“Once we let go of the things that don’t matter, we are free to pursue all the things that really do matter,” Joshua Becker wrote in his book about five essential benefits of minimalism.
Yet many of us keep clinging to things we don’t need and people who keep us from the life we want to live. Why does this happen?
This is what Sharon Salzberg — a meditation teacher of immense wisdom and kindness — considers in a passage from her book The Heart as Wide as the World.
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Sharon Salzberg writes:
In the Old City section of Jerusalem, there is a wonderful open-stall marketplace. It is a place teeming with life — a deluge of sights and sounds and goods for sale. When I was teaching in Israel once, some friends and I went there. As we were walking down an alleyway one of the merchants called out to me, “I have what you need!” I felt a thrill go through my entire body. “Wow, he has what I need.” I stopped, turned around, and started walking toward him. Then I thought, “Wait a minute. First of all, I don’t need anything, and second, how would he know he has what I need?”
In many ways the world is calling out to us all of the time: “I have what you need! I have what you need!” In response, we internalize those voices into: “I need. I need something. I’m in a state of deficit, of deprivation.” It’s as though we turn into some sort of cartoon figure, with our eyes popping out of our heads like they are on springs. “Where is it? Where is this thing I need?” Our arms extend, reaching out. The fingers flex, trying to grab and hold on to one object or another. Our heads rigidly fix in the direction of the object of desire, so as not to lose sight of it. Our bodies incline forward in anticipation. What an uncomfortable mess!
[…]
It is true that all beings want to be happy. We want to feel at home in our own lives. We want to feel a part of something greater than our limited sense of who we are. We need an internal feeling of abundance, to be able to give to others. We need the fulfilling knowledge of our connection to all that lives, in order to love others. But in our habit of reaching out to satisfy our needs, we miss where our deepest satisfaction lies. A Tibetan text puts it like this: “Beneath the pauper’s house there are inexhaustible treasures, but the pauper never realizes this, and treasures never say, ‘I am here.’ Likewise, the treasure of our original nature, which is naturally pure, is trapped in ordinary mind, and beings suffer in poverty.”
Sharon Salzberg concludes:
All of those voices lead us away from knowing that we already have what we need. When we practice meditation, we discover the treasure of our original nature. We learn to let go of that cacophony of voices shouting at us about our seeming poverty. We learn not to get caught in trying to reach out and grasp after things we never really needed to begin with.
About the books’ author: Sharon Salzberg has played a crucial role in bringing meditation and mindfulness practices to the West and into mainstream culture since 1974 when she first began teaching. She is the co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, MA and the author of Lovingkindness and Love Your Enemies.
Complement this meditation in prose from The Heart as Wide as the World with Zenju Earthlyn Manuel on inner peace and solitude.
I’m a freelance writer and mindfulness advocate behind this blog. What you see here is the combination of my three favorite things: reading, writing, and mindfulness. While you’re here, subscribe to my blog updates and gain access to free mindfulness resources for stress relief.
