How Can We Quiet Our Incessant Seeking?
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I was listening to a recording by Sarah Blondin on Insight Timer earlier this week, and she asked a question that hit me so deeply that I've not been able to get it out of my head since: How can we quiet our incessant seeking? This question struck a chord with the work I'm actively engaged in right now around releasing hope of having had a different past, accepting impermanence in the present, and letting go of expectations about the future. All three necessitate ending the constant searching for a "what if" in the past, for elusive stability in the present, for a magical turn of events in the future to make things exactly like I want them.
For most of my life, I have sought solutions to my unhappiness outside of myself. I was continually looking--for easy answers to all my problems, for love (in all the wrong places), for stability, for hope, for peace--and was deeply confused by my lack of success. If we're open to all of these things, I thought, they're "supposed" to come to us. Being open and willing to have love and happiness come into my life was supposed to shift the energetic balance somehow in my favor, but things didn't change. I wasn't any happier, so I kept searching.
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Through the work I've done in the last ten years or so, perhaps the most concrete truth I've come to understand is that the answers are not out in the world; they're within me. Sarah Blondin's question made me realize that our incessant seeking is the greatest impediment to a happy life. We need to make peace with what is--not because we need to give up trying to make our lives and our world better, but because not accepting how things actually are keeps us from living in the moment. Wishing things were different keeps us trapped in story, and that story keeps us focused on a reality that exists only in our minds. Thinking about what our past wasn't like doesn't help us to deal with the effects of what it was like. Yearning for our current circumstances to be different doesn't give us the space to grapple with how things are so that we can really reflect on how to change the things we aren't happy with, both inside and outside of ourselves. Wishing for a perfect future doesn't make it appear.
Release the search for a different reality in the present moment or in the past: it only causes the heartache of longing that will never be satisfied. Be here. Now. See your circumstances for what they are. Search within yourself for the changes you wish to make and for the ways to make those changes happen. No one outside of yourself can make you happy. No one outside yourself can push you onto the right path. No one outside of yourself has what you need. Be true to yourself and follow your path, and love and happiness will come to you without your having to chase them.
