The Path Is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You

by Matt Licata

In the spirit of open inquiry, we may discover how much of our “fixing” activity arises not from true compassion for the other but from an unresolved relationship with the darkness within.

Possibly the kindest thing we can offer our suffering friend is to sit in the charged energy with them, holding their experience and staying close, removing the burden that they come out of their pain, feel better, transform, or heal in order for us to stay near.

When we prioritize the urgency of relief over the slowness of presence, it is very easy to overlook the dark yet pregnant creativity and guidance that is seeking to emerge. In ways they may not be able to articulate in a moment of pain and confusion, their deepest longing may be to have their experience held rather than “cured,” to know that there is someone on this planet who can truly feel them, as they are, and that they do not need to become someone else to maintain the connection.

As we turn to embrace our own unmet disappointment, grief, and despair, we remove the burden from others to care for this material on our behalf, which they cannot do, despite the most genuine, heartfelt intention on their part.

From the perspective of wholeness, every inner experience is worthy of our attention, ultimately workable, and a pathway back home into presence. From within this new orientation (which may be a bit disorienting at first), the idea of a particular feeling being an “obstacle” falls away and is replaced by a deepening curiosity to know ourselves at the most subtle levels.

We need only look to our intimate relationships as very vivid reminders of that which remains unresolved within us. Owing to the power of intimacy to constellate this material and bring it into the here and now, relationship might be seen as the royal road to the unconscious, a modern-day temple and crucible in which split-off, dissociated material may be most skillfully illuminated and worked through. Especially as we allow another to matter to us, let them into our hearts, and assume the risks that vulnerable, exposed, embodied intimacy always requires, we can count on this material to vividly present itself as it longs for holding and metabolization. As nearly all of our early wounding arose within interpersonal contexts, it makes sense that it will be most powerfully activated (as well as untangled) within a relational field. Many of us have experienced this, often the hard way, in our journeys as lovers, partners, parents, children, close friends, and clients in therapy. We all know the experience of having someone we care about say something rather innocuous, or fail to respond right away or in the way we’d like, only to be flooded seconds later with unexplainable and seemingly irrational feelings of fear, rage, abandonment, and rejection.

In these moments, a very powerful practice we can do is to slow down and inquire carefully what it is above all else that we simply do not want to feel, that if we were to allow in would overwhelm us, take us out of our window of tolerance, and result in devastating and life-shattering consequences.

it is important that we cultivate the intention to become more interested in the truth of our experience than in our demand to find relief from our symptoms. It is natural to not want to feel pain, but if our primary concern is relief, we may not be able to allow ourselves to get close enough to the intelligence and creativity that are attempting to break through. As long as there is a subtle agenda to “meet” the material because we believe it is the quickest way to eradicate and escape it, we subtly keep the neural pathways of aggression and misattunement alive, which will interfere with the slower, intimate, and kind encounter that is required. This is not a journey of perfection, but one of wholeness.

In other words, those qualities that repulse, trigger, or infatuate you represent parts you have deserted into the shadow and that to this day you work creatively (though usually unconsciously) to keep out of awareness through avoidant activity of all kinds. When these unmet parts and pieces are triggered in a variety of unique relational configurations—which they inevitably will —your defensive strategies will kick in, resulting in a whole range of anxiety-related feelings and bodily sensations. From this perspective, the anxiety itself is a heads-up (a mindfulness bell) that material you’re usually able to keep unconscious is now threatening to erupt into conscious awareness. Not to work against you but as an opportunity for integration.

In order to reframe the activation in this way, it is vital that you cultivate the intention to know what is true more than anything: more than feeling good, more than appearing spiritual, more than being untouchable, more than being happy all the time, and more than needing to keep up the appearance that you always have it together.

You can make a commitment that each time you find yourself irritated, annoyed, triggered, enamored, or enchanted, you will stay close. Sacred data and information are being presented that are ripe for your holding and attunement, a rich opportunity to befriend and take care of yourself in a radically new way.

There is never an end to the path of the heart. There is no final, safe landing place, no mythical fairy-tale ending, no completion, and no resolution. Only endless unfolding. Your heart is endless.

From this perspective, “I love you” equals “I allow you.” I allow you to have your own experience—to organize and make meaning in the way that you do—and I will offer you my presence and warmth even if I do not understand you or agree with your perception or conclusions. Even if your being yourself triggers within me surges of emotion, vulnerability, and unmetabolized feeling, my vow is to allow you to be what you are. While I will not allow you to abuse me or to act violently or break the agreements and boundaries we have established, I will allow your inner experience to be what it is. Even if I cannot allow your behavior, I will not demand that the flow of feeling or emotion within you be reorganized to fit my own preferences, hopes, or fears. While I may turn from you in the external world, I will not turn my heart off—because I love you. This refusal to turn our hearts off is not something we are asked to perfect and then shame ourselves when we inevitably “fail.” Rather, it is an intention and an aspiration, to care deeply for ourselves and for others as we are able.

We seek intimacy with the other and their unfolding experience as it is, but without coming so close that we lose perspective and become emotionally fused. In this sacred middle territory—in between the extremes of cold, passive, disinterested witnessing and sticky, unboundaried identification—we bestow the gift of our attuned presence.

In this context, space isn’t something that we “give” or “do”; it is what we are. By resting in the organic space of being, we plant the seeds of a cosmic trust that their experience is valid, that we do not need them to transform in order for us to stay close. We commit to not flooding them with our requirements and agendas, but will honor their unique process and path by being there for them if (and only if) we are needed. We will not impinge upon their journey, we will allow them to fail and to succeed, and we will walk side by side with them into the dark and the light.

Additionally, we can give ourselves these same qualities of good contact and attuned space. In many ways, this is one of the essences of true meditation: to meet our immediate experience exactly as it is, in a warm but provocative, curious, and intimate embrace, without any agenda that it be shifted, transformed, changed, or healed.

When our subjective experience is empathically held, accurately attuned to, and provided sanctuary in which to flower, we come to a natural place of rest, harmony, and homeostasis. From this spacious ground of being, we are free to allow others to matter, to take the risk of being ourselves, and to abundantly participate in the world around us.

From this largely unexamined belief, we very naturally conclude that if we do not feel safe, something is wrong with us, we have failed or fallen short, and we must act urgently to return into feelings of safety. The invitation is to discover if it is actually true that if we feel unsafe this means we actually are unsafe. We must explore whether it is an accurate perception that we must first feel safe before we can fully show up in our life, lead with our vulnerability, take a risk in relationship or with our work, and otherwise participate with an open heart. This is an inquiry that each of us must engage for ourselves to discover what is most true in the here and now.

When the known crumbles away, all that remains is your burning heart. There is nothing more alive than that. There is nothing more sacred than that. There is nothing safer than that.

It may feel impossible to cut through and reestablish solid ground, but you are only being asked to attend to this one moment that is here, now. Not to take care of a future moment or to clarify a memory from the past. But just this moment. Can you care for this moment? You can begin wherever you are, no matter what is surging through you, to slow down and surround yourself with the warmth of loving awareness, with the intention to no longer abandon yourself as was required at an earlier time.

In order to hold, work through, and metabolize that which we’ve previously disowned, we must train ourselves to come back over and over again into the aliveness of our immediate experience with newfound levels of self-compassion and presence.

As open, sensitive human beings, we may never be able to avoid the experience of emotional pain. This fact is not evidence that there is something wrong with us, but that we are alive.

Stay close to your sadness and surround it with curiosity, presence, and warmth. With the fire of awareness and with the ally of your breath, descend underneath the story of the sadness and into the crucible of the body where the sadness essence dwells and makes its luminous home. Go on a journey into the core of the feelings, sensations, and images and into the raw, shaky life that is longing to be held.

The reality of aloneness, on the other hand, is an expression of intelligence and is surging with life. Despite our connection with others, we are asked to make the journey alone. No one can experience life for us, love and be loved for us, embrace and feel our achy heart for us, or die for us; nor can we for them. The traveler of aloneness is at home in this environment—and even welcomes it—knowing that organizing her reality around love will inevitably trigger the experience of tender, penetrating vulnerability. Living in the delicate field of aloneness is so fragile, so unknown, and unbearably touching; it is always uncertain, shaky, and groundless, and a piercing reminder of how open it really is here, revealing the disorienting truth that you can never really look to the known to tell you who you are or why you’ve come here. It is a penetrating invitation to live your life, for you cannot live someone else’s.

Though related, the experience of loneliness is usually born out of resistance to our present experience, of turning from feelings of grief, sadness, hurt, and shame, as well as from more “positive” feelings that are too exposing, including intimate experience of all kinds. When we are unwilling to provide a home for these feelings, we feel cut off from life, lonely, and disconnected. We long, at the deepest levels, to know the entirety of what we are; anything short of that is never going to meet our primordial cry for wholeness. On some level, we intuit that each visitor, whether invited or otherwise, is its own unique doorway into presence, into one of the unique crystalline qualities of love, and we become lonely when we abandon those parts that only long to be allowed back home. The only way out is through; and the only way through is by love. While the mind is sure to forget this simple yet revolutionary truth, the body knows … the heart knows.

As we deepen our inquiry, we may notice a hidden agenda lurking in the background. “I’ll sit with this feeling of sadness, grief, shame, or fear because I’ve been told that’s what I’m supposed to do, and when I do it right, the feeling will transform, I’ll be healed and free to carry on with my life.” This orientation is evidence of a subtle resistance to our experience and thus continues to support the ongoing encounter with loneliness, with that sense of cut-off-ness. When this intention is primary, we move toward our experience not out of curiosity or love of the truth but unconsciously in service to and reenactment of earlier strategies of aggression and self-abandonment. With clear awareness, we just begin to see how these dynamics might be operating in us, that’s all. No shame, no blame, no self-attack. Just more awareness. And more kindness. We can make use of even this behind-the-scenes agenda as a way to come closer to ourselves and lay down new paths of empathic attunement. Nothing is rejected on the journey of love. All is path.

Yes, today may not be the day for answers but to finally let your heart break open to the vastness of the question. To stand on the rooftops and proclaim that you are not a project to be solved, but a mystery to be lived.

Perhaps the kindest act of self-care and self-love is to finally slow down and see, to be willing to set aside everything you have concluded about who and what you are, about who and what others are, and about what this life is all about. To return to the mind and heart of the beginner and (re)enter the mystery. And to finally discover whether the feelings and sensations themselves are the cause of your struggle or whether it is the abandonment and rejection of them, bolstered by the conclusions you’ve come to about what these feelings mean. There is no answer here—it is really just an experiment. An experiment in radical self-care.

Perhaps you are the savior you have been looking for.

Honor the forms of love as they appear but allow them to depart so they may continue their journey. For it is one of cosmic creativity. Yes, your heart may break as the forms dissolve in front of your very eyes, but it is by way of this breaking that you may be resurrected once again.

Learning to suffer consciously is an art that has been lost in our times. By training yourself to enter into an intimate, curious, embodied relationship with difficult psychological and emotional experience, you reclaim your right as an alive, sensitive, empowered human being. And proclaim your willingness to practice transmutation for the benefit of life everywhere.

Ultimately, it is love, in the most resplendent sense of the word, that will soften the wounds of the body and the heart, for they will never unwind in an environment of self-aggression. It’s just not safe or majestic enough there.

What do we mean by this word “ego” anyway? I don’t use the term very much because I have come to find it to be a rather disembodied and experience-distant concept. Also, it usually carries with it an undercurrent of judgment and shame, at least in spiritual circles, often employed as a way to attack our vulnerability, our humanness, and our relative (and equally sacred) nature as separate individuals. But mostly, I have looked long and hard and have never found such an entity in my immediate experience. Or in another’s.

If we look carefully, we may see that if the ego is anything, it is likely those very voices that are yelling at us to get rid of it.

One simple way of defining “ego” as a process (if we must) is any activity—conscious or otherwise—that leads us to turn from, abandon, practice aggression toward, or stay in resistance to what appears in our immediate, subjective experience. So, if in a moment of activation, we become aware of feelings of rage or grief, a constricted throat, a heavy heart, an aroused nervous system, a limiting self-narrative, or a cascade of critical, ruminative thoughts, we might see the ego as that process whereby we move away from and avoid that experience rather than approach and move toward it, which would be a more embodied, compassionate, or contemplative response. This movement away, which we might come to discover as the root of nearly all of our psychological suffering, usually takes place either by denying what is there or by indulging in interpretations of it, fueling it, and fusing with it as who we ultimately are. Both of these strategies (corresponding to limbic fight-flight as well as to anxious-avoidant attachment) will inevitably trigger engagement of compensatory (addictive) behavior, designed to take us as quickly as possible out of our vulnerability and the oftentimes messy and sticky world of feeling altogether.

In other words, ego is a process of dissociation and splitting off, to use psychological jargon, in the attempt to prevent overwhelming anxiety from pouring into conscious awareness. Or, in more spiritual terminology, it is the attempt to keep us out of the otherwise naked reality of how open, unknown, and groundless our lives truly are, where anything could happen at any time, where reality is never going to correspond to our hopes, fears, and dreams, and the way we thought it was all going to turn out. It is just too alive without a reference point of “me” to organize around, and the only possible response is to contract and return to safe ground. It is this process of contraction that we might refer to as “ego.”

If we want to get to know more about how “the ego” works, we can begin by getting curious about those feeling states that we will do just about anything to avoid. Start to become really familiar with the specific strategies you employ to avoid feeling, which can include any sort of habitual, addictive behavior. Remember that the goal of this inquiry is increased awareness, not the cultivation of a new tool to shame yourself or beat yourself up with. From the ground of clear awareness, you can then slowly re-invite the feelings you are avoiding into your experience and begin to hold, contain, and reintegrate them, very slowly, one moment at a time.

We can train ourselves to meet our experience instead with empathy, warmth, and compassion. And proclaim to ourselves and to the world that the entirety of our inner experience is valid, intelligent, and worthy of our care and holding. In this sense, ego is an invitation into presence. As we slow down and reaffirm our commitment to knowing ourselves at the deepest levels—no longer meeting our present experience in a field of judgment, dismissal, and aggression—we can re-craft the narrative of ego in new and more integrated ways rather than using the concept to indulge in reenactments of the shame and blame that so many of us were met with in our families of origin. In this way, we can actually use the energies of “ego” to come closer to ourselves, and as an ally on the path of deepening clear seeing and self-compassion.

Once we slow down in this way and connect with our natural curiosity, we can then ask: What is this life that is surging in me that I have overlaid with this word “fear”? What is erupting underneath the surface, longing to be known, emerging out of the depths for a moment of my undivided, loving, unconditioned attention?

As our inquiry deepens, however, we may discover that there is no suffering inherent in the arising of this inner material. Yes, it might be intense, it might not be fun, it might take everything we have to stay close and to stay open. But the movement away from what is alive within us is the root cause of our struggle, along with the deeply embedded emotional conclusions about the meaning of this unprecedented assembling of emotion, rumination, and felt sense. While in most cases we do not have much control over the arising of the inner world, we do have some say, with practice, over how we respond, whether we will meet what appears in a field of openness, curiosity, and compassion. Or whether we will receive it with misattunement, self-aggression, and the strategies of self-abandonment. Training ourselves with our hearts wide open to reorganize the meaning and purpose of our symptoms and difficult emotions is a profound act of self-love, rooted in wisdom and creativity.

All experience is welcome as valid and worthy of your care. Everything is path, including the raw, immediate, somatic experience of fear, as long as it is not abandoned, rejected, and made into an enemy via spiritual process and theory. In this, a great mystery can be revealed: there is no suffering inherent in the experience of fear, but only in the moving away from it, invalidating it, and concluding that it is an error that must urgently be remedied.

Fear is merely a temporary wave in the nervous system, longing to be met, integrated, and metabolized in the wholeness that you are, as are all forms that appear in the mystery of the inner landscape.

Apprehended with an open heart, fear is revealed to be a unique form of aliveness that seeks the light of your presence, which could never, ever be blemished by the temporary movement of fear.

When fear is fully met and safe passage is provided, it reveals itself, like all form, as none other than love in disguise. You need no longer practice a spirituality of exclusion and aggression. Fear is not the opposite of love, for love has no opposite.

While there may be power in “now,” there seems to be very little power in the concept of now.

The flow is here right now, utterly inseparable from what you are, and is revealed by way of your commitment to close, empathic self-attunement, rooted in curiosity and self-care.

By way of this inquiry we may discover that we need not “let go” of any inner experience, but that it will “let go” of us when we meet it with loving presence and the energies of non-abandonment. It will release its hold on us when infused with breath, awareness, embodiment, and life. Further, it will “let go” of us when we have received its revelation and when we are no longer in need of the function it provides. In the Dzogchen tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, it is the nature of all phenomena to “self-liberate” upon a meeting with naked awareness. When we are able to stay with what arises in the field of consciousness in an embodied way, wrapping it in a cloak of warmth and loving presence, we may become astonished to discover that it takes care of itself without any effort, striving, or struggle of our own. “Taking care of ” doesn’t mean that the experience we do not like will go away and be replaced by alternative experiences that we like better, or think we should be experiencing, or have been told by others are the “right” ones to be having. “Taking care of ” refers to the inherent great natural perfection of things as they are, and the reality that the forms arising in awareness are no different from the ground of awareness itself; that they are in fact made of the same luminous and alchemical substance. And even that unique configuration we call “ego” comprises these same strands of awareness, radiant and vast, and will reveal its nature when we meet it in direct em...

It is possible to discover that the purpose of the journey is not to solve our problems or make us happy. And by insisting that our inquiry, our practices, and even our intimate relationships function primarily in this way we vastly limit what they are truly offering.

No longer oriented in how to get from “here to there,” but endlessly fascinated with how it is that love wishes to infuse “here” with its qualities. The path is endless. You are endless. Your heart is endless. And love will continue to reveal this endlessness to you, in ways that are at times peaceful, sweet, and soaked in pure joy. At other times, as wrathful, disturbing, and awash with the transmutation of the dark.

At times, a child will appear at your door. She will be cold, scared, and tired from a long journey. Her heart may be broken, rage may be erupting from her body, and she may be confused and uncertain about who she is and what is being asked of her. How will you respond when she comes calling? Will you allow her entry, move toward her with love and curiosity, and provide a sanctuary for her to fall apart in your arms? Or will you first demand that her fear convert to joy, her anxiety be healed, her confusion turn to clarity, and her heart be mended?