What running away to Mexico taught me about life.

“There are two types of seekers, those who want to wake up and those who want to escape. In that instant, I knew where my search had gone wrong.”

I was sitting in a bright green VW Beetle next to my friend Maya. The taxi was being driven at speed by a Mexican, taking his time to weave expertly in and out of the six lane highway, driving us to who knew where. Forty minutes into the journey and we were both fucking terrified. We looked at each other, nobody spoke – we just held hands and prayed.

I was running away, again so in a sense I didn’t care. Though for all my bravado when it did become clear we were heading into the mountains and he was to pick up a friend, it turned out I did care, very much. I thought of my four young children at home and tears pricked the backs of my eyes before dropping slowly down each cheek.. I was a fool, for leaving again and I knew it.

For as long as I can remember I had been searching for something. It would manifest as a curious longing that at times can overwhelm all my senses and bring me to my knees. The Mexico journey had been born out of such longing. I had been practising meditation within a spiritual community for some time and had somehow picked up the notion that to achieve enlightenment I would need to pay a large sum of money and travel to the silver jungle in Me-hi-co- The more observant among you will note a basic flaw in my plan – but bear with me please.

The curious notion had taken hold in my susceptible brain, and I could not let it go. In the past, the same thing has happened with food, sugar, drugs, money, people and technology. I can’t let it go. My brain, it seems is neuro-adapted. It’s not easy to stop.

And now instead of enlightenment I was being driven up a mountain track in dwindling light with no phone signal and no way of letting anyone know where we were. Was that it? It turns out in the moment of need all talk of enlightenment left the building and I was left with a hollow emptiness in the pit of my stomach - which now you come to mention it was the thing I had been trying to run away from for most of my life.

I call it the void and I have dreamt of it often. It is a vast canyon that is difficult to cross and for many years I would see myself lying off to one side, face down on the cliff edge, scared to move forward.

The canyon was pain but I learned early on that I could change the way I felt by eating – it would always make me feel better, until it didn’t. And then I had to eat the crap food just to feel normal. It was a slippery slope. But in the chaos I trained myself to see that food was the answer, no matter what. And then it was hard-wired in my brain. That’s a hard habit to break.

Often it felt like I was trying to fill the hole, trying to plug a gaping emptiness inside me. What I know now is, that feeling is an aspect of being human. We are hard wired to experience this just as we are hard wired to experience spiritual awakening. That feeling keeps us humble to the truth of who we are. It is there to help us realise our true nature.

Recently my brilliant friend Paula, told me to think of the hole in my body as the Grand Canyon. She told me to explore and observe and visit and experience and even strengthen my relationship to this place with my kundalini yoga practice but to learn to enjoy it for what it is. She said that no-one visits the Grand Canyon with a shovel and an intent to fill it in. It is a tourist attraction and people come from miles around to view its vast open space and its emptiness. They come to view this empty place for its exquisite natural beauty and to experience the wonder and awe of nature. She left me with an invitation to discover the beauty of my own Grand Canyon and to become familiar with it’s own true nature – to let it be.

I know now that the core problem in my life was one of disconnection from my True Self. I scoured the scorched earth with everything I had looking for that magic silver bullet that would make everything right. I could not find it. I ran away over and over but that thing I sought was not possible to find while my focus was on the outside. I had to lift the veil of illusion and accept my life on life’s terms.

When we live in the disconnect, a pattern gets written into the mind and the body – a pattern of stress and a pattern of tension. Our thinking becomes tight and fixed and one-pointed, and we start to give away our power showing up in the world under the influence of external forces. This Includes our own programming in the sub-conscious mind – and so many people get stuck in this place.

We come to know happiness and contentment as the experience we have after the relief of satisfying an urge, a craving - that moment when everything feels bearable. We come to believe that experience is happiness and contentment when that is so far short of what is possible when we realise our true nature.

It was in the conscious act of running away that I was missing the whole point of being alive. Silence, as much as we need it in spiritual practice can also become an escape from the issues in ourselves we need to confront and work our way through. The spiritual work we are here to do is to free ourselves from the reactive patterns of stress and tension and the emotions and feelings that follow on. But we believe we are the patterns of stress and tension and the emotions and feeling that follow on. That is a true case of mistaken identity.

This work is done by learning how to use our ordinary everyday lives as a spiritual practice not by running way and not by distracting ourselves with external focus. It is in the ordinary times that we can most easily reconnect with the true nature of life. Recovery, it seems is an inside job.

Gyan Dhama in the book “Centred in the Now” writes

“Clearing out those patterns happens when we spend time around the objects and people we are attached to in a meditative and aware way with an attitude of practice. This may seem an unsentimental or unromantic way of life – it may even go against everything we think life is for – but if we want to find a way out of suffering, we cannot do that by hoping, fearing, clinging, rejecting, reacting (or stuffing it all down with food – authors note) We do it by cultivating our awareness because being aware, being present, being where we are is how we exit this realm of suffering. It is about us learning how to use the joys and sorrows that we experience as we move through our lives to cultivate minds that are present and aware – minds that live and exist where they are, in the present moment. That is a practice and that is how we turn the lives we have to live whatever they are monastic, worldly or otherwise into paths of realisation and enlightenment.”

And so that takes me back round to the bright green taxi, to my friend Maya (true story, true friend - and you are right not to lose the significance of her given name) and our journey in darkness to the silver jungle ashram. Holding hands in the back of that taxi, a silent awareness bound us to the present moment. It still takes my breath away remembering the depth of feeling in that moment. I am struck too by the paradox of movement captured at still point, held in grace, as we whooshed past trees and forest and jungle, a true metaphor for life.

We made it of course. A hefty taxi fare followed – we found out later that we had been charged three times the going rate and had experienced a long detour as part of the deal. But what I now know for sure is that grace was present on that journey and, like the stillness that held us as the taxi roared through the jungle, she was teaching us that the only way out is through.

#addiction #recovery #realisingourtruenature #sugaraddiction