Free to Be Fully Human
Libre para Ser Plenamente Humano
A student shares how reconnecting with their own humanness has helped them see thoughts and feelings more clearly, and the teacher explores how disidentifying from the body-mind need not mean excluding the human dimension of experience.
Free to Be Fully Human
A student shares how reconnecting with their own humanness has helped them see thoughts and feelings more clearly, and the teacher explores how disidentifying from the body-mind need not mean excluding the human dimension of experience.
I just wanted to share something which has helped me grasp the non-doer more easily. It is easier for me to have some reflection on the reality of it. Being in touch with some sense of humanity in myself has helped me see more clearly all these thoughts or feelings that I supposedly don't want to have. I'm able to sit with the humanness of it more easily if I see myself as going through a spiritual experience but also living in this human body. Human beings just think all kinds of weird, strange, scary things, and just having that in mind has helped me very much.
Yes. A lot of the teaching and the pointing toward disidentifying from the body-mind, from the human aspect, is in a sense valuable. It's needed. But it doesn't mean we then exclude the humanness.
The hand metaphor
It's like realizing I'm not my hand. If I've lived believing I am my hand, then everything is going to depend on how my hand is, whether my hand is okay or not. Then I could realize: my hand is a part of me, a very beautiful and valuable part of me, but it's not all of what I am. By seeing that, we're free from the illusion that all of my life and destiny depends on what happens to my hand. But then we don't say that my hand isn't there. My hand is very much there.
Freedom includes the humanness
So once I see I'm not my hand, I can live freely, and my hand becomes a beautiful and important part of life. You're also mentioning the complexity of the humanity: all of the challenging aspects of thought, emotion, relationship, evolution. That's all part of, to stay with the metaphor, the hand aspect of the body. And so it can actually become very treasured, very loved and appreciated. There is a great deal of learning that can happen, because there is a certain kind of distance and at the same time more intimacy than ever. I'm not rejecting it, I'm not fearing it, I'm not in this push-pull experience. So the intimacy with being human can become much more radical, because I'm not resisting it, because I know that's not all of what I am.
Being only human
In a sense, I become free to be fully human. I would even say I'm free to be only human, because that perspective is no longer so threatening. The movement of perspectives on what I am can shift and change at any moment toward something more expanded, with both happening simultaneously. It's like the yin and yang: the doing and the non-doing are part of the whole. There's a freedom to savor or taste more of one side or the other at any moment. Both are there, both are true, both are real in a sense, and neither is truly, absolutely real.
When that clicked for me, it was a huge insight, because for a very long time I was just very detached from my humanness.