All of us suffer, and yet the suffering of each one of us is so different from the next. Too much heat for me is suffering. Too much cold for someone else is suffering. The beach sand drives my friend crazy. I can’t get enough of it! Being in nature frightens some folks, but the noise of the city causes anxiety for someone else. Often, what causes our suffering is not the objective thing, but our interpretation of it. This is the subject matter of one of my all-time favorite books: Falling into Grace by Adyashanti. A Zen practitioner and teacher in California, Adyashanti invites us to take a deep dive into our own suffering to understand its root causes. “The ways that we struggle keep us locked and confined within the prison of the ego. When we begin to see that our mind is just a storyteller, however, then we begin to listen – not for more thoughts or more complicated understandings, but for the silence. It is when you listen in this way that you can see that it is only your mind that has the capacity to make you suffer. Only your mind has the capacity to convince you to struggle. Only your mind, nothing else. It’s all an inside job.” p. 88
Ultimately, Adyashanti brings us up out of the cauldron of our despair and into a larger awareness that peace already exists within us if we can learn to release what we struggle with, become aware of what we resist, and curtail our black and white, right and wrong judgments. From time to time throughout the book, he explores the life of Jesus in light of his teachings, noting how Jesus lived and walked as a human being, but did not get swept up into the fear that his apostles felt or resist what was happening, including going to Jerusalem when his friends were warning him of the dangers there. He presents Jesus as the model for this way of being in the world. Sometimes books on this subject can be pretty heady, but I found Adyashanti very conversational and easy to read, and definitely worth the time. And if you enjoy Falling into Grace, his book Emptiness Dancing is also worth a read!
