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In my long journey traveling the spiritual path I’ve found that there are two main areas of benefit: making regular situations better and making stressful, upsetting situations less stressful and upsetting.

My experience has been that making the bad less bad has given me far more benefit than making the normal better.

What this usually entails is learning and practicing how to respond rather than react when something upsets us. Like when your spouse says or does something that absolutely infuriates us and we stop, breathe, take a few seconds…and then respond. Rather than…

Losing our shit and lobbing every low blow we can at them, which can result in a multi day cold shoulder stand off…or worse.

The problem is our short fuses

Every single one of us knows the conundrum here: That fuse that gets lit inside us when we get triggered is so damn short that we explode before we can respond! Usually in less than a second.

The work lies in lengthening that fuse enough that we have time to put it out before we rein holy hell on our spouse, work colleague, mother-in-law, etc.

The long-term solution to this problem is letting go of the ego that is the source of the explosion. Ideally, we get to a place where there’s nothing anyone can do or say that can trigger us into exploding because we’ve let go of our ego.

We need a practical strategy

In the meantime, we need to employ effective strategies for staving off the explosions and the resultant wreckage that often follows.

My strategy when devising strategies is always to start with the practical and logical. Just because we’re dealing with spiritual matters doesn’t mean we need to look for the ethereal and metaphysical for solutions.

In this case, practical starts with asking: What could I actually do to give myself a chance at not snapping right in the moment of upset?

For me, that’s having something I’ve already thought through at the forefront of my mind. I call it a go-to.

So we tell ourselves,

“Okay, next time I get all spun up, I’m going to do my utmost to go immediately to X.”

What is that all-important ‘X’ we should go to? There are many options. It could be:

“Accept.”

“Don’t resist.”

“Breathe.”

All of those are great, but they aren’t what we should go to first. It’s a question of order.

My middle of the night racing mind

This all came to me in the middle of the night a few days ago when I had a bout of racing mind syndrome. Anybody else ever had that? Ha ha. I haven’t met anybody who doesn’t get this at least occasionally.

My go-to was,

“It’s alright. This is just your mind going off on its own; it’s not you.”

And that’s a good go-to for that situation. But it didn’t work very well.

Why?

It’s about what we do first

Because I needed to do something else first. That something else is the point of this article.

It’s one word.

Relax.

Some of you might be thinking,

“He’s mentioned relax a zillion times in different articles. What’s different here?”

What’s different is that it occurred to me that relax needs to be our go-to for every stressful situation we face. Every one of them.

Triggering causes physical reactions

Why? Because when we get upset, we react physically. We release hormones like epinephrine, norepinephrine and cortisol, which speed up our heart rate, increase blood pressure and tense up our muscles.

“Accept,” “Don’t resist,” and even “breathe” are responses that require some level of thinking to set in motion.

But what we need is a mostly physical go-to right when we get triggered. It’s the only chance we have to nip all those hormones in the bud.

Relax is physical

Relax is that physical go-to. We know exactly what we mean when we say this word to ourselves.

It immediately conjures slower, deeper breathing and a general relaxing of our muscles. Closing the eyes can help us better focus on relaxing.

I don’t care what scenario you find yourself in, relaxing is the best thing to do right off the bat.

Your boss insults you in front of your colleagues? Relax.

Your teenage daughter says you look fat? Relax.

Your mind starts racing at 3 a.m.? Relax.

You hit the fifth red light in a row? Relax.

Bottom line: We need to feel relaxed inside if we are to respond rather than react to stressful situations.

Mickey Singer’s take on relaxation

My favorite spiritual teacher Michael Singer goes as far as saying that relax is the most important word in all of spirituality. I agree.

Best of all, it’s the greatest win-win available to we mortal Earthlings. How?

Win #1: When we relax through a stressful scene and respond from a place of presence, we achieve the optimum outcome and avoid disaster.

Win #2: Relaxing when we get triggered allows us to actually let go of the egoic baggage/Samskara that has been stuck in our lower selves, wreaking havoc on our lives. Each time we relax and let go we lighten our psychic load and become more peaceful and present.

As for the “how to” of it, there’s nothing magical involved. When we get triggered we relax.

Commit or it won’t happen

Most important is making the commitment to actually do this. We need to be vigilant about it. And give significant attention to it. Without that, this will be just another spiritual teaching that dissolves into the ether after a day or two.

Start by committing to just one day. Wake up in the morning and have a note by your bed that reads,

“Today I am going to RELAX immediately whenever anything stresses me out. Then I’ll respond with presence.”

It’s helpful to think about two or three things that stress you out on a regular basis. Could be your spouse/significant other, traffic/commuting to work, your boss’s comments, your thoughts racing in the middle of the night…

Just think of a few of them, no more than two or three, then visualize them happening. Then see yourself relaxing in response.

If you’ve already played it out in your mind, it will be easier to do when it actually happens.

The takeaway

This one is so simple, but so valuable!

Commit to it. Practice it.

Relax when you get triggered.

The pay off will be exponential.

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Most people on this planet are stuck in their heads most of the time. Thoughts about the past, worries about the future, and just plain trivial nonsense dominate most peoples’ moments.

That’s the bad news.

The good news is that past years have seen an upsurge in public awareness that this state of affairs is not a good thing. For millennia before this, people accepted that their minds were who they were and didn’t see this as particularly concerning. The boom in meditation and mindfulness has the world trending in the right direction.

The faulty understanding of dealing with the mind

But many wading into the incipient stages of these practices have a faulty understanding of what the true game plan is.

They identify, correctly, that the mind and all of its injurious, involuntary thinking is the main culprit. They then deduce, logically, that the way to approach this problem is to try and conquer or control this mind that has caused them so much grief throughout their lives.

How does this strategy manifest? In meditation, people say to themselves, “Okay, let’s focus on stopping my crazy mind from thinking…”

This may work for a short while, but then the thoughts inevitably come charging back with a vengeance.

How we go wrong in mindfulness practice

In practicing mindfulness, it comes out when, for example, someone is out in nature and says,

“Wow. What a beautiful sunset. Let’s just stop thinking and be present with it…”

This also ends in frustration and increased thought traffic.

Or when their spouse says something that infuriates them, they stop, close their eyes, and say to themselves,

“Okay. I’m not going to let that incredibly stupid and insensitive comment rile me up. He/she probably didn’t mean it the way I’m taking it. Just chill out…”

That’s not mindfulness. It’s suppression.

Observe, don’t conquer

The point is that the human mind cannot be wrestled into submission by direct action. It’s simply too strong.

So, what is the best strategy for slaying our noggin dragons?

To observe your thinking mind.

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I’m not a Buddhist. I’m not an anything for that matter.

My MO has been to survey the totality of the spiritual landscape and embrace what makes sense and is useful.

But boy do I love me my Buddhism; specifically, its core tenet of the Four Noble Truths.

Those four are commonly known as:

1) All of life is suffering.

2) We suffer because we desire.

3) If we cease desiring, we eliminate suffering.

4) We cease desiring by following the Eightfold Path.

The crux of it all is that life is rough for we mere mortal Earthlings because we want too much. Get rid of that wanting and we’re golden.

Why am I writing an article on this when most of you aren’t Buddhists? Because most of you, as spiritual seekers, have heard of the Four Noble Truths and have given it some thought.

And there are two concepts that throw people off the scent of its truth which then lessens its value.

Analyzing those two misconceptions is an invaluable teaching in itself, even if you’ve never heard of the Four Noble Truths.

So, let’s get to it.

Misconception #1: Desire isn’t what you think

The first misconception has to do with the word desire. Most Westerners read that and go straight to things like sex and food and drink cravings.

But that is only Kama-tanha, in the Sanskrit, which is just one of the three types of desire that the Buddha teaches are the cause of suffering.

The other two are Bhava-tanha, the desperate urge to be famous, successful, or immortal, and Vibhava-tanha, the urge to escape, destroy, or avoid unpleasant feelings.

In short, most people believe that the suffering caused by desire is limited to things like a guy walking around all day wanting to have sex with every woman he sees or somebody wolfing down a pint of Ben & Jerry’s chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream every night. That’s only a small part of the desire that causes suffering.

My favorite spiritual teacher Michael Singer frequently refers to a quote from the sixth century Buddhist Third Zen Patriarch that replaces desire with a more accurate word.

The quote is:

“The great way is not difficult for those who have no preferences.”

Preferences. Not desires.

It’s about preference not desire

The difference between these two words is significant. Why? Because preference casts a much wider net.

What preference boils down to is wanting things to be a certain way.

Crucially, it also includes things we prefer not to happen, otherwise known as our fears.

So…

I want sex. I want cheese enchiladas for lunch. I want a lemon drop Martini before dinner tonight that has just the right combo of fresh lemon juice and simple syrup to go along with three ounces of vodka.

And…

I don’t want my boyfriend to break up with me. I don’t want to get fired. I don’t want my cancer to recur.

Suffering comes from clinging and resisting

The bottom line on all this? The Buddha meant that suffering is caused by clinging to the things we want and resisting the things we don’t want.

In other words, it’s not just about sex, drugs and rock and roll!

Why is this distinction so critical to understand? Because if we want to eliminate suffering and achieve liberation we need to know that getting there is really about accepting and not resisting what life throws our way.

Misconception #2: How to curb desire

The second misconception about the Four Noble Truths deals with the ‘how to’ of eliminating our preferences/desires. Buddhism teaches the Eightfold Path in achieving this, but that is an involved process followed by committed Buddhists.

Most Westerners who are aware of Buddhism but are not adherents, which is almost all of us, often jump to the logical thought process of:

“Okay, desire causes suffering. So to get rid of it, I’ll just work on not desiring anymore. I’ll curb my crazy ice cream habit by not buying any at the grocery store. I’ll stop eating enchiladas by not going out for Mexican food. I won’t go out at night to curb my lust for women…”

Going straight at curbing desire like this is not that path we want take. Why? Because that’s just suppression and renunciation and it doesn’t work.

It’s about working at the root

What does work? Working at the root, another concept emphasized in Buddhism. Trying to directly curb desire is like cutting off the top of a weed. It accomplishes nothing. To eliminate the weed we need to dig all the way to the root and then remove it.

So what we need to do is dig down to the root of desire. And doing that starts with asking ourselves this question:

What causes us to cling to the things we like and resist those that we don’t?

Ego, ego, ego

It should be no shock to any of you that the answer is…

The ego.

Which is all of the experiences we’ve had in life that were so good that we clung to them or so troubling that we resisted them. Whether we clung to or resisted them, those experiences got stored inside us as little pockets of energy that run our lives.

Examples?

“I had countless experiences throughout my life of people complimenting me on my beauty that, now in my 50s, I’m clinging to that by getting every cosmetic surgery in the book and starving myself to keep my figure.”

“My parents’ marriage and divorce was so ugly and tempestuous that I resisted all those terrible feelings, and therefore held on to all of them because I didn’t let them pass through. Now I’m forty and still haven’t had a relationship that’s lasted longer than a few months.”

Fine. So the ego is what causes us to cling and resist. What do we do?

Let go, let go, let go

We let go of the ego.

How?

That beauty queen? Every time she looks in the mirror and feels that pang of ‘less than,’ she closes her eyes, relaxes around the feeling that has arisen…and lets it go.

Every day. Day after day. Month after month. Year after year.

Same for the relationship-phobe. Every time he gets in a relationship and starts to get feelings of panic, all of which trace back to his boyhood, he relaxes around those feelings as best he can…and lets go.

Every day. Day after day. Month after month. Year after year.

By letting go of all that baggage, both of these people will, ever so gradually, start to cling and resist less and less.

And, as Noble Truth number three states, their suffering will diminish.

The takeaway

To recap:

1) Desire is far more than sex and ice cream. It’s about wanting things to be a certain way, which involves resisting and not accepting what life brings our way.

2) We don’t curb our desires directly, but by letting go of what causes them in the first place: The ego.

Bottom line: The more we let go of our egos, the less we prefer everything to be a certain way. And the less preferring we do, the less suffering we experience.

Over and out.

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Thousands of books about work, work habits, what to do, what not to do, have been written by a plethora of brilliant minds over the millennia, especially in the last fifty years. I’ve read some (The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey comes to mind), but certainly not all.

For my money, the most profound advice of all regarding work comes from a short passage in my favorite book of wisdom, the Tao te Ching, written 2,500 years ago by Lao Tzu.

From Chapter 24:

“He who clings to his work will create nothing that endures. If you want to accord with the Tao, just do your job, then let go.”

That’s it. Just do your job then let it go. What does that mean?

What it means for writers

Let’s start with what this would mean for a Substack writer. It means work your ass off on the article you’re working on. Put in all the blood, sweat, toil and tears you can muster to make it the best it can be. Then submit it and move on to your next piece.

What shouldn’t you do? Check your stats page every five minutes to see how many reads you’ve gotten. Or call every friend you have and see what they think about your latest feat of brilliance. Or spend ten percent of your time writing and ninety percent pushing it on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube.

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I tend to use an unscientific and unprofessional word to describe anxiety: It sucks. One major reason it sucks is that anxiety can be hugely difficult to eliminate, especially the free-floating sort that has no easily discernible cause.

But there is one type that we can discern the cause and that we can exorcise and that is anticipatory anxiety (AA).

What do I mean by AA? It’s the anxiety we produce when we forecast how we’ll feel if things don’t go as planned and then we feel anxious about it. Without anything bad happening at all.

As Thomas Jefferson famously wrote:

“How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened.”

The pain Jefferson references comes in the form of anxiety.

The Gerkens head to Asia

To illustrate this I’ll use the two week trip I just took to South Korea and Japan with my wife and three kids. Traveling with two teenagers and a nine year old? No anxiety there, right?

I wish.

Traveling, of course, presents numerous opportunities for falling into the anticipatory anxiety trap. Here are a few examples I faced in Asia where I could have succumbed.

-The first bout of potential AA came in the days before we even left. Because of the Iran War gas price spike, air fares also spiked. Bottom line: I paid $10,000 for five round trip tickets to Asia, far more than I’ve ever paid. So in the days before we left, the temptation to fret about our Uber to the airport being late, getting stuck in traffic on the 405 freeway and my youngest kid not being able to check-in online for reasons we couldn’t determine, was front and center.

-We booked a nonrefundable river raft trip north of Kyoto for which we had to arrive at 9 am. That meant getting the teenagers up early, never an easy task. So the potential disaster of, “I just want to sleep. Leave me alone,” could have crept into my psyche the night before and through the night, resulting in lousy sleep for me.

-We also booked a nonrefundable Japanese tea ceremony in Kanazawa. My teen daughter and I needed to take a taxi from our hotel and meet the other three there. Would my wife, son and other daughter be able to find the place, which was inside the labyrinthine Kenroku Gardens? Would the taxi the hotel called for my daughter and me show up on time?

Fortunately for us, we made it to LAX no problem and got to the raft trip and tea ceremony without any problems.

But that’s not the point. Because this article is about eliminating any of this anticipatory anxiety in the first place.

So the truly good news is that I didn’t have any AA with these three examples or any other part of our trip.

Michael Singer’s invaluable teaching

Why not? What was my magical remedy for not doing what most people do, which is worry and get anxious over stuff that might happen?

The answer lies in a teaching from Michael Singer, my main spiritual guide.

The teaching boils down to this: Handling what life throws our way.

Before you click away to check your Instagram because this sounds so simple and ridiculous, let me explain.

The reason we subject ourselves to anticipatory anxiety is because we don’t think we can handle something.

“If we miss our flight to Seoul, I’ll be out $10,000 and I won’t be able to handle that!”

We get tense and anxious about this in the days before and day of the flight because, in an unconscious and insidious way, we think that will lead us to be more aware and “on the ball” in getting to the airport on time and all the rest.

I think we also get uptight and anxious so that if the worst does happen—we miss the flight—we will have already girded our insides to handle the blow.

We’ve handled adverse situations in the past

But here’s the thing. We do handle it when things go south in our lives. Whether it’s canceled flights, missed appointments because we got stuck in traffic or thousands of other examples, we do handle it.

It may not be fun and pretty, but we’re still here, right? However bad the awful event, it didn’t kill us.

And that leads to the crux of this piece so please lean in and focus.

The worry is unnecessary

We’ve already proven we can handle things in life so it isn’t necessary to torture ourselves with anticipatory anxiety. In other words, why worry about missing the expensive flight to Seoul if I know I can and will handle it?

I used this teaching to stave off AA on all three of those examples of my family trip to Asia…and many more.

What specifically did I do? Each time an anxious thought arose like —

“Boy, I hope the Uber arrives on time and we don’t hit traffic on the way to the airport,”

I would nip it in the bud by saying to myself,

“If we miss the flight, I’ll handle it.”

A critical point to realize is that AA overtakes us in myriad situations for a simple reason: It’s automatic. We don’t even think about it.

We worry just…because we’re used to it

When we start wigging out the night before we travel, it just happens.

What Michael Singer’s teaching does is merely get us to look at the reality of things…

We have handled things in the past, so why get all spun up in anticipation of things going wrong?

That previous sentence is key to the whole shebang. So step one is embedding that truth in your noggin. You’ve handled it before, so why worry?

Step two is to practice becoming aware when you notice anticipatory anxiety thoughts arising and telling yourself that if whatever adverse event happens, you’ll handle it.

It’s that simple.

The takeaway

I hope this all makes sense to you because it is profoundly helpful.

Think of the hundreds, actually thousands, of times in your life that you have gotten unnecessarily anxious about something coming up in the near future.

Now think of how how much calmer and peaceful your life will be when you eliminate that anxiety going forward.

Ahh…

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Happiness is a tough topic. Why? Because what we deem happiness to be guides how we live our lives. And there is much disagreement over what happiness is or should be.

Here’s what the late Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh believed:

“Many people think excitement is happiness. But when you are excited you are not peaceful. True happiness is based on peace.”

Now do you see why happiness is a tough topic? Because what we believe will make us happy is what we pursue in life. And Thich Nhat Hanh is saying that pursuing excitement will not make us happy.

What I mean by excitement

Since excitement and peace are just a collection of letters making up two words, let’s define, using examples, what we mean by both.

I believe excitement arises from things like getting that big promotion at work, buying a flashy new car or even something like, “Oh my God! She agreed to go on a date with me!”

Do any of these occurrences make us feel peaceful inside? No.

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I wrote an article a few years ago about the very first lines of my favorite book of wisdom, the Tao te Ching. They go like this:

“The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name.”

The point of the piece was that the higher truths about God/The Tao/Universe/Nature can’t be understood through language or naming things. In other words, trying to use our minds to comprehend the weightier matters of the universe is futile.

How best then to approach these matters? By sensing them.

The purpose of today’s piece is to expand on the topic of transcending language. If this sounds confusing, here are three examples that illustrate what I mean.

Example #1: Meditating on a single word

The example that fueled the idea for this article came from my meditation practice. For many years one of my go-to cues has involved saying a single word in my head. I’d do it in the last part of my meditation sessions, after I’d calmed down into some level of presence.

All it entails is this: I inhale, then on the exhale I say in my head the word ‘still.’ And just keep doing that.

I’ve found that simply saying ‘still’ on each exhale deepens and perpetuates the stillness I’m already feeling.

Sensing the stillness without saying the word

Here’s the wrinkle I’ve added in the past few weeks. Instead of saying ‘still’ on the exhale, I focus solely on sensing the stillness. It’s subtle.

Why is this “better” for me? What does eliminating words/language from my meditation accomplish?

It allows me to go deeper. To feel even more still.

Why is this? It gets back to those first few lines of the Tao. The naming and speaking of things take us further away from them.

Our souls don’t know the language

It makes sense if you think about it. The soul doesn’t know anything about language or words.

We’re born with a spirit that manifests as energy/shakti/chi coursing through our bodies. That spirit is not of the mind. It’s much deeper and stronger than anything the mind can possibly fathom.

But it’s also elusive. And mysterious. If it wasn’t, we’d know the answers to the big questions of life.

Example #2: Near-death experiences

That brings me to another example, one that blows my mind. It comes from NDEs (near-death experiences), a subject that I’m shocked doesn’t receive more attention.

You’ve heard of the many common experiences of those who have medically died and come back to life, whether from a heart attack, car accident or any number of causes.

The one that I find most consequential is of those who report being next to a brilliant, white light. That light gives them a feeling of total and complete love and acceptance. It also tells the near-dead not to worry. That everything is going to be okay.

But here’s the catch: These people all say that this white light (God? Who knows?) didn’t actually speak to them. It just somehow communicated the above in a way they couldn’t explain.

That, to me, is the perfect example of how the higher power/higher plane communicates in ways other than language.

Example #3: Movie dates

In my early dating years (high school) I used to take girls to movies. Mostly because I loved movies. Who doesn’t?

But I remember my dad always telling me, “Why do you take a date to the movies? You’re just sitting there in the dark. Go out for dinner where you can talk and get to know each other.”

Well, here’s the thing. I look back and see that two relative strangers watching a movie together felt intimate to me. It was if our souls would come out and get to know each other while our egoic minds stayed out of it. No talking. Just our energies commingling. That’s how it felt to me.

The supposition of this piece, then, is that removing the barrier of language in certain areas of our lives will serve to deepen our connection to this subtle and mysterious higher power.

How can we take that idea and make it useful to us in some practical way? Consider trying this no-language thing in these three situations, and any others that strike your fancy:

1. Meditation: If you meditate and use word cues as part of your practice, try dispensing with the words for part of a session. Sense them without saying them. See how it goes.

I already mentioned the use of ‘still.’ I also frequently use ‘relax’ in the early part of a session when doing the body scan. And of course, ‘neck,’ ‘hand,’ ‘jaw,’ and several other body parts. I’ve been sensing those, too, rather saying the words in my head.

2. Any Beautiful Scene: Let’s say you’re watching an absolutely sublime sunset; pinks, reds, and oranges mingling to form a colorful concoction of natural beauty that knocks your socks off.

Try something different. Resist the temptation of saying to yourself or even somebody who’s watching with you, “Wow, what an amazing sunset! Look at the amalgam of brilliant colors!”

Instead, try following your breath a few times. Then look at the sunset from a place of pure presence. No thought. No words. No describing. No commenting.

Commune with the sunset

Let your conscious presence commune with the sunset. Let the natural you commingle with this other part of nature…the sunset.

Granted, this can be hard. I’m one of those who get excited about things and want to share my thoughts, emotions, and enthusiasm with others. Or with myself if I’m alone.

The problem is that when we do this, we cheat ourselves out of deeper, more profound experiences.

3. Listening to music: When listening to one of your favorite songs, one that transports you to that other realm, try to be there completely. In the moment. Experiencing the sounds of the music with no commentary in your head.

Treat the music like that sublime sunset. Just you and it communing with each other. Dancing with each other. No words. No language. No thinking. No involving the mind.

The takeaway

The key point here is to take the middleman, language, out of certain situations so that the higher power in us can commune with the higher power “out there.”

It’s about learning to communicate in the mysterious language of the Universe.

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I believe the Tao Te Ching is the wisest book ever written. Thought to be written in China by Lao Tzu some 2,500 years ago, the Tao is a guidebook on how to live life.

What does Lao Tzu mean by the Tao? Here’s the definition given in the Merriam-Webster dictionary:

“The unconditional and unknowable source and guiding principle of all reality.”

One could say that God and the Tao are interchangeable. Or the Tao and nature. Or this: The Tao is what existed before the Big Bang occurred 13.8 billion years ago.

The passage I’m writing about today is chapter 33. This is it:

“Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom.

Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power.”

What Lao Tzu is saying here is that the riches of life are found inside us.

When I come across wisdom like this that was imparted so long ago and that resonates with me, you know what I do? I lean in. And I listen.

Putting chapter 33 into action

What would listening to this Tao nugget entail for us?

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That Buddha was one wise dude.

His main teaching was that suffering comes from wanting things to be a certain way. Stop doing that and the suffering falls away.

So powerful. So simple. So true.

But as impactful to me is his emphasis on the concept of impermanence. What is that?

Here’s how Mr. AI explains impermanence:

“The Buddhist teaching that n…

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My favorite spiritual teacher Michael Singer has offered his tug of war teaching in several talks I’ve listened to. As usual, it is pithy, powerful and wise.

Let’s get into it with this from my AI pal:

“A tug of war is a competitive sporting game where two teams pull on opposite ends of a rope, each trying to drag the othe…

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If I was back in my Hollywood screenwriting days and was writing this article as a movie, I’d title it: “Letting Go of the Ego 14: Resistance Kills.”

Why fourteen? Let’s face it, I’ve written a lot about letting go of the ego, something I have zero misgivings about. It’s foundational to our well-being.

We’ve all accumulated and stored all sorts of egoic gunk throughout our lives and unless we do the work of letting it go, it just sits there. Doing what? Running, and often ruining, our lives.

Meditation won’t get you there

I don’t care if you meditate five hours a day, unless you let go of that baggage (called Samskaras in Sanskrit), it’s not going anywhere. Scars from parents’ divorces, bad break-ups, pressure to “succeed” heaped on you by overbearing parents, siblings and friends…

It all has to go.

We’ve attacked the “how” to let go from several vantage points in previous articles. Today’s teaching is, like the others, simple and invaluable.

As is the case with so many of the teachings I have learned from the likes of Ram Dass, Michael Singer and Eckhart Tolle, the key to this one is awareness.

As Tolle eloquently put it:

“Awareness is the greatest agent for change.”

I’ll keep using that quote until my fingers turn blue from typing it.

Awareness is essential

Why is awareness so central to spiritual growth? Because unless we’re aware that something we’re doing is harmful to us, we’ll never do anything to correct it.

Such is the case when our emotional/egoic baggage is poked. How so?

Let’s take a simple example. Your dysfunctional parents drilled into you from day one that you were not the sharpest tool in the shed.

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Today’s piece is going to be another in a long line devoted to illuminating something critically important, this time understanding our minds.

The whole point of articles like this is to clarify and heighten your understanding of something that is absolutely essential.

Featured today is Joseph Goldstein, someone I’ve be…

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Happiness. It’s a loaded word. Call it contentment. Inner peace. Whatever we call it, let’s all agree that it is what all humans want in life.

The core problem most people have is they pursue paths that don’t lead to happiness. Society, our parents, our friends…they all send us in the wrong direction when it comes to bei…

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I’ve written frequently about the importance of responding and not reacting during tense, confrontational situations.

It’s the difference between possibly resolving a dispute in a constructive manner that benefits you or dooming yourself to outcomes that cause you great harm. That harm can be as minor as an hour of giving the cold shoulder to your “opponent,” or as serious as ending up in divorce court.

Bottom line: It’s worth putting in the work to avoid those explosions.

But what is that work? What can we do to save ourselves from ourselves?

I try to approach these challenges from a practical, logical standpoint. Here’s what I’ve come up with on the explosion thing.

Those critical first seconds

First, so many of the fractious scenes we encounter come down to how we respond in those first few seconds after our inner lava has been stirred. Most of us don’t make it past those first moments. We explode.

I’ve gotten comments from many readers attesting to how difficult it is to make it past the ‘reaction’ phase to the ‘respond’ phase.

Fine. The key question then becomes: What can we do to strengthen our ability to get through those first few seconds without exploding?

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In all the years I’ve been writing about and studying the spiritual path, nothing has vexed me more than the idea behind attachment.

And it’s important. Why? Because attachment lies at the heart of our spiritual journey.

You know who thought so? The Buddha, one of the wisest beings to ever live, who said:

“The root of suffering is attachment.”

Sounds pretty…

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Let me state up front that I am not a high being. Far from it.

High beings are those like Ramakrishna, Ramana Maharshi and Neem Karoli Baba, people who shed their egos and became close to pure consciousness.

Me? I still fly off the handle when my teenage daughter makes my nine-year-old daughter cry. I have a ways to go…

The question I’d ask

But if I were you, someone interested in articles I write about traveling the spiritual path, I’d want to ask this question of me: Of all these things you write about, which work best for you?

The answer is that many work for me. But…

There is one that I find helps me the most. And it is this:

Accepting and not resisting what comes my way.

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Here’s how I look at studying the macro matters of the metaphysical.

Imagine a circle. At its center is another, smaller circle.

The circle of truth

That small circle is the absolute truth of the human condition. And from several points on the bigger circle, we can draw a line to the smaller circle of truth.

What those…

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I know I sound like a broken record on this ‘letting go’ thing. And I don’t apologize for it. Because letting go is the central activity required for liberation.

Put another way. When my wife and any of her friends ask me for advice about tennis – I’ve played since I was eight and was a four-year varsity letterman at Princeton – I tell them, again and again, that job number one is to be loose. Be fluid. That is central to playing good tennis.

The point is that the fundamentals of any endeavor – writing, piano, golf – need to be stressed, over and over and over, in furtherance of mastering said endeavor.

Letting go leads to liberation

Well, no endeavor is more important and yields more benefit than liberating ourselves from ourselves. And, as Michael Singer teaches, the root of liberation lies in letting go.

Why is that so? You’ve heard it before, but here it is again.

Starting in our youngest years, we had experiences that we either really liked, so we clung to them and want them to repeat, or, much more common, really didn’t like, so we resisted them, thinking that would protect us. In both of those scenarios, we held onto those experiences.

That holding on manifests inside as energy. Stuck energy, unfortunately. Because that stuck energy, which collectively comprises the ego, runs and ruins our lives. How?

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The impetus for writing this came the other day in a two-hour conversation with my great friend and spiritual confidant Nick Winger, a close approximation of his name (and no, it wasn’t Mickey Singer).

We went deep, covering everything from what consciousness is, what the Universe wants to achieve through we mortal beings…

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This article will be particularly impactful for any of you who place yourselves on the sensitive end of the sensitivity spectrum. I imagine that’s a goodly sum of you as we peeps interested in the spiritual tend to be on the sensitive side.

The story starts years ago when I heard my favorite spiritual teacher, Michael Singer, say something in one of his talks that made my ears prick up. In subsequent talks over the years, Singer said it again. And again. And again.

So why am I just getting around to writing about this now rather than years ago? I should have. Mea culpa.

Well, better late than never, so let’s giddy up to the meat of the matter.

I’ll start by asking: Do you ‘take things personally’ on a regular basis? What do I mean by ‘take things personally’? I think you know but here are a couple of examples to illustrate.

-You’re talking with an acquaintance at a cocktail party when they abruptly bolt from you to talk with someone “more important.” You take it personally.

-Your spouse says you’ve been slacking off on the household upkeep. You take it personally.

-Your surly teenage daughter says the jeans you’re wearing look terrible on you. You take it personally.

Taking these perceived slights personally manifests in different ways for different people but usually includes some kind of physical jolt or pang inside. I feel that jolt in my stomach.

That brings us to the teaching du jour, Singer’s two-word gem of wisdom:

“Nothing’s personal.”

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