I’ve spent my life stunned by the unfairness of things. The last twenty-three years have meant a sort of rehabilitation. My mother and father were self-aggrandizing, neglectful, egocentric, and circumstantially cruel. As a result, my early path was one of intense trial and error. Because of emotional scars, many of my lessons have been learned through adversity and a series of grave mistakes. I became a ‘spiritual warrior’ because I have been at war with myself, my history and the players within it, my lot, and the Universe. Today I emerge battle scarred but with a more lucid understanding of my path, albeit there remains a relatively troubling degree of uncertainty when I think of my purpose. I fear sometimes that I chose the wrong path. And though I have achieved a relatively impressive degree of spiritual wholeness, or in the very least, awareness, with that achievement came unsavory consequences and losses too numerous to count. If a path is so riddled with hard-won victories, could the strife involved be indicative of some wrong decisions? After all, we are to maneuver through life with relative ease, if we struggle, we are somehow remiss in our responsibility to live zenfully. 

I find myself now halfway through my life wondering: what do I do next? I became a victor at healing. I’ve become so spiritual and wise that I would feel no intimidation having a heart-to-heart with Buddha or even the Universe, in fact I would welcome a little direct and personal guidance from either at this point in my life; but materially, I confess a certain impotence as I look around at the dereliction. What do I have? I am less afraid than I used to be, yes, though I’m not absolutely sure if that is indicative of spiritual success, or merely because I’m still alive and so, the odds that I’ll survive have been empirically proven. I can look back at my many successes, surely. I am not so soured that I cannot see a profound strength within me, one that has defied some unreasonable endurances and countless irrationally hellish circumstances. But what do I really have? I feel exhausted, mostly, though paradoxically I feel more confident than I’ve ever been. I see an almost open future, though I’ve not honed the tools to develop a plan to make sound use of it. I see my life as a panorama of ever-evolving self, behind me some dark wilderness that I don’t care to look back on, and before me this barren expanse. What do I do now?

I used to believe in magic, but the day has come that I have to concede that believing my life has been driven by the supernatural is an embarrassing folly. However, I’m not alone in my virtuous beliefs. Nowadays this thing called ‘manifestation’ is on everyone’s lips. As though intense belief in personal sorcery can build a dreamscape life. But all manifestation is, really, is the ability to make better choices, and that ability can only be earned through an astonishing amount of work on the self that never receives adulation or reward beyond the more pleasant consequences that ensue. There are gurus who would have you believe that they hold the keys to successful manifestation, that there is a precise, esoteric way of thinking that only a few can master. I happily disabuse you of this sort of thinking: the only way to manifest is to make less self-flagellant choices.

If magical manifestation was synonymous with true actualization, none of us would have to work soul-sucking jobs or endure loveless relationships, we would all intensely believe in ourselves, and by virtue of this Herculean belief, we could build essential lives under the watchful eye of our own private Universes. The world would be an Edenic tapestry of symbiotic love and good, no mistakes, no faltering in our unyielding confidence.

No one has believed in magic more violently than I have, but life has proven to be nothing more than a concatenation of consequences based on prior decisions, and when the blueprint of a life begins with decisions made by people incapable of sound judgment, then the underpinnings of one’s life are going to forever remain tenuous at best, and no amount of ‘healing’ or spiritual excavation can change this. What with our mind’s eye set on internal equanimity can do, however, is allow one to better cope with a fractured past, and to navigate through one’s life more skillfully having acquired the skills to make more sound decisions for ourselves.

When you set out on a path of healing from childhood trauma, certain things must be sacrificed. You cannot develop a fruitful career and realize your Buddha nature. There is just not enough time, frankly, and I know of no one with the superpower to achieve both. One generally chooses one over the other to focus one’s attention on. Long ago, I decided that the only way that my life could have meaning was to reclaim and redefine myself according to my own vision. Over two decades later I have found success in that, but I also realize that there is no end to this pursuit, so, I have to set it aside for a while. One can never fully give up spiritual ambitions, because what we are is both spirit and matter, and one can no more forfeit the spirit than one can the body and continue to plow on with this human experience as we know it. I see now that true success is the ability to nurture both, to harness that always evolving duality. The successful balance becomes a marvelous and fluid dance of temporal and spiritual energies. I see this now, after a life of material negligence and feeling that entire half of myself having atrophied. Unfortunately Most of us are a delicate suspension of ‘successes’ and ‘failures’, because in this life, this is how the evolved human has chosen to view itself. Survival of the fittest is a primordial scheme that has forced us into quantifying who we are within these two polarities, and we have chosen to define our success in concrete terms, which is why there is such a significant spiritual dearth the world over. We see it in our despotic politics, our unrequited longings, our shallow pursuits, our splintered community. The spoils of a materially motivated life are more alluring than the subtle endowments  of those spiritual. Material quantification appeals to that very human, very primal part of who we are. We can touch it, our security becomes tangible, and it tends to be more immediate, even if evanescent. Equanimity on the other hand holds no charisma, it is not an intoxicating and immediate thing that can be purchased, it is hard-earned and requires lifelong patience, but it is also everlasting and the rewards are transcendent.

If none of this sounds promising or idealistic it’s because it’s not. I have found that too many spiritual works are just that, idealistic. I have found that in life there is a measure of whimsy and heartache, and I have found that in many ways the dispensation of either is both arbitrary and in direct relation to the quality of decisions one makes. I have no happy ending for you and I offer no key. What I can offer is this: you are here, so do the best you can to make decisions that will move you closer to the vision of how you would like your life to be. Understand that you will miss the mark, no matter your achievements materially or spiritually. You will make mistakes, and as scary as that reality is, accepting it will soften the many blows you will likely endure, though if you can manage to embrace this your mistakes will move from catastrophes to rerouting of opportunity. All mistakes are, really, are the inability, for whatever reason, to made a better decision at that moment. So don't condemn yourself, ever, for not having the ability to make a better decision. You're working on it, trust this, and trust that your decisions will become more in sync with your life-vision over time. The goal is to learn from every decision that we make, and the only way that we can grow from them is to look at them objectively, as guideposts leading us where we want and need to grow.

Your past absolutely does define you, but understand that adversity is your greatest ally if you see it as a means to discover your most fantastic strength and use it to make better decisions with your mind’s eye set on forging a better present and thence, a more promising and fulfilling future. Your life will be a collection of dark energies and light, and all the shades of gray that you could possibly imagine. If you work your hardest not to quantify it in terms of winning and losing, good and bad, success and failure, if you can manage to see it as a beautiful kaleidoscope, then your life becomes your own intrinsic story, unlike any other story, and living authentically is the only truly rewarding path. It's a devilish pursuit, this, and I am still working on it. I suspect I will be the whole of my life.

we lose sight of our value because it gets buried under external imposition. as easily as we accept external imposition, so can we just as simply refuse it. and as its power dissolves, our self, our value, emerges through the mist. always remember that our lives are made up of a concatenation of choices. we are the sole authors and architects of our lives. when we choose to give away portions of our power, the imbalance that ensues is in direct proportion to that which we relinquish. it is as simple as a choice to refuse the imposition of externals. in order to do this we have to find a fearlessness that defies our diminished perception of value. when we succeed, we realize that we are more powerful than we could ever imagine with our self-repressed perception.

external imposition must be invited. make the choice to be fueled by your own power, and your life becomes essential. it becomes the intricate work of art that it was meant to be when the universe designed you. if you disconnect from your power, go inward. if you should find that your life is a panorama of unsavory memories or ideals that you did not choose, go inward. if you wear a mantle as you move along your path, cast it aside and go inward. should you feel weak, or small, or alone, go inward, for you are none of those things. your essential self is one of wholeness and significance. you are sui generis, and that is your power. there is no merit in defining oneself according to the superficial values of the herd. when thinking like this, we realize that it is an affront to deny the essential self through acceptance of imposed externals. do not lessen your value by giving it away. realize that you are a divine construct, and that which does not serve falls away. you emerge the light of your whole being, and in this emergence we can no longer support the illusions that we once thought so vital to our existence, that we indeed employed as the building blocks of our existence. with one breath we can blow our illusion into the cosmos, but there is not a single force in the universe that can move the essential self.