How to Find Enlightenment
It's closer than you think.
I used to spend a lot of time searching for enlightenment. Years. Thousands of hours of meditation, study, prayer, self-reflection, journaling, medicine ceremony, workshops, shadow work, breathwork, inner child work, energy work…
Why so much work? Shouldn’t enlightenment be fun?
It’s no secret that our society has conditioned us to believe we must work hard to achieve anything of worth. Logically, this would mean that achieving the MOST valuable thing would require a ton of effort, right? And logically those who work the hardest are the MOST enlightened, and the MOST spiritual!
Goodness, I can hear Babaji chuckling already.
So how many hours of work does it take to get the Golden Goodie? To lick the Big Ice Cream Cone in the Sky?
Personally, I’ve spent about a decade of active seeking.
And did I find enlightenment?
Well, yes, actually.
And you have, too.
But neither of us needed all that work to find it.
We found it quite easily in every moment of genuine laughter.
Or as we drifted off to sleep.
When we looked into the eyes of the ones we love.
When the beat dropped and we just couldn’t help but shake our booties.
Or when inspiration surged through us like lightning and moved us to create.
It’s a feeling we all know. I’d argue it’s our natural state. We feel it regularly. Some feel it more than others, but everyone knows it.
And yet, we’ve become addicted to struggling instead.
That struggle is the dominant narrative in society these days, but it doesn’t have to be.
Blood, sweat, and tears may be the price for material gains, but the greatest treasures are not material.
Finding them requires a different approach.
I trained under a Taoist mystic who once told me that being in harmony with the Way was like riding a dragon.
“And the dragon’s back is slippery…” They used to say, with a mischievous gleam in their eye.
It’s not like flipping a switch and you are suddenly enlightened forever.
And you don’t even have to be. Most who seek enlightenment already have it in some capacity. We may feel it occasionally, regularly, or even frequently, but when life brings us challenges, we feel lost, defeated, like we never had it to begin with. We’ll drop thousands on weekend workshops, or spend every spare moment of the day digging through ancient tomes for a chance to feel that elusive feeling instead of the troubles that we now face.
Does this sound like you? It used to sound a lot like me.
Most of the time, we don’t feel like we want permanent enlightenment anyway.
We just want to not feel bad when we face our struggles.
But there are no one-and-done solutions for that human condition, I’m afraid.
Only continuous practice that you have the opportunity to choose every time you meet resistance.
It requires a lot of discipline to be so consistently mindful.
It’s also the easiest thing in the world.
It is easy because ease is the hallmark of enlightenment. Feeling ease is a sure sign that you’re heading in the right direction.
Because it’s not actually an action, it’s non-action.
Or to explain in a way that is perhaps easier to understand: non-grasping. You can still do things while you are in a state of enlightenment, you just aren’t attached to those things.
So you remain at peace, regardless of what you are doing, and regardless of the outcome.
Yes, I am absolutely saying that inner peace IS enlightenment. What else could it be? What could possibly be more powerful?
If you encounter Thanos with the Infinity Gauntlet, and he has the power to snap his fingers to completely erase you from existence, but you were totally chill with that, then who is more powerful? Thanos? Or you?
Some would say Thanos.
To them, I say that is a beautifully crafted illusion, my dears, but it won’t help you find happiness.
There is nothing more powerful than peace. Everything else is a fleeting illusion that will ultimately be swept away into the chaos of time, but inner peace resolves all conflict in you.
It frees you from that entropy and liberates you to live your purest Truth.
The waves of the cosmos will break upon your shores and weather away your body, but you will remain.
Give Peace a Chance
When you find your peace, you relax into a flow state, where everything is just easy and effective because you are in harmony with your inner world and the outer world.
From what I’ve learned and witnessed, relaxation is a key indicator of mastery in any skill or craft. Even in the most intense sporting events, the victors are at peace within their own minds, even while the body is working harder than anyone else.
When I’m playing music, and I lose myself in the song, dancing on the drumkit, it doesn’t matter how intense the song is. I am at peace with it, so I can ride the wave without resistance.
The moment I start thinking or about what to do, or worrying about my mistakes, I lose the beat.
In the Western world, we’re taught that we have to figure things out, come up with good reasons, work hard, be productive, follow the rules, and a million other expectations that keep you from residing peacefully in your natural, authentic state of being.
Which makes it incredibly difficult to consciously choose peace.
And I am certainly not the best at it. When I face certain triggers, I drop out of enlightenment really quickly, and it takes a lot of time to find my peace again.
But I feel like most people have a hard time even recognizing their own peace because it feels so right. We’ve learned to define our reality by contrast, so it’s much easier to notice tension, conflict, and disturbances than something so simple, quiet, and unremarkable.
In fact, I’m pretty sure that there are lots of enlightened people out there in the world who don’t even know it. Like Forrest Gump, or Joe Dirt. They've found regular peace already, and it comes to them naturally. They don’t need to take on the label. It would just get in their way, if anything.
And that, I’ve found, is the key to enlightenment:
Letting go of everything that is in your way.
Let’s demonstrate with a hands-on example:
Go ahead and pick something up —anything— and hold it in one hand. Stand up, and hold it outstretched in front of you.
Now let it go.
How was it? Did you actually do it? Was it easy? Hard? What were the consequences? And how did it make you feel?
I’m willing to bet that you didn’t drop it, because you didn’t want to damage it (or the floor), or make some noise. Or perhaps you did drop it only because you knew it wouldn’t break, and that nothing bad would happen.
In either case, you did what you did because of the consequences of the action. You made your choice based on an evaluation of the circumstance and attachment to the outcome.
Not because you were at peace.
(Or maybe you were at peace, in which case I’m happy for you!)
This is a powerful experiment because it starts to help us see the threshold between peace and disturbance within ourselves.
That threshold only exists in the place where our expectations reside.
An expectation is an attachment to a specific outcome. When we are attached to a specific outcome, we become immediately disturbed when that outcome is not achieved. Often we feel disturbed if we even begin to suspect that the outcome won’t be achieved.
Even more often, we fool ourselves into believing that when everything does go according to plan and bring our desired outcome, that we can finally be at peace.
This is even more insidious because we unwittingly give away all of our power to create our own peace. We forfeit agency over our own lives and say that it is the responsibility of everything and everyone outside of us to make us happy, and bring us peace.
When we do this, we reinforce the subconscious belief that we are helpless, that we are victims, and that we have no control.
This often leads to us desperately seeking ways to feel like we do have control.
We cling and grasp for new external circumstances to make us feel at peace. Then, and only then, can we be happy.
And so the cycle of suffering continues, even though our own peace is within our reach.
I don’t mean to make it sound too easy, because it certainly isn’t. Especially when we are raised in systems designed to profit from our stress, and circumstances where stress is all the people around us have ever known.
It’s the water we swim in. And unfortunately, it is heavily polluted.
Fortunately, we have a golden opportunity to clean it up.
To practice breaking those cycles and replacing them with patterns cultivating health and mindfulness in each moment of each day.
When we choose to practice mindfulness and radically-honest self-reflection, we start to witness the truth of our internal world and our power to influence it.
Enlightenment becomes a choice for us when we are able to witness ourselves grasping, or becoming attached to an outcome. When we feel that tension, we choose to let go.
The key to letting go is just that: Let go!
Don’t overthink it. There isn’t some clever trick or brute force method of letting go, because letting go is not an action, it’s cessation of action.
Grasping is the action. When you let go, you simply stop grasping.
Instead of doing something actively, we relax and see what comes. We drop the expectations, the attachments, the stories, and allow ourselves to simply observe without judgement.
As a somatic exercise, you can try this:
Breathe in slowly and fully, without going so far as discomfort. As you do, feel the breath moving through your body, filling you with fresh life.
As you breathe out, let all of your tension and stress go. Again, don’t overthink it, just feel the sensation of breathing out, and feel the disturbance leaving your body along with your breath.
If you would like to add visualization to the exercise:
Close your eyes. See yourself at a riverbank, with the river flowing gently in front of you.
As you breathe in, witness the cause of your stress or disturbance arrive from upstream.
As you breathe out, watch it all float away, down the river.
It can definitely take some practice, especially if the cause of the disturbance holds a strong emotional charge for you. But every time you practice, it will become easier and easier to let go and find your peace, regardless of the situation.
Some find this approach to peace difficult because they feel like they want to be engaged in life.
But please understand, this is not apathy. I’m not trying to convince you to let go of everything you hold dear. I’m actually not trying to convince you of anything.
I’m just trying to illuminate the fact that the ultimate cause of our suffering is not the circumstance, but our reaction, judgement, and attachment to the circumstance.
That’s not to say that the internal world is the only world that matters. We can and should take action to reduce pain and suffering in this world wherever we can. And there are many places to do that work.
We are, simply, most effective at doing that work within.
When we found our peace within, we can more clearly see the ways we can best serve the world.
No matter what we choose to do, we can do it with or without attachment to the outcomes.
It’s all a matter of how we relate to our own life:
Are we mired in the suffering?
Are we obsessively controlling?
Are we drifting passively?
Or are we observing, peacefully?
I’ve spent quite a lot of time in each of these states, and I can tell you for certain which one I prefer.
Now, much of my mental health practice is devoted to understanding how I choose to relate to my own life, and finding ways to shape that relationship to support my personal wellbeing and harmony with the world around me.
It may be easier said than done, but everything is easier said than done.
Except flatulence.
For me, the most powerful tool in understanding how we relate to our own lives is Story.
The story that we craft about our own lives determines how we see ourselves and place ourselves in the Universe. It shapes our passions, dreams, and fears. It determines our habits and patterns, and if we don’t consciously write our own story, it will ultimately control our destinies.
In the future, we’ll dive into the topic of shaping our stories to change our lives. We’ll look at anecdotes from my life, and discuss practical tips to cultivate our own stories to live a life of greater wellbeing.
I look forward to talking with you soon.
Until then,