Everything Is The Path

By freddielaraThoughts

Everything Is The Path

This is a delicious saying in Buddhism and in metaphysics. Everything that happens, even the way I responded or didn’t respond is part of the path. What is the path? For me it’s the mundane, and exciting , joyful and painful, peaceful and chaotic parts of life. It is everything that happens, the way I reacted to those things, all that I’m sensing and feeling , what I know and what I don’t have awareness of in my psyche, it is the beautiful and the ugly , the fragrant and the nauseating, my psychology and my behavior. And although I would love to run away from some of the more unpleasant things that I experience I cannot for there they are.

As I was watching American horror story the other nite (congrats dear Leslie Jordan on joining the cast) it struck me that the always fascinating Miss Jessica Lange has been through some shit! You just know that the paths she has been through , well that she knows them well.There is no running away from the darker , more unpleasant parts of life for her. And because she had the courage to look at them her performances are always painful and layered and beautiful.

One thing I’m trying to practice more diligently is the idea that I have no control over people, places and things. Circumstances happen, life happens, the bills come, the lover moves out, the parking tickets come and when I decide to fight it I create more suffering in my life. Sure, some circumstances are inherently unpleasant but it’s not the thing itself that adds the extra layer of unpleasantness, it’s my continual need to react to it in a negative way that’s creates a barrier to my peace. And as an actor, trying to run from what is happening right now will keep me from an authentic emotional response.

I remember hearing a story about a monk. The Buddha had just passed away and, as he was the closest friend to the teacher, he sat at the end of his bed and was sobbing uncontrollably. One of the younger monks saw this and came to him and said “I thought that all attachment was wrong, if so why are you crying?” The elder monk looked at him thoughtfully and responded “because I am sad”. This illustrated to me so painfully that sometimes life is unpleasant, that sometimes grief is the correct response. When we are grieving a loss, or dealing with deep emotional pain then our grief can be the only authentic emotional response.

But that’s not what I’m talking about here. I sometimes have a tendency to add more reaction than what is necessary trying to find a metaphoric meaning behind it, or what it says about me, or what others may think about me. Usually the only best response is to grieve and to get on with the dealing of what we can transform and leave what we can’t change alone. We can’t change it so best to feel it and get to the other side of the unpleasantness.

Over time we see that we have made everything that comes into our life part of the path. We don’t run from life, we just know that this too shall pass and when we get to the other side of it we have yet another experience we can utilize in our work. We have yet another layer that we can layer into our script or scene. Now our pain becomes part of our tool kit and useful for others as well. “This is how I walked through this fire and you can too” “this is how I survived being human and you will as well” .

And that’s not to say that we will ever have lived through everything that playwrights have written about. Most of the time the playwright stretches us out into the farthest reaches of human experience. This is where we use our powers of imagination to create a “what if?” . What if I had so much anger I could destroy another person? What if I loved beyond my capabilities and years? What if my actions were more beautiful or terrifying than I could ever imagine doing in my everyday life? Then we search for the inherent thematic chord in all of that that resonates for us in that situation. We search for the similar psychology that it is to be human, remembering that we are all of us connected and share the same human experience. We play in our imagination until we find a “what if?” that is similar to something we have felt.

But by staying still and experiencing all of life instead of running from it we begin to learn that we have the human strength to survive anything that life throws our way. That we can wait until life shifts yet again as it always does due to the impermanence of all things. That not only can we survive it but we can then use our experience in our work and light the path for those watching us and in need of some direction and hope . We illuminate not only humanity but their path to their strength and survival. All because we have made “everything the path”.