Who Is That One

Working with my sponsor and mentors through the Twelve Steps and an intentional meditation practice led me to a hard question I couldn't answer honestly on my own...

Was I authentically being myself, or was I a kind of "meat puppet," acting out and reinforcing a sense of self that the thinking mind was continually attempting to construct, curate, and maintain?

Was I actually living my life, or simply reinforcing a story about who I thought I was supposed to be?

What became increasingly clear was just how much suffering was involved in that process... How much of my life was being lived by default, conditioned by thoughts, fears, assumptions, and expectations, rather than through intentionality, awareness, and a willingness to discover what was actually happening right here... right Now.

I wasn't necessarily experiencing life as it was unfolding. I was experiencing it through the narrative that the thinking mind was continually creating... and then unconsciously co-participating in keeping that narrative alive, as the meat-puppet.

Without the self-examination encouraged by the Twelve Steps and meditation, I wouldn't have recognized this clearly. Like Zen Master Sokō Morinaga said in his book 'Novice to Master…' "The purpose of practice is not to increase knowledge but to scrape the scales off the eyes, to pull the plugs out of the ears," so as to be fully whole and wholly free.

This is one reason I've come to appreciate that healing and awakening are, in many ways, a team effort. We don't always recognize the stories we're caught up in while we're busy living them. Sometimes it takes another person, grounded in experience and wisdom, to help us notice what we cannot yet see for ourselves.

It's remarkably easy to get lost in the ever-changing waves of the thinking mind... mistaking the story of our lives for the actual experience of living.

The invitation toward AUTHENTIC FREEDOM rather than 'synthetic' freedom isn't just about trying to heal alone. It's knowing who's on our team and actively engaging with them to allow for change instead of managing stagnation.

一We Are the Practice Itself