in a tree.

It grows because it releases what's keeping it from being in agreement with its source and seed.

We cannot find anywhere in a plant the need to produce more flowers in order for it to feel purposeful.

They just grow the right amount to keep in balance with itself and the greater whole.

In our ongoing process to become someone else,

Someone better,

We've lost sight of what is most transformative.

And that is truth.

Truth is not something we can ever arrive at through addition,

Nor push ourselves into through effort,

For it is the very home the search party leaves from and returns to.

And truth isn't that extraordinary when we remember it.

It's not even spiritual.

It's simple and homely,

Like walking back into a house we loved deeply from a long time ago.

Who you essentially are,

Your true nature,

Has been replaced by a narrative authored by the ego.

Your sense of self,

Mistakenly rooted in the mind,

Now tells you who you are,

What you're missing,

And therefore what you need to gain in life in order to be happy.

This forgetting of what is true is the cause of all life's unrest.

This amnesia of who you fundamentally are is the cause of all sorrows and searches,

Dead ends and merry-go-rounds,

The endless accumulation of dust.

Every emotional sickness is a homesickness.

A deep desire to return to your true nature,

Unfragmented by discontent,

Lack,

And longing,

Which are all bound by a story based in thought,

Not in truth.

Story is why we are here,

Fumbling in the dark for someone who knows our name,

Who can tell us with certainty who we are and why we don't feel like we want to,

Why we don't have what we need,

And why we haven't arrived there yet.

All ache is a story.

A story about a someone who is in pain,

Lack,

Or dis-ease.

All suffering exists because a thought is being believed by a someone who we mistakenly believe ourselves to be.

All stories of unwantedness,

All mental narratives about how life should or shouldn't be protect this false sense of self.

All identities are forged in the flames of childhood,

In the ritual burning down of what was too much or not enough according to somebody else,

Or according to the kind of culture that walks around with matches in its pocket.

And in our leap away from the unsafety of our own bodies,

We built a story,

A new narrative around a someone who can feel a sense of lack.

What is dissociation,

Beloved,

If not the belief that who you are can be dissociated?

What is fear,

Beloved,

If not the belief that who you are can be hurt?

What is unworthiness,

Beloved,

If not the belief that who you are needs to earn goodness?

What is struggle,

Oh beloved,

If not the belief that who you are can ever move against life?

Just because we have created stories doesn't mean they are not real.

Stories,

Just like who we think we are,

Are very real.

We live them into reality.

But this does not mean that they are true.

What is real and what is true are very different.

And the one you seek to know yourself through,

The one you seek to live,

Will determine the quality of your life.

We all fear losing our sense of self.

The good parts of who we are,

Our history,

Our humanity,

In our quest to rediscover ourselves.

But nothing of importance is ever lost on this journey of remembering our true nature and intrinsic wholeness.

We do not disappear.

In fact,

We become more vibrant,

A palette of color for the great mystery to paint with.

We do not become indifferent to life.

We finally realize that we are life,

A unique and important part of the whole.

We do not bypass difficult emotions or hard circumstances,

But finally allow ourselves to feel,

Meeting whatever comes our way with a softness and the sensitivity most of us have been taught is a weakness.

Stories are not an enemy.

But there are other stories wanting to speak through you.

Like the one mycelium knows of interconnectedness.

Or the one thunder knows about God and silence,

About grace.

There are so many other stories in the world that we do not hear,

Because all we hear is filtered through the self who is in pain,

Struggle,

Or in need of something more.

Our bodies,

The very home we had to burn our connection with a long time ago,

Contains the doorway to truth.

It is through our senses that our soul speaks to us,

In a mother tongue never lost,

Only forgotten.

I invite you now to lay down upon the ground,

Resting comfortably,

Palms open to the sky,

Feet slightly apart,

Natural,

Gentle,

Open.

Let us now remember another way of being in the world.

More intuitive and true to our nature.

Let us come home to the untethered self,

Unbound by story.

I'd like you to close your eyes.

Feel the weight of your body here.

The contact you're making with the floor.

Just feel where your body presses heavily into the ground,

And where it presses lightly.

Imagine what kind of imprint your body would make if you were lying in a soft bed of sand.

Feel your lungs bringing gentle movement to your body.

Become aware of how the body rises and falls,

Opens and contracts,

Just like everything in the universe.

Allow gravity to help you sink deeper into your bones,

Releasing any tension that might be lifting you away from your body.

Allow all thoughts that appear to pull towards the back of your head,

Like a bowl of shallow water,

While your awareness stays clear towards the front of your face.

Breathe,

Sink,

Rest,

But stay alert in awareness.

As we dive into the following journey,

Remember to allow your answers to find their way to you,

Through the body,

Rather than through thought.

Thoughts will always try and prove their intelligence by being loud and conclusive.

But there is too a subtle knowingness here,

Beyond thought,

That senses your answers through the quiet unspoken mystery of you.

Use the feeling of gravity and the assurance of your breath to ground yourself,

Knowing we are not leaving our bodies at any point,

But becoming more in contact with them.

Take a slow,

Intentional breath now.

Let us cross the threshold from this world into our imaginations.

The most transformative tool nature helped us create,

To heal what lives deep inside the soul and psyche.

Imagine that you are lying in an open glade in the forest.

Gentle breeze laces through the canopy above you.

The sun dapples its way down onto your body,

Creating a dance between shadow and light.

The soft grass beneath you brushes against your skin.

There's a sweet smell of honey and damp soil.

The fragrance of life and death living in harmony as one process.

This ground holds you,

Your body no different to that of a deer.

All is held,

Pressed gently into the earth as it spins slowly through space.

The movement of your breath is symbiotic with the gentle opening and contracting of all life.

Listen closely now to these sounds all around you.

Notice all the layers and nuances in this environment.

Where in your body do you receive these sounds?

Where is the self who hears located inside of you?

Can you locate a solid self inside of me,

Inside my voice?

Is there a hearer in what is being heard?

Or is there just hearing?

Can you find lack in sound?

Or do thoughts impose a story of preference and judgment onto sound?

Feel intimately now with your sense of touch all the things you are in physical contact with here.

The ground,

Your clothes lying against your skin,

The air around you,

The temperature,

The subtle vibration of your body.

Is there a limit to what you can touch?

Is there a beginning or an end to touching?

Where is the solid and separate self that feels?

Located inside of you.

Is there a feeler in what is being felt?

Or is there just feeling?

Can you find lack in touch?

Without the story.

What you are seeing in your mind's eye right now,

This glade,

This quiet and beautiful place you've created inside of you.

Is there a limit to what can be imagined?

A beginning and an end to what can be seen?

Where is the self,

Your sense of self,

The solid identity you believe yourself to be that sees,

Located within you?

Is there a seer in the seeing?

Can you find lack in sight,

In imagination,

Without imposing the narrative on what is seen?

Is there an owner of this experience you are having right now?

Or is what you are a verb,

A mysterious,

Organic and spontaneous unfolding happening through the senses that inherently have no lack or limit?

Even if it is slightly possible that this experience isn't happening to a limited someone or for a solid self,

Can we really say that we know how life should be?

How life should unfold?

How healing should look?

What would struggle and pain be if we lost the narrative about it?

Would they not too be a sensory experience?

Held within the realm of the body,

A pure feeling of storyless sensation?

Take a deep breath.

Make contact again with the grounds pull upon your body.

Fill yourself with awareness,

Safety is found in presence.

Only a story can lift you up and out of your body and into fear.

Only a narrative about certainty can cause uncertainty.

Only a narrative about anxiety can cause unrest.

So remember your ground in the truth of this breath,

In the weight of your body.

This body,

Imperfect as it may seem,

Is giving you everything you need to return home if you allow it,

If you stay with it.

Rain begins to patter lightly through the canopy and onto your body.

Tiny droplets sink into your skin.

The earth begins to smell of warm pine and the soil swells upward to meet the sky.

Birds sing joyfully among the boughs above you while they bathe themselves.

You are at ease with the life that is celebrating itself all around you.

Allow the story of who you think you are to subside now.

Allow the gentle rain to wash away the accumulation of labels,

Identities,

Concepts and certainties.

As if your body were being tenderly rinsed of the invisible words others have written upon you.

Allow the rain to cleanse you of what has gone,

What no longer lives here,

Of the false narratives that no longer speak of your wholeness.

Become bathed by the senses in only what is here.

In the life that unfolds right here within you.

Remember both past and future are but thoughts rooted in worlds that have no soil,

In places that cannot nourish you nor reveal to you the truth.

Allow each gentle drop of rain to wash away the color of your skin now,

The story of what it is to be human,

To be of a certain culture,

Of a certain history,

A certain time.

Allow the rain to wash away a certain time.

Like water rinsing an inky paintbrush,

Allow your mind,

Body and sense of self to return to its translucent and porous nature,

Leaving only a felt sense of your energetic field.

Can you sense your innermost being here,

The verb of you?

Can you sense the aliveness of your finite body being known by something infinite,

Unburdened by the mind?

You are the awake and pure knowingness of what is felt,

The knowingness of what is seen,

The knowingness of what is heard.

And if knowingness,

Your innermost nature,

Does not judge,

Compare or prefer one experience to another,

Then who you are is love,

The deepest,

Most inclusive kind there is.

No thought can keep what you are bound to a story of lack,

Unworthiness,

Pain or struggle.

No thought whose job is to protect and validate the small self can conceptualize what you truly are,

Your potentiality,

Your magnitude,

Who you are can only ever be sensed in the present moment by being yourself knowingly.

As you lie here,

Lovingly sensing this moment,

Realize that objects outside of you that are heard,

Felt,

Smelt,

Seen cannot be separated from you experiencing them.

The weft of the external world is tightly interwoven with the warp of your awareness of it.

This is to the deepest love to recognize yourself as not a bystander of life,

But the very reason life gets to experience itself.

This is what it means to be at one with life,

To be deeply and unconditionally home.

This sensual way of being in the world was your natural state as a child.

Before you were made into a story.

You haven't lost yourself,

Only believed yourself to be something else.

All pain is in that forgetting and,

Therefore,

All freedom is found in remembrance of what is already here.

The rain begins to subside now,

Allowing the sun to shine down on your beingness,

Slowly adding layers of color and depth to your body.

Everything about you becomes brighter and clearer.

Your skin silkens under the rainbow light.

Your unique physical body,

Its textures and nuances fully return without imposed narratives and judgments.

The unique pattern of your mind returns too,

But now it feels lighter,

Translucent and porous in quality,

Making it easier to connect with your true nature,

That loving presence of who you are.

Both the relative and the absolute,

Human and being reside in harmony within you now.

Polarities blend,

Your senses,

The language of the soul,

And your flesh,

The language of the earth,

Fall into peace within you.

As you return,

You return knowingly to your life.

You are you,

But grounded in your essential being,

Held safely within the storyless experience of the present moment.

You have lost nothing,

Perhaps not even your sense of self,

But now you return knowingly with a wisdom of what is true.

An inner kind of smile unfolds within you,

Like an uncurling joy deep in the pit of your belly,

A remembrance of something un-extraordinary,

Yet profound.

Perhaps this is what the sages have been pleading to us from across the millennia when they say,

Know yourself.

You are now whole,

Returned,

Rewilded,

Home.

Only thought can fracture this very normal and natural state of being,

Which it will inevitably,

Making how often you return to yourself what matters most.

As the glade fades away from your imagination,

As the glade fades away from your imagination,

Just lie here for a moment,

Pulling in what's yours through the inhale and leaving all else to feed the earth through an exhale.

You do not need to understand this experience.

To know is just more thought,

More storytelling,

More separation.

So try and sense with your body what resonated.

Take a final moment in this beautiful,

Open space within you,

A place you created as a refuge for yourself,

A place you've allowed yourself to inhabit again that is always waiting for the shape of you to return.

Place a hand over your heart and thank your deepest self for calling you to this practice.

And when you are ready,

You can open your eyes.

You may want to return to a seated position or stay where you are.

Move in any way that feels comforting to you.

If any kind of fear came up during this meditation,

Remember to see it as a story.

Not because it's not real.

We all know fear is very real,

But we can also investigate it for its roots in truthfulness.

We can find fear to be a truthful response in critical moments that require physical protection,

But often our fears are misguided responses to otherwise neutral experiences.

Our existential anxieties tend to develop from experiences in the past that were confusing or threatening,

And although the physical symptoms of that experience have passed,

Our conclusions about our experience stayed.

If you earnestly seek the truth in all your experiences,

You will quickly come to recognize that all thought roots itself in a false sense of I,

Who is limited,

Fragile and in constant need of validation.

We need the world to tell us who we are.

We need others to validate our needs.

We need life to be easier on us,

Not knowing we have a choice to function from the limited story of the small self or reside in the selfless,

Loving awareness of who we truly are.

As you come to feel for yourself,

The latter is like coming home after years of being away,

And it feels deeply natural to the body,

Making anything that causes anxiety to remain within the realm of thought.

If you come back down to the truth of what is here,

What is felt,

Seen,

Touched,

Smelt and heard in the present moment,

You will discover a complete intimacy with life that is already full,

Connected,

Complete,

Whole.

Stories are not intrinsic in experience.

They are always afterthoughts,

Making a tree only a tree after we have labelled it,

Making suffering only suffering after we have judged our experience.

When we hold on to thoughts,

Concepts and stories that claim lack,

We believe in an idea that who we are can feel separation,

Isolation or a need for life to be more than this.

But if we feel into our experience,

We can't actually find lack in the sensations of the body,

The truth of experience.

We can't find lack in the verb of being.

It seems that the sensory expression of what we are is full to the brim and abundant in nature.

Every texture of experience is a miracle,

And how incredible it is that this can be experienced at all.

Perhaps it is the idea that this moment is about someone or for someone that obscures the vibrant miracle of our expression.

There is only lack in labels,

Pain in stories and narratives based on a forgetfulness of our true nature.

If we believe ourselves to be a fragment of experience,

We will always feel deficient.

But in the very verb of what we are,

There is no deficiency.

This wholeness is not something that can ever be lost or something that we can ever fall out of.

It can only be a fragment of experience.

It can only be apparently forgotten.

So we just need to peel back the layers of what we believe and be willing to unknow reality in order to discover the inherent fullness and intimacy we have with life in every second,

In every sight,

In every fragrance riding an air current,

Every sand grain running through our fingers.

Nothing in nature has an individual sense of self,

An identity split from the whole.

And you are no different.

You are nature.

Born,

Forged and will fall away under the same laws as the whole.

Your senses,

Unburdened by interpretation and judgment,

Will show you the way,

What's true in this life.

Offer yourself to the discovery of what it means to be a someone not validated or protected by thought.

And you will come to know the secrets our loving universe has seeded in the last place we would look,

In the soil of our own sensory body.

Thank you for sharing this journey with me,

For being open and willing to remember something about yourself.

Take only what feels native to your body,

What wishes to belong and bloom in the garden of your being.

Always feel free to connect with me and ask any questions or share this meditation with a group and discuss your experiences with fellow Wayfarers.

In whatever way you are present with this work,

I am forever grateful for the privilege of being a friend on this pathless path with you.