Renounce and Enjoy

[This first appeared in my column "A to Zen" in the January/February issue of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]

When asked by a reporter to sum up his philosophy in three words, Gandhi replied, “Renounce and enjoy.”  It isn’t easy to summarize the complexity of Vedanta philosophy in three words, let alone 300, while at the same time conveying the essence of the world’s wisdom traditions. Maybe that’s why they called him Mahatma, the Great One.

And what is it to renounce? It is to relinquish the illusion of control, move out of the ego-mind and into a deep and restful state of acceptance and surrender. Renunciation is the conscious decision to stop resisting what is. When asked “What is your secret?” the great 20^th century spiritual teacher Ramana Maharshi simply replied, “I don’t mind what happens.”

Yet for Gandhi renunciation was no sack cloth and ashes asceticism. The goal is not withdrawal from the world but full immersion. Free from the tyranny of our own ego demands, we are for the first time truly capable of experiencing joy. It is a terrible irony that the endless search for happiness is the very mechanism that generates perpetual dissatisfaction. Joy, it turns out, is our natural state. When we realize that happiness and joy are already inherently ours and not the result of the fortuitous arrangement of external circumstances, we loosen our grasp.

Renunciation and enjoyment are two sides of one coin – you can’t have one without the other. When you are truly enjoying something, you are accepting it as it is, you are surrendered to it, and you are aligned with it. And when you are accepting, surrendering and aligning, you are enjoying.

Yet how are we to practice renunciation in the midst of this busy, active life? Do we not set goals? Do we not strive to achieve them? If I practice renunciation, who’s going to do all this work?

In the Bhagavad Gita, Gandhi’s favorite book, we read Krishna’s words of counsel to the beleaguered warrior Arjuna as he lies crumpled on the battlefield, paralyzed with anxiety. He knows that no matter what he does, terrible things will happen. For Gandhi the battlefield is a metaphor for the field of action in which we all stand. Each of us is the Arjuna of our own lives. We may not literally be warriors, but every day we face a daunting phalanx of rivals, impossible tasks and Sophie’s choices. When Krishna tells Arjuna to fight, he is telling all of us that life brings agonizing dilemmas, and we can’t opt out – we must act. Inaction and action both bear fruit. As Jean-Paul Sartre reminds us, when we do not choose, that is still a choice. There is no reprieve from our radical and inescapable freedom.

The only choice we have is what kind of action to take – selfish or selfless. Krishna tells Arjuna to act without attachment to the fruits of action. We must do the right thing, intend the highest good, and let go of the outcome. When we renounce attachment to results we become a channel through which the infinite good manifests itself.

Things will go wrong. Unintended consequences will unfold. Take action anyway. “Every action, every activity,” says Krishna, “is surrounded by defects as a fire is surrounded by smoke.” Practicing renunciation, we don’t cling to mistakes or define ourselves by them.

Beneath it all is the teaching of non-duality. Everything is a manifestation of the one divine reality, the Godhead Brahman. Therefore, everything that happens is ultimately a manifestation of Divine Mind. The only thing that can interfere with this sacred outflow are self-obsessed people trapped in ignorance, imposing their own limited and limiting agenda on the world. In renunciation we move out of self-will and into accord with Divine Mind becoming its instrument. Then even in the midst of conflict the background hum of divine harmony can be heard. Sometimes it even rises to the surface.

In 1943 my father Hilbert Bolland was taken from his native Holland by the Nazis to be a slave laborer in Germany. It seemed as if the world had come to an end. Yet during those long years of war, each spring the trees blossomed, the deer in the forest gave birth to fawns and the world renewed itself, oblivious to the travails of man. One evening, my father was startled by the trill of a nightingale singing unseen high in the boughs of a Linden tree, its beautiful melody drowning out the din of distant artillery fire. In that timeless moment he knew he was going to be alright. He knew that there was a sacred presence beneath the surface of things, an eternal ground of being upon which everything stands, far more real than any man-made mayhem. By surrendering to that we gain our footing, find our path and realize our joyful nature.

Ten Steps Away From Anxiety

Nothing interferes with our peace of mind more than anxiety. Anxiety is our ever-present friend, stealing our joy, hampering our relationships, clouding our judgment, and wasting our time. Why is this malady so persistent, so resistant to treatment, so common and widespread? Maybe we’ll never rid the world of anxiety altogether. But we can learn how to manage it better, and how to walk away from it one step at a time.

1. Clear the Clutter
The first rule of feng shui, the Chinese art of spatial arrangement, is eliminating clutter. It is difficult to free your mind from chaotic thinking when your environment is chaotic. Clutter, dirt and debris trap the soul in a downward spiral of inertia. The Hopi people share a similar perspective, that the outer world is a mirror of the inner world, and that the way we arrange our homes and offices reflects the order of our minds. Take a long, hard look at your room, your house, your office, your desk, your closets, and your in-box. The office-kitsch witticism a neat desk is a sign of a sick mind is a clever bit of nonsense belied by this essential truth: simplifying and streamlining the world around you frees your mind of untold stress and needless ineffectiveness.

2. Get Back in Your Body
Anxiety is over-thinking, plain and simple. The most direct and immediate remedy is physical activity. Get out of your head and back into your body. Your body was designed to move. Modern life has us sitting down nearly all the time. Push back your chair, get up and go outside. Walk, run, swim, surf, bike, hike, play, work out, have sex, do yoga, dance – whatever you like. Or at least clean out your garage, wash the windows and mop the floor. That way you accomplish steps one and two simultaneously.

3. Be Present
Anxiety is future-thinking. Anxiety only exists in the realm of thought. It cannot exist in this now moment because this now moment is not a thought – it is Being itself. When we worry, we wallow in troubling fictional scenarios that have not happened yet, all of them centered on our victim-status and affirming our weakness. In other words, anxiety is a defense mechanism that prevents action, for if we do not act, then we cannot fail, thereby fulfilling our childish need to be flawless and perfect. Every action is necessarily flawed, ringed round with unintended consequences. It is so much easier to risk nothing and retreat into the safety of our anxiety and fear. To combat this well-worn pattern, drop out of future-thinking and down into this present moment – this room, this conversation, this priceless, fleeting miracle, this simple task. The world will never again be exactly as it is in this now moment. Stay in your thoughts and miss it. Come out of your thoughts and be it.

4. Practice Allowance
We all carry with us a long list of expectations, judgments and ego-demands that deeply interfere with our effectiveness and joy. Simply notice how much agitation is generated by your resistance to what is. Arbitrary and self-serving ideas about how things should be blind us to the only reality we have and lock us away in a fantasy state of alienation and loneliness. Making peace with what we cannot change, letting situations unfold on their own terms at their own pace and allowing people to be who they are frees us from the relentless and agonizing task of trying to control everything and everyone. Living in a perpetual state of disappointment and resentment is detrimental to our well being. Unskilled self-interest leads to bad habits and self-absorption. Genuine, enlightened self-interest leads to allowance and joy.

5. Let Beauty Happen
One of the gifts that arise when anxiety is relinquished is beauty, or rather, the ability to perceive beauty. Beauty is never hidden, but it often goes unseen. When we are lost in the fog of fear and future-thinking we fail to feel the utter perfection of the uplifting moments that make up our lives. The quiet heroism of our fellow-travelers, the shimmering light that bathes every leaf on every tree, the smell of distant rain on the wind from the mountains, the love in the eyes of those who forgive us in spite of our blunders – this aura of abundance shines around us in every moment. We have only to cultivate the eyes to see.

6. Take One Step
The journey away from anxiety is a path of action. We don’t need to think about it anymore. The time for reflection and contemplation is past. Now it is simply time to move our feet. One step is all it takes. Notice how the thought of all those endless steps before us stops us in our tracks. So don’t think. Act. You don’t have to know what all of the next 10,000 steps are. You know what the next step is. Take it.

7. Shift into Appreciation
 Instead of focusing on all of the unfinished tasks and challenges unmet, look back and marvel at how far you’ve come. Take the time to appreciate yourself and everything you have accomplished. Cultivate the consciousness of gratitude and let it be the lens through which you see the world. Journaling can be a helpful practice because it forms a chronicle, a written record of all of the myriad ways things go right and how we are surrounded by abundance and beauty. A gratitude journal forms a crucial counterpoint to the mind’s natural tendency to dwell in the consciousness of scarcity and fear.

8. Don’t Resist Anxiety
Instead of turning conquering anxiety into yet another stress-inducing chore on your to-do list, re-frame it as simply an inappropriate or disproportionate response to uncertainty, or as a necessary time of restlessness out of which great creativity will soon emerge. I imagine that a butterfly feels a lot of anxiety as it fights its way out of the cocoon. What if anxiety is as necessary as adrenalin? What if anxiety is an evolutionary adaptation, a needed jolt of juice to spur us to action? The caveman who worried about the saber tooth tiger (whether there was one around or not) survived to pass on his genes. His hapless brother, not a care in the world, got eaten. Turning anxiety into a problem only strengthens and deepens its grasp. Quite often, anxiety is just how change feels.

9. Stop Thinking You’re in Charge
One of the primary sources of anxiety is the groundless yet persistent delusion that we are in charge. Our ego continually mistakes its limited range of power and influence as omnipotence and as a result we take on challenges and tasks that are absolutely none of our business. We don’t have to run the whole world, and in fact we couldn’t if we tried. Gandhi called this shift renunciation and correctly identified it as the core principle of the world’s spiritual wisdom. Paul McCartney lost his mother Mary to breast cancer when he was fifteen years old. Years later, through the voice of her grieving son, she sang a mantra of renunciation to all of us: “Let it be.”

10. Find Your Higher Power
Atheists, have no fear, this works for you too. There is an order, a structure, a pattern, a presence, a force in nature that binds all individual phenomena into a singular whole. Some people personify and deify it. Others prefer to let it float just out of range of the conceptual mind. No matter how you conceive of it in the realm of thought, the Source is real. Make peace with it. Find it in meditation, prayer, service, nature, art, beauty, truth, or in the deepest recesses of your own beating heart. Gandhi didn’t have a personal god, he just called it Truth. When you are rooted in the depths of your higher power, you live in a peace that surpasses all understanding. In what the mystics call God-consciousness there is no room for ego, and therefore no room for anxiety or fear.

This then is how we begin. Don’t try to conquer anxiety. Simply see its uselessness. Even that simple awareness will weaken its hold. Then take one step, then another. This is how we move away from anxiety and toward the joyful life our soul is asking for.