Confessions of a Spiritual Teacher

by Amoda Maa Jeevan, author of Embodied Enlightenment

Even as a spiritual teacher, life is not always easy. There is an idea that after awakening, life just flows along in some kind of fluffy way—that there is nothing we have to do and nothing we want and nothing to work toward—and so we experience only the bliss of ease and happiness. But this is blatantly not true, at least not from the perspective of the human experience.

Yes, it is true from the perspective of the absolute, of no-self; the self as ego is actually not in charge of life, and there is a death of this belief and a cessation of the attempt to control anything. This is the surrender: the recognition that life manifests you; that life really does just happen, and you are responding to this; that you are not the creator but the servant of this intelligence that moves life—this is the deepest realization, and it is ever-present when awakening has fully matured. And of course, there is a great peace in this, a peace that has nothing to do with what happens or does not happen in the external world.

But I can tell you that for me, fifteen years after awakening, there is still a very human experience going on in which the waves of life keep coming. Of course, I could have “gone to sleep” after awakening, become passive, and stayed in my comfort zone; then everything would have been easy. But I hold a passion to grow in ways that are as yet unknown, I hold a dream that is unfolding within me, and I simply cannot ignore this. I’m willing to take risks by jumping into new adventures and walking through new pastures (even though there is discomfort and fear and insecurity)—just because this is the intelligence of life moving through me and I have to obey it. And so there is grit on the road, I am continuously being tested in my capacity to surf the waves, and there is an incessant demand to sacrifice any tendency to “play it small” in order to fulfill my destiny in the world. To be more accurate, it is not “my destiny,” but the destiny of life’s flow.

I hope that you, too, my friend, have the courage to live selflessly by listening to the deepest call within you—before or after awakening, it does not matter. In any case, none of it really matters because when you die, the whole movie comes to an end. What is there to lose, my friend? Only an illusory idea of comfort and security. What is there to gain? Just the deepest fulfillment of following what is true in you.

Amoda Maa Jeevan is the author of Embodied Enlightenment: Living Your Awakening in Every Moment, published by New Harbinger Publications. Copyright 2017.