Coming Home

Opening to Here-Now

I’m sometimes asked, what do I do when disturbing feelings, unsettled energies, troubling thoughts, dark moods, or unwanted emotions show up?

I’ve noticed that when such things arise for me, thought often proposes all kinds of “solutions” to this disturbance: buy some beer and start drinking again… stop writing and holding meetings and go into permanent retirement because you have no idea what you’re doing… binge watch a really disturbing crime series on Netflix until after midnight… scroll through YouTube for highly charged political commentaries and watch them… oh yes, and whatever you do, be sure to breathe as shallowly as possible—and maybe try picking and biting your fingers.

So far, I haven’t gone for the beer or given up writing and holding meetings, and I suspect I won’t do either of those any time soon, but I have done all those other things—Netflix, YouTube, fingerbiting, barely breathing. And that’s okay. It definitely beats some of the things I did in the past, such as getting black-out drunk, chain smoking cigarettes, shooting heroin, or waking up in bed with someone I had no memory of ever seeing before.

But I do know there is another possibility when disturbance arises—I write books about it after all—and yet, even after all these years and all these books, it often takes a while to get there.

That other possibility is very simple: sit down in silence and simply be present. Do nothing else. Breathe deeply. Feel the body. Hear whatever sounds show up. See the colors and shapes, the light and shadow. Feel the bodily sensations. Allow the thoughts that arise to pass through. Resist nothing. Just be. Be still.

Sometimes there is instant relief. Everything settles. I’m Home. But sometimes that doesn’t happen right away. Sometimes the agitated or restless energy feels unbearable, like I’m going to explode if I don’t get up and DO something.

But maybe it’s possible to not move, to let it be, to find out if this energy really is unbearable or if it just feels like it will kill me. What happens if I simply allow this sense of urgency to be here? Not resisting. Not needing it to be different. Surrendering completely.

Eventually, everything settles. The energy smoothes out. I’m Home.

We all have the same Home: the openness Here-Now, this boundless indivisible aware presence that is always by its very nature allowing everything and clinging to nothing. This Home is never actually absent. It is ever-present, always waiting to welcome us back whenever thoughts, storylines, inner weather conditions and old habitual energies have seemingly carried us away into troubled waters. We simply need to stop running and shift our attention to what is most intimate, most trustworthy—and discover that we are already Here—we were just pretending otherwise.

It can seem scary to let go of our drama and our disturbance and drop into the vastness of nothing to grasp and nothing to do—even when we know from long experience how healing this is—it can still seem scary in some way. We are strangely attached to our suffering, our disturbance, our familiar habitual patterns. They keep the sense of “me”—the separate self—alive.

When we stop running away and open to simply being here, the problem dissolves along with the “me” who seemed to have it. There is peace and the sense of vast open space. Groundlessness with nothing to cling to and nowhere to land sounds scary to the mind, but it is actually enormously relieving and freeing.

And out of this simple open presence, the fully functional human being can re-emerge, refreshed and washed clean, ready to act in wholesome ways.

Of course, eventually, more stormy weather comes, and once again the mind suggests its litany of possible self-destructive escapes, and once again, we eventually stop and open. And over time, the self-destructive escapes are less and less alluring and the stopping and opening get easier, and the clearings come more quickly.

But each bodymind organism is unique—the weather conditions in each are different, just as they are in different geographical locations—so this process may go very quickly and smoothly for some, and very slowly and with great difficulty for others. Don’t assume the smooth ride is the better one. And whatever kind of ride we get, this is a lifelong, present moment, re-turning Home. Home to the place we have never actually left, the place we all have in common: Here-Now.

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Love to all…