When is the last time you told yourself or another “I’m trying!” Whether it is trying to meditate, to overcome an addiction, to be compassionate, to exercise, to eat well, the personal growth world these days is full of trying.
But it doesn’t work.
Trying is what you do when you forget that you are what you are looking for.
I understand that we all want our best efforts to be rewarded. But the consciousness of trying is a barrier to getting what we really want.
We want to be okay no matter what. We want to be worthy and loved and accepted whether or not we succeed or try hard enough or don’t. Any of our lives, upon inspection, will contain many things that fall into these three buckets.
From the point of view of Truth there is no trying, there is only being and not-being. You can’t try to be your true self. You can only be it or forget to be it, and even then you are still being it deep down.
The spiritual journey is not about effort. It is not about trying. You can’t try to be love, you are love. You can’t try to find the Divine, you are the Divine.
I invite you to stop trying and try resting. Try relaxing beyond all that effort that simply reinforces the illusion of scarcity and choosing a different way to enter your life. What if you didn’t have to try? What if you were okay just the way you are?
What would you do if you knew you didn’t have to try? I suspect that inquiry will take us far closer than any program or discipline or practice. In fact, it is a discipline and practice of its own as we struggle against the conditioning that tells us that we are somehow in a deficit that needs to be made up for by effort.
The opposite of trying is being.
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