Wednesday, April 22, 2015

Unlearning Yearning

Recently, I posted a cheat sheet entitled 27 Life Changing Lessons to learn from Eckhart Tolle on Facebook. I loved A New Earth and absorbed concepts from that book that, though I had heard them all before from different authors, became more accessible to me through Tolle's presentation. Or maybe I was ready to hear them. It seems am circling around on these concepts again because I am in a new place in life. Eckhart Tolle's name keeps coming up in a way that makes me want to grab his books and find a quiet spot to reread. Until that time, I have this list. In reviewing it, I was struck in particular with #21: Seeking is the antithesis of happiness.

I am working with this very concept in this cycle. It is part of the reason I burned all my journals last week. I was paging through them seeing the same yearnings over and over again, and in that yearning was desperation--the very opposite of appreciation. Such yearnings take me away from the present moment. We did not uproot our whole household and move to Arden to be caught up in a cycle of Okay, Utopia is really cool; what's next? I am here! I need to live in the full expression of what has come to pass.

It goes against a lot of my Type A personality, plan-everything-out mentality. Enjoy the now and be available for what shows us are foreign concepts to a lot of us--especially living in the United States. But guess what? Stuff continues to show up--without my having to push. And it is astonishing stuff that I could not even think to yearn for--even if I had diagrammed a five-year plan, complete with S.M.A.R.T (specific, measurable, assignable, realistic, time-based) goals.

Of course there are things that I still want to have happen in my life. And I would like to continue to journal. This blog is a part of that grand tradition--one that I hope I won't feel the need to eradicate in the years to come. (It's really hard to burn a blog.) So to dodge future destruction of my writing, I choose this space to be an exploration and appreciation of the experience of living here and being in vibrant artistic practice. The Practice. The doing. Not the perfection of. Not the wishing for. Not the fear of.  If I can manage that, all else will fall into place. I don't even need you to read this. It is in the action, and in writing this entry, I have already fulfilled its purpose.

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