Non-duality and the body

A few years ago, I had completed an advanced yoga teacher training on Paradise Island in the Bahamas. After the closing ceremony I wandered onto the beach. I was bare-foot, wearing a white dress, my mala beads around my neck. I was healthy, tanned and toned from hundreds of hours of yoga. The sand was pale yellow and the sea and sky a brilliant blue. A breeze gently lifted my hair from my neck. I walked along with my feet in the water. I was completely alone on the beach, and it was utterly tranquil. I was deeply at peace, feeling at absolute one-ness with life, the elements, the teachings. I understood in the core of my being the perfection of it all.

Then, out of nowhere, there was a roaring sound. Startled from my non-dualistic contemplations, I looked up to see a jet-ski appear in the empty sea ridden by a man and a woman. I watched as the jet-ski came straight towards me almost as if it was going to plough into me. Then at the last minute it took a steep curve, creating a wave of water that arched high into the sky before descending and drenching me with perfect precision from head to foot. The man and the woman burst into laughter and waved as the jet ski disappeared into the distance, leaving just me, the sea and beach once again.

I stood there for quite a while, a bedraggled, soaking, salty mess.

Then I wiped the sand and seawater off my face with the hem of my dress as best I could and made my way back to the ashram.

We think we’ve got it. We think we are complete, that we are enlightened, that we know everything, that we are somehow above all human suffering. And the moment that thought appears, along comes something like those cheery, wavy drenchers to say,

‘Oh no you haven’t. Not even slightly.’

The jet ski might come in the form of a parking ticket, an illness, an assault, a row with a friend or spouse, redundancy, a divorce, an unruly child, unexpected bills, criticism, indifference, being ignored or excluded…

The resistance and resentment experienced will come from whatever in that moment the identity is most attached to.

This is the gift of our lives. This is the perfection of the design. It shows over and over again that the identity of separation can never be secured.

The Shift cannot ever be driven by ego.

The Shift cannot even take place by trying to get rid of the ego.

Because the Shift is the ending of the attempt to secure the idea of a separate me through seeking, resistance or control. And that includes any attempt to get rid of an ego that is supposedly in the way of the desired experience of peace, happiness or freedom.

The Shift is not an activity of separation.

It is separation falling away.

The Shift is not an activity of control.

It is all belief in an independent controlling entity dissolving.

The Shift is not an activity of resistance.

It is an opening to experience happening.

The Shift is not a denial of reality.

It is attention coming from such openness and curiosity that anything not true cannot remain.

The Shift is not even a change.

It is the disappearance of what wasn’t even there in the first place.

The Shift is a non-event. Simply the ending of an illusion. Simply truth realised.

The Shift.