This year has been quite revealing so far. It started with the grief of being unseen by the very mountains – I thought for all through my childhood and adulthood years – that were holding the sky. The mountains were parents. They were the people and the structures around which I had unconsciously organised my life. Not because they were perfect, but because they seemed large enough to provide the ground. And then life did what life always does. It revealed their humanity. Not suddenly. Not cruelly. Slowly. One disappointment at a time. One limitation at a time. One grief at a time. I kept repairing the mountains internally till the illusion gave away – for they were never mountains, they were just humans. Limited, flawed, conditioned, finite. The insight was painful, but it was also liberating. The mountains shrank and something larger became visible. The sky had always been there. I just couldn’t see it while I was busy looking at the mountain.
Then, during a drive into the hills one day, another question emerged.
Now that I really understood the limitations of human beings, how does one still choose to love despite the grief?
The answer arrived quietly. We spend much of our lives dropping anchors into other people. We ask them to become our certainty, our refuge, our home, our proof that we are safe. And inevitably, the anchors slip. Not because people fail us, but because no human being can sustainably carry the weight of being another person’s ground. Eventually I discovered what the slipping anchors were trying to teach me all along: the ocean floor was inside me.
I thought that was the end of finally finding out the route to follow. All I had to do was find the ground within, had to stop outsourcing my existence in something else, to something else. All I had to do was become free of this unconscious habit of placing structural reliance on teachers, systems, close friendships – something that was outside of me.
What I hadn’t factored in was the ruins of disillusionment which were lying scattered – a strange kind of loneliness, grief. Not the loneliness of being abandoned. Not the loneliness of having no one. The loneliness of seeing the limitations of human form- Of standing amidst the ruins of stories I once called reality. The stories were beautiful in their own way. That one day they would understand. That one day they would see. That one day the distance would close and the words would finally land where they were meant to. That one day joy would find its place. And then, quietly, without announcement, the stories die. Not because anyone changed – But because one finally sees what was always there. The ruins are of expectations, of imagined futures, of conversations that never happened except in the mind, of versions of people that existed more in hope than in reality. Not because they failed to become something else. But because we kept waiting for them to.
For a long time, I thought this grief was about them. It wasn’t. It was about the collapse of possibility. The ending of negotiations with reality. The moment life quietly says: This is what is. Strangely, every illusion occupies space inside us. Every expectation consumes energy. Every imagined future asks us to postpone our life until reality cooperates. When the illusion dies, the space it occupied becomes available again. The grief doesn’t vanish, but something shifts – it coexists.
In any case, for the past one plus year I was struggling to establish connection with my practice – the cushion felt distant. It was natural for me to re-establish the connection with the spiritual tradition which laid my foundation. I booked my spot at the ashram and time with the teacher, and explained my dilemma of unable to find connection with my meditation practice – expecting some guidance on the meditation technique. Instead, all he asked me was “What does your routine look like?”
I described it. My discipline, the workouts, the work, the responsibilities, the practices, the structure of my routine.
He listened quietly and then said:
“It’s mechanical. There is no joy in it.”
The words stayed with me.
At first I thought he was talking about my routine. I spent time contemplating – what did he mean when he said “there is no joy..”
It was only after getting back home from the ashram, I realized that he was talking about my relationship with life.
My life had become a self-improvement project. For years I had been trying to clean the muck of ignorance. Understand myself. Heal myself. Integrate myself. Become free. None of it was wrong. But somewhere along the way, life itself had become secondary. Every experience was being filtered through the lens of growth. Every challenge became a lesson. Every emotion became material for inquiry. Everything had meaning. Yet somehow intimacy with life had gone missing. I realised I had become very good at understanding life without fully participating in it. Every experience was being observed, interpreted, questioned. Very little was simply being lived. The morning tea was time with parents. The workout was improvement. Meditation was practice. Relationships were mirrors. Everything had purpose, but very little had reverence.
The realization came from an unexpected direction.
I found myself reflecting on intimacy itself. On how often we reduce it to outcomes. To performance. To climax. Yet genuine intimacy is not really about arrival. It is about presence. Participation. Exploration. Vulnerability. Reverence. The willingness to be touched by the experience itself.
And suddenly something clicked. This was what was missing from my relationship with life. I had spent years trying to awaken from the dream. Life was now asking me to become intimate with it. Not because the mountains had disappeared. Not because the ground within had been lost. But because neither the mountains nor the ground nor the sky were the point. They were preparation. Preparation for participation.
For the first time, I began to understand self-love differently. Not as taming the ego. Not as endless self-improvement. But as becoming intimate with my own life.
Meeting it, Listening to it, Participating in it, Allowing it to touch me. The ups and downs, the joy and grief – the full duality of it.
Integrity still matters.
Honesty still matters.
Authenticity still matters.
But another value has quietly joined them.
Reverence.
Even though I had reverence for mother earth, trees, plants, animals, for wisdom – the inner reverence was missing. Reverence for this body-mind as a temple. Reverence for this life. Reverence for mundaneness.
The mountains, the sky, the anchors, the ground, the ruins – all were necessary.
And perhaps this is where the journey was always leading. Not towards perfect understanding. Not towards perfect freedom. But towards intimacy.
Towards living as though life itself is sacred.
Towards meeting each day not as a problem to solve, a lesson to learn, or a project to improve, but as a beloved. I still don’t know fully how. It feels like a new territory. But lately, in some unguarded moments, I’ve caught glimpses of it. A cup of tea being tasted instead of being consumed. A conversation listened to instead of analysed. A workout done not for any fitness goal, but to feel the intensity of the breath. Brief moments, where life stops feeling like a project and starts feeling like a relationship.
The mountains shrank, the anchors slipped, the ruins remained – simply creating the space for life to just be.