Being Important by Lexie Wolf

“I want to keep affirming that more than your specialness, more significant still is the way in which you are unique as part of a totality. I really see us all as having work on earth that is equally important. We just have different parts to play. “ – Ram Dass

A dear friend told me some weeks ago she was working on “becoming nobody.” This phrase, which describes a core yogic teaching, was made popular by Ram Dass. It has kept popping up for me since then in different ways. I’m listening.

Ram Dass and Michael Singer podcasts accompanied us on our trip north to visit our families. Exactly what we needed. Links to a couple of the ones that informed this essay are below.

Surrender. Letting go of the desires and aversions that form our human identity, rule our lives, cause suffering. Living and loving from the heart instead of the ego. Becoming nobody.

Ram Dass spoke of an experience spending a month with his parents, and surrendering to everything they brought forward. Not refusing their food because it wasn’t “yogic” – but recognizing it was made from love and eating it anyway. Watching their TV shows. Just being with them exactly as they wanted to be, without trying to exert his own preferences or needs. How incredibly loving is that? There’s no way I could possibly do that and that’s why Ram Dass is Ram Dass and I’m Lexie.

Singer described for us the process that might actually get us to the kind of nonresistance Ram Dass was embodying. He called it the Pathless Path. First: Be awake enough to witness yourself in each moment. When you catch yourself resisting something, relax. Allow it in. Let it move through. Every. Moment. You start with the small ones, and you work up to the big ones. That’s the pathless path.

The hard things we resist stay stuck in us, becoming catalysts for our suffering in the future. The gunk that gets left in there becomes food for triggers. The yogic teachings describe this process of falling into ruts of ingrained behavior that doesn’t serve as samskaras.

Families can be counted on to give us lots of jabs in the samskaras. I’ve quoted Ram Dass before in pieces about my family: “If you think you’re enlightened, go spend a week with your family” is probably his most famous phrase. Because it is perfection. Here’s a post I wrote a couple of years ago about that.

Families love and need to pull other family members into their stories, so the dramas tend to be intricate and layered. It’s rich and validating to successfully draw those closest to you into the TV show you’re currently starring in, especially one that started in 1976 and is still running.

The teachings tell us that these games and stories of manifest reality are all maya – illusion. Remembering that helps me keep things in perspective. At the same time, telling myself that feels like resistance.

If I’m telling myself all the stuff is just illusion and not being drawn into it, aren’t I resisting it? Maybe the practice is to let myself fully experience what comes up without turning it into another story. To feel it, without either pushing it away or climbing into the TV show.

How to be fully in the world but not of it? This is a beautiful challenge. Feel free to write in your advice, yogis.

Bill and I are each fortunate to have one deeply cherished living parent.

Both are very fond of describing people they are connected to as “important” based on their material achievements. This is still triggering to both Bill and I. I guess because we haven’t fully let go of that conditioning in ourselves. We smile indulgently.

I do think it’s not entirely benign. Deeming certain members of society “important” reinforces separation, not to mention the violent hierarchies and inequalities already baked into our culture. But if I’m being fair, that’s probably not the only reason it gets under my skin.

For me, the recognition that my father will never see me as important by his standards stings.

One funny exception happened on this trip. Dad took Bill and I to a monthly meditation group he’d been to once before where he tried to introduce me to the host as an important meditator.

“She’s been to India twice!” he boasted.

It was hysterical, and mortifying, both. And hysterical that my Dad can still mortify me.

A cousin who has drunk the “important” Kool Aid asked me as an opening conversational salvo what was the most interesting thing about me. I dearly wanted to say: Nothing.

I didn’t. I came up with Something.

Maybe becoming nobody isn’t about convincing myself that none of this matters. Maybe it’s about letting all of it matter – the sting of wanting my father to think I’m important, the irritation when someone starts ranking the humans again, the ridiculousness of being asked why I’m interesting – without needing to do anything with it. Without building another story around it. Although clearly I’m still building stories – you’re reading one. Maybe the practice isn’t to stop making stories, but to remember they’re stories.

Thanks for joining me on this little spin-out.

We’re all important, every one of us. We are all expressions of the Divine. And none of us is important in the least. We are little ants, here today gone tomorrow, crawling around on a dirt pile in space.

I can feel the stirrings of freedom in being nobody  - and everybody. I have far, far to go and that’s okay.

It’s the great work of this wondrous life.

love
Lexie

Ram Dass and Michael Singer are geniuses in making the deepest teachings of yoga sound simple and straightforward. They’re important! Here are the podcast episodes I referenced:

Ram Dass on Honoring Parents and Incarnation: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5qd2uqZdX90sonRkSqn6N9?si=a4aaf337ff1c4668

Ram Dass “Playing your Part” https://open.spotify.com/episode/0shhNOtYEJWXCn9fANeNs0?si=f50dc99442b143e0

Michael Singer “The Pathless Path: Learning to Handle Reality” https://open.spotify.com/episode/4wrWMgs13IEFw7LXQ1DrTW?si=641eeb6ae32c43ad