First Cycle

We are used to thinking that maturity is the ability to keep ourselves under control. Not to get angry. Not to become anxious. Not to think “bad” thoughts.

But this is where the first mistake begins.

A person does not choose what thought will appear in the next second. He does not order anxiety, anger or doubt the way one orders a dish in a restaurant. Inner events arise by themselves: from memory, from the body, from habit, from fear, from a reaction to the outer world.

We are not the authors of every inner movement. We are rather its first witnesses.

The problem does not begin when anxiety appears. The problem begins at the moment when a person says: “This should not be here. I should not feel this.”

This is how an inner civil war begins.

The harder a person tries to suppress a thought, the more attention he gives it. And attention is nourishment. A thought that is being fought receives strength precisely from the fight.

Awareness begins not with victory over thought, but with a small shift: “I am not this thought. I see that it has arisen.”

Instead of “I am a failure,” there appears: “A thought about failure has arisen in my mind.”

The difference is enormous.

In the first case, the person becomes the thought. In the second, he sees it as a phenomenon.

This is where freedom appears. Not the freedom to forbid thoughts to come. The freedom not to become every thought that comes.

We are not masters of thoughts.

But we can become masters of attention.

The body is one of the most honest languages of a human being. It often shows what the mind has already managed to cover with explanations, habits and social masks.

Through breath, movement, tension, relaxation and bodily reactions one can see a great deal: fear, suppressed anger, old pain, automatic defenses, forgotten desires.

That is why bodily awareness really matters. It returns a person from the abstract head into the living sensation of being.

But the body is the first door, not the final goal.

The trap begins when a person gets stuck at the level of sensations and takes a pleasant state for spiritual progress. Relaxation becomes proof of depth. Bliss becomes a sign of enlightenment. Vibrations, warmth, lightness or peace begin to seem like final truth.

But a pleasant experience is not yet liberation. Sometimes it is simply well-trained biochemistry.

If practice is needed only for the sake of a pleasant state, it easily turns into a soft cage. A person seems to be engaged in spirituality, but in essence he is looking for a more elegant way not to meet himself.

Real movement begins where not only pain and anxiety are observed, but also the very pleasure of practice. Even peace should not become the new master.

The body may be a guide.

But it must not become a throne.

The past seems solid to us. As if somewhere behind us there lies an unchanging territory of events: this happened, then that happened, here is the cause, here is the consequence.

But inside a person, the past does not exist as pure fact. It exists as memory — and therefore as interpretation.

We remember an event already from a different state of consciousness. With new knowledge, new experience, new fear, new resentment or new fatigue. What once was a simple fact eventually becomes overgrown with explanations, justifications, pain, pride and inner commentary.

This is how not the past appears, but a version of the past.

This version may be convenient for the ego. It may make us right, innocent, special, wounded or deceived. Sometimes it helps us survive. Sometimes it becomes a cage.

A person thinks he suffers because of what happened. But often he suffers because of how it happened inside his memory.

The past cannot be returned and corrected like a thing. But one can see that a significant part of its power rests not on the event itself, but on our current interpretation of that event.

This is precisely why the present is so important.

In the moment of “now” we do not destroy the past. We stop being completely subject to its old edition.

A person does not live in the past.

He lives in his version of the past.