Where do I stand? If I take stock of who I think I am at this moment and I am as honest with myself as I can possibly be, the world transforms into a scary place. My inner world becomes the Hall of Judgments, where everyone is out to get me and everyone else is right. A friend of mine who has been following my blog offered to lend me a Superman costume for Halloween. I turned her down because I don’t feel like identifying with Superman, at least not yet. Who do I identify with? Is there a path that leads to always feeling grounded and at peace with who we are?
I feel unmotivated all too often. It is exhausting work to consistently attempt to fulfill what I believe to be other’s expectations of me: Dennis the performer, the Disco dancer, the leader, the extrovert, the one who has all the answers at work and now the Super-blogger-man. What I have come to realize though is the idea that these expectations that others have of me, is an illusion projected by my own insecurities. I have such a fear of being found out as a phony. This fear is what causes me dis-stress, so where do I stand? I work very hard at the office to give off the “I’m busy , I care and I’m on it” persona. I do this so that I never hear the dreaded words, “Dennis is a fake, he is not good enough to take us to the next level, he is not committed, he is a disappointment, and we would do better without him.” I have to admit that one of the reasons it is so difficult to resign from my position is because I am still trying to prove myself at work. If I don’t let this go, I will take this stress with me. I will spend the rest of my life trying to prove myself as a writer, a lecturer, and a healer. Scary place.
So is there a place to stand? One of my favorite souls on this planet is Ram Dass. 15 years ago, I bought a set of his taped lectures and my life would have turned out very differently had I not done so. Every time I have felt depressed since, I put on his tapes and go for a run. I come back feeling free. What Ram Dass says about whether there is a place we can stand is that there is one place: “We can stand nowhere”. If I stop thinking that I am the doer, the actor in this play and let go of the “I” in “I have to…” then there is nowhere to stand. If I sit with the laziness without judging it, then out of this uncomfortable stillness comes a slight movement. This movement does not come from a place of obligation or to impress anyone but out of purity. Then it does not matter what I do. I can wear a Superman costume or skip a day in my blog. I can stay at the university or write five books and sell them on Oprah. This is what it means to stand nowhere. No-where or Now-here.
As you can see, the war I wrote about in my first entry still rages. It helps to blog about it. Patience is not my strongest suit and I have 51 days to go. I’ll leave you with a short story about the moment Harvard Professor Richard Allpert became Ram Dass.
“My deepest teachings on the subject of death came from Maharajii, my guru- but interestingly enough, my mother cropped up several times in the course of my connecting with him. First of all, she appeared to me on the ceiling of my hotel room in Nepal, while I was lying there trying to decide whether to go on to Japan with my friend David Padwa, or go back into India with Bhagawan Das and do temple pilgrimages… As I was sitting there trying to figure out what to do my mother appeared. She looked at me with a look that was both peeved and pleased at the same time. The middle-class mother role was peeved, saying, “When are you going to settle down and become a responsible member of the community?” But the other, pleased, part of her was saying, “Go, baby, go!” ..There she was in a hotel in Kathmandu, encouraging me to go to India- where, as it turned out, Maharajii was lying in wait for me.”
A few months later, when I first met Maharajii, it was through an exchange regarding my mother that he blew my mind and opened my heart to him. The day I met him, Maharajii said to me, “Your mother died last year.” He closed his eyes and he said , “She got very big in the stomach before she died”- which was true, because of her enlarged spleen. I said, “Yes”. Then he spoke the only word that he said in English, the organ that had killed my mother. The one word brought my mind to a screeching halt. How did he know? How did he know? My mind was like one of those pinball machines going “Tilt!”- it stopped dead in its tracks! And then my heart could open to him.”- Ram Dass
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