Knowing Ourselves
As my annual vipassana retreat approaches, I find myself sitting with a particular reflection that keeps returning: the idea of mission. So many of us carry a sense that we're here for something—that there's a purpose woven into our existence, a reason we were put on this earth. And maybe there is. But I wonder if we've misunderstood what that mission looks like.
What if our mission isn't something grand or external? What if God (or the universe, or whatever we call the source of meaning) simply wants us to get to know ourselves? Not through sermons or philosophies handed down by others, but through our own direct experience. Through the quieter work of turning inward.
Since I was a child, silence has been my favorite sound. People have told me there is no sound in silence, but in meditation and outside of it – there is a feeling of sound that silence carries. Time isn’t what we experience in our daily life, and we can be one with it. In silence, we can let go. I spent much over a decade of my adult life just meditating or teaching and not working. It has been interesting to transition to full-time work and experience life with myself in it, in another way - another dimension.
In my therapy practice, I hold a curiosity centered on a simple question: How do we learn about ourselves? How do we truly grow together and each other in relationship? The honest answer is humbling. We don't know anything. Each moment is greatly colored by assumptions. And yet, we need the security that we can interpret our world around us. This is where pain often comes in, we want to have power over our circumstances so we don't feel power under them. We're all playing this game of hoping to be God, and in that playing, we lose ourselves. We stay stuck in a cycle of needing to control what we can't. There's another way to hold power. I'm interested in training myself, each moment, to have power with—power with the universe/Gd, and with my own creativity. There is such wonderful joy in creating something out of nothing. To me, that is real power and real prosperity. Perhaps this is our mission: taking action to create something that allows each of us to evolve, and knowing we can’t do it without partnership with the universe/Gd.
In meditation, grit is essential. The ego is the first thing you meet every morning. It convinces you to avoid and it comes up as uncertainty, pain, laziness, etc. A teacher of mine shared with me, “excuses are self-abuses,” which I still use the phrase because it wakes me up a bit to what I am doing to myself and redirects my actions. When we're learning and growing, resistance and avoidance are inevitable. We need to face them head-on. Sometimes that means saying, "F*** you, Laziness. I'm going to meditate anyway. I'm going to show up anyway." We need to meet this resistance because it doesn't like your freedom. It will create every excuse in the world, make you think about your past, convince you something is wrong with you, anything to keep you from doing what you actually want. You need to take real action into that void. When I started my meditation practice as a kid, I had to have consistent, real action. I needed grit. And here's what I learned: this resistance doesn't need to be solved or understood. You just have to move through it anyway. You just have to say f*** it or I love pain/laziness and go do the action the resistance told you not to do. As humans, we are bigger than the fear or issue that we are resisting. We forget at times. Back in the day, there was a saying - “Bring on the fear. I love the fear.”
I like to say to myself, “I’m bigger than the fear (or whatever experience is in front of me.)” I’m making a choice to be giving here, which connects me with my life force and my wholeness. I am choosing in that moment to give up any resentment or unfairness that my ego is telling me the story around.
When the fear comes up, what are you going to choose? Your Wholeness and Life, or Unfairness and Resentment. FYI: We live in an unfair dualistic world. The light will also reflect a shadow. Everything comes in pairs. It’s the way the world works and we have no control over it, so we accept the beauty in the moment or we create stories.
Why does this matter for knowing ourselves? Because resistance is where we hide. We avoid when we feel fear. It's where the ego convinces us we're not ready, not worthy, not capable of being present. For me, the silence allows me to sit in myself to then hear others without fixing, managing or binning people into categories and labels. I can witness reality more verses my projections or expectations towards my own potential. My hope is to sit to let go, listen more fully, increase my grit to then meet myself and others with a little bit more genuine presence and aliveness. Silence fosters the humility to teach this, and that's why I keep returning to it. Life is an experience and it’s fun to bring our life force into the ride.