Wanting Otherwise: On Inevitability and Refuge

I’ve been thinking about inevitability.

The inevitability of falling apart. The inevitability of sickness, old age—if we’re so lucky—and death. The inevitability of phase change, from the smallest, tiniest repositioning of the elementary particles that comprise the light show we call our human embodiment, to the more painful phase changes of grief, loss, and life transitions.

I’ve also been thinking about refuge. Not just in the traditional Buddhist sense—though it seems that, if we allow it, the idea can encompass all concepts of refuge. However we might conceive it, what we’re seeking is more immediately available than we typically recognize.

Though our situation—the desperate desire to escape the uncomfortable inevitable—isn’t exactly our fault, it is our problem. Whose else would it be?

Every person I’ve ever met—myself included—has a built-in attraction-aversion response to stimuli. We live most of our lives automatically divvying up our experiences into three basic categories: Don’t like it. Kill it with fire. Or: Like it. Need more of it. Need to protect it, secure it, defend my position with regard to it. And then, of course, there’s the big fat middle: Didn’t even notice.

When almost all of our experience is conditioned toward that kind of automatic response, we’re not only missing a lot, we’re constantly getting bashed back and forth between our own grasping and aversion.

The lived experience of conditioned aversion is stress, anxiety, dis-ease. Even when we like something, in our ordinary experience, that liking can easily slip into contempt. Something changes; other qualities become apparent apart from our expectations and projections. Familiarity breeds contempt, and so forth. Now we want it to be some other way! Most people live their entire lives like this.

How exhausting.

The good news is, we can de-colonize this conditioning, and experience relief from our constant want for things to be otherwise. To do so, we don’t need to manufacture more solutions, engage in more conceptual algebra. We need a healthier way to relate to thoughts, emotions, feelings, sensations—anything that arises within the embodied human experience. And that is through a direct relationship to what’s actually felt.

Not blocking, not judging. But also not accepting, not rejecting. Not manufacturing anything beyond what’s there. Simply noticing and leaving be within the effortlessly accommodating, non-judgmental, intimately present, spacious ground of our basic awareness. That might sound like a pile of woo. But it is the key to metabolizing prior experiences, and, eventually, abiding simultaneously with the openness that is the essence of all that we experience, “inside” or “outside.”

Refuge, in that sense, is not escape. That said, it seems that everyone who comes to a healing or spiritual path—or any kind of interoceptive work—is motivated by the desire for relief. This too, is something we can accept openly, tenderly, and with deep permission.

Refuge is the cessation of flight. It’s grounding and orienting in relaxed, basic wakefulness. Turning further in, we develop a felt sense of security in that openness. To start, all we need is to slow down and notice what’s already there. Suspending judgment—or giving deep permission for feelings of judgment to stretch out, relax, and metabolize in their own time. Meeting any thought, emotion, or felt sensation with kindness, openness, and relaxed accommodation.

Often it helps to have a mental image—a loved one, cherished pet, a place where we have felt real relaxation and unforced ease. Ocean, park, woods, mountains. Sometimes it’s a gesture of tenderness or support, big or small, long ago, or more recently. A feeling of being welcomed into a space where you can simply be yourself. That’s the kind of refuge we try to invoke, especially at first; something that helps us touch into our inherent okayness, where we don’t have to try to alter, change, or fix. Where we can, for a time, suspend the desperate wanting it to be otherwise.

That is a practice we can all engage in, regardless of our personal histories and backgrounds. It doesn’t require belief, but rather presence. Relating in this way won’t negate the inevitabilities of cause and effect, of mutual causality. But even if just for a moment, it allows us to release our fixation—our grasping at our own prickly bits—within that awareness. The rest is a matter of familiarization and integration.

Keep going!