Finding Your Way

There are many ways, there are many right ways, and there are many deviations from the way. The right way for you is the one found before you and within you. It is also right to say it is the way you are taught. On one side, it’s to trust and respect your teachers as your wise friends on the path, and on the other, to not forget that those teachers have teachers, and somewhere along the line, they were taught by something inspired, something realised, something enlightened. That which is inspired breathes within you, and you can find it too.

For there is a teaching that is passed on, and there is a teaching that connects you to truth. That teaching is the Master’s teacher, and that is the teaching that you should follow. This is a path that no one can find for you, a path that no one can walk for you, and a path that must be revealed to you through your own investigation.

The 9th-century Sufi Bayazid Bastami said a wonderful thing: “The thing we tell of can never be found by seeking, yet only seekers find it.”

Whichever way you walk or path you find, what matters most is that you walk with love. 

Without love, the fruition of your efforts is not sweetened, nor fully ripened. It is easy to take the spiritual path as an intellectual joyride, to realise the mirage of the mind, and to stumble into emptiness. It is easy for one to attain much, and it is easy for one to get lost.

I see many people with spiritual struggles. Many people who start practices, make vows, and engage in ceremonial rites find that things start to change in all sorts of ways. They get worried quickly. They doubt. They become despondent. That’s when we have to remember the seeds we planted, the prayers we offered, and renew our respect for the immensity of the path.

That is when we must learn compassion, forgiveness, and mercy. We must slow down. That is when we learn humility and how to observe—to observe it all. If you observe it with a little love, it becomes a little more lovely. If you walk with love, then love is the path that you walk.

So let love be your lighthouse, your guiding star and inward flame. Let love slow you down, dead in your tracks. Let love lift you and lead you. Let love lift your head to catch a breath above the waters and show you her shoreless oceans.

For when you give love, there is love inside of you. If there is love inside of your heart, then you have love to give. It is in giving that we also receive. So, if you want love, then begin by sharing it. For the path may be long, but longer still is love. The world may be wide, but love is much wider.

Temptations, distractions, and all types of ignorance are vast and come for us all the time, but love is larger, and it comes for us twice as much. And as it comes for us, we may realise that it has never actually left, it has been here all along.

It is true that you must work very hard for your liberation, to come to the light, to live in the light and to reclaim yourself as an heir and child of the light.

For just as everything is calling for you to wake up and to come home… 

Everything else is trying to keep you asleep, to keep you confused, contracted and distracted—pulling you away from knowing who you truly are.

Be certain about nothing except Love.

Place your faith nowhere but in the space of presence that holds all things.

Fear nothing but the forgetfulness of this and forever place yourself in the dwelling of this remembrance.