Let­ting go of techniques

Last arti­cle, I talked about non-duality, and would reit­er­ate that the gist of non-duality is that every­thing is ‘as it is.’ In a sense, you could say that it’s all about non-separateness. Or non-distinction. Non-judgment. And non-technique.

In other words, non-duality is drop­ping your insis­tence on the cor­rect­ness of your judge­ments and prej­u­dices, by barely and sim­ply notic­ing what your mind is up to—while let­ting go.

What we let go of are dis­tinc­tions, sep­a­rate­ness, and dual­i­ties.

Not easy.

You are con­di­tioned to judge, and then to seek a ‘cure,’ as if you are sep­a­rate from your judge­ment, and sep­a­rate from what your are judg­ing. What I’m work­ing on com­mu­ni­cat­ing is that get­ting all of this involves see­ing through dual­ity to the under­ly­ing unity. But notice—seeing through some­thing means that the thing is there, and you are now see­ing through it.

Hav­ing and Being

This is a big issue. Notice how often peo­ple say, for exam­ple, I have a headache. The idea is of a thing out­side of myself, like “I have a book on my desk.†Yet, the headache is not a for­eign ‘thing’—an ache that exists in your head apart from you. Rather, the sit­u­a­tion is, “I am headachy, among other things.â€

What I mean is that peo­ple objec­tify and exter­nal­ize their exis­tence. They might think that their lives are empty and mean­ing­less, and that they should be full and mean­ing­ful. Then, they assume that they need to learn to do some­thing different—learn a technique—and then every­thing will be great.

Except it just doesn’t work that way. What we are talk­ing about here is not an ‘add-on’ that you imple­ment when things are going wrong. It is a way of being whereby you choose, always, to see through the game you are playing.

In other words, you begin to live
in the here and now.

Often, peo­ple start a spir­i­tual path—meditation, yoga, mind­ful­ness, what­ever, with the goal of ‘becom­ing more healthy and being less stressed.’ And, for a while, this works. As with any­thing new, there is a period of bliss. (It’s like a new relationship—they always seem per­fect in the begin­ning, and then the nov­elty wears off, and you dis­cover, often to your hor­ror, that the per­son you are with is who he or she is, not who you imag­ine them to be.)

Fol­low­ing the bliss comes the bore­dom of the real­iza­tion that this new skill set changed noth­ing about you or about the world. You might be phys­i­cally more flex­i­ble, from, say, yoga, but your life is just as weird.

On the other hand, show­ing up at yoga class with no other goal than to be present with your body and to see through your body—to use the asanas to stretch your self-awareness—now that has a chance of working!

Tech­nique actu­ally gets in the way, mostly. I once had a client who was quite com­mit­ted to coun­selling and Body­work. One day, she stopped com­ing. A mutual friend asked her why she’d quit. She said, “Gotta keep mov­ing, try­ing new things. Don’t want to get stuck with the same thing.â€

What I saw hap­pen­ing was this: the work she was doing was help­ing her to peel away the lay­ers of the games she played with her­self. What was under­neath all of the sto­ries she was telling her­self was the non-dual nature of her­self.

In other words, she was begin­ning to see that all of the drama, all of the blam­ing, all of the guilt and jeal­ousy that she saw ‘hap­pen­ing to her’ was peek­ing out past her defenses. She was begin­ning to see that she was the one mak­ing her life as it was, and this flew in the face of her ‘blame game.’

As soon as this hap­pened, she flipped on to another tech­nique, so she could escape from deal­ing with herself.

Our goal, in this series of arti­cles, and indeed in all of our work, is to con­vince you to let go of blam­ing and iner­tia. In other words, to con­front the veil of con­fu­sion and judge­ment and story-telling you do, and to see through it.

Our goal is to urge you accept the real­ity that all there is, in your life, is you and the games you play.

Let go. Let go of want­ing to sub­sti­tute one story for another. If you want ‘happy’ instead of ‘sad,’ think about it. No mat­ter what level of hap­pi­ness you get, it will never be enough. Instead, sim­ply see your grasp­ing after hap­pi­ness as another veil, and drop it.

Set­tle into the moment, have a breath, and see how things are. If you can hold to sim­ply see­ing, you’ll dis­cover that things, right now, are as they are, and are never otherwise.

And as you think about apply­ing this ‘tech­nique,’ remem­ber that it isn’t one.

As my super­vi­sor used to say,
“You don’t do it, you be it.â€

Fig­ure that one out, and you’ve got it!