Today’s letter is inspired by my experience at the most authentic and revered Ayurvedic clinic in India, where I visited to address chronic headaches I’ve had since I was a little kid.
On my first day, the doctor felt my pulse for about 30 seconds and knew how my grandfather died.
I’ll write another letter one day in more detail about the healing power of these doctors and their archaically ancient yet unbelievably effective methods…
…But today I want to focus on expectations.
In previous letters, we’ve discussed figuring things out for ourselves, aligning with the universe, and knowing what to do in any situation.
But what happens when things don’t go as planned?
My teacher, Thom Knoles, says, “to be dis-appointed, you must first have an appointment.”
It’s a simple concept, yet tells us so much.
When we expect things to go a certain way, we create an opportunity for ourselves to be let down, worked up, or thrown off when they don’t.
If we never have any expectations in the first place, it’s impossible for us to be disappointed if they aren’t met.
Now, my teacher’s teacher’s teacher, Guru Dev, the Shankaracharya of Jyotir Math— and a man who kept two tigers as pets—famously said, “You deserve the best…but you have to accept it. You have to expect it. You have to claim it.”
So do we expect the best? Or do we eschew expectations altogether?
These two ideas may seem to contradict one another, but they don’t.
The nuance is subtle.
Guru Dev is telling us to expect the best.
Thom is building on that, telling us to not be so rigidly attached to those expectations.
It’s helpful, given the quantum mechanics of manifestation, to expect the best.
But when we become attached to a specific outcome, not only do we set ourselves up for disappointment, but we limit ourselves to one very specific version of “the best” by excluding any other, potentially even better scenarios we’d never expected.
So the key is to expect the best, but embrace whatever comes, even if it doesn’t initially seem like our version of what’s best. We call it being adaptable.
When you’re infinitely adaptable, it’s impossible to accumulate stress, because nothing is problematic; everything is just an opportunity for adaptation and adventure.
So how does this relate to the clinic?
Well, before I arrived, I had been told to expect fairly rustic and un-luxurious accommodations, basic meals, non traditional treatments, unreliable schedules, and generally loosely organized chaos at all times, but that it was all worth it in the name of working with some of the best doctors in the world.
So I was ready for that.
As Nietzsche said, “he who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” And I really wanted to rid myself of the headaches I’d been having since I was little.
But I was also told there would be reliable wifi, A/C in all bedrooms, and ample time to work—and there wasn’t.
Whereas the things that unfolded as I’d expected them to did not bother me, the things which differed from my expectations created some uneasiness for me.
I had resigned myself to the idea that “the best” would be working on my laptop in a cool room with good wifi between treatments, and I felt I wasn’t getting it.
After a few days of turbulence, I remembered another saying passed down to me through the Shankaracharya lineage—“let go, or be dragged.”
In the Art Deco era in India, monkeys were considered fashionable pets.
So monkey trappers would trap monkeys by digging holes in the ground and filling the holes with sweets. The monkeys would reach their hands in and clench their fists around the sweets, and then be unable to pull their hands out because they refused to unclench their hands to let go of the sweets. So attached were the monkeys to the sweets that they would be captured, just sitting there trying to get the sweets out of the hole instead of forsaking the sweets and fleeing.
Let go or be dragged.
Once I let go, I found a whole different world of experiences available here—new friends, walks in the park, shared meals, and rest. I’ve still managed to get work done, by taking advantage of wifi when it’s available, but I’ve managed to ride the wave.
And now, not only am I having a better experience, but I’m doing better work.
I actually wrote this letter while undergoing some of the weirdest treatments I could ever imagine.
How did I do it?
Each time we sit to meditate, we rest deeply and thereby increase our adaptation energy, not only releasing past stresses, but becoming more impervious to new ones.
NOTE: Group med is CANCELED this Sunday and will resume February 26.
Happy meditating and see you soon!
“Everything in the outer world that had promised great happiness had deceived me; but one thing has never deceived me—my own inner peace.”
—Paramahansa Yogananda, author of Autobiography of a Yogi
There will be no sorrow…let it be.