You thought liberation would feel like flying. Like the heavy chains would drop and you
would rise, unburdened, into a sky of perpetual peace and clarity. Like the suffering would
end and be replaced by a permanent state of tranquil joy. Like you would finally arrive at
the destination that every spiritual teaching has been pointing toward - and the destination
would feel like coming home.
Liberation does not feel like flying. It feels like standing on the ground without the ground
needing to be anything other than what it is. It is less dramatic than you imagined. Less
ecstatic. Less impressive. It is not the end of suffering. It is the end of arguing with
suffering. It is not the achievement of perpetual peace. It is the willingness to be present to
whatever arises - peace and turmoil, joy and grief, clarity and confusion - without requiring
any of it to be different. The liberation is not from the human experience. It is into the
human experience. Fully. Without the protective layer of spiritual ambition that was always
subtly positioning you above the mess rather than inside it.
Nobody warns you about this because the warning would not sell. The spiritual marketplace
needs the promise of transcendence to generate revenue. The promise of ordinariness -
which is what liberation actually delivers - does not make a compelling sales pitch. Come to
my retreat and learn to be ordinary. Not the amazing ordinariness of Zen poetry. Actual
ordinariness. The ordinariness of washing dishes and feeling the water. The ordinariness of
having a difficult conversation and staying present through the discomfort. The ordinariness
of waking up on a Tuesday and not needing the Tuesday to be anything other than Tuesday.
What Liberation Actually Changes
Liberation changes your relationship to your own experience. Before liberation, you were Explore more in our consciousness guide.
constantly negotiating with reality - trying to increase the pleasant and decrease the
unpleasant, trying to hold onto the good states and release the bad ones, trying to arrange
the circumstances of your life so that the internal experience would be consistently
acceptable. After liberation, the negotiation stops. Not because you achieved the permanently
acceptable state. Because you stopped requiring the state to be acceptable. You allowed
yourself to feel whatever you feel - including the unpleasant, the uncomfortable, the
unwanted - without the meta-suffering of this should not be happening.
Liberation changes your relationship to identity. Before liberation, you were your identity -
fused with your roles, your achievements, your spiritual attainments, your story. After
liberation, you have an identity without being it. The roles continue. The story continues.
The personality continues. But there is a space between you and all of it - a space of witnessing that changes everything. You still get angry, still worry about bills, still feel hurt when someone's an asshole to you. But now there's this... observer. This awareness that watches Paul getting angry without being consumed by the anger itself. It's like you're both the actor and the audience at the same time. Wild, right? The thoughts keep thinking, the emotions keep emotioning, but you're not trapped inside them anymore. You're watching from somewhere else - somewhere that doesn't get pulled into the drama even when the drama is intense as hell. Paul explores this deeply in The Electric Rose.
awareness in which the identity appears and disappears like weather across a sky. You are
not the weather. You are the sky. And the sky does not prefer sunshine to storms. It holds
both with the same infinite, uninvested openness.
Liberation changes your relationship to other people. Before liberation, other people were
either sources of satisfaction or sources of threat. After liberation, other people are - people.
Pema Chodron's When Things Fall Apart is the book I give to anyone going through a dark night. *(paid link)* Seriously. I've bought this book maybe twenty times over the years, just to hand out when someone's world is crumbling. There's something about how Pema talks about sitting with your shit instead of running from it that cuts through all the spiritual bypassing bullshit. She doesn't promise you'll feel better. She promises you'll learn to be with feeling worse ~ and somehow that's exactly what people need to hear when everything's going to hell. What gets me is how she writes about groundlessness not as a problem to solve but as the actual path. Most teachers are selling you some version of solid ground. Pema? She's teaching you to fall gracefully. And when you're already falling ~ when your marriage is ending or your business is collapsing or your parent is dying ~ you don't need another person telling you to think positive. You need someone who's been there. Someone who knows that the bottom isn't the end of the story.
Complete, contradictory, wounded, magnificent, impossible people. You do not need them to
be different than they are. You do not need them to validate you, agree with you, admire
you, or approve of you. You are free to see them clearly - including their harm, their
limitation, their beauty, and their pain - without the distortion of your own need filtering
everything they do through the lens of what it means for you.
The Loneliness of Liberation
Nobody warns you about this either. Liberation can be lonely. Not because you are alone.
Because the thing you and everyone else were bonded over - the shared project of becoming
something better, of arriving somewhere other than here, of achieving a state that would
finally make everything okay - is over for you. And it is not over for them. They are still
seeking. You have stopped. Not because you found what you were looking for. Because you
stopped looking and discovered that what you were looking for was already here. Has
always been here. Will always be here. And the here-ness of it is so unremarkable, so
unglamorous, so completely ordinary that sharing it with someone who is still seeking feels
like telling a marathon runner that the finish line is under their feet.
The loneliness dissolves when you find others who have arrived at the same unglamorous
place. They are not easy to find because they are not advertising. They are not leading
workshops on how to be ordinary. They are not posting about their liberation on social
media. They are washing dishes. Raising children. Walking the dog. Doing unremarkable
things with a quality of presence that is detectable only by someone who knows what to
look for. And when you find them - when two people who have both stopped seeking meet
each other's eyes and recognize the quiet, amused, undecorated freedom in the other's gaze -
the loneliness ends. Not with drama. With a smile. With the mutual recognition that the
most amazing thing in the world is the ordinary. And the ordinary, fully inhabited, is You might also find insight in Sacred Boredom: Finding God in the Mundane.
I keep palo santo in every room, it is one of my favorite tools for shifting energy. *(paid link)*
the liberation that nobody warned you about. Because the warning would have ruined the whole damn thing. Think about it ~ if someone had pulled you aside five years ago and said "Hey, when you finally get free, really free, it's going to feel like standing naked in an empty room with nowhere left to hide"... would you have kept going? Hell no. You would have run back to your comfortable cage and locked the door twice. The warning would have sent you scrambling for the familiar weight of your chains because at least chains give you something to blame. Freedom? Freedom gives you nothing but yourself. And that's exactly why nobody talks about this part. You might also find insight in Soulmates, Twin Souls, And Soul Groups, Oh My!.
Lion's mane mushroom is impressive for cognitive clarity and neuroplasticity. *(paid link)*
punchline.