Being the Buddha by Michelle Cromer

Introduction

Spiritual awakening, and finding your center is often described as a journey to the top of a mountain. But it’s not. That’s because it’s easy to go up a mountain alone. It’s easy to think you can just leave everyone else behind and escape, heading off on a solo mission for the holy grail of enlightenment. The challenge is staying down in the village with the crazies and the lunatics and the people who aren’t in your family.

Actually, the path goes down, not up, as we move toward pain and turmoil. Facing crisis, embracing chaos-not pushing uneasiness away from us-is the journey and the way to our center. Our awakening begins when we refuse to avoid fear and uncertainty and instead seek to understand how we can relate to the inevitable discomfort in our lives.

This book is about my journey down and my arrival at my breaking point, when I realized I was standing in the nine circles of hell that were my life. It eventually occurred to me, some time during the intense spiraling downward, that I was going through several distinct cycles- seven, I later realized.

But, at rock bottom, I was not alone. I had just written my first book and, while traveling around the country as part of my national book tour, I learned that there were a lot of other people who were having similar moments of disorientation and longing for balance and something more. Because my first book encourages creative burial alternatives and planning one’s “exit strategy” in advance, it was not surprising that the majority of people who attended my readings were baby boomers. What was surprising, however, was that this same group of people did not want to discuss shooting their ashes into space or turning their loved ones ashes into diamonds, or what to do with the dead at all. They wanted to talk about what to do with the rest of their lives. A shocking number were drawn to questions of spirituality and religion, hoping to find meaningful answers. It seemed we all agreed these newfound feelings were changing our lives-because once you begin to ask deep, personal questions, you activate and open a dormant part of your brain. And like Pandora’s Box, it is a part that can never be closed.

Spending time with others and wondering about their lives gave me the courage I needed to examine my own. As I moved down through each cycle, I realized each is a stepping stone, each following the steps previous like movements in a symphony. We cannot be impatient, because we need each of the steps along the way to experience the journey as a whole.

To many of us the Buddha represents the icon for an authentic spiritual quest. However, Buddha has been commercialized, trademarked, and tattooed by faux-soul searchers for generations. We buy a statue of him, with his smooth hairless face, his cross-legged, upturned-palm stance, and we set him up on our shelf, next to some books in the front bookshelf at our house, and tell our friends when they ask why that we’ve found spirituality. That we’re no longer Catholic or Protestant or atheists, but that we believe in spirituality-not really having a clue what spirituality really means.

Being the Buddha means waking up to your truth-the dharma, the Buddha’s teaching-and letting go of what we think life might be by opening up to what our life is. This is what Siddhartha did before he transformed into the Buddha. This Hindu prince also went through the same seven cycles and, through his constant questioning and personal fortitude, chartered a new path that transformed life in India, Asia and now the West.

Let go of your attachment to your story. Walk with me down the mountain and through these seven cycles. Start now, not tomorrow, not later, not when you feel better.

The hard part will be deciding whether or not to be honest with yourselves and whether you are willing to truly take the time to peel away the layers covering who you really are.

Whatever has happened in your life up until now, whatever you have believed in, hoped for, or dreamed of, is in the past. A new life, a new chance, now awaits you. You have the opportunity to reach out and take it. All you have to do is take your first step down the mountain.