Entering The Tao on a Thursday
In 2005, the world was introduced to the gang from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. The show follows five bar-owning Philadelphia locals through their schemes and mishaps and has become the longest running live action comedy series in history. Each episode begins with a black screen with the time of day written in white, followed closely by the day of the week. I think it serves to show the viewers that the crazy antics that you’re about to witness are just a regular day of the week for the main characters. Nothing special. And with our topic this month, I thought it would be fitting to start the same way.
7:09 AM
On a Thursday
I woke up for real after snoozing my alarm clock’s initial blare at 7:00 AM. I rolled out of bed and walked downstairs to make a quick breakfast and then returned upstairs to meditate at my altar. There was nothing special about today’s meditation. It was just a regular meditation. I then sat in bed sending out some emails and looking at the schedule for the day. I had gone to sleep the night before thinking I had overbooked. With traffic returning to Los Angeles, I was cutting some of my travel time between clients pretty close. I also had quite a few clients on the schedule. I resigned myself to the thought that someone might get a late cancellation towards the end of the day if I got backed up.
I then went downstairs to shower and finish up getting ready before heading out the door to my first client. I’ll save you some inconsequential details to the story, but note that all of my clients seemed to be doing well and everybody got in on time. I wrapped up the day teaching my evening yoga class and then made my way to the beach to catch the sunset and the rise of a moon that would be full the next evening. I was traveling the next day and wanted to make sure I saw Her as close to full as possible. I figured this would be close enough for some of my rituals. A friend met me by the shoreline for some meditation, breathwork and a bit of moon bathing. It wound up being a pretty good day.
But maybe that isn’t explaining it correctly.
You see, I didn’t think this day was going to go well. I had looked at the schedule the day before and could see issues and hiccups around every corner. I told myself you better get a good night’s sleep so that you’re prepared for the tsunami heading your way.
The tsunami never came.
And I didn’t really try to keep the waves at bay. I didn’t rush between appointments. I didn’t fret over the symptoms that clients shared with me. I didn’t think too hard about the best course of action in anybody’s treatment program.
I’m reminded of Yoda’s advice to Luke Skywalker.
“Try not! Do or do not. There is no try.”
I wasn’t really trying. I was just doing. There was a distinct lack of effort on my part. Not in the way that would suggest that I was half-assing any appointments, but more in the way that everything just felt so simple, as if there was no other option than the action that I had decided upon doing without even really deciding to do it. It was all just happening around me rather than by me or to me.
So I believe that this past Thursday, I stepped into the Tao.
Sticking with our Star Wars reference, I don’t find the Tao to be all that different from the Force. Yoda tells us that the Force surrounds us and binds us. A Jedi must feel the Force around them as their connection to everything. This is how I have always understood Taoism. The Tao roughly translates to ‘the path’ or ‘the way,’ and I have taken it to mean the way of things or the way of the universe. There seem to be certain laws at work in this existence. Karma tends to be one of those rules of the universe that people will lean on, but there are many more both named and unnamed. There is a certain effort that I make through my daily dedications and practices to enter into this state of union with the universe, but it rarely happens. Most of the time I find myself sitting at my altar during a meditation session running through my to-do list. Now that tends to be a helpful practice in itself, but it’s not why I’m sitting there.
I sit there and meditate every day because one out of one hundred times I hit a spot where I go clear, and I hate that that phrase has been abducted by Scientology because I find it to be such an effective representation of how I feel when it happens. The second you notice that it’s happening, it’s not happening anymore because you’re right back in your body noticing the experience and trying to remember or explain how everything was different just a moment ago. When you meditate, that feels pretty good. It feels like all of your hard work is going somewhere. You’re reaching peace of mind at your altar, which was the point of all this in the first place.
But when it happens during the actions of everyday life, it feels very different.
It feels numb.
Maybe numb is not the right word. Or maybe numb just still has a more negative connotation in my mind because of Linkin Park. Either way, there’s no real joy to be experienced when you hit that state during a typical work day or errands. There can’t be. Because who would it be that would be feeling such joy? It becomes this weird and awkward paradox because you can feel everything around you unfolding in just the way that it should. Every little raindrop landing exactly where it was supposed to land. Every grain of sand placed exactly in the right spot. The very experience supports all the crazy hippie-dippie spiritual mumbo jumbo that you’ve buried your face in since you walked into your first guided meditation.
And even though none of it feels good, maybe it feels right? I mean, the main problem I’ve always had with Christianity is this promise of a perfect situation. Perfection, in that form, doesn’t seem to exist. Meanwhile one of the first things you’ll learn in Buddhism is that life is suffering, but that doesn’t seem quite right either. It might be somewhere in the middle. And it might not be as important, gold-covered and grandiose as we had expected it to be either.
Maybe it’s just this weird little no-thing thing that happens once in a while.
Mine happened at 7:09.
On a Thursday.