[embed]https://youtu.be/TKJduBIhhtc[/embed]In this episode of 'Turning Towards Life' Lizzie and I talk about how our stories about what's happening can get in the way of our bringing ourselves fully into life. We consider how the very way in which we make sense of ourselves as 'having to get somewhere' with obstacles in our path that need to be overcome can throw us into an interpretation of life that's riddled with fear, resentment, and comparison. We wonder together what it would be to 'swim past obstacles without grudges or memory' and to understand life as an unfolding story that changes itself in each moment and with each action - and what new possibilities for freedom and contribution that can bring.Our source is the poem 'Because Even the World Obstacle is and Obstacle' by Alison Luterman, reproduced with permission from the author. You can find out more about Alison at www.alisonluterman.net
“Because Even the Word Obstacle is an Obstacle” by Alison Luterman
Try to love everything that gets in your way:The Chinese women in flowered bathing capsmurmuring together in Mandarin doing leg exercises in your lanewhile you execute thirty-six furious laps,one for every item on your to-do list.The heavy-bellied man who goes thrashing through the waterlike a horse with a harpoon stuck in its side andwhose breathless tsunamis rock you from your course.Teachers all. Learn to be smalland swim past obstacles like a minnow,without grudges or memory. Darttoward your goal, sperm to egg. Thinking, Obstacle,is another obstacle. Try to love the teenage girllounging against the ladder, showing off her new tattoo:Cette vie est la mienne, This life is mine,in thick blue-black letters on her ivory instep.Be glad she’ll have that to look at the rest of her life, andkeep going. Swim by an unclein the lane next to yours who is teaching his nephewhow to hold his breath underwater,even though kids aren’t supposedto be in the pool at this hour. Someday,years from now, this boywho is kicking and flailing in the exact placeyou want to touch and turnmay be a young man at a wedding on a boat,raising his champagne glass in a toastwhen a huge wave hits, washing everyone overboard.He’ll come up coughing and spitting like he is now,but he’ll come up like a cork,alive. So your momentof impatience must bow in service to the larger story,because if something is in your way, it isgoing your way, the wayof all beings: toward darkness, toward light.
If it's our everyday habits of thinking, action and relationship that keep the world as it is (and they do), then it's experimentation that has the greatest chance of opening a new world with greater space for us to move in. And when the old world is no longer working out, or bringing suffering, we could all do with a way to open to a new kind of freedom.This is the topic that Lizzie and I took up in yesterday's Turning Towards Life conversation, which you can 
In just a month over 350 people have joined our new 
It's probable that our conscious minds, the part we each so readily take to be 'me', is but a tiny sliver of light floating on a darker, more inscrutable background.Deep in this mysterious substrate lie a host of automatic processes - monitoring, regulating, pulsing, analysing, stimulating, suppressing. We don't have to do anything to make our hearts beat faster when we're excited or scared. And breathing, while amenable to control by the conscious mind, just gets on with itself when we're not looking.Alongside the complex but more automatic processes are parts of us - equally hidden from our direct experience - with immense intelligence, capable of making sense, following through on goals and plans, directing us, holding us back, moving us forward. As Timothy D Wilson says in 
If you were parachuted into your life from outside - into your life and body as it is today - you might start to see what's there through new eyes.Perhaps you'd be more immediately grateful for the people around you, for the love, support and attention they bring you that you had to do nothing to earn. And perhaps you'd see the difficulties in your life for what they are - difficulties to be worked with, rather than confirmations of your inadequacy.Enormous possibilities and freedom to act might come from inhabiting this world in which you're both supported and have problems towards which you can bring the fulness of your mind, body and heart.Being parachuted into your life might put an end to self-pity, because you'd come to see how the body you inhabit has been training, practicing all these years building skills, strength and an understanding of the life it's been living and the difficulties it's been facing. Maybe you'd see that you are precisely the one best equipped to deal with the detail and intricacy of this particular life. And perhaps you'd discover a way to look honestly at your situation and the resolve to deal with it, step by patient step.Maybe if you were parachuted into your very own life, you'd understand that everything that has happened to you - so far - is not a shameful failure but the exact preparation you need for living today, tomorrow, and for the years to come.
Life is too precious, and too important for us to believe the stories of our own unworthiness, to plead that we have a special kind of suffering unknown to anyone else, to wallow in shame at our incompleteness, our falling short, our confusion, our lostness.Yes, let's feel it all, but let's not take it to be the only truth about our situation. Because life is too short for us to wait until we feel better before we begin.Let's allow ourselves to look at life with childlike eyes that see again the wonder in things, and that live it all, fiercely and passionately. Let's learn to drop our defences, to give it all away, and use our experiences, all of our joys and all of our sorrows, as a channel for aliveness.Life is too short, too precious, and too important for us to waste our time doing anything else.
There are enough people afraid, yelling, paralysed, spinning, panicked in the world already, and it's not helping us. Right now what's called for is the capacity to be grounded, to see with as much clarity as we can muster, to take the world and its changes with the equanimity that comes from knowing that change is the way of the world, and to bring as much virtue to the world as we can.It's always been the case that the world, and everyone in it, benefits when we can find courage, truthfulness, compassion, kindness, service, justice, mercy, creativity, gratitude, patience, integrity, fierceness of purpose, commitment and the like. Let's please, do what we can to cultivate that in one another and in ourselves, rather than those qualities that dehumanise us or isolate us from one another.Right now I'm taking up the practice of reading less news and more poetry*. I'm finding in this a deeply renewed capacity to engage. So much of what's passing for news at the moment is in any case fevered speculation, and reading more of it numbs me (with fear or denial). Exercise is helping enormously. Meditation. Long hugs with people I love. Giving up the fantasy that I can control what happens. And doing the thing I'm here to do - writing and teaching.It seems to me that if ever there was a time to start committing ourselves to what we're really here to do (rather than what someone else told us to do, or what we imagined would get us liked or give us status) it's now. With as much sincerity and integrity as we can find.Let's get to it.*I found this suggestion in the wonderful work of 
Some resources for these days in which the world looks so uncertain.(1) How we can respond to the US election resultA fabulous, wise 30 minute talk by Norman Fischer at Everyday Zen, which is actually part 7 of a series called 'Training in Compassion' but stands alone beautifully. What Norman has to say is both a reminder of our capacity to respond and a call to hope in that capacity right when we're least sure what to do.
Walking among tall oaks in London's Hyde Park, my thoughts turn towards the end of things. Leaves are falling, their curled crisp edges crunching beneath my boots. There are still many trees clothed in green. The end of this will come soon, I can see, leaving the dark shape of curling branches clear against the sky.One day, each of these trees, too, will be gone.It is a relief to know that this is how it is. That things come to an end. Quite naturally. Quite ordinarily. And that it is true for us too.How many mornings I have awoken with such deep lonely sadness at all this. That I will lose myself. That I will lose all of my faculties. That I will lose everyone I love, and they will lose all this too. That all this has already begun.But here, among the trees, I am gladdened. Losing it all is not my fate alone. It is not a gross unfairness visited upon me. It is not something I always need to mourn. It is the way of life, and always has been. It is the condition of humanity, and always will be.I am joined in this path by every living thing that has ever existed, and every living thing that will exist. I am unified with all of life, indivisible from it.Yes, deep sadness at how all of this ends has its place, reminding me how I long to live and how much there is to lose. But equally appropriate is joy, and wonder, exhilaration and radical amazement that any of this is happening. That I get to take part. That I am, for now, here.My heart quickens and my eyes widen at the beauty and fragility of life, at its preciousness, at how fleeting it is. I see that there is no time to waste. There is so much to do, so much I can do. Whatever contribution I am here to make, now is the time. Every moment until now has been preparation for this. Every moment to come, however many or few, calls with the promise and possibility of participation in life's grand, beautiful, tragic, surprising, endlessly creative unfolding.It is time, as it always is, to begin.