The Razor's Edge

Years ago I sat in a meeting of people who were planning a peace walk and encountered anger, rage, and in fighting.  I recall thinking "how interesting"; these folks are advocating for peace but they seem to be filled with anger, hatred and in-fighting toward each other; and I wondered how they could manifest peace out of so much rage?  I eventually came to the understanding that social activism can produce a feeling of righteousness and this feeling robs us of mindfulness.  If we need to be right more than we need to be free, peaceful, or what ever we are working for, we lose the focus of our original intentions.  We replace tyranny with our own brand of control.

We are walking the Razor's Edge and it is a precarious, but necessary, balance. I believe this balance is helped by our understanding that it is ego that needs to be right not our true essence, and this creates conflict between others egos that are seeking the same thing.  From this paradigm we are lost in a world of others who do not understand how right we think we are because we are relating through ego rather than being true to who we truly are.

This is the edge of perception where we are given the opportunity to practice discernment.  We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are. This is an important perception and distinction because our perception is a part of our ego, and ego ties us to the illusion of how we think we appear, not who we really are.  When this happens we become lost in our emotional reactivity.  As we learn how to allow others to be as they are, not as we want them to be, we stand at the threshold of opening to compassion.  In this moment the brittle facade of our ego is softened, our reactivity becomes pliable, and we let go of our attachments to how things should be and accept them as they are. 

If we want peace we must become peace; to experience joy we must practice joy; and to have abundance in life we must become abundant in all that we do. How we live directly affects who we are.

Realizing and remembering this is hard to do.  In the midst of despair it is easy to let that define who we are.  The despair is how we feel in a moment but it is not a definition of our true selves.  Neither are joy, sorrow, anger, or happiness, and to remember this keeps us from the emotional reactivity of identifying with these feelings as being the sum total of who we are.  

The razors edge is the path of experiencing all of our emotions without allowing any to completely identify who we are.  Learning to assimilate all of our emotions into our being without letting one or the other define us helps us find balance in life.  I find that when all things are in balance I can experience my emotions, give voice to them, and then detach from them.  My experiencing and acknowledging them allows me to let go.

To let go of anything we first must own it.  We can only let go of something that is ours; not in theory but in fact.  I understood this years ago when I sat in the meeting planning a peace walk.  The people there were in denial of their own inner rage, and because they had not owned their anger it was displayed in their relationships to others and in the energy that created this walk.  I realized that to successfully advocate for peace I had to manifest peace within me first.  Until I do this what I say I want becomes a shadow of what I don't want.  This then creates non mindfulness in life.  The Razor's Edge teaches me to dance with and through all aspects of myself, and to accept each part of me with unconditional love.