In Life

Life is the greatest teacher and as such will teach us the lessons we need.  I have been moving away from speaking about spirituality and simply speaking about life.  What is interesting is how several members of my group have also commented that they feel it is time to go back into life. 

My last article also dealt with this topic, and I am finding that I am being led to explore this area more. For as beautiful as the gatherings, as sweet as the discourses.  We cannot stay longer than we need to in the ashram or dargah as much as we wish too.

What liberation offered me was…

a way to see life so much more expansively than if I had continued to live in the story

In my own experience “losing” my teacher and school was a traumatic experience.  I was, or so I thought unable to make decisions and the teacher and his teachings offered me a way to hide from life. Even though at that time I would never had said I was hiding. 

Being a student offered me an effective way to bypass the problems in my life and to give myself some consolation that I was on a more enlightened path than most people.  This attitude was encouraged by several of the other students, as no doubt they also needed an excuse not to face life too. When finally, I found myself cast out I confess I struggled.  I had left under a dark cloud and had during my time there been told that he who did not have a teacher took the devil as a teacher.

For someone already suffering from depression and anxiety this was a scary proposition and I desperately looked for another teacher. None appeared, but unbeknown to me Life was now my teacher.

I moved to Glasgow and the peace and solitude of being by myself offered me an opportunity to take stock of my life and to pursue the goal of liberation much more intensely. When the idea of seeking came to an end, life had another journey in mind. One of teaching and traveling, again unknown to me I was being brought more into life.

I could never have imagined that someone who went days without eating or washing or generally doing the things we consider normal was now in front of rooms of people speaking. I had another move to Manchester where I met my partner and I published a book and then wrote another. The shy, depressed and anxiety ridden boy turned into a confident man and the journey continued.

The world was stopped by a pandemic and I found myself on the other side of the country away from my family. Again, life gave me another time of solitude and my ideas about liberation became subtler and moved more towards speaking of the joys of simple living.

Returning to Manchester as the lockdown eased. I noticed life trying to show me something more. I had always spoken about the ordinary, and I started experiencing it more in my own life. Life was about the simple things. People and relationships I had destroyed as they were not spiritual enough started to return and I noticed a wisdom in them that had eluded me.  Whereas avoiding my pain I had taken another journey, had I been braver and faced what ailed me I may never have taken the journey and yet I found that I was glad that I had taken the journey to liberation.

What liberation offered me was a way to see life so much more expansively than if I had continued to live in the story. There was a great freedom in entering into life without the veil of seeking. In that sense I started appreciating my time in the school so much more, including my leaving and spending what I thought was years in the wilderness. A newfound humility and gratitude towards life arose and I saw life’s hidden hand in my life and how I had always been where I needed to be. The realisation that I had always been in life was revelatory and taught me more about acceptance.

We sometimes rail about being in the wrong place at the wrong time or that we do not have time and that we have to wake up in some specified time frame and yet life in its perfection always has us in the right place at the right time. So even retreating from life meant I was in life. I realised my conditioning and the conditioning of others sometimes did not let us accept that we were exactly where we needed to be and if we just accepted that then everything would open up.

I titled this article In Life as the journey I appear to be on is the culmination of so many years of trying to gain some understanding or some miraculous event that would make sense of it all. I am reminded now of the saying, “everything at the appointed hour”.  We are not going into life after some understanding, we are already in life. Sometimes we do not understand that and maybe we are not meant too. Maybe there is a reasoning that life must withhold understanding as to why something is happening. The joy of discovery and realisation allows us constantly to reveal ourselves to ourselves. For are we separate from this life we seek to understand or are we one of a myriad of manifestations of this incredible play called existence.

I feel excited after so much turbulence that I am finally settling, going from seeking all those years to seeing. What I see now is so expansive and so alive. The moment is all we have and yet this moment offers so much. It is like the lover meeting the beloved and realising it is meeting itself. There is a bittersweet sweetness of being and witnessing the being. That love story in which the lover frantically tears at the veils of separation only to realise that he is tearing at his very existence. Those moments of rest constantly leading to a humbling and gratitude to life, that I knew so little and yet I was elevated by you.

Life is simpler now. It is observed, it is lived. There is laughter where once there were tears. A growing old in which there is an eternity meaning there is no death only an idea of it. An acceptance, an openness. A perfect love story in which the Sufi poet Amir Khusro sang:

Khusro baaji prem ki

Main khelun pee ke sang

Jeet gai toh piya more

Jo main haari pee ke sang

Khusro plays the game of love

I play with my dear one

If I win, my sweetheart is mine

If I lose, I am still with my dear one