Unshakable Trust: Addressing Confusion Around Fragility and Process

I want to address the issue of Fragility in practice a bit more after a recent post.

There is a big difference between someone who is practicing, perhaps more of a beginner, and they are emotionally or psychologically fragile, versus someone who has touched this deep place in their practice and they are in the midst of integrating this into their lives and walking around.

The second one is coming from this place of unshakable trust, this place where no matter what, they are okay. They may still have trauma in their system and residual emotional issues. They may have stuck places they are working to let go of. But they have a foundation of great unwavering faith. They have touched a place beyond trauma, beyond psychological issues. Their perspective is fundamentally different from someone who has not experienced this shift.

The first one is still working from a place of fundamental confusion. Their perspective of who they are has no root, and they are pulled between this concept of truth and that, this fleeting desire and that one, never truly meeting their lives. Never seeing this bigger life, this huge mind. They have not touched this Great River which wipes out this confused perspective, leaving only a shadow, which must be honestly looked at and shed over a couple of decades.

People imagine that their practice will be a gradual working on smoothing out and healing trauma until they reach a place they imagine, and that will be enlightenment. Or that it will be what they had always hoped for. This is confused. What actually happens is when people go truly deep into practice, they come to a place of fundamental shift in perspective, where they see that their small view of themselves was irrelevant. The practice is not a linear process but a true shift in perspective, whereby the old way of viewing life is seen through.

People begin to shift when they start to feel that something is happening in their process beyond their understanding, and they can gradually trust in something bigger than the trajectory they had envisioned. And the rabbit hole keeps going deeper.

Psychological health then happens within this bigger, transformed perspective, rather than a gradual refining of the same perspective.

This shift is sudden, as it is a change of perspective. We go from one domain to an entirely different, much more open one. It is not always dramatic, but it can be seismic.

In fact, we are all there now, but we are stuck accidentally gripping on to our mistaken perspective.

Once we touch this, we then have the long process of learning to live from that place and have our lives taken over by it and through it. It is important to have support in many ways during this time, and good friends of the path.

I see a lot of spirituality as coming from the first, smaller perspective. This is much of what the spiritual marketplace is selling. And just to be clear, what I am sharing in my work is not the first, but the second perspective.

Of course we must work on our psychological health. Of course we must let go of trauma and heal. We should all be working on that no matter where we are in our process. But the point of practice is to deeply realize this huge perspective, die into that, and to touch this place of pure faith. Then we can begin to be useful to society.

Hugs to all of you. Thank you for reading.

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