What Are We Searching For?

Please note: This track may include some explicit language.
Most of us move through our lives with a sense of seeking. Whether it's happiness, success, satisfaction, love - it seems in all our seeking, throughout our whole journey we just have never quite found "it".
This episode explores the possibility that we already ARE that which we seek. That all our seeking outside is perhaps just a confused quest because we have simply been removed from what we really need, which has been right here waiting for us all along.

Transcript

Wake the Fuck Up,

The podcast that mingles mindfulness,

Buddhism,

Brain science,

Evolutionary biology,

And real authentic human experience.

Welcome to Wake the Fuck Up.

Hello,

And welcome to this episode of the Wake the Fuck Up podcast.

My name is Tiffany Andres,

And I am so happy to be here with you today.

This episode,

I want to talk about,

I guess,

Kind of the truth of this life,

This humanness,

What it is we're all seeking for.

In a previous episode,

Maybe even the first one,

I talked about happiness and contentment.

And in a way,

I want to agree with myself and backtrack a little bit here.

And I'll ask for your forgiveness and permission to do this constantly,

And also encourage you to be open to yourself to doing this constantly.

Because I think one of the things I've absolutely come to trust and love about this journey and spirituality and humanness is that the moment we think we've got something that we really understand it is the moment that life throws us something to be like,

Oh,

Well,

I kind of got a little bit of piece of that,

You know,

But now I fucking get it.

But that feeling,

Those aha moments,

The holy crap,

I've been missing this for so long,

The wow,

What a fantastic feeling of understanding this is.

Those are so immense,

But they're also not the end.

I think my own experience has been that every aha moment for one concept is followed by another aha moment for that same concept.

And this episode is really about the newest aha moment of what our purpose is here.

You know,

What what is it that we as people as human beings are really seeking what creates happiness in our lives,

What creates a sense of satisfaction and contentment.

And contentment was that first aha moment for me.

I realized many years ago that happiness is this ephemeral state of being it's an emotion,

It's a spurring of our spirit by something that happens outside of us or inside of us that lifts us up into this heightened state of joy,

Which is fucking beautiful,

Right?

But it's ephemeral.

It's,

It's an emotion.

It's something that comes and goes.

In my mind,

In my experience,

The idea of contentment was like this quiet river that could flow through us in every single moment of our lives,

Regardless of the emotions that are present.

And maybe I'll offer here that I think my felt sense of the idea of contentment is what's talked about in Buddhism as equanimity.

And I want to be careful and tread lightly here because I'll offer quite earnestly and honestly that equanimity is still something that I know I have many aha moments I need in order to fully understand.

But I think my concept,

My felt sense in my own body in the past of contentment is tied to this tangential and necessary and important and beautiful idea of equanimity from Buddhist philosophy,

This idea that no matter what is present,

We can be in this space of,

It's like a quiet joy,

You know,

In my own experience.

And I'll just place here the reminder,

I know I've said this before,

But for anybody listening,

Please don't trust shit I say on this podcast.

If anything strikes you as powerful or beautiful or truthful,

Take it out and test it in your life.

You know,

Use your life as a hypothesis and a science experiment because my truth is that we as human beings don't really learn and ingrain something into who we are until we have our own felt experience of it.

My own experience with equanimity is a perfect example.

I knew for years what equanimity meant in Buddhist philosophy and I thought it was great and I wanted it and you know,

It was something that I was hoping for.

But until the first time in the midst of meditation,

I felt like I really felt equanimity.

I couldn't even have a concept of it.

You know,

It's like trying to explain to somebody what the feeling of love and falling in love feels like.

We can do our best,

Right?

And they can be like,

Wow,

That sounds great.

But until they have their own experience,

They're never going to get it,

Right?

And so everything I offer here is that same thing.

Trust it,

Don't trust it,

Whatever.

But try it.

Take it into your life and have your experience because that's when our hearts change.

So going back off the tangent.

I've come to believe now that what we're all truly seeking is our own loving.

Not love,

Not being loved,

But our own loving.

And again,

To draw the parallel here to the Dharma,

The Buddha's teachings,

I would call this our true nature,

Our Buddha nature,

Our Christ nature,

Our awakened and enlightened self.

I love that I heard Pema Chodron talk one time and she made it clear that we are all already awake.

There is nothing to transcend.

There is no place to get to.

There's nothing we have to grow beyond.

Her analogy was that every single moment is like flipping a coin,

That we either flip the coin and it lands on our humanness and our conditioning and into the mind,

If you will,

Or we flip the coin and it happens to be a moment that we touch into our true nature of being awake.

My felt experience over the years,

And again I will say this is not the end or the truth.

It is not everything all at once.

It is just my understanding as it is in this moment.

And I imagine in the future it will change.

But my felt experience is that the truth of that true nature is love.

It's loving.

It's an overflowing.

I can feel in my heart as I'm saying these words.

It's an overflowing of love from the core of our being that doesn't have to be spurred.

It's not that someone says something or does something that deserves our loving.

It's the state of being in which all of our walls of conditioning and protection fall away,

All of our need to control ourselves and our lives fall away,

And what we're left with in that most quiet space is loving.

I have a friend,

Julian,

If you're listening to this,

Fucking thank you,

Who gave me a book right at the beginning of my separation called Love Yourself and Let the Other Person Have It Your Way.

Oh,

And it's such a simple book,

My dears.

It's repetitive and it's repetitive on purpose because it's so simple that it's almost as if our minds can't accept the simplicity of it for the radical way it shifts our lives if we really embody it.

But the essence of this book,

Which I feel like speaks so much truth,

Is that any moment that we suffer,

Any fucking moment that we suffer,

The reason that we're suffering is because we are out of our own loving.

Something has happened that we disapprove of.

We dislike and we disapprove.

And as soon as we step into disliking and disapproving,

What we are out of is loving.

Then what we step into is controlling,

Trying desperately because we dislike the feeling of disliking and disapproving.

We of course feel good when we're in a state of loving and we feel shitty when we're in a state of disapproval.

That often what we do is then try to control the circumstances that are in front of us or inside of us in order to get back into a place of loving.

But by trying to control,

By rejecting our disliking and our disapproval,

What we're really stepping into is more rejection.

The simplicity of this book,

He actually says in the book,

Think of disapproval like a hot fire poker.

As soon as you touch it,

Fucking drop it and step back into loving.

And we can practice this.

And I know I've said this in a previous episode,

But we can logically and conceptually buy into so many things that are so hard to embody and to learn and to just become.

We have this beautiful,

Rich human mind that one has been hardwired for us over millions of years of human evolution to be vigilant and scared and caring about our survival and making it to tomorrow.

But it's also been conditioned over the entirety of our lifetime based on past experiences to truly protect ourselves.

And I think one of the most powerful recognitions is that the ways in which we unconsciously protect ourselves are actually harming us because the greatest experience we can have in our lives is the experience of loving.

Think about it.

Think about your life.

If I asked you right now to close your eyes,

As long as it's safe,

And think about the most incredible fucking moments you have ever had in your life,

I guarantee you what was there is that you were loving them.

And I wonder if you think back,

If you could connect to moments that were,

Should have been awesome,

Should have been amazing,

Should have been these most powerfully fucking incredible moments of your life,

And yet something,

Just something was missing.

They didn't hit you in the same way.

What I would offer and argue here is that what was missing was nothing from the external and just that your own freedom of deep loving is what was missing.

So the ways we protect ourselves,

We guard our hearts from hurt,

Somebody says something that's painful and our shoulders curl in and we close ourselves down a little bit,

That pain becomes us.

But in the moment we roll our shoulders back and we open our hearts and we say,

I can love and approve of this too,

This pain,

This hurt.

I love and approve of the infinite and eternal being on the other side.

We don't have to approve of people's actions,

We don't have to approve of their choices,

But we can approve of ourselves,

The infinite and eternal beings that we are,

The quiet whisper that's constantly guiding you towards more goodness,

More love,

More happiness,

More freedom in your life,

More success.

That is our true nature,

Calling us back to ourselves,

Whispering to you,

You deserve your own loving,

You deserve love.

And as I say you deserve love,

What I want to offer here,

And I'll speak this from my own truth,

That it took me until this fucking incredible opportunity over the last six months of being alone,

Truly alone for the first time in my life.

I am 35 years old you guys,

And this is the first time I am living alone.

I went from living with my parents,

To having roommates in college,

To having roommates in graduate school,

To moving in with my wife.

And so here I am 35 years later,

And this is the first time I'm living truly alone.

And what I realized is,

You know,

In my marriage I spent so many years,

We started this episode talking about happiness and contentment,

And I spent so many years feeling like I lived in contentment,

Oh my god,

Everything felt great.

I loved my life,

I loved walking through my home and feeling the floors underneath my feet,

The sun rays coming in through the window in the morning,

The taste of my coffee,

I loved sitting outside with my wife in the mornings and throwing the ball for our dog and the small conversations we would have.

I loved doing my son's homework with him and watching him grow and be so proud of himself for being tall.

All of these little,

Small,

Simple moments that made life beautiful,

Right?

But in the moment I came to live alone,

What I realized is that so much of that contentment came from the experience of being loved by another person.

And I think this is necessary,

Right?

Like to be human,

We can't do it in isolation,

We're not meant to be isolated because the truth is we're connected to fucking everything,

But that's so hard to see.

This is sort of a tangent,

But I was talking to a friend the other day and I kind of laughed at the idea that if we lived in water,

We would all know that we're connected all the time.

And I would be like,

I jump around and shake around and the ripples in that water are going to hit the person next to me and we feel that,

So we know we're connected,

But here we are living in air and we think we're disconnected from everything and it's just bullshit.

But that's a side note to say that we don't live in isolation and there is a reality of needing to be loved that's just as true as needing our own loving,

Right?

But over the last six months,

What I've realized is there are so many moments where I'm out of my own loving.

There's so many moments where there's a quiet undertone within me that is rejecting and disapproving of myself first and what's here often second.

For those of you listening that have any tendency toward a spiritual path,

One thing that I want to offer here is often that the thing we are disapproving of the most is ourselves.

I had a realization the other day and listening to an audiobook,

He was listing off all of these beautiful self-care practices and he probably listed these things,

Reading them for three or four minutes.

It was a long list and I have done or actively participate in a lot of them and I was giggling as I was listening and then all of a sudden I realized how heartbreaking it felt that I was not offering these things to myself as gifts or care or a gentleness or tenderness but I was doing them as ways to fix myself.

And my loves,

If that's our point,

We're missing it because the truth is as Pema offered,

We are already whole,

We are already complete,

We are already beautiful and worthy of our own loving.

Oh my God,

Are you worthy of your own loving.

Think of the life that you've lived,

Think of the hardships,

Think of the things you've endured,

Think of your intention that you carry with you every day,

Your want to be happy,

To be satisfied,

To have love,

To give love.

Jesus Christ,

Do you deserve your own loving?

And so I say that because the moment that I realized that I was engaging in all of these beautiful practices because I wanted to be better than I was,

I had to realize that what that really meant is I didn't think I was good enough.

I wasn't whole,

I wasn't worthy,

I wasn't complete and in that moment I made the choice not to believe that anymore and that was the moment that I realized I had the capacity to offer myself my own loving in every moment and I said this in a previous episode,

My phrase to myself in any moment of discomfort or suffering has become,

I love you.

Oh sweet one,

I love you and I'm here,

I'm here.

And as I say that my eyes are closed,

My hand is on my heart and I mean it but I mean it because I practiced it,

Not because I meant it the first time.

It's so hard to change these paradigms of believing that we're not good enough or not worthy.

It all takes practice,

It all takes trust.

So I want to end this episode today,

If I had to wrap all of this in a bow,

It's to say that the most glorious,

Grace-filled,

Connecting moments that feel real and true for me and my life and I think,

I truly believe this is real for all of us as human beings.

The thread that weaves all of those moments together is that they are moments where we are fully embodied in our own loving.

It is loving that makes us happy and content that settles us into equanimity.

It's loving that makes life full and beautiful.

It's loving the small things,

It's loving the big moments,

It's loving ourselves,

It's being willing to be loving towards another human being when they are hurting and unskillful because you see their worthiness in the same way you see your own.

Any moment that we step into disapproval,

Any moment that we step into disliking and rejecting,

Just ask yourself the question,

What would it feel like if I could love and approve of the feelings that I have in this moment,

If I could love and approve of myself as an infinite and eternal being,

If I could love and approve of the other person,

Their infinite and eternal nature,

What would this moment be like if I could step into my own loving?

Thank you so much for being here with me today.

The light in me sees and deeply honors the light in you.

Until next time.

Thank you.

Reviews

That talk feels like the piece I have been missing. I need to learn how to love myself, regardless of what is going on around me. Then I will have the capacity to love the world around me. Thanks Tiffany