Understanding Dharma: An Open Letter to Oneself

What is my dharma? This question has plagued me day in and day out. I always feel that there is a conflict between the way I am living and the way I should be living. Dharma — as it is commonly understood translates to “what you should be doing” at any given point in time.

And that there are dharmas that conflict with each other as different priorities come about as we go through life. A common one that comes up in my life is my duty towards myself versus towards my family. Do I do what makes me happy or what makes them happy?

Do I change my career to do something I love or do I stay in my current job because it pays well and supports my family? As I move through life, I feel that I’ve understood what spiritual teachers were saying when they said things like “be with what is” or “be here now” differently than I did when I first encountered those ideas.

I was never able to understand the practicality of what it meant to be with what is. Now, when I reflect on it further — the way I understand that idea is that all of my mental anguish stems from my inability to be with what is.

For example, if it is the middle of the night and my baby is crying and I need to get up from my slumber, I feel frustrated. Then after I pick up my child and try to lull her back to sleep I’m frustrated as I am doing it.

Each wail gets more and more annoying as I think about how I need to go to the office the next morning and how I’m going to be tired all day long. As I look at this scenario from a bird’s eye view, I realize that all of the frustration is mental.

There is no actual cause of frustration. The frustration is purely a result of my inability to be with what was in that moment. I kept thinking about what could have been if what was in front of me wasn’t in front of me.

But, if I just accepted what the present moment had given to me, I may have actually enjoyed that moment with my child. Instead of being annoyed at my child’s crying, I would be more focused on how I could soothe him in that moment.

I’d be present to the fact of how lucky I am to be spending quality time with my child when in a few years I’ll never get this moment where he needs me back. I could actually revel in the richness and the deliciousness of that moment.

The way enlightenment has been branded these days makes us always feel that it must be something unordinary. That there must always be something different or special happening. That I can’t just be the same person I am. But what if we could be extremely joyful in the ordinariness of it all just by being present?

The questions that have risen in my mind when I go down this path is, “does that mean that we can’t achieve any progress if we are just supposed to be in the present moment?

Does that mean we lose all ambition or desire to change the status quo or develop?”After some deeper reflection on this, I believe that ambition or desire to change and being in the present moment are unrelated.

All of mankind wants progress and expansion in all facets of life from wealth to knowledge to love. We want to maximize all of these things in our lives at all times. However, that doesn’t change what is present now for each of us.

I could want children but my spouse could have infertility issues. I could want an amazing job but I could be stuck at a bad one because my family relies on the income.

Does this mean we can’t change or progress? Absolutely not! When life gives us the opportunity to make the change, we can make the change. But if life doesn’t give us the opportunity, we will still be joyful as we are living in the present moment and not in the world of our unmet expectations and desires.

And what does this all have to do with dharma? Everything. Dharma also has a concept of my dharma. What am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to live? Should I be living the same as the way I see others who I respect living? Absolutely not. What I am starting to embrace is that I need to live the way I need to live given the circumstances that I’ve been given. I need to do justice to the things that are in my life.

I spend too much time comparing my life to others’ lives. Forcing things into my life that don’t necessarily belong. Creating expectations for myself and the people around me that don’t fit. Creating more and more frustration about why I am not able to create the life that I’m trying to force into existence. Idealism is great as a North Star but progressive idealism is a far greater tool for true happiness.

This approach should not give rise to laziness. It requires some level of intellectual honesty and self inquiry. To further illustrate how this approach is not one of laziness I’d like to introduce the Toaist concept of Wu Wei, which means “effortless effort.” We can live in this world gracefully. The way we see the ideal doesn’t always need to cause cognitive dissonance.

We can achieve a state of working really hard but not feeling mental fatigue if we accept the present moment. If you believe in karma, whatever has presented itself in this moment has done so because you needed it to. And if you aren’t present with it now, it will just continue to present itself over and over and in more extreme ways until you do.

It is a like a fractal pattern which just expands endlessly until it is met with complete presence and awareness. So instead of trying to do someone else’s work in this world, I should try to do my own. Instead of looking at someone else’s life and thinking about why I don’t have what they have, I need to be present with what I have. In the words of rapper J. Cole…

“ Always gon’ be a whip that’s better than the one you got

Always gon’ be some clothes that’s fresher than the one’s you rock…

But you ain’t never gon’ be happy ‘til you love yours

No such thing as a life that’s better than yours

No such thing as a life that’s better than yours

No such thing as a life that’s better than yoursNo such thing, no such thing….”