The Loving Nudge

Posted on March 20, 2012 by Shayla Wright, One of Thousands of Spirituality Coaches on Noomii.

We’ve all heard about this, haven’t we? That outer events do not determine our inner experience. That we are never really at the mercy of happenings and situations. Something in us responds to this. We feel some kind of instinctive recognition that this could be true. Until something challenges us and we collapse into our reactions, our stories and our beliefs. Then the notion of unconditional happiness sounds a bit far fetched, like something out of a spiritual fairy tale.

What happens when we make a strong commitment to living this way? When we actually get serious about recognizing this well-being that is unconditional?

How do we encourage this possibility in ourselves and the people in our lives?

I have been wrestling with these questions deeply during the last while. I’ve written about the Dalai Lama as a living example of someone who has found an unshakeable sense of well being, undiminished by everything that has happened to his country.

Does it seem arrogant, to open myself to the possibility that I could live like this too? Is it possible that this unconditional happiness is not just reserved for special people, like the Dalai Lama?

Whenever I really get deeply engaged in this question, all hell seems to break loose in my life. It’s as if life is nudging me, saying, “Do you really want to know how to be unconditionally happy? Then try this on for size.” In retrospect I can feel the nudges as loving. At the time they seem anything but that.

For quite a while now, I have been dealing with some major difficulties in my life, connected with my family, that won’t go away. It makes perfect sense to my conditioned mind to get very unhappy about these things. And this just perpetuates the whole illusion that I can only be happy when things are going ‘my way.’ I don’t want to live like that anymore. It’s just that simple.

What I noticed recently, when chaos seemed to be infiltrating my existence, was how we all seem to agree collectively that events really are what determine our inner experience. There’s not a lot of inquiry going on in our culture about this!

In fact, it almost seems taboo, unthinkable, that I could actually be okay when things seem to be falling apart. This fundamental well being, that asks for nothing, seems to challenge so many of our beliefs and perceptions. It’s often labelled as denial or repression. “Well, she seems to be okay now, but just wait..”

What if this isn’t true? What if we all have a natural capacity to remain just fine, even when intense feelings are moving through us, even when what we want, what we desperately want, is not being given to us?

During this most recent period of disintegration in my life, I was pulled again and again into stories and beliefs that were incredibly painful. The only place I could rest was right here, in this moment. That’s where life was nudging me, like a loving mother, right back into the not knowing, the unfathomable nature of what is here, right now.

It wasn’t easy. My images about the future were so vivid, so alive and so compelling.

One night, when my anxiety was keeping me wide awake, I realized that my mind would rather imagine the worst, than face the fact that the future is utterly unknown and unknowable.
It was shocking to really see that need to know playing itself out in this way.

And to recognize the loving nudge, the question that wouldn’t go away, “What if this moment is all there is? What if you really have no clue about what is going to happen next?”

What if everything that has happened is already gone, and this moment is new, and this one, and this one..

What a strange place to live. So edgy. So open. And so alive.