"Wherever You Go, There You Are!"

 

Wherever You Go, There You Are!

Meditation adapted from the book Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn, pages 195-200.

(Originally posted to Facebook May 29, 2014)

There is no running away from anything. Sooner or later, the things that you don't want to deal with and try to escape from...catch up with you—especially if they have to do with old patterns and fears. The romantic notion is that if it's no good over here, you have only to go over there and things will be different. The underlying thinking is that the reason for your troubles is outside of you—in the location, in others, in the circumstances.

The trouble with this way of seeing is that it conveniently ignores the fact that you carry your head and your heart, and what some would call your "karma," around with you. You cannot escape yourself, try as you might. It is easier and less threatening to our sense of self to project our involvement in our problems onto other people and the environment.

It is so much easier to find fault, to blame, to believe that what is needed is a change on the outside, an escape from the forces that are holding you back, preventing you from growing, from finding happiness. This can turn into serious delusion, an unending quest to escape looking at what is closest to home and perhaps most painful. Out of fear and yearning for someone special to help them see clearly, people sometimes fall into dependency relationships.

The casualties of this way of looking at things are all over the place: broken relationships, broken families, broken people—wanderers with no roots, lost, going from this place to that, this job to that, this relationship to that, this idea of salvation to that, in the desperate hope that the right person, the right job, the right place, the right book will make it all better.

There is no successful escaping from yourself in the long run, only transformation. It doesn't matter whether you are using drugs or meditation, alcohol or Club Med, divorce or quitting your job. There can be no resolution leading to growth until the present situation has been faced completely and you have opened to it, allowing the roughness of the situation itself to sand down your own rough edges. In other words, you must be willing to let life be your teacher.

This is the path of working where you find yourself, with what is found here and now. This, then, really is it...this place, this relationship, this dilemma, this job. The challenge is to work with the very circumstances that you find yourself in—no matter how unpleasant, how discouraging, how limited, how unending and stuck they may appear to be—and to make sure that you have done everything in your power to use their energies to transform yourself before you decide to cut your losses and move on. It is right here that the real work needs to happen.

So, if you think that the conditions aren't right where you find yourself, and you think that if only you were in a cave in the Himalayas, or at an Asian monastery, or on a beach in the tropics, or at a retreat in some natural setting, or with different people, then things would be better...think again. When you go to your cave or your beach or your retreat, there you would be, with the same mind, the same body, the very same breath that you already have here. After fifteen minutes or so in the cave, you might get lonely, or want more light, or the roof might drip water on you. If you were at the beach, it might be raining or cold. If you were on retreat, you might not like the teachers, or the food, or your room. There is always something to dislike. So why not let go and admit that you might as well be at home wherever you are? Right in that moment, you touch the core of your being and invite mindfulness in to enter and heal. If you understand this, then and only then will the cave, the monastery, the beach, the retreat center, your relationships, offer up their richness to you. But so will all other moments and places.