Travis Eneix

I’ve come a fair distance in recovering my physical health and fitness over the last sixteen years. Down from a scale weight of 396 pounds to 190, give or take a five pound swing. My resting heart rate ha gone from 125 beats per minute to 52. My blood pressure has gone from through the roof to text book perfect. I’ve gone from huffing wind after waddling to the refrigerator and back to enjoying fast pace jaunts of a mile without breaking a sweat. Life has gotten better. And, all that has taken a lot of hard work.

My mother, bless her, is not in the best of health. She is grappling with obesity, very bad knees, and suffered a massive heart attack about two years back. She needs a walker if she is going to go very far, and stairs are a big challenge. She spends a lot of time sitting and watching television. She is living an unhealthy lifestyle and knows it. There’s the rub.

My mother is a very smart woman, with a degree in nursing and a long career of psych nursing behind her. She put in twenty years at the Veterans Administration hospital, and was a rock star of a group therapist. She is no dummy. She knows better than to leave her body in its current condition, and she knows that she knows it. Still, she is not taking action and she laments that.

I was visiting with her the other day and we were discussing these very issues. The problem comes down to feeling too uncomfortable in her body to do anything about it.

That’s the break point.

The Chinese have a saying in the Kung Fu circles, “You have to be ready to eat bitter.” That phrase helped me a great deal in the early years of my martial arts training as a morbidly obese man. It still helps.

If you are living in a discomforting physical level of health, the only way out is with more discomfort. Exercise is not easy. It is work. The pay off is a more comfortable existence, but the road there is not.

The American phrase for this is, “No Pain, no Gain.” That doesn’t quite work for me as well as the Chinese saying above. “No Pain, no Gain”, as I have often heard it used, seems to imply that you must suffer. Suffering comes from thinking that things should be other than they are.  The Chinese sentiment is more like taking medicine. It may be unpleasant, but it’s good for you.

It takes time to live a life of only lazy comfort to get your body to the point where life itself is discomforting.  It will take time, and discomfort to get out.  Learn to value discomfort and live a life free from suffering.

We all get these doing this Awakening stuff. I had one the other day I wanted to share. I have been working with the Self-Inquiry taught by Ramana Maharshi and championed in the modern day by John Sherman, with a side order of the Headless Way as pioneered by Douglas Harding.

I’ve posted before about the mantra I have been using for my practice here. My mantra is this, “If I can see it, it is not me.” See in this instance stands for being aware of rather than literal seeing, but, “If I can be aware of it, it is not me” doesn’t roll off the tongue as well. This mantra helps me push back into the ground of being, and up to the next stage of integrated awareness.

So, the other day I was running this mantra during my daily morning meditation and a realization came to me. I am aware of being aware. This snapped me into a big moment of, “I am…” and just that. For a timeless time the tumult of thoughts that regularly follows the internal, “I am” stopped. I just am. Nothing special about that, just present. Ordinary.

It occurs to me that the Ego that the spiritual path is so concerned about, the thing that needs to be fixed or dealt with before we can be just what we are, is only the perfectly innocent result of having been born into this world of Form as a distinct Form. The ego is just the function of a distinct body-mind. It doesn’t change the fact that I am, one iota. No harm in that, and only suffering, really, when I struggle with it. It’s like the cute little puppy who gets startled by the sight of his own tail, and wanting desperately to make friends and sniff the backside of a potential new pal, whirls in circles getting more and more bothered until he collapses in a pile of dizziness.

Are you polluting the world or cleaning up the mess? You are responsible for your inner space; nobody else is, just as you are responsible for the planet. As within, so without: If humans clear inner pollution, then they will also cease to create outer pollution. - Eckhart Tolle

If anyone tells you a person speaks ill of you, do not make excuse about what is said but answer, “He was ignorant of my other faults else he would not have mentioned these alone.” - Epictetus

As I mentioned before, John Sherman does live world wide online satsangs about twice a month. You can check the schedule here. His talk today was just as encouraging, for me, as it always is. His offering to the worlds is simple, and he always circles back to it. It was the offering her received from Gangaji, and then from the words/work of Ramana Maharshi.

The offering is this (in my words) -

• All spiritual and religious works of the world have at their heart the simple realization that the problem of our lives all issue from a false identification of what we are.
• And, that the only thing we have ever wanted was to know what we are.
• So, the solution to the problem is to come to know the Truth of what we are, which is all we have ever wanted.
• The method is just to look, whenever you can, at the basic knowledge that you always know that you are here. That you exist. No matter what is occurring in your life, the truth that you are, simply are, is always available.

John is on a warm-hearted mission to offer this idea, this practice, to everyone, and to get them to try and look, just once, at the fact that they always know that they are here.  I think that’s one of the sweetest life goals possible.  Cheers!