Welcome to the Game
About twelve months ago Beth reached out to me to be a contributing author for the community journal on Held in the Heart. I had never shared any of my writing with her personally so the offer came out of nowhere for me. It may have stemmed from a series of Instagram posts that I had made while studying Yoga’s Yamas and Niyamas. I’d pick one per week and write a quick little caption on my successes and (mostly) failures in the self-practice. I’ve not really put much effort into developing a brand or social media presence so I wasn’t really even sure anybody was reading the captions. But I guess that someone was. And I guess that someone took note.
I recently took a trip down memory lane to look at those old posts. It’s funny because even though these all occurred over a year ago, I know exactly what I’m referencing in each post.
When practicing Ahimsa (non-violence), I speak about anger spilling up and out of me onto someone I love. I can remember the argument. For Satya (truthfulness), I write about the universe giving you truths that you don’t want to accept. I’m fully aware of the truth in question. Santosha (gratitude), Tapas (self-discipline), Isvara Pranidhana (self-devotion)… They all have a little story attached to them and though the details aren’t exactly laid out bare to the untrained eye, I was there and I know what it was like to dive into the practice.
The articles that I’ve shared with you are no different. A bit more lengthy and self-indulgent, but if you’ve been here since last year you’ve followed me through some interesting times. I’ve had break-ups and festivals and ceremonies and hangovers and satori and depression. A beautiful roller coaster ride of emotions and actions. There are times of clarity and intense knowing, but the scales always tip the other way to balance it all out. The angels keep on winning but never close the deal, while the demons keep on losing but continue to fight on. Such is life.
I’ve been considering this idea of hopelessness over the past couple of weeks.
There’s a weird little cartoon on Netflix called Midnight Gospel that discusses some Buddhist thoughts in an episode titled The Annihilation of Joy. The show watches a bit like a podcast and the host shares a dialogue with his guest that hit me right in the feels.
“This is hopeless… this is hopeless. The moment you accept things as they are, you don’t need to hope anymore because you realize that where you are is…. Kind of okay.”
I get super annoyed with the spiritual community, as you’ve seen through my past articles. In my journey, I’ve realized that when something triggers me it’s best to look within, rather than outside of me. Why would a simple Instagram post reading “You, as much as anyone else in the whole world, deserve to be loved” make me so goddamn angry? It’s harmless and it might really help someone who needs to hear it. Yet I have an almost visceral negative reaction to it. In a time where yoga teachers are adjusting to the new norm of virtual classes and switching up their approach to let students know that it will all be alright, why do I have so much resistance to teaching online? I put in the work. I try to move forward in my practices each and every day. Sure I stumble and fall here and there but I keep on getting up.
I should be better than this by now.
I should be better.
And that’s it right there. The thought that I might one day actually get where I’m going has been, up to this point in my life, nothing more than a delusion. I got into meditation over ten years ago. I’ve had my fleeting moments of understanding, but anybody who considers me enlightened hasn’t been paying attention. I took on yoga as a way to bring my body along for the ride as I worked through all of my own shit, and every time that I step on the mat, there is more work to be done. There can’t be a goal. If there’s ever a goal, I just can’t wrap my head around it. I can’t believe in it.
Consider if you had a microscope. You could look at all sorts of cool things at a more intricate and possibly cellular level. The more you look through that microscopic lens, the more you would start to understand what you were seeing. More than that, you’d start to understand what you weren’t seeing. You’d start to understand the limitations of your microscope and realize that you couldn’t possibly see everything. So you go back to the drawing board and create a better microscope that is more precise and exact. But that just starts the cycle over again. The more fine and precise that you make the instrument, the deeper you go, but the answers you find will only lead to more questions.
There is no end point. There can’t be.
That’s why this is hopeless. And I do understand the negative connotation surrounding the word, but I still feel like it’s the best word for the job. Buddhism has this reputation of being a nihilistic philosophy and from the traditional manner or western religious thought, that could be true. But maybe we can look at it from a different perspective. Buddhism preaches non-attachment, easily misconstrued as non-commitment but the two are different.
In Buddhism, I can commit to the daily practice of meditation without having any attachment to the outcome of said commitment. It’s like working out. If you start a program that promises six weeks to a six pack, you can become dissatisfied with the results and give up the practice entirely. However if you commit to the practice without any attachment to the results, the results tend to show up by themselves. Or they don’t. But at that point it doesn’t matter.
Six weeks of core exercise is going to help anybody, but the person who is attached to the end result is much more likely to write off the program as something that didn’t work for them. It’s more difficult to get that person back on the train. You’ve lost the trust. You gave them hope that they would be better. To steal a favorite line from the typically hushed Jon Snow, ‘When enough people make false promises, words stop meaning anything. Then there are no more answers, only better and better lies.”
So, my dear reader, I offer up this thought to you. This, all of this, is hopeless.
There’s no winning this game.
There’s no magical mountain top that you’ll reach one day where it will all be good. There’s no bright sunny day when you’ll be better than you are today. Ten years of meditation and twelve months of pouring out my journey to you have taught me that. But don’t let that get you down. Don’t let it be a depressing thought to you because it’s really not. It’s actually an incredibly freeing thought that takes the weight of the world off of your shoulders. You don’t have to be above the anger that you feel towards someone. You don’t have to be healed from the great losses of your life. You don’t have to be above making mistakes. The deeper you dive into the practices you choose, the more challenges you will face. And you won’t fully conquer any of them. It’s a rather brilliant way to keep the great game going.
That’s just something I’ve been sitting with…