No Longer Waiting

"She had been on the quest for so long that the reasons for it were no longer clear to her. She was just moving, step after step, too tired to think. Having recently fallen down a slippery bank into a thicket, she was bruised and scratched, her daring leaps of former times now too difficult to execute. Seeing a river in the distance, she made her way there to get a drink and wash her wounds. Afterward she lay under a nearby tree thinking that if she could just get some rest, she would be able to renew her journey with invigorated determination. After all, the quest was important. The quest was all there was.

She was about to drift off to sleep when she noticed an old woman sitting on the riverbank nearby. The woman, who had been gazing at the water, turned and silently gestured to her, opening her arms with palms outward as if to say, “Just this.” Yes, just this, the woman thought as she fell into a deep sleep. When she awoke several hours later, evening had fallen and the old woman was gone. Getting up, she realized that something was very different. The stars were now shining pinpoints within her being, their light no longer traveling from a distance but encompassed by her awareness as glowing prisms within the vast regions of herself. The river and its sound, the trees and their smell—all now existed in a sweeping whole, a multidimensional canvas of color, forms, and sensations.

She realized in a flash that it had always been so. Her restless thoughts, so long her only companions, disappeared into a void as soon as they arose, as though pulled into space. They were whispers in a cathedral. They were ghosts, without relevance. She remembered that she had been on a quest, but now the idea of it seemed strange, and she could no longer hold the thought of its importance. The silence, on the other hand, seemed almost loud in contrast. She spent the rest of the night feeling like a bird that had been freed from a cage into a palace of starlight, the silence now and again punctuated by the words “just this,” though even these words were claimed by it…”

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"For nearly twenty years I practiced Buddhist meditation in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, while studying the great texts of Asian philosophy. I traveled the world many times over, sometimes as a dharma bum, sometimes as a bohemian journalist, and sometimes first class. I backpacked overland from Italy to India, hitchhiked across the Moroccan desert, swam with dolphins, kayaked with orca whales, slept under stars in Afghanistan, and hiked mountains in Argentina, Switzerland, and India. I drove on roads laden with land mines on the Cambodian border while reporting on the war there, and I sat with many of the great contemporary spiritual teachers in some of the most peaceful places on earth. I went to Ladakh the first year it opened for visitors, spent many nights watching bodies burn on river ghats in India, chanted to Siva till dawn in Benares, danced to reggae till dawn in Jamaica. I watched lunar eclipses from a sailboat in the South Pacific while stoned on psychedelics and from the snowy grounds of a New England monastery while stoned on silence. I had an international community of interesting, funny, and kindhearted friends engaged in spiritual, social, and environmental causes. I attended conferences and vacationed in the world’s most exotic playgrounds. I read important works of literature, nonfiction, and the new sciences.

Along the way, I also had a number of romantic relationships with incredible men and once fell so wildly, passionately, and erotically in love that I may never quite recover from it. But there was always something missing, and so the search went on. The problem was that no matter how satiated and alive I felt in moments of profound experience, it didn’t last. Like the hunger that returns only hours after the gourmet meal, or the thirst that follows soon after being quenched, the experience of fulfillment was limited by time. I yearned for a satisfaction deep in my being, unmitigated by time, but I found only a collection of experiences that had all ended. The search had been an attempt to make more of myself. No matter how noble my various endeavors, the intention to enhance me remained a primary motivation.

Even in meditation practice there was a hope that I would attain something one day, something more would be added on. I would get the insight, realization, satori, or enlightenment, and then I might finally be able to relax. I was always toppling forward, looking for the next experience, the next fix. During an electrifying moment of aliveness, I would also be aware of its impending end and of the need to re-create the feeling again somehow. I would be distracted from the full enjoyment of it by a desire to savor it later. I would miss the experience I was having in the present, like people who go on adventures and spend most of their time taking photographs, trying to capture their moments for later enjoyment and seeing present reality only through a tiny lens, fixated on a future that never comes.

Meeting my teacher Poonjaji woke an intelligence in me that knew there was nothing to do or to get and that the search itself was the problem. The very idea of a search must begin by thinking that something is missing. It assumes deprivation at the outset. What if you knew that nothing is missing—right now—that nothing is needed for your experience of aliveness but being alive? What need would there be for a search? What would you hope for? Picture it right now. What do you want in the future? What would it give you if you had it? Whatever that is, is it not available right now in your own being?"

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"The thing is to not postpone living your life. There is a subtle way that we have of waiting for something to come or waiting to get rid of something we have (even in the case of extra body weight, for instance) and thinking that our real life will begin then. Your real life is happening now, and there is no guarantee for any of us how long that life will be. As we let ourselves live fully in present awareness, it is as though we are experiencing life at last. We are no longer waiting."

~ Catherine Ingram is a renowned dharma teacher who has been leading Dharma Dialogues and retreats since 1992.