Image from Mouse and More
The author of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Sogyal Rinpoche, relates a story of a lady who went to his (Sogyal’s) spiritual teacher during a crisis. She had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and was told she had a few months (might have been 3, I don’t remember) to live.
Sogyal’s teacher did not speak or understand English and thus needed Sogyal as translator. When the distraught woman told the teacher that she was dying and it was translated to him, he burst into uncontrollable laughter. You can imagine how the woman must have felt. When finally the teacher composed himself sufficiently to explain the cause of his amusement, he said, via Sogyal:
From the moment we are born, we start dying.
We are all dying, at least our physical bodies are. From conception, our rate of growth exceeds our rate of decay/degeneration until we reach a peak when the ratio begins to reverse. If we are careful, we will be able to retard the rate of decay/degeneration or reduce the ratio so that we can live longer. The question for me today is: How are we living?
Are we living the life we want? Or are we living the life we don’t want? Are we, in fact, contributing to our ‘dying’? And slowly, since we now know how to prolong the life of the physical body?
It seems to me that every time we deny ourselves our true and deepest desires, our most intimate longings, our natural passions, we deny ourselves life. We die. That said, I realize that there is a great deal of confusion surrounding our notions of ‘desire’, ‘longing’ and ‘passion’. These are not unambiguous concepts and they are often controversial.
Go through a book of quotations and you will find statements both exalting and condemning them and from people whom many of us would regard as wise, inspiring and knowledgeable. Likewise in religious/spiritual teachings. And add to that the most recent, ‘New Age’ take on it ala The Law of Attraction and you can understand why so many people feel conflicted.
I have written previously about passion and desire so I won’t repeat it. My focus here is on how we might be dying a slow death by denying ourselves, and not just in large, obvious ways but is small, moment-to-moment ways, what we deeply and truly desire.
I believe we all want to be happy but it seems to me that many of us expect happiness to arrive in some special packaging in a dramatic and obvious fashion, rather like the overture in an opera – that relationship, that income, that lifestyle… But in fact, that state of consciousness called happiness, is lying in wait for us in every moment. It is there regardless of what we happen to be doing. Yet, how often we miss it because we are too busy directing our attention to the things that we believe don’t make us happy – a particular person, incident, word, situation etc.
In these ’small’, yet critical moments that we fill our lives with, we deny ourselves the life we want by focusing on the life we don’t want. In short, we allow ourselves to die a slow death!
What do you think? Do you find you are waiting for a grand entrance of Happiness in your life? Do you think you might be dying a slow death by denying yourself your deepest desires, longings and passion? If so, what might be stopping you?
Lucy Lopez – Hire Me!
Finding happiness moment to moment!
