FEELING OVERWHELMED • Ram Dass
This is about learning how to take the stuff of daily life and converting it.
Someone asked me ‘How do you keep from burning out?’
The answer to that is the injunction from the Bhagavad Gita which says
‘Do not be identified with the actor.’
In other words, when you drive a car, you’re hurtling through space with about 4000 pounds of metal.
You’re doing that, while making incredibly subtle and complex decisions about forces, rates of deceleration, and all that…
And all the time, you’re usually tuning the radio, thinking about where you’re going, watching for police…
And while you’re doing all that, you’re doing it with ‘base brain’, you’re doing it without being ‘someone who’s driving’.
And yet driving is happening.
It’s interesting how you can cultivate a place in yourself that rests, even as you’re full of activity.
So that the activity doesn’t wipe you out because you aren’t doing it.
I could say
‘I’m on a tour now of 60 cities. I’ll be in a different city every other night.’
People say
‘What a demanding schedule! It must exhaust you!’
You know who will say that to me?
A woman raising 3 kids.
I’ll say
‘Are you kidding? I look at your life, what a demanding schedule! It must exhaust you! Just like you, I get up every morning, I brush my teeth, and I get dressed, and I do stuff all day. And then at night, I take off my clothes, and I go to bed. And then I start the next day. That’s what you do.’
But as soon as I have a model of ‘travel’, something happens.
‘I’m travelling.’
And with that,
people get caught in the dramatic storyline of it,
and so you get wiped out.
You get wiped out because you milk the drama of your own life.
Like “What a day I’ve got!”
Instead of dramatizing everything,
you do what’s immediately on the plate in front of you.
If you’re here and you’ve got to get there,
you get in the car and drive there.
And then you’re there and the next person comes in.
And then you meet them.
But if you keep overriding it with a storyline of
“It’s 10:00 and I’ve already done 4 and I’ve got 6 more, etc…”,
you’ll wipe out.
On the other hand,
if you just do the next thing,
•
then the next thing,
•
and each thing you do fully,
•
constantly pulling your awareness,
•
noticing where your awareness is,
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bringing it back,
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you keep coming into a resting space as you’re doing it.
And then it’s just event after event after event…
And you end up being at rest.
It’s just a matter of learning how to be in the doing,
rather than get lost into the doing and lose the being.
There are techniques like the witness
— which is cultivating a part of you that notices what’s going on.
Most people, when you get agitated, or angry, or depressed…
“I’m so depressed.”
“Is every part of you depressed?”
“Yeah, I’m completely depressed.”
“Is there any part of you that isn’t depressed?”
“No, I’m completely depressed.”
“You’re noticing you’re depressed?”
“Yeah.”
“Is the noticer depressed?”
“Euh…”
The noticer is just noticing.
There’s your entry.
That little place.
It starts out with such a tiny bit of your mind.
99% of your mind is depressed.
And 1% is noticing.
Or you can just follow the breath – rising and falling in your abdomen.
When it rises, notice it rising.
When it falls, notice it falling.
Your mind will try to pull your attention away
‘This will never work’ ‘Don’t you have anything better to do?’ ‘This is boring’ ‘I’m hungry’…
Every time a thought arises,
notice that it has arisen,
allow it,
and then very gently,
return your awareness back to the rising and falling.