Turn Towards All 🌅

A client recently didn’t want to admit that they’re self-critical. Here’s what I told them:

One way to think of enlightenment is oneness with everything, at the level of identity. So if there’s anything you’re not willing to hold in your identity, anything at all you’re resisting or avoiding, that’s a place you can claim more enlightenment. Turn toward whatever you don’t want to admit is you. That’s where your freedom lies. Somewhere deep at the bottom you will find something like guilt for being at all. For believing you’re separate. Gently, with compassion and patience, you can turn towards this feeling too.

It’s counterintuitive. Claiming identities feels limiting rather than liberating. But the more you claim in your “I am”, the bigger the you doing the claiming gets, and the smaller each defining characteristic you claim gets (relative to the whole). Whatever I am, I am also its opposite. Like Whitman said, “I contradict myself (I am large, I contain multitudes)”.

With love, Jordan