During my first few years on the path, I met with Sunyata one-on-one every week in a small office in Berkeley. Those meetings became the most precious time of my week. I felt that I was with someone who was really seeing me, beyond the ideas I held about myself. Being seen that way stirred something in me that nothing else in my life had.
At the time, I was going through a major upheaval in my understanding of my family and of myself. My family had always been one of the most solid structures in my identity, so when my parents got divorced, I found myself asking a much deeper question: If I can’t trust this thing I have always believed was so solid, then what is actually real?
Rather than giving me another set of beliefs to replace the ones that were falling apart, Sunyata helped me look directly at what was inside of me, what were the fears and angers that were making me upset and causing me to feel pessimistic.
I remember one conversation in particular. Sunyata went to a whiteboard and began drawing a series of connected circles. She explained that these represented the “karmic circles” we move through unconsciously: the beliefs and patterns that we are infused with as we’re imprinted by our environments, by the world.
She drew my trajectory as one circle leading into another, and then another. I could see how the ideas I had inherited shaped my views and attachments to what I want and don’t want, which reinforced the mold and therefore became the reality I experienced. A life where I often felt trapped and unhappy. Life could appear to be changing and evolving, but I was often moving within the same underlying judgments, using new experiences to reinforce old ways of seeing myself. Old ways that felt stale and limited.
Then she showed all the space around it.
“This is what meditation is,” she explained. It takes you outside of the rigid judgements of good and bad we were handed, without you asking for it. The Taoists say that it is the root of suffering brought on by mankind – this contrived value system of what’s good and bad and right and wrong. It determined the shape of all my fears, anxieties, unconscious reactions and unhappiness. I was already experiencing the more open spaciousness of meditation. It gave me a new understanding of how I was moving into the larger wonder of existence.
I had never thought about meditation that way.
I had thought meditation was about calming my mind or becoming more peaceful. Suddenly I saw it as something much more practical yet revolutionary: a way of stepping outside the structures that limited me, that made me feel trapped in low self-esteem and insecurity, that had unconsciously shaped my entire experience of life. My parents’ divorce shattered my view of reality, and I realized how unstable and unreal it had always been. But now I was going towards something that felt more real. Not the stability I had imagined my family would always provide, but learning to be confident in myself with the realization that life, families, people and situations are all transitory.
She explained that we could move from one trajectory to another, becoming lighter, freer, less bound, continually recalibrating to a still center within ourselves that is connected directly to life rather being driven by judgements of good and bad, right and wrong.
That image stayed with me.
Looking back, I can see that those weekly meetings weren’t about Sunyata telling me who I was. They were about helping me question the assumptions I had never thought to question, so that I could begin discovering who I was for myself.
The deeper teaching was that freedom does not come from finding a better version of the same identity. Is that even possible when that identity is built off of fear? No. It comes from becoming conscious enough to stay with life, with the moment, without getting battered about by out of control thoughts, reactions and emotions.
Meditation became, for me, a way of staying on track with myself and with life.