Okay with Being Just As You Are?

Okay with Not Being Okay?

Earlier today, in the bathroom, this question popped up: What would it be like to be totally okay with being exactly as I am? (As a human being, I meant, but it could also refer to being okay with the whole universe being as it is—I’m pretty sure the two are related—but in this article, the focus is on the human aspect).

In a certain sense, I am okay with being just as I am. I’m not plagued by guilt, shame, regret or embarrassment as I once was, nor am I lost any more in fantasies of becoming some future perfect me. Many curative fantasies and self-improvement efforts have indeed fallen away.

I write books and articles that might give the impression that I’m perfectly at peace with being a neurotic and imperfect human, and in many ways, more than ever before in my life, at age seventy-six, I am. But to be really honest, I still find myself at times reaching for a cure or trying to override some habitual behavior with a supposedly more desirable one. In fact, I’m not always totally okay with being exactly the way I am.

For example, although I felt quite certain six months ago that the finger biting compulsion I’ve had since early childhood had fallen away at long last, it has re-emerged. It’s less severe and happens less frequently, but it still happens. My fingers are bandaged as I type this. (I bite the flesh, not the nails). I would like this compulsion to be gone. I no longer feel shame about it or think it means I’m a failure, and I no longer feel like it has to end. But I would like to be free of it.

I still have a habit of (silently) talking to myself a lot of the time—sometimes about real situations in my life or the world, sometimes as if I’m arguing in a courtroom, and sometimes in little make-believe conversations between imaginary characters, as if I’m playing multiple parts in a movie. I have a pretty busy mind. And I still find myself at times trying to stop this mental activity, believing that it is somehow “not okay” or that it is holding me back spiritually, and sometimes I try to replace this chatter with a perfectly silent mind abiding in boundless awareness. This always feels effortful and eventually I stop trying.

I still get emotionally triggered sometimes, usually over political issues, and sometimes in frustration over something not going the way I want, and I find myself feeling angry or threatened, and sometimes saying or doing snarky, mean-spirited, aggressive or passive-aggressive things. I’d like to be able to meet frustrating situations with equanimity. I’d like to be able to listen openly to people whose views I disagree with without my buttons getting pushed. I’d like to be “beyond it all,” above the fray, perpetually equanimous, not bothered by any of this. But often, I am bothered and reactive. I lose my temper. I become agitated.

I still find myself at times feeling like I’m totally lost and clueless, and maybe because I’m functioning as some kind of “nondual spiritual author and teacher,” I find this especially distressing. It seems like I ought to have it together, and I feel like I don’t. I feel like a fake. So then I find myself reaching for some certainty, some solid ground. I (briefly) imagine myself converting to Catholicism, returning to the Zen Center, joining the local Episcopal church, going back to live at Springwater, settling fully into the radical nondual perspective, or dissolving into pure consciousness.

Or I find myself reaching for a book I’ve read many times before by some teacher in the hopes that it will settle all this uncertainty. But it never does. I’d like to feel completely comfortable with being clueless and uncertain. I’d like to be free of these absurd fantasies. I’d like to stop reaching for books in this way. I have the idea it would be better (more enlightened and more enlightening) to simply be still and experience the uncertainty in the body. If only I could do that more often and more fully, I have the idea I might finally transcend all these compulsive, habitual patterns once and for all and be completely clear about the nature of reality, no longer clueless or doubtful.

But alas, when my attention shifts into nonconceptual, sensory experiencing, or bare presence or empty mind, as it often does, and which I usually find very enjoyable, but then at a certain point, I can sometimes feel myself pulled back from this by a sense that this is too unsettling in some way, too open, too unbound, too nonsubstantial, too unmoored, as if I might simply dissolve into a kind of formless incoherence where I can no longer function. I feel the need for more secure footing, more solidity, more definition, more coherence, more certainty, more familiar patterns, more me. I return to the familiar thought-realm where I seem to know what’s what.

So, what would it be like to be totally okay with all of this, with being exactly as I am?

Including being totally okay with not always feeling okay.

Sometimes, I am totally okay with it. But right now, I’m thinking to myself that I don’t know if I should publish this article. It might ruin my career and my credibility as a spiritual author and teacher. (I don’t call myself a teacher, but I hold meetings and have led retreats and workshops over the years, so in a real sense, I do function as a teacher even if I reject the label). And I depend on the income from all of this, including the donations many of you are generous enough to send me. But who wants to read books by, or meet with, a non-teacher fake teacher who admits to being a totally neurotic, fucked up mess? Other teachers seem to have it much more together than this.

I could, of course, write a whole book about the beauty of being imperfect, about the wholeness in which none of this is personal—it’s all meaningless and impersonal weather—and how all of it belongs and none of it has any real substance. In fact, I’ve written those books, five of them now. And a multitude of articles. And sometimes I think it’s all just a bunch of meaningless sounds or hot air. And sometimes that feels totally okay, playful and fun and very relieving that it is just hot air and sounds, sound and fury signifying nothing as some person (maybe some woman calling herself Will) once wrote. Well, I better publish this before I lose my nerve.

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I’ll leave you with the final chapter from my book Nothing to Grasp, a chapter which seems to relate to this article. It opens with two epigraph quotes, one from Karl Renz and the other from the movie American Beauty. They say we teach what we need to learn, and I suspect I’m always writing and talking to myself. Here’s the complete chapter:

Just When You Get It, It’s Over!

There is no happy end. That’s the beauty of it.
– Karl Renz

I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me, but it's hard to stay mad, when there’s so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all at once, and it’s too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst. And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can’t feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life.
– Lester (voiceover), after being shot in the head in the movie American Beauty, screenplay by Alan Ball


What the greatest Zen master or Advaita sage realized and embodied is not other than this inconceivable present happening that is ever-changing and always complete. Liberation is so simple, so effortless, so completely available, so absolutely free. It is not the freedom to do whatever we want or to become who we think we should be or to make everyone else the way we want them to be. It is rather the freedom to simply be what we are.

That, I discover again and again, is the biggest relief, that there is nowhere to go and nothing to become.

There is simply this present happening, the boundless unicity that includes absolutely everything and that holds on to nothing. Sometimes it seems that we can recognize or allow this simplicity of being, and sometimes it seems that we can’t. In times of stress, old habits tend to return and take over. We jump back onto our imaginary treadmill of suffering. The dream of separation and lack seems believable. We chase the carrot. It happens. But all of this is the movement of life, vanishing instant by instant into thin air. It’s not personal. And in the end, in waking up or in deep sleep or at the moment of death, we see that nothing has ever really happened.

The mind loves to create idealized pictures of How Life Should Be and How I Should Be, and reality has a wonderful way of defeating all our ideas.

The more we’re able to simply relax and be open to life being exactly the way it is, the more available this unconditional love becomes. And when it’s not available, then it’s not. Flowers open and close. The sky clears and then clouds up again. Some places have more stormy weather and more cloudy days than other places. This is the nature of life. Waking up to the unblemished simplicity of what is isn’t something that happens once and then its done. There is no end and no beginning to this infinite Self-realization, and sometimes it hurts like hell.

Years ago, I was at a concert with a popular folk-singer. He was leading the audience in singing a round, and we were finally beginning to learn the words and get the feel of it, and then it ended. “Life is like a song,” the folk-singer joked, “Just when you start to get the hang of it, it’s over.” That’s not bad news. That’s just the way it is. Everything plays its part and then it dies and becomes food for something else in an endless recycling where nothing is wasted and nothing is ever really lost. In that sense, we can’t ever really waste our time, lose our lives, or miss the boat. Wherever we go, here we are. Even the apparent mistakes are all part of the process, the grit that creates the pearl.

During the last year she was alive, at age 95, my mother said many times, “It’s so freeing to realize that nothing really matters.” She said it joyously, with relief, as if a burden had been lifted. She also said over and over, “Love yourself.”

Love sees the True Self, the boundless absolute, right here in the messiness and imperfection of this human life. Love sees that nothing matters in the way we habitually think it does, and at the same time, it recognizes everything as the Holy Reality.

In the end, it gets simpler and simpler. Watching the clouds, hearing the birds sing, drinking a cup of coffee, breathing in and breathing out, biting the fingers, wiggling the toes, opening the heart, being Here / Now – this that you cannot not be – nothing is more important than just this.

—final chapter from Nothing to Grasp

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Love to all…