You can dance around it your whole life, chasing money or love or fulfillment ‘outside of yourself’, but it always comes back to You. Like the great Ramana Maharshi put it when asked, “How are we supposed to treat others?”, he spoke, “There are no others”. If I’m convinced of anything about anything, it is the truth of non-dualism. Whether it’s ancient wisdom like Advaita Vedanta Hinduism or the forefront of modern physics, different humans at different times have uncovered the same truth: there is no separation. Everything is one.
It may not seem practical to go about your day-to-day life with the knowledge that all of existence (including what you consider to be ‘You’) is just one big infinite, timeless, energy soup, but coming to this knowledge in a fully embodied way is the only game in town. I say embodied, because I don’t believe anyone has to grasp it with their mind. I believe an enlightened person could be fully at peace, present and at one with all things without having to conceptualise it, having won the knowledge through experience. It may be the only way.
I’m not writing this from the perspective of someone who has fully embodied the knowledge that all things are connected in oneness. I get the concept intellectually, and can talk about it in what I believe to be an eloquent way, but any attempt to put this knowledge into words is like a toddler with a crayon trying to recreate the Mona Lisa. I feel like in the last year or so in particular, I’ve embodied more knowledge of the Truth than ever before, and the recent passing of my beloved friend Kaja held up a mirror to let me see that. She has helped me to see how strong I have become, and capable of really feeling her loss without breaking.
When the shit hits the fan, you get to see who you really are; how much of ‘the work’ have you done to get to know the nature of yourself in an embodied way. How much have you really looked inwards, and how much do you really know yourself? What do you consider to be ‘You’? Is it your personality? Is it your body? Is it your memories? All of these things come and go, they change and are different in this moment compared to when you were a baby, and will be different again when you take your last breath. The only constant is Awareness.
You are the timeless present awareness. There is only Now. Try being in Tomorrow or Yesterday. Tomorrow never comes, and we can only experience past or future in the present as thoughts. Thoughts create stories and it’s our stories that remove us from fully Being; imposing limitations on your vast, infinite oneness. The thought , “Oh I couldn’t do that, I’m too shy” may be more accurately seen as the story, “I am too scared to do that because if I get rejected, I believe I won’t be able to cope with the pain”. The truth is, it’s just a story.
Where do you feel held back in life? How are you limited? What are your stories around these things? Those stories served a purpose at some stage in your life to help you survive. If we take the example of the shy person again, the story might stem back to infancy when acceptance, approval and attachment to the parent was necessary for survival, so an unconscious inner child part of their psyche equates rejection to death. That’s a hard story to let go of. Embodying who you really are isn’t about acquiring new information, it’s about letting go of the stories and patterns of behaviour that obscure your ability to see what’s already inside.
Letting go can be extraordinarily painful, but like it or not, it’s coming to you. Stories by their nature have a beginning, middle and an end. The truth of oneness is stillness, timeless, no story, peace. The stories that limit your wholeness and keep you in bondage, also hold the key to your salvation. When you experience suffering as a result of a story, you have the opportunity drop the thoughts and get solely into the feeling. No feeling will last forever, like a storm it blows through if you can sit with it. As an example, if something pisses you off, try getting out of the thoughts around it and just into the anger for even a day. Good luck.. it’s not possible.
Sitting with uncomfortable emotions like anger, sadness, fear or grief without the story attached to it can be painful, and I believe the only way to competently do so is practice and experience. The Cold is a master teacher because it forces you into present moment discomfort. You either get caught in your stories of not being able to do it, or you get present, feel it, then low and behold, the discomfort passes and on the other side of fear is freedom. Someone who masters the cold has earned a little embodied knowledge of Truth. Next time their life experiences invite uncomfortable emotions, their body knows how to hold it in stillness.
The practice of letting go deepens through lived experience. Like a gladiator training with a wooden sword in the barracks, you can gain some skills through practice in an ice bath, or with meditation, or psychedelics, or any other inward looking practice of building awareness. It’s not until you are confronted with some real shit in life are you truly in the arena, and you get to see if your practice has paid off. I spend a lot of time in the metaphorical barracks, but the loss of my friend has spurred me on to step into the arena more frequently.
I’m addressing the areas of my life that in this moment I’m letting stories hold me back from my wholeness. I’ll keep up the ‘practice’ and going to therapy, meditate etc., but it’s time for me to be even more unrelenting in my true Self, both the shadow and the light. My story is that I can win acceptance if I’m ‘nice’, kind and giving, but with my best friends like Kaja, I can share controversial ideas or dark jokes that would have any of us ‘cancelled’ by 21st century thought police. I’m tired of showing up as 80% me; it’s time for me to grow up.
My child self is going to need a lot of reassurance and nurturing in order to let go of old patterns and stories. Those patterns were successful; I have survived until now, but their limitations no longer serve well. This isn’t as black and white a process as it may read, anyone can look at my life over the past seven years to see how much I have already stepped into myself. In my young adulthood, I may have shown up most of the time as 20% me, but now I openly express most of myself freely. It’s my biggest passion to help others do the same.
I didn’t always know it, but Causeway Living was always a vehicle to help others on the path to themselves. It’s been refined and iterated and shown up in different ways, but ultimately everything I teach is aimed towards helping others expand their awareness, become capable of holding what arises within that, letting go of their limitations, and reduce suffering. The further I walk along the path, the further I have been able to lead others, as I feel confident that anyone who has taken part in the Academy program will be able to attest to.
On the evening that I got the news about my friend Kaja passing away, I wanted to watch her TED talk again; it’d been years since I’d seen it, and I was struck by the relevance. Ultimately, she was sharing the same message of how much a person can suffer when they’re not showing up as their authentic self, and inviting others to step into themselves as she had been doing, and continued doing right up until her final days. It’s an honour and privilege to have walked the same path as her and keep sharing what she was passionate about.
If I follow Kaja’s advice to embrace being different, I’ll find a way to finish my book, start a podcast, live life in new country, continue to expand my awareness, and embody that awareness fully as an increasingly liberated being, helping others to do the same. I want to continue helping people on a one-to-one basis, but I enjoy bringing groups together as well and I love the idea and practice of facilitating retreats. This is what I’m working towards, and I aim to share more about that and my plans to fulfil those intentions very soon.
Take care until then,
