Whenever desire or dissatisfaction shows up our first instinct is to try to get or change something. We’re trained to leap up and run after our impulses like show-dogs. Desire says “jump” and we say “how high?!” And since these thoughts and feelings and wants keep popping up, large and small, we’re endlessly running around, being led by the nose, slaves to our conditioned need to fulfil every desire, to get rid of every uncomfortable feeling. We seem to have no will in this, we’re just reactive complexes of desire and reaction. And it’s a miserable and exhausting existence.
But if instead, when some desire or difficult feeling arose we let it be, we might find that there was no lack and no need, just a field of peace and joy, and we might see that desire actually arises as an invitation to return to our true restful nature.
But the generational, inherited virus of conditioning corrupts our natural responses and leads us in the exact opposite direction to our well-being, and in that and every moment of conditioned reflex we lose ourselves, again and again.
The good news is that each moment offers a fresh opportunity and a new invitation. Every momentary feeling of discord or wanting is a gateway to our truth. By simply being conscious of our conditioned reactivity we have the possibility to let the reflexive grasping pass, to let go of the need to chase anything, and to drop back into our natural state of easeful abidance.
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