There’s a story about a dedicated spiritual practitioner who was challenged every day by a stranger who passed by and would always ask, “What are you doing?”
Each day the spiritual practitioner would attempt to do a more authentic practice – praying, studying, chanting, doing difficult yoga poses, visualizing, meditating.
Each day the stranger would ask the same question, and when the spiritual practitioner replied he would say, “Oh, only that, why not go deeper?”
The spiritual practitioner would take on ever harder practices until there was nothing else left to do. Where could she go from here? How could she go deeper than she was already going?
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The point is that what you do is not as important as what you are.
Nor is it what you’ve done in the past, or who you know, or what you know, or where you’ve been, or what you’ve seen, or what you posses. What matters is what you are.
How do you discover that?
That’s the question!
What you are means what you embody. Everything you do and say comes from that embodiment, that being..
What you are is your essence, it’s what’s expressed through you after the work of transformation. What the work you did is not important. The question is how you embody the work now, and who you have become.
The work is never finished. So what you are is also how you continue to embody that work, that living.
Another way to describe this is that you become congruent. Your values are congruent within themselves, and with each other. Your conscious and unconscious mind are congruent with each other. You ‘walk your talk’… You are embodied.
Another, even easier, way to say it is that you are happy, joyful, and present to whatever you are doing; not distracted by what is or isn’t about to happen, and still on purpose, even if the purpose is no more significant than looking out of the window, or smiling at a stranger.
Simple. Maybe not easy to arrive there. But simple. And we’ve all tasted it at some time or other, otherwise none of this would make sense.