Ease, challenge and suffering

“Energy just started flowing as soon as I started reading the first section and continued till I stopped, as if the simple act of reading was a healing process. It was amazing!” Fiona F, England

A big thank you to everyone who has supported this project. I still have a few supplies from the original print run and when they are gone I will evolve to ‘print on demand’, which has advantages in terms of distribution but is inevitably lower quality. If you want to enjoy the highest quality product, personally signed if you wish, now is the time to order: Buy book

The idea came to me as a theme one recent night. A full moon brought the foxes out into the fields around us and our dog worked herself up into such a frenzy that she threw up all over the carpet. Our daughter developed a fever which kept us up some of the night, the toilet broke and the winds blew my new veggie cloches clean across the garden.

These were small challenges in the general scheme of things, but I could really feel the close relationship between the ease of that day and the challenge of that night.

I drew a Tarot card and got Temperance – the essence of moderation and finding balance between the energies of ease and difficulty. It asked us to explore how we keep in balance when we are faced by the inevitable challenges of life. How do we meet the easy and the difficult with equanimity?

I journeyed shamanically to the mythic and was shown the scales of balance, with the suggestion that planet earth remains in balance when there is an appropriate presence of ease and difficulty. The sweetness of the human existence depends upon the contextual canvas they bring and how we relate to them.

I explored whether this balance point required an identical match of the two energies and was told ‘no’, that the Universe, or at least our part of it, had a slight tendency towards light and the expansion of consciousness, so a tendency towards ‘love’.

Each is essential to the other but, without undue influence, our soul’s journey should take us closer to God and Spirit, not further away.

This reminds me of the Buddha’s teaching, that the route of all suffering is desire, described under the three headings of greed and desire, ignorance and delusion, hatred and destructive urges. When we overcome our shadow desires, we can transcend suffering.

The problems of the last 200,000 years, which we could call ‘recent history’ in the wider picture, started when one person saw the homestead of their neighbour and wanted it. The age of the ‘taker’ had begun, a still active period of history where the powerful take from the powerless and have priority access and influence to goods and services, information, medicine and legal support.

When I asked Spirit in my journey what would bring this situation back into natural balance I was told the energy of ‘equality’. This makes sense to me, the full rotation of our species back to that original place of harmony when we all lived in right relationship with each other, when we shared the abundance of nature with moderation, taking what we needed and no more. A return to these values would mean a return to love and a world of peace where neighbours live in harmony with each other, without envy or the shadows of desire.

So, with another nod to Buddhist teachings, if we can accept that challenge and difficulty is a natural and necessary part of the human experience, then perhaps we can learn to embrace it for the gifts it might contain, meeting our challenges and our ease with equanimity. How much more gentle might life feel if our difficulties could be seen not as karmic punishment or penance for our low intrinsic value, but as simply the nuts and bolts of life on planet earth? It’s not personal, it’s just life.

In my small world, our carpet is clean again and our border collie more relaxed. My daughter is well, the veggie cloches are back on, and we have a super new set of drain clearing rods.

These are minor issues for sure, but I feel it is important to celebrate, with deep gratitude, the privilege of my relatively safe and abundant life. I also take action to honour the vision that, one day soon, this will be available to us all.

With love

Andrew