Joining Life

Life.

A huge wave of volatile energy. Poured into the vessel of my horse Jade, of me, of all of us, of all of life on the planet. Bursting at the seams.

It’s very scary all that energy. What to do with it?

One of my teachers who has showed me what to do is my horse Jade – and the greatest teacher of all, life itself, God, or awareness. Whatever you would like to call it.

She is life - raw, instinctual energy. A big horse, 16.1 hands high weighing around 1200 pounds. Raw life force energy poured in the vessel of her form and evolution. A vegetarian animal - prey - programmed to save herself by running away. With me on her back.

She is life and she represents life, the incredible power and energy of life that is like a big wave. A huge cosmic wave set in motion from a mirror-like ocean that gains momentum with our physical reality. It merges again with the vast ocean it came from when its energy has been expended.

Can we ride this wave? Can I ride my horse, stay on top of that volatile energy? Can I surf this terrible and awe-ful energy and not fall and disappear under the great wave of life?

That is the big question.

What do we do with that insuppressible energy? Dominate it? Beat it into submission – as many have done with horses, other animal beings, people, and life itself? Resist it? Try to change it?

None of that works.

So what do we do?

We join life.

This is what my horse has taught me. To join with her. To be a leader and to ask. To respect who she is and her powerful energy, which could so easily destroy me, like life. To go with the flow of that powerful force, to accept it, and guide it when necessary, and to set my ego aside. It would battle this force forever, something interesting to do. Defend its life.

Joining life has been a life-long learning for me and continues.

The ego is a force of resistance. That is its job and there is a reason for it. It functions as a shell, a barrier that creates friction, and it helps us gain awareness and make an effort to break it. It constitutes the separate entity we think we are, defending ourselves from death and other terrible experiences. The ego wants to exist and doesn’t want to dissolve and disappear into the great infinite. It resists that. It is wired to look after our comfort and pleasure. After all, we are physical, vulnerable entities and we do need to look after ourselves as danger lurks everywhere.

But there is more to us than that. We are a totality of being of which the ego is a part. The ego has forgotten that or denies it. It’s come to mistake itself as the boss, like a two-year-old throwing a temper tantrum, or, and this is a better analogy, a teenager who knows it all. And so it wants what it wants and it paddles upstream, causing a lot of pain and suffering in the process.

If we allow our ego to call the shots, we will be busy forever fighting the windmills of our mind, an endless supply of enemies conjured by the ego. We will suffer much with all the things we don’t want.

But there is a different approach. We can join with life and not fight it. We can accept it as it comes in the moment. This doesn’t mean we roll over and submit to what is wrong. It doesn’t mean we become a victim and accept defeat. It means that we accept whatever life gives us as it shows up in the moment. For example, if I break my leg, I can accept this situation, instead of resisting it and railing against it. I can accept that this is happening and then take appropriate action.

I invite you to become aware of the nature of resistance of the ego. Notice how often you say to yourself you don’t like something. “I don’t want it to be this cold, I want to go skiing. I don’t want a broken leg, I want to go hiking. I don’t want this disease, I want to be healthy.” It ranges from the inconsequential to the serious, but it is the same thing nonetheless.

Much of our energy is bound up in the resistance and it doesn’t allow us to move on as we are stuck with it and all the emotions that go hand in hand with it.

But we can free ourselves. By accepting what is in the moment and to not fight it. By opening to it and having a loving relationship with it, even if it is a lethal disease. Then we can think of what we need to do and take action.

When we accept and open to what happens in the moment, we can discover a deeper layer of our being. We can experience a depth of our being that lies beyond the ego. We can discover spaciousness and the totality of our being that bring a very different perspective on what happens in the moment.

The totality of being that we are is like a circle. This is vast consciousness. In this circle exist many physical things and mind concepts. If we focus on and identify with the physical things and concepts in the circle, we won’t see the truth of things and we are identified with the physical and with our personality and body, which are impermanent. This is death. But if we focus on the big circle of life, the totality of being, there will be much space and we won’t be caught through our identification with physical things. It frees us and there will be life, even if there is physical death.

There are various things we can do to become more present in the moment. We can use any of the senses to ground ourselves. We can focus on something around us that attracts our attention. We can observe and describe in detail to ourselves objects around us, listen for sounds, identify sensations in the body, touch different textures of different objects, and we can smell and taste things. We will each have a preference for a particular sense and we can get creative with that. For example, if you like sound or touch, you can make a game of it and identify objects by sound when tapping them with something or identify objects by touch.

Meditation, of course, can help us become more present in the moment, provided it is not a meditation that takes you out of the present moment. Following the sensations in the body and the breath can help us be more present. When we do these things, we will become more grounded but it can also help us with becoming calm and reduce or eliminate our anxiety.

If we do this, we can discover that another world begins to open for us. We can discover a presence, something that permeates everything. We will find a deeper, more beautiful world and we notice much more of what is going on. We notice the birds and what they are doing, how the wind moves the leaves, a shadow on the wall. I love shadows, particularly the moving shadows of branches and leaves stirred by the wind. I love to listen for sound. And I love to hear the silence. It brings with it a lot of space and spaciousness that belongs to what is present. I love to hear that vast field of silence, which is the field of awareness and all the noise and sound that lives in it. They accentuate each other.

When we become more grounded and present in the moment, the world opens up and we can be. We begin to feel the love that is everywhere. Inside of us and outside of us. In the beautiful blue sky or a clouded, dark one. In the squirrels and other animals and even people, although they can be pretty scary!

What we need for us to begin to experience this is to slow down. Slow down our rampant mind, the hurrying, the catching up, the doing of things we don’t want to do. To stop and look beyond the surface and busy thinking mind. There is so much to discover there.