Breaking Through the Clouds

Have you ever wondered why your life is constantly fluctuating and it is hard for you to feel peaceful? Have you ever wondered why love seems so fleeting? You might think that life is hard and love is unpredictable.  You feel like your life is shaky like a candle light in a windy night. It actually doesn't have to be that way.

Yes, life is constantly changing.  It seems that nothing is eternal.  You feel fragile and vulnerable.  But if you look at your situation objectively you will likely find that you just identify with something - you hold on to the yin but reject the yang. When you identify with something, you tend to just look at things from this particular perspective and lose access to the whole picture that way.  This is when you think that you are stuck and that life is unchangeable. You forget who you really are and identify yourself with a fleeting phenomenon; you feel fragile, vulnerable and unstable.

Try to identify yourself with the eternal observer - your consciousness - and see how your inner state changes accordingly.  Now you can detach yourself from all that is happening to you and watch everything unfolding with a pair of eternal eyes.  See how things move past you just like a cloud passes the sky.  The dark clouds, the colorful clouds, or even the white clouds won’t influence the sky a bit.  The sky never comes, never goes, never change; watch and allow the clouds to come and go with an open mind.

 Just imagine how serene you will feel when you watch your life unfold just as a changing weather formation. Whatever happens in your life, you know it is just temporary, joy just as much as sadness, love as well as hate, anger as much as peace.  You allow these emotions to come and you are not identifying with any of them. Our problem is that we always try to hold on to one state just as we don't want to associate with the other. But when the dark clouds are moving in we feel  confused and lose our direction.

You are the sun that is always shining. You know that whenever the sky is blue, but even when the storm clouds are moving in, you can always rise above them and connect with that eternal spring of consciousness, light, and love.  Try it!  Every time you feel lost, confused, not loved or angry, know that you have again falsely identified with the clouds. Accept the stay you are in, don't fight it, but don't get pulled into the thought or emotion either. Accept the turbulence but rise above it until you have broken through the clouds.

By Su Zhen