Authenticity, life and leather shoes

In a forest full of thorns and briars it is impossible to walk bare-foot. One can do so if the whole forest is covered with leather, or if one's own feet are protected with leather shoes. It is impossible to cover the whole forest with leather, so it is wiser to protect one's feet with shoes. Similarly, in this world man is troubled with innumerable wants and desires, and there are only two possible ways of escape from them, either to have all those wants satisfied, or to give up all of them. But it is impossible to satisfy all human wants; for with every attempt to satisfy them, new wants arise. So it is wiser to decrease one's wants by contentment and the Knowledge of Truth.
(Sri Ramakrishna)

What is a desire? What is a fear? When you fall in love someone, do you fall in love with that person or do you fall in love with the desire to feel safer, to be more lively, and somehow being better off? When you push for your promotion, do you root for a better professional expression of what you are all about, or are you after the desire to be looked up too and to having a bigger bank account? At the end of the day, it doesn’t even matter if you have some ‘selfish’ wants as long as you are always honest about them. Life will always give you a chance to express yourself, but let go of all the pretense. Otherwise, you will always shadow box and dance around the essence of the situation at hand.

Artificial wants and inflated fears always fall by the Wayside once we truly open up to life’s message. Sure, we want to be close to love, we want to be surrounded by abundance, and we want to express ourselves creatively. Yet, we always have that option at our disposal. It is just that we were running after the glitter on the horizon before unknowingly trampling on the diamonds in front of us. We didn’t appreciate our package deal before. ‘Breaking free’ is the ability to awaken to the past we carry around and to snap out of the misguided expectations, and our self-imposed interferences. ‘Breaking free’ is the ability to understand what we are truly all about and appreciating life differently than we have before.

Suzanne Yang added that comment to my post yesterday and I thought that it is really a beautiful description of how we can break free: Just accept who you are and don't ask you to be in a state you are not.  We can always learn something from where we are.  Have compassion about yourself and use it a way to know how human beings are.  When you expand your experiences to all human beings, you open your heart and know how other human beings are suffering.  This is how human beings are suffering.  When you can do that, you transcend your experiences already.

It might not be the ultimate ‘breaking Free’ where even the experience of ‘you’ and ‘I’ starts melting into One, but our journey is always one step at a time. Spring is around the corner. Now is a good time to de-clutter, to put on your leather shoes and making a trip to the thorn-filled forest nearby. Your unitive experience is waiting for you.