Triggers as Teachers: Getting Free Instead of High
In Ram Dass' teachings, he shares a pivotal moment in his spiritual journey when he realized he wanted to be free more than he wanted to get high. It's a common experience among us all on the spiritual path - we enjoy a moment or period of bliss, joy, or love - getting "high" - which is then followed by an inevitable low. We begin using our methods as a way to stay high and push away the lows. This creates a kind of yo-yo effect on our lives. Once we really understand that, we begin to shift toward wanting to be free instead of high.
Freedom does not mean feeling good, grounded, and calm all the time. Freedom is engaging with the everyday aspects of life, good, bad, pleasurable, painful, fascinating, boring... with equanimity. Instead of trying to escape reality, we use the circumstances of our lives as a path to growth and learning. We stop avoiding or pushing away any part of the human experience, including sadness, anger, or fear. Instead, we use it to help us learn more about ourselves and our attachments to how we think things ought to be.
This includes cultivating the capacity to turn toward suffering - both our own and that of others - and act with compassion. Compassion implies action - a response to suffering as an attempt to alleviate it in whatever way we can. As we continue on our spiritual path in this way, we eventually realize that service is the highest high we could ever achieve. We learn to thank whoever and whatever triggers us, because they are helping us notice our shadows - our secret stash of ego attachment - that we still need to work on.
There's no "there" there - the recursiveness of life
Going hand-in-hand with this perspective of triggers as teachers is the realization that there is no finish line. We cannot "kill" our ego - it comes with the body, and it serves an important function! It is the vehicle for our work in this lifetime - our unique personality, perspective, gifts, and talents that we share with the world.
What a relief it becomes to let go of the expectation of completion or finality. We are such a multi-faceted, multi-dimensional being... There is always more! So, there's no need to become angry or frustrated when something we thought we had healed or were "done" with comes back around. We are simply refining our understanding.
There's a helpful visualization for this process that I’ve heard both from my teachers, Behnje and Rick, as well as Ram Dass: polishing the mirror of the heart. Through this perspective, our hearts are mirrors that are dirtied by what's called "dross" - rubbish, scum, or impurities of ego, attachment, fear, etc. The dross prevents us from shining the authentic light of our True Self into the world as much as it prevents us from seeing that True Self reflected back to us from within the "other".
Our practices and methods for burning away ego-driven illusion, "us" vs "them", hidden issues and tendencies (shadow), and emotional baggage help to remove the dross and polish the mirror of the heart. This inner refinement helps us learn how to use the ego in service to the world around us. We occupy many different levels of consciousness simultaneously. The practice is to yoke them together - to integrate them into union.
We are both separate beings with unique experiences and perspectives and All One - an interdependent, interconnected being. And we will continue playing that edge of both/and until that harmony of begin becomes our home base.