Enough is not found in more

more is just a story

We have to be careful. There is a trap almost no one sees, a belief that fulfillment is somewhere ahead of us, waiting for our arrival, instead of already happening through us now.

Because so much of us is constricted. We don’t always feel free. We have to do things that feel heavy, things that have nothing to do with the essence of who we are or why we are here. And in those moments something in us begins to call out, saying there is something else, out there, somewhere ahead, that is our actual fulfillment, and we will know it when we finally arrive.

One of my greatest lessons from a year away from the West, is as my sound practitioner teacher Wolfgang, says in his clear calm German accent at the end of each sound session “slow life, is good life.” Reminding us all of the profound simplicity of “enough” without story, or chasing, or “growth”, as a mind exercise. An attendee asked him one night “how do I stop the racing thoughts in my mind?”. He responded with the simplest “Its the hardest thing, very hard, but need to practice, just practice, moving slow, thinking slowly”.

So we make fast stories. Winning the lottery, finally being seen for the unique thing we sense we are, finally meeting the love of our life and walking into the life we have always dreamed of, the house in nature and the quiet morning and the good food and the body that is not so tired all the time. We create these outsourcings of fulfillment, and in subtle ways the stories themselves remove us from the experience of what is unfolding in front of us right now, in this moment, while we are not looking.

The traditions all knew the world moves in pairs. Yin and yang. Masculine and feminine. Sun and moon. Light and dark. Witness and felt. Infinity and finiteness. These are not metaphors. They are the two currents that move through every life in every moment, inside us and outside us at the same time.

The masculine in us, the witnessing current, loves achievement, success, conquering, winning, completing. When we lose touch with that current, we begin to chase the experiences that will briefly return it to us, the victory, the peak, the win, anything that signals we are alive enough to register an arrival.

The feminine in us, the embodied current, lives in sensation, feeling, energetic exchange, the textures of belonging. When we lose touch with that current, we begin to crave the experiences that will briefly return it to us, the love, the touch, the recognition, the food, the eyes that finally meet ours.

And so our whole life becomes a push and pull within the polarity, an ebb and flow that is for certain outside of us in the world but is also happening inside us at every moment. When we are out of balance we go looking for what is missing. The masculine reaches for proof through doing. The feminine reaches for proof through being received.

So we develop subtle substitutes that give us small inklings of the thing we are actually missing. Earning money. Raising children. Acquiring things. Expressing creativity. Building businesses, building relationships, building reputations. All of it real. All of it meaningful. But none of it the thing itself.

Because the thing itself, the sacred union the older traditions point to, is already happening within us, all the time, and all we have to do is tune in to the witnessing and notice what is happening within our own body. Our consciousness is the masculine current. The felt experience of our body is the feminine current. They are constantly at play. They are constantly expressing themselves as infinite love and boundless freedom, and they are giving from the heart whether we are paying attention or not.

But the masculine in us is always fueled by success and failure. Am I succeeding or am I failing? Am I waiting for that final day when I will finally be enough, when I will finally give myself permission to live the way I actually want to live? And by the time we notice the question, we have spent so many years inside it that we have basically trained ourselves to equate being with doing. We do not know who we are when we are not chasing something.

We have all met people who have achieved many layers of success and still feel empty on the inside. We have probably been those people ourselves. And still, we keep pursuing, because something deep in us knows that the destination is not the answer but the doing itself, the way we move through the doing, who we become inside the doing. Something in us already knows we are free. But there are parts of us that still believe we have to earn the freedom, and so we keep building the story of the earning, and we keep going.

And the feminine in us is always dealing with love and heartbreak. Am I loved? Am I not loved? Am I seen? Am I not seen? Am I appreciated for the beauty of what I actually am? The body holds these questions in quiet, and the body builds its own stories around the pain of the asking. And so we expose ourselves, we show ourselves, we offer ourselves, hoping for one small hit of yes, you are loved, you are seen, you are enough.

I have lived inside this loop. I ran a wellness company that looked, from the outside, like the answer. We grew, optimized, won. And every morning the chest did not ease. I eventually left the West entirely, moved to a quiet stretch of coast in Phuket, started a hotel, raised a son and daughter, kept training, kept sitting. The discovery I did not expect was that the body had carried the chase across the ocean with me. Only the geography had changed but the fast noise came with me, and it only began to release when I stopped trying to outrun it and started witnessing it from inside the same body that had been doing the running.

Meanwhile, there are some people in this world who carry a unique openness, a sensitive vibrance. When we stand near them, we feel something different. A depth. A texture. A presence that is not performing. And we realize these are people who have stepped outside the story for some time and have begun to cultivate both currents within themselves, the masculine and the feminine, the witnessing and the felt. And as they do that, they see us. They see us regardless of our stature or our success. What they see is the state of our heart, the way we move with other people, the way we allow our own currents to flow through us as love unfolding in this moment, with each breath, with each word, with each small action. They see whether we are giving freely or whether we are giving with a clench, with fear, with a transaction attached.

This is the difference between those who have cultivated spaciousness in the heart and those who are still trapped inside the story of the world.

The invitation is to open the heart by going deeper into what we already love. To embody it. To feel it. To experience it the way sound moves through water, the way music and light pass through us when we are not protecting ourselves. And then to express it as our truest truth, as our brightest light, until the story begins to fall away and we begin to uncover who we are in essence, even though the words always fall a little short.

Because what we are is not just love or peace or human. It is some mixture of light and clay, perceiving infinity while also being deeply attached to the textures and experiences of the world, the beauty of it, the heartbreak of it, the darkness of it, all of it interplaying within us at once.

And so our whole life becomes a dance of polarity. Movement and stillness. Prayer and devotion and work and sacrifice. Forgetting and remembering. The opening to bliss and the opening to pain. The hardship and the subtle moments of mundane nothingness. Postures, movements, love and loss, all of it flowing through us like a poem writing itself.

So how do we feel it all? How do we breathe it all? How do we open to it all? How do we lose ourselves in it and then find ourselves in it again?

Slow down everything, our eye movements, our body movements, the rush to do more to be more. Allow yourself to fully engage with life at the pace of nature, at the pace of your real voice that can only be heard in silence, true silence, the kind only seen in horizon.

That subtle conversation between the sun and the leaf, the ocean and its waves, and the stars behind your pupils and the slow sweet breath of a lover after a kiss.

Then stop reaching until the questions disappear. Allow the “slow life” to become the “good life”