I took this photograph while walking my dog in the local park today. It’s five minutes from my house and I would class it as an ‘ordinary’ sort of place. Not somewhere I would go to find something special. But through my i-phone lens today the scene was far from ordinary. On my doorstep. With a smartphone. Just like that.
This reminded me that when we are seeking something – peace, happiness, fulfillment, for example, we usually end up disappointed because we look too far, too hard and in too complicated a way.
Those things, the things we really want, the inner experiences that we believe will result from all our hard work, are actually inside us right now. The answers are here, within us, ready to be found as soon as we stop seeking outside ourselves and get really still.
And it’s not that hard. We are told so often, and we tell each other and ourselves, that life is difficult, that the best things result from hard work, and that it takes a long while to attain something worth going for. Well, that’s not always true. Some of the things that are most worth having are really easy to get. We just have to let go, be our real selves and spend some time in awareness.
Neither does it have to be complicated. When I teach people, in Mind Calm workshops, to notice and spend time in their own awareness, I say, ‘that’s it, that’s all there is, nothing more.’ We are so used to complicating things that we often automatically take something very simple and add all sorts of frills to it, losing the real treasure in the process. Being ourselves, aware, in stillness is so simple that we could miss it because we just don’t believe that’s all there is to it.
After a lifetime of conditioning, I have to remind myself of this, often. Peace* is right here, under my nose (assuming that ‘within’ is below nose level!), it’s easy to find and it’s so simple I could miss it while looking for something fancy. Just like my photo.
* For peace, we could substitute ‘love,’ ‘happiness,’ ‘freedom,’ ‘success,’ or whatever else you are seeking in terms of an inner experience.
So true Harriet… We seem to have such a resistance to peace and joy, old mechanisms designed to protect us, I’m sure.
I love watching the cat, Alison who will happily spend many an hour sunbathing and fire gazing, totally peaceful and unthreatened and not feeling guilty about anything!
Yes they are wonderful teachers aren’t they? Thank you!