When life brings challenges such as loss, error, pain or fear, we may habitually attempt to run away, or to ‘control’ the situation. These choices are like paying the price for a crucially necessary medicine, and then leaving the medicine at the store because it is the wrong color.

We will often keep paying the price for this same medicine over and over again throughout our lives, and never receiving the incredible benefits it might convey if we actually received it.

Of course, if we can be aware of the great abundance and actual safety of our deepest nature, we can receive the medicine… which might be understood as the learning that comes with living intimately in and with the actual complexity of the world as opposed to our stories and expectations of it… then the price will undergo a bizarre transformation.

It will become a reward.

Although I am now coming to understand this conceptually, it is more difficult to practice it. In my youth, I acquired habits of criticism, flight/hiding, fear, and self-abandonment. I was not really capable of honestly questioning my reactivity or choices. These incredibly crude coping mechanisms, largely invisible to the outside world, became my inward hallmarks. As they tend to be self-obscuring, they remained largely invisible to me, as well.

Now that I have discovered this, the process of growth and transformation, so long preempted by my ingrained habits, is beginning. But it feels delicate, tremulous, and uncertain. Eyes so long accustomed to darkness may find the light too fierce, at first, to bear for long. With time and care, they will adjust. Perhaps we shall, too.