Praying for Myself
Cultivating vertical and lateral freedom
I’m learning how to pray for myself. Most of the time, I pray for other people, or simply for the good of all. When I pray for myself, I usually pray for healing and evolution and empowerment in service to others.
Generally speaking, this is a good way to pray. But at times, it has been a way of bypassing my own needs and desires.
A version of me and my life died at the end of last year. After that life ended, I lost interest in living. I was ready to drop this body and go home. But I kept on breathing. Each day I kept waking up and drawing breath. Surrender as I may to the Grim Reaper’s blade, it never came. Eventually, I had to accept that it wasn’t my time to die, and that life would go on, whether I wanted it to or not.
I’m a recovering nice guy and people-pleaser. I learned how to have no needs and desires early on. Maybe it is something I inherited from my ancestors or a past life. Wherever it came from, I remember deciding early on that the best way to survive in this world was to want and need nothing and to have no attachments.
In the absence of self-direction, I learned to live for others. I lived for the approval of society, peers, and family. Then, when I got a girlfriend, I started living for her.
I gave my power away to anyone who would take it. I abandoned myself at every opportunity, and saw it as piety. I kept creating lives I lost interest in that parts of me wanted to destroy. I failed to thrive because I kept living other people’s lives.
I abandoned myself and called it selflessness. I thought I was acting from a place of kindness, when it was often fear. Fear of conflict, fear of looking at and accepting my own wants and needs. Fear of being seen and fully involved in my life.
That version of me died at the end of last year. I still catch myself falling into old patterns from time to time. But I’ve been given a clean slate and an opportunity to make different choices.
I don’t know if I’m becoming a monk or recovering from it. Am I in a process of excavating and alchemizing my last remaining seeds of worldly desire, or am I simply learning basic lessons about how to feel at home in the world?
I’ve been contemplating Osho’s teaching about Zorba the Buddha, which encourages us to embrace the totality of our being, both human and divine. In this teaching, Zorba the Greek represents western materialism. He loves to sing, dance, drink wine, and make love. He takes great pleasure in all the sensory delights of the world, without concern for matters of the soul.
The Buddha, on the other hand, represents the opposite polarity in this teaching. The Buddha has transcended materialism and abides in his enlightened state uninterested in the fleeting pleasures of the flesh. The Buddha is blissful but austere, transcendent, but uninvolved in the world.
True enlightenment, Osho says, combines the qualities of both Zorba and the Buddha. Zorba, Osho says, can always become a Buddha and his zest for life is the fundamental energy from which a Buddha is carved. But the Buddha cannot be Zorba, because he abides in the golden cage of his own holiness. The key Osho says, is to be both, to be fully involved in the world and to take pleasure in the human experience while cultivating the transcendent bliss of the Buddha.
I think this is an unfair caricature of the Buddha, but it gets to something really important and true. True liberation requires us to break the shackles of both materialism and transcendence. True enlightenment is being both vertically and laterally free, able to move joyfully through the world while being fully involved in it, and transcending it.
Some of the first instructions the medicine gave me were to be more like a plant. She told me to nourish myself, and to be less judgmental about what I need to thrive. She told me to drink deeply of life and to get my fill, that there is always more, and that in my thriving I will nourish others.
I’m still learning how to be more like a plant. I still have human judgments that get in the way of my thriving. I’m still learning to pray for what I want and need, and to receive it with humility and gratitude.
I’m trying to be more like Zorba the Buddha, completely free and fully alive.
Welcome to the world of abundantly enough.
The training I got as a child was the world was stingy enough, barely enough. The world I see presented by consumerism is "more" and "never enough" with only the elect few endulging in more of never enough at the expense of most with less than or barely enough.
The transition for me is similar to what you are describing. Now, with all obligations fullfilled, I find that abundantly enough does not include indulgence of never enough and a clear seeing that more does nothing except bury abundantly enough.
I have found the people in my life now are few, but at the same time abundantly enough to feel whole. I look forward to your reports going forward into this vibrant new world.