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Lately I’ve noticed something occurring within me as I listen to others share their philosophies — spiritual teachings I once resonated with deeply.

There’s a moment that arises where I can feel myself searching for a place to land inside of it. Because I can't anymore.

It feels incomplete.

And almost just as quickly, I observe my mind pipe up with a counter. One that is more "whole." And I feel for a brief second, how that offers my body relief. I soften. As I trick myself into believing it's arrived to a final conclusion on life, knowing how to live it, once and for all.

But this impulse is birthed from a desire to have something I simply can't... certainty in a reality that does not offer it.

It stems from the fear of being wrong — the fear that I made the wrong choices, and that those choices are the reason I suffered. Beneath that is the belief that somewhere, there is a "right" way to live, one that would have spared me everything I've been through.

Isn't that what we're really doing when we attempt to heal our trauma? Acknowledge our past pain, yes — but isn't there a subtle assumption that our integration of it, will prevent us from experiencing that pain again?

It's ironic, isn't it? 

How the mind is constantly seeking for a place to rest. It says, "This hurts. This is a problem. And now I am on a mission to solve that problem."

And we believe that whatever framework, philosophy, ideology that soothes our nervous system in that moment, is the path toward eliminating our future suffering. 

We drift back off to sleep, beneath a blanket freshly woven with our latest source of security.  

But there is no philosophy that will save us from being alive. No amount of understanding quantum physics that can protect us from the vulnerability of being human.

And yet… I still find myself looking for one. Even now, two years after the first shift that initiated a sequence of full system collapse.

I understand the motivation. My survival instincts are heightened and I would argue — justifiably — scanning like crazy for safety right now. 

But do you see the paradox? How we devise philosophies as a reaction to our vulnerability, only to find that when in our rawest state, they don't hold up?

So, is the ongoing pursuit of philosophies and spiritual ideologies — particularly ones that aim to make the human experience more palatable and digestible — seeded in the total paradoxical nature of Life? Or are they birthed from the mind, as a reaction to it? 

And where does that leave us?

Ahhh, the hamster wheel of the mind just spinning and spinning. Never fully landing.

Where do we truly rest, if we cannot rest in the ideas and concepts of the mind?

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