Consider the wingsuit flyer standing at the edge of a cliff.
He steps into emptiness.
Gravity immediately pulls him toward the earth.
The rushing air meets the wings of his suit, creating the aerodynamic forces that allow his descent to become forward flight.
Two forces.
One pulling downward.
The other making the glide possible.
And yet the flyer does not try to defeat either one.
He works with both.
Take away gravity, and there is no descent to transform.
Take away the air, and there is nothing for the wings to work against.
Take away the wingsuit, and the relationship between those forces changes completely.
But when everything comes together . . .
the glide appears.
Perhaps this is a beautiful metaphor for meditation—and for life itself.
The mind also moves through opposing forces.
Pleasure and pain.
Fear and desire.
Success and failure.
Holding on and letting go.
Past and future.
What we want . . . and what life gives us.
We usually believe peace will come when one side finally defeats the other.
When fear disappears.
When uncertainty ends.
When the mind becomes perfectly still.
When life finally goes our way.
But perhaps awakening asks something entirely different of us.
Do not eliminate the opposing forces.
Learn to glide between them.
Meditation is the wingsuit.
It does not abolish gravity.
It does not stop the wind.
It does not destroy thought.
It teaches us how to enter into a different relationship with all of them.
Thoughts still come.
Emotions still rise.
Life still pulls us in one direction and pushes us in another.
Yet beneath all that movement, something remains quietly present.
Awareness.
Awareness does not argue with the forces.
It does not choose one side of duality and declare war upon the other.
It simply sees.
And when thought, emotion, body, breath, and attention are allowed to find their proper relationship, there comes a moment when effort begins to soften.
You are no longer wrestling with the sky.
You are moving through it.
You are gliding.
Perhaps that is why awakening does not always feel like acquiring something extraordinary.
Sometimes it feels more like discovering what was already here once we stopped interfering with it.
The wind was always there.
Gravity was always there.
The open sky was always there.
Awareness was always there.
We simply had to discover the wings.
The awakened life is not the absence of opposing forces.
It is discovering how to glide between them.
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