Can we stop being such a baby? The road to Enlightenment is hard and boring. It's time we get over it and get on with it.

The Boredom is worth the Bliss

Photo by Tim Bish on Unsplash

The kid rolled her eyes at me on the ride to school this morning.

It wasn’t a lecture. I swear! It was a rattling off of my excitement about where I’ve gotten to this year so far on the road to Enlightenment.

I realized recently I've been living WAY too comfortably to reach Enlightenment. If I want to get to oneness in this lifetime I have to stop bullsh!tting myself and make it the focus experiment of my everyday.

Back in January, something inspired me to commit to practicing Eckhart Tolles’s idea of clearing the mind as a way to feeling the Bliss of Oneness. I had started praying. I’ve never been one to pray. Or if I did it always felt like I was desperate and begging for something. Now it feels like a tool for communication with God. It’s a very different approach.

The road to oneness is boring.

I started practicing clearing my mind whenever I felt myself ruminating. It felt a little pointless. I remember thinking, “this is boring.” The voice in my head, much louder now that I know how to talk to God, told me to keep going. Give it a try. What have I got to lose? I’ve tried a lot of things over the decades to get to oneness. Still not there. Yet. So let’s give this managing the mind trick an all-in try.

I got better at it. I got better at catching myself before I went down the rabbit hole of worry. I was even catching myself from getting pulled off into the abyss of anger.

It took less than a month of the boring phase for me to be experiencing the upside to learning to settle my mind and pull it away from creating tragic stories about a feeling I was having. When the mind gets hold of an emotion it’s not good. Unless you’re trying to be a master of worry and anxiety.

What the freak is duel focus anyway

Having duel focus on being present in your body and heart while doing a task in this physical world has felt like such an unattainable idea. It’s made about as much sense to me as the idea that this world is an illusion.

I’m hungry right now because swimsuit weather is just around the corner. I want to eat a family size bag of chips in one sitting. That’s no illusion.

Duel focus isn’t a natural born phenomenon. Or if it is, it gets programmed out of us as a young child. So we have to go back and take those baby steps to relearn it.

Learning to clear the mind is the crawling phase to Enlightenment. And we have to crawl before we walk. And walk before we run. Well most of us do.

Avoid Enlightenment if you don’t like intensity.

The idea of an intense relaxation sounds weird. If you’ve ever had a deep tissue massage you can wrap your head around it.

We can bring intensity to anything. Joy. Wonder. Creativity. And when we do, this is where the magic happens. Just think about those rich joyful times that really stick with you. What was different about them? Can you sense the intensity of the experience?

Once we have some kind of a handle on clearing our mind, it’s time to level up. We have to learn to extract the intensity from the emotion about the thing or person.

It’s like the Hope Diamond. There’s a pure, exquisite, priceless gem in the center of that emotion. The raw intensity. It’s soul food. The soul thrives on intensity.

The path to oneness is not a lazy river ride.

We have to stop being such a baby.

We have to get in a zone of focus on what we care about.

We have to push ourselves.

If you’ve been on a path to Enlightenment for years or decades and are still skirting around the edges, something is off. That something requires an honesty check. How committed are you really? Is it really the center of your daily training? Your daily self improvement experiment?

What if our lives depended on reaching oneness? Well, they do. We can go through the motions of life. Or we can feel alive. Oneness is the ultimate alive feeling.

Like anything we get good at, we have to make it a priority. Practice as much as we can. We can’t just sit around and read about it and ponder the idea and do a little mantra and meditation. We have to direct a laser focus on it. Treat it as if we are running a marathon. Actually running it. Not just watching it from the sidelines.

Pick me! Pick me!

Why does it seem like just a tiny fraction of us have reached Enlightenment? I don’t have the answer. I just know I want to be part of the numerator of that fraction. And I want to help that numerator be in the millions if not billions.

Let’s keep leaning into oneness. We are magical in what we’re capable of.