“I’m stalled out,” Rachel says. “I’ve been meditating off and on for almost 10 years, and even done a few retreats. No matter how hard I try, I can’t quite seem to get there.” What she means by “getting there” —she explains when I ask—is enlightenment, waking up, that blissful experience of durable peace she’s read about and seen in movies and heard others describe. And her version of “trying really hard” is a discipline that has included reading books, classes, therapy, and a much longer and more consistent sitting meditation practice than almost anyone she knows. “Sometimes I feel so frustrated,” she says, “Like something precious is being withheld from me. And it makes me angry sometimes, like, why do other people get to have that experience but not me?” She’s generated lots of pleasant states while meditating, she says, and she’s pretty sure meditating helps keep her anxiety in check, but somehow the ultimate prize—enlightenment, satori, nirvana—still eludes her.
Just a few minutes in and already I love this conversation. Not only because Rachel is so smart and self-reflective. And not because we are walking along a postcard beautiful Lake Michigan beach with gulls wheeling in the background. I love this conversation because the theme is so familiar to me, both from my own practitioner perspective and from my role as a spiritual ally to others. The satisfaction I feel is similar to that of standing beside a friend who is very close to “solving” one of those optical illusion pictures, the ones with a 3-D image hiding in them. “Try focusing on the surface reflection rather than the colored field itself,” you might suggest, repeating advice that had once been given to you. Even if your companion is oozing frustration, you know the pleasure she’s in for when that subtle-but-radical gestalt shift occurs, when the flat image bursts into three dimensional life. It seems like Rachel and I may be on the verge of such a moment and so I ask her: “What do you imagine the enlightenment prize to be like. How do you think your life be different once you attain it?”
There is a long hesitation before she responds, a pause that feels fecund and robust. As if by simply considering the questions she can sense that she already contains the “answers” within herself. And it’s no more than I expect. I am, after all, merely enacting a beach-walk version of the Socratic method, that simple dialectical technique meant to help elicit innate knowledge, expertise, and clarity. It’s the same sort of philosophical coaching that my spiritual supporters—my teachers—have provided to me. And I love being a coach of this sort because it’s so evident that all who come to me are more or less talented, often requiring a mere nudge, a micro adjustment, for some old/new insight to appear. And in the protracted pause Rachel takes before responding to me, I can see that she’s already leapt way ahead. “Oh,” she says, “I see. I’ve been making assumptions. I’ve been looking and waiting for THAT thing, and because what I’m imagining doesn’t show up, I keep decide I’m failing.”
And so I ask again, although it probably isn’t even necessary at this point: “What have you imagined ‘enlightenment’ to be like?” Her smile widens and a quiet laugh escapes, a sweet sound that is nearly lost in the shrieks of the gulls and the whoops of two gangly boys throwing a football back and forth. Her laugh means everything, is perhaps the truest sign of enlightenment there could be if “enlightenment” were a word to be trusted. “Right,” she says, as if affirming something I’ve said, but we both know she is really talking to herself: “I’ve basically been seeking an escape from the challenges of life. That if I still feel unhappy or impatient or inadequate or whatever sometimes, then that’s proof I’m failing at my spiritual practice.”
After that, we tug out some of the other assumptions underlying Rachel’s limiting belief: that “normal” life is effectively a problem to be solved. We work together to lay bare additional ancillary, implicit beliefs, ones that I too have clung to at some point, beliefs such as: A life containing spates of physical and emotional pain and discomfort is subpar. And that a TSP (Truly Spiritual Person) will have a relatively rarified personality, one exuding “spiritual” qualities such as acceptance, compassion, and equanimity. That she will surely not get angry at coworkers, irritated at the heat, or worry about the results of a medical test. And Rachel can quickly see how such assumptions have pre-conditioned her search for enlightenment. As if she had gone in search of a new friend or lover having dictated so many details in advance that every candidate would fail to measure up: the “wrong” height, age, sex, race, nationality, profession, and on and on. So too, it seems, our demanding prejudices about enlightenment can keep us from recognizing it even when it displays itself submissively before us like a puppy eager to have her belly rubbed.
It is only my next question that seems to jar Rachel a bit, one that rattled me too when it was first posed to me: “So, what do you want more? To be happy and peaceful and have a ‘good’ personality, or to be enlightened?” She is off balance for only a moment though and then she laughs again. “Right, right,” she says, “What I’ve actually wanted most is to be happy and peaceful and I’ve wanted enlightenment to get me that.” Now I laugh too because it is almost exactly like hearing the punchline of a joke. And though it’s not at all necessary for me to do so—it’s so evident that Rachel’s doing all the work here—I share that I personally haven’t found “enlightenment” to be an especially useful notion. At the same time, though, yes, my times of ease and peace have, as an apparent byproduct of my practice, greatly increased as I have become less dictatorial about what sorts of emotions and experiences are acceptable to me. I share that my ease with my own existence has deepened as I’ve stopped demanding that life look and feel a particular way. It seems that the elusive experience of awakening—is that what this is?—is more likely to reveal itself when we are relaxed and open, when we stop judging and trying to control the normal vicissitudes of an embodied life.
Some lose interest in spirituality at this point. “If there is no pot of spiritual gold at the end of the rainbow,” they may think, then I have no interest in pursuing the path. If all my “spiritual work” cannot at least promise me greater happiness and that I will be a “better” person, then what could possibly be the point? And, for some, “quitting spirituality” may be a legitimate, sensible choice. For someone who has set their heart on Indian food, it makes no sense to keep showing up at a hot dog stand. Maybe this is why the first Noble Truth so doggedly asserts that there is a kind of unsatisfactoriness stitched into human existence itself. That we may sometimes flail and struggle and wail—feel jealous or heartbroken or angry— is not necessarily proof that we’re doing spirituality incorrectly. But such lessons in impermanence and flux will probably be no more impactful than describing to someone who cannot see it the elusive image of a sunflower hidden in a sea of colors. They may briefly agree that, sure, the image is probably there, but, ultimately they must relax and open, soften their gaze and drop all expectation and prejudice until the sunflower blooms for them too.
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