Beyond Anxiety: Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life's Purpose

Here is the true miracle of life: when it is awake, it heals.

This is why Gandhi said, “When I despair, I remember that all through history, the ways of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it—always.”

granite. To us, with our left-hemisphere focus on grabbable stuff, fluid things appear less powerful than rigid ones. But “water falling, day by day, wears the hardest rock away.” That which adapts and includes will win over that which rejects and excludes. Or, as the Tao Te Ching puts it, “When two great forces oppose each other, the victory will

I think this may be why Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön, after years of spiritual practice, wrote, “I am awake. I will spend my life taking off this armor.”

You can use that suffering as motivation to relax, breathe, and ask yourself, Can I imagine the space, silence, and stillness I share with everything?

In other words, what science shows us—even working through the “I know!” mind—is the don’t-know mind. Reality is unfathomably paradoxical. The mind that excludes can’t handle what we actually are. Only the mind that includes can hold the paradoxes of being. When we embrace don’t-know mind, we can find ourselves as drops of consciousness existing be

Since then, Dinah has lived according to a phrase she heard in a yoga class: “I exist in continuous creative response to whatever is present.” This is the way of life that arises when we accept that we don’t really know much, and what we do think we know may be false.

I believe that accepting the limits of our own perceptions is all we have to do to begin waking up. The road to waking up is paved not with new knowledge but with unknowing—really knowing how deeply we don’t know things, like what reality actually is. We start down this road by accepting not-knowing as a fundamental quality of being human.

I’ve met several people who I believe have “awakened.” All of them told me that the awakened state is always present in everyone, and that staying in it is simply a continuous choice to direct our attention toward whatever connects us with the perception of a benevolent universe.