The Misery of Spiritual Seeking

Your head’s in the tiger’s mouth.

Saraswati, Goddess of Wisdom Photos by Heidi

It’s hard to remember a time when I wasn’t seeking. Sometimes I called it looking for happiness, sometimes enlightenment; but mostly I think I was working to find a place where there wasn’t any pain. And if I were lucky, my life would be all rainbows, puppies and sunshine.

There were many promising paths to this goal. Seminars, workshops, retreats, meditation, cults, yoga teacher trainings, more yoga teacher trainings etc etc. After many, many disappointments and what I felt were failures; I finally settled on never having another spiritual teacher ever, ever again.

And so it went for at least a decade.

Then in 2007 I was given a book in a cafe in Rishikesh, India called No Way Out by Ram Tzu. It was a book of poetry about non-dual Advaita philosophy- irreverent as heck towards the specialness of being a seeker. In it Ram Tzu mentioned please don’t try to find him because he didn’t want any miserable seekers sitting around his living room. Ok then. (Later my husband researched and found that Ram Tzu was actually Wayne Liquorman.)

By “happenstance” a year later I was reading a local newspaper’s ads and saw a tiny announcement for a weekend retreat he was leading just down the road from me. I went. And really didn’t stop going to see him as often as I could for the next ten years.

Ramana Maharshi says that “Your head is already in the tiger’s mouth. There is no escape.”

This Advaita Teaching certainly was that for me. There were no promises nor hope. No effort nor struggle. No one wanted anything from me. Wayne said “look and sometimes you will see.” I had so many things I wanted to fix and/or erase in myself. Even with all this inner turmoil I had going on, with Wayne I had the visceral experience of being loved unconditionally.

Wayne’s term for the ego is the “false sense of authorship”. We feel like we could and should be able to control what happens in our life. Even when we know deep inside that we cannot. What a formula for misery! It’s exhausting.

I think one of the things that can make spiritual seeking so miserable is that there is a point where you start seeing your vasanas, as they are called in Hindu philosophy. Simply defined, vasanas are undigested emotions from your past. As you slow down enough to look and really feel, these emotions and the whole gamut of the experience come to the surface.

The upside, of course, is as these vasanas are seen and digested; the seeker feels lighter, freer and more able to respond to life in the moment.

Around 5 years ago, the urge to seek left me. The time of seeking, especially my time with Wayne, was so intense and all-consuming. It didn’t happen suddenly, but one day I realized I wasn’t seeking any more.

Last pointer- Wayne distinguishes between pain and suffering. Pain is something that happens in the moment. We will all have a certain amount of pain as human beings. Suffering, however, happens over time- in the gap between how it is and how we think it should be.

That seeking has ended certainly doesn’t mean I am not learning! Gautam Sachdeva, another beautiful Advaita teacher in the same lineage as Wayne, wrote that you can get your driver’s license, but you still need to learn how to drive. As my teacher teacher Erin Reese has shown me “The development and demise of the human being continues.”

It is obvious to me that all my so-called failures in my search were exactly what needed to happen to end up where I am.

If you are a seeker or have been a seeker, I would be curious how having your head in the tiger’s mouth has felt for you. Your subscription, comments and likes mean a lot to me! Thank you for reading.