What You Avoid Is the Fire
Lo que evitas es el fuego
A conversation about how avoidance works in practice: the surprise of discovering what you're truly avoiding, and how the path sometimes requires moving directly toward what is hardest.
What You Avoid Is the Fire
A conversation about how avoidance works in practice: the surprise of discovering what you're truly avoiding, and how the path sometimes requires moving directly toward what is hardest.
What you avoid is the fire, the most intense possible thing. I think for me it's always a little surprising. I think I know what I'm avoiding, and then I discover it wasn't that at all. It's something else, a new discovery. Because the avoidance really is sneaky. I also find it extremely exciting, though: going forward into the unknown.
And the way it works is extremely mysterious. Only in hindsight, at least for me, can you look back and understand: "Oh, this is how it works. I see this, I see that." Only in hindsight.
Interesting.
The teacher's own pattern of avoidance
I was very emphatic about my challenge with the world from quite a young age. It was very obvious to me. But I also had people I trusted point it out to me, for example, my teacher. He said, "Your meditation is just your work, your project in the world." He said that to me for years and years.
Then, when that big, final shift happened, he told me, "See, you were running away from that your whole life." In a sense, I had to go toward what was hardest for me. In hindsight it makes a lot of sense, but it looked very paradoxical. How it unfolded was very paradoxical. I had to go toward what was really hard and then see that that was the avoidance, but I had to go deeply in that direction in order to come through it.
I think you were hunted on both sides. That energy, that recognition, was chasing you from a very young age, but you were also terrified of the world. You put a lot of your energy and priority into waking up. That was your number one priority. But then your teacher would say, "Okay, fine, but your meditation is your worldly project."
Yes, it was exactly like that.
So it was this constant tension. And then both sides collapsed in these last several years.
Coming through by facing both sides
Yes. I think eventually it was a kind of balance, both sides being faced really fully.