Rest in natural great peace this exhausted mind,
Beaten helpless by karma and neurotic thoughts
Like the relentless fury of the pounding waves
In the infinite ocean of samsara.
—NYOSHUL KHEN RINPOCHE
There is a Zen story about a monk who is vigorously sweeping the temple grounds. Another monk walks by and snips, “Too busy.”
The first monk replies, “You should know there is one who is not too busy.”
The moral of the story is that while the sweeping monk may have outwardly appeared to the casual observer as “too busy,” actively performing his daily monastic duties, inwardly he was not busy. He could recognize the quietness of his state of mind, the part of himself that was at rest in the middle of things.
Most of us think we are too busy. Probably we are, but also the way we think about the topic matters. When I was in third grade, the minute hand on the large, round school clock moved incredibly slowly as I awaited the two o’clock dismissal bell. Summer vacations seemed to last forever. Now time flies by, and vacations are never quite long enough. What happened? There are still the same twenty-four hours in every day, which means the feeling of “not having enough time” doesn’t align with my objective reality.
What happens is that when I am caught in a time-driven, scarcity mentality or tumbling unconsciously from one moment to the next, I become a prisoner of my thoughts. I get trapped in a jail of my own construction. And I don’t even realize that the cell door is not locked. I have only to choose to open it.
Finding a place of rest isn’t about adding another task to your already too-long to-do list. Nor does it mean napping more during your workday (though this may prove helpful). It is a choice—a choice to be alert, to bring your attention to this moment. Multitasking is a myth that only serves to seize our attention and exhaust us. At the end of the day, it is neither enjoyable nor productive. Let’s face it: none of us have that superpower; we can only live in one moment at a time.
Mahatma Gandhi once said, “I do not want to see the future. I am concerned with taking care of the present moment. God has given me no control over the moment following.” This idea frustrates us. We want to spin plates, juggle balls, and live two dreams at once. Anything else sounds boring. “I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” we say.
As a result, we end up addicted to busy. We confuse rest with non-productivity and laziness. “No time to waste!” we chide ourselves as we race from one activity to the next. Yet we do it all in a continuous state of partial attention, imagining we’re accomplishing more, when in reality we are living less.
The smartphone, our most constant companion, is a shining example of this mentality. A recent survey of San Francisco residents found that on any given day, most people interact with their smartphones more than they do with other human beings. Half of the people surveyed admitted to using their phones to escape social interaction, and nearly a third said they felt anxious when they didn’t have access to their phones.
Remember when computers were sold to us based on the idea that they would create more leisure time and greater human connectivity? I want my money back.
In truth, many of us fear rest. Doctors and nurses often speak to me of how exhaustion is a central part of their training and how they continue to drive themselves ruthlessly at work. They fear that if they were to stop racing around, the enormous suffering they have witnessed would crash through their defenses. Tears would flow, and they would be unable to stop crying.
The armor we build around our hearts may lock out our pain, but it also prevents tenderness from entering. We are afraid that we will be forgotten, that if we stop going all the time, the loneliness and emptiness we fear will surface. So we build a false sense of security, warding off uncertainty by making a fetish of constant activity.
In this way, we become invested in our own exhaustion. During seminars with health care professionals, I like to ask them to explore the counter-intuitive question, “What’s right about being exhausted?” At first they deny any benefits. With time, however, honest answers emerge. Some say, “People believe I am working hard. I get credit for being dedicated.” Others respond, “Being overworked and worn out means I matter.” One or two acknowledge, “People feel sorry for me, and that makes me feel loved.” Often our exhaustion doesn’t come from doing too much, but rather from a lack of full engagement or wholeheartedness.
There is a common phenomenon among those newly diagnosed with cancer. My friend Ange Stephens, a longtime therapist to people with life-threatening illness, calls it “a secret gratitude.” After the initial shock subsides, many of her clients quietly express relief. “Now I can say ‘no’ whereas I always had felt obliged to say ‘yes,’” they tell her. “Now I can finally rest.”
Do we need to die before we can rest in peace?
Rest is found when we are present instead of letting our minds wander aimlessly through the hallways of fear, worry, and anxiousness. Rest comes when we become more by doing less, when we don’t allow the urgent to crowd out the important. It is the result of a decluttering of the mind and decoupling from fixed views. Rest is a Sabbath, when we stop and turn to worship the possibilities of the ever-fresh moment.
Idleness is not an indulgence or a vice so much as it is indispensable. Nearly all plants go dormant in winter. Certain mammals hibernate, slowing their metabolisms dramatically. All are guided by inner clocks to emerge again in the fullness of time, when conditions are right. This period of rest is crucial to their survival.
We, too, need to heed our instincts and find a place of rest. My friend and Metta Institute faculty member, the late Angeles Arrien, was fond of saying, “Nature’s rhythm is medium to slow. Many of us live in the fast lane, out of nature’s rhythm. There are two things we can never do in the fast lane: we can neither deepen our experience nor integrate it.” She would often encourage our students to spend an hour outdoors each day and at least a half an hour in silence every day. She said, “When we lose touch with the rhythms of nature, we become unbalanced. To be fully present within our nature, we must be in balance with the land around us.”
Living out of touch with the primal rhythms of life takes a toll on us.
* * *
I like to scuba dive. It’s one of the ways I get in touch with what nature has to teach. My favorite thing to do while diving is to sink slowly to the bottom and sit on the ocean floor. Most guides move too fast for me. They want to show you this coral reef and that wreck and the other thing. But I love to stay still, watching the underwater life pass me by and listening to my breath as it regulates in the infinite silence of the sea.
Once, while in Indonesia, I went for a night dive. It was breathtakingly beautiful that evening. We left at sunset, the sky ablaze with streaks of burnt orange, the clouds radiating a pink and purple peace. We traveled in rustic wooden longboats painted in vermillion reds, saturated yellows, and the turquoise of the sea. The calm ocean mirrored the sky, and the thin horizon line gave the impression of two worlds merging.
All we had to light our way once we got into the water were simple flashlights wrapped in duct tape, no special night-diving lights. As I traveled down into the darkness with my diving partner, I felt an urge to turn my flashlight off. And when I did, I quickly realized how truly dark it was; a kind of pitch blackness I had never experienced. I couldn’t tell which way was up, down, or sideways, and I had no idea if anyone or anything was nearby. I could feel a physical contraction in my chest as I experienced a wave of anxiety, but the feeling soon passed, like a child’s nightmare.
When I turned on my flashlight, my buddy and I swam around a huge coral reef. In time, we settled on the very bottom. It was even more still than usual at night. Even the fish seemed to be at rest. As the ocean enveloped us, I felt an imperturbable sense of peacefulness as spacious as the night sky.
At the end of the dive, when our time was up and our oxygen was running low, we began to ascend to the surface. When you come up from a dive, you have to move slowly, pausing at points to avoid getting sick. Midway to the top, we could feel the powerful ocean currents, like rivers coming from far away that move through the ocean, threatening to carry us away. When we surfaced, we realized that a huge storm was raging with torrential rains, thunder, and massive ocean swells. It was wild.
It’s not the safest place to be—out at sea during a storm. But I howled at the top of my lungs in sheer glee. The turbulence wasn’t frightening me. Contentment had traveled right up from the ocean floor with me. It wasn’t something special. No hocus-pocus. I was just there, fully present with what was so, grounded in my own inner peace.
Fortunately, I could make out our boat a short distance away. My buddy and I were able to get on board along with all the other divers that night. We made it home safely—and I will never forget the thrill of the experience.
In teaching meditation practice, I often turn to the metaphor of the ocean to describe the layers of mind. On the surface, there is generally a fair amount of turbulence in our thoughts. We are affected by whatever winds are blowing at the time, the conditions of daily life, the busyness of the day, the stress, the anxiety. Most people live at this level, with a fair amount of mental agitation, with emotional storms threatening to drown us. It can feel like it is all about us. We see ourselves as the center of the universe. This painfully narcissistic mind-set, driven by our survival instinct, can lead to expectations that the world owes us or an inflated belief that we are responsible for much of what is happening.
Settle the mind a bit more through meditation, and we can begin to sense the more universal currents, those underwater rivers that help to produce the disturbances on the surface. We contact the deeper human tendencies, the instinctual drives, the primal forces, the ancestral conditioning that everyone is subject to and that are not limited to our individual circumstances. These ingrained patterns of mind attempt to construct a fixed sense of self and a stable world from a flow of continuous change. They shape our behaviors, create our habits, and distort our beliefs—all of which lead to suffering.
With mindfulness, we start to see, “Oh, there are these currents moving through my mind, pushing me around. They show up as reactivity, fear, anger, a desire for control. But they are not particular to me. They are moving through all of us. This is the human condition.”
Moreover, we realize that these impersonal human conditions predate our births. They are not our fault. I didn’t choose to be born into an alcoholic family. My unborn soul wasn’t waiting up in heaven looking for a chance to jump into a body that would be sexually abused when I was just thirteen. But I did have to learn to deal with what happened to me. The critical point here is that while we need to be responsible to the impact these conditions have on our lives, we are not responsible for their appearance.
This is the beginning of our release from self-consciousness into a more expanded appreciation of life, this realization that we are all subject to conditions beyond our control. The recognition of previously unconscious currents gives rise to more empathy, compassion, and acceptance, not only of ourselves, but also of others.
If we drop still further beneath the surface of our minds, we encounter a vast, serene calmness. We recognize that while this human condition is always moving through us, we do not have to get caught up in it. We do not have to be swept away by these universal currents. In so doing, we are not escaping from the vicissitudes of life. We are simply finding a natural place of rest, as if sitting at the bottom of the sea, observing the movements of our minds and hearts like fish darting through coral.
Resting in this open awareness, we release ourselves from the habits of managing our circumstances and striving for control as ways to avoid pain and gain pleasure. We have more space, more freedom from reactivity. We are not denying, justifying, or rationalizing; we are allowing. When it is this way, we know that it is this way. When it is that way, we know that it is that way. This is a gentle yet committed and courageous way of appreciating the deeper truth of what it means to be human.
It may sound complicated, but it starts with basic awareness and putting into practice simple routines. I once worked with an executive at a billion-dollar technology company. He was experiencing dramatic symptoms of stress: skin irritations, bowel problems, and sleepless nights. He spent most of his day in a windowless conference room, meeting with various work teams charged with the development and rollout of new devices. Teams would come and go, but he rarely left the room.
We began with the very straightforward agreement that he would take a break each hour to use the bathroom. Gradually, we added a few conscious deep breaths during meetings and a mindful walk down the hallway to the toilet. Over time, the bathroom stall became his temporary meditation hut. There, he would reconnect with his own calm center and then, often quite serenely, return to his business meetings.
* * *
If we hope to find true rest, we need to see clearly the currents that disturb us. Yet recognition is only the beginning. To make real change, we have to dive deeper to understand the specific ways that we have been conditioned throughout our lives. Then we can address the underlying causes of our internal distress or lack of restfulness.
In the Buddhist tradition, there is an image known as the wheel of samsara. Samsara means the cycle of death and rebirth to which the material world is inextricably bound. The wheel as metaphor illustrates the continuous cycle of conditions that cause us to spin round and round. The engine that drives the wheel is sometimes referred to as the three poisons. These are the root causes of our suffering: craving (greed), aversion (hatred), and ignorance (delusion). At first, poison may seem like a strong word—until we begin to recognize the toxicity of these afflictive states and the ways they contaminate our minds, obscuring our natural openness. Still, I prefer a more contemporary and visceral way of naming these universal obstacles, which Martin Aylward, the resident Buddhist teacher at Moulin de Chaves retreat center in France, shared with me in a conversation. He called them demand, defense, and distract.
Craving, the first poison, is a demand that the objects of our desire provide us with lasting satisfaction so that we feel fulfilled, whole, and complete. It is the tendency to cling to someone, something, some idea, and become rigidly attached to it. Greed creates an inner hunger, which has us always striving for an unattainable goal: a new job, a new partner or child, a new car or home, a new body, a new attitude. We mistakenly believe our happiness is dependent upon reaching our goal, getting what we want. But the problem is that even if we do attain it, we find that we can get no lasting satisfaction from our accomplishment or possession because everything in life is subject to the law of impermanence. Circumstances will change, or we’ll become accustomed to the new role or thing or person in our lives, and our pleasure inevitably will fade.
Tragically, inherent in demand is the notion that what is here now, what we have now, isn’t good enough. We can sense this drive for more in our bodies as an energetic pull, the desperate wanting for something to fill up our underlying sense of deficiency.
The second poison, the defense of aversion, can show up as anger, hatred, bullying, loneliness, intolerance, or fear. We habitually resist, deny, and avoid unpleasant feelings, circumstances, and people—whatever we do not like or want. Defense traps us in a vicious cycle of finding conflict and enemies everywhere. It reinforces our mistaken perceptions that we are separate from everything and everyone. Energetically, we know this drive in our bodies as the opposite of pull. It is a pushing away. The irony is that whatever we push away usually pushes back even harder.
The ignorance of distraction is the third poison. It blinds us to the way reality works, giving rise to the tendency to pull (demand) and push (defend) against life. We misperceive the nature of things, which is that they are both interdependent and impermanent. Instead, we get lost in a loop of distractions as a way of disconnecting from our pain. Alcohol, shopping, eating, gambling, sex, social media and video games, even meditation—all can serve as habits and strategies for distracting ourselves, all can go unquestioned. We lose ourselves, get confused, and hold unhelpful views. We go about our lives in a kind of fog, unable to see clearly that there is a way through our pain, which requires us to turn toward it. By trying to ignore it, we continually trip and fall further into our suffering. Energetically, we feel spaced out, dull, or vaguely unconscious.
These are the three underlying, impersonal poisons that lurk below the surface of our awareness, impacting our everyday behaviors and preventing us from ever feeling at rest. Some people like to think of them playfully as Buddhist versions of the Myers-Briggs personality types. Imagine going to a party. The demand (craving) type heads straight for the buffet table. The defense (aversion) type complains about the décor, the food, and the music. The distraction (ignorance) type wonders if he’s actually at the right party. It’s a lighthearted way of recognizing these impersonal conditions that shape our personalities.
Generally speaking, we sense the presence of these conditions, but we prefer not to acknowledge just how strong of a hold they have on us. They are the universal currents batting our minds about like tiny ships at sea.
The antidote to all three poisons is mindfulness. Healing occurs through learning about these afflictive states of demand, defense, and distraction and realizing that they impact all moments of all experiences. Suffering is not random, nor is it a punishment for our personal failings or a sign of moral weakness. Suffering is the natural consequence of ignoring the truth of life’s ever-changing causes and conditions. And our natural inclinations to crave, avoid, or distract ourselves won’t go away by pretending they don’t exist. On the contrary, they need to be seen and understood. When we realize how much pain they cause, we are less inclined to follow their commands.
In the Buddhist tradition, we say, “The obstacles become the path.” The missteps we make as we demand, defend, and distract are also gateways to the innate beauty of our inner being. When we allow ourselves to rest in our natural openness, we can come to know these poisons clearly and recognize their detrimental impact on our lives. Once the blinders come off, we are no longer fooled. We see our conditioning, our identification with the poisons, with clear awareness. Then we wake up to the fact that our suffering was fueled by a drive to ignore the truth all along.
This is a moment of liberation. The truth that was obscured, yet was always present, now sets us free. It’s a bit like the way our eyesight can change almost imperceptibly over time, blurring our perceptions of beauty. We get fitted for glasses and suddenly we see without distortion. The magnificence of the world becomes more apparent to us.
In addition to recognizing the three poisons, it also is helpful to cultivate balancing factors to temper their strong forces and transform them into something more positive. For example, we can nurture our innate generosity and equanimity to balance our demand urges, and discover contentment. When we do, we find that we enjoy far more the beauty and pleasure that already exist in our lives. Furthermore, we begin to think of ourselves as the temporary caretakers rather than the owners of what we have been given, and so we share our gifts openhandedly.
Loving kindness, gratitude, and compassionate action can soften our demands and relax our tendencies to defend. Tapping into a concern for others and a commitment to healing and connection, we utilize these capacities to challenge inequality, environmental devastation, and social injustice.
Wisdom cuts through distraction, and clear comprehension replaces delusion. When we use insight to loosen the grip of our self-centeredness, we come to appreciate that all of our actions have consequences. Then we feel compelled to act to reduce the suffering of the world and increase the happiness of all living beings.
Today, after spilling water on my laptop, I panicked. I raced to the computer store, where the technicians told me my device was beyond repair. I had to buy a new computer and reinstall all of my files.
During the first hour, I felt highly stressed. My primary reaction was defense: I wanted to push this experience away. Feeling myself to be a victim of the little blue line that signaled how long the installation would require, I thought, Five hours? That seems like a long time. Then later, Wait, what? Fourteen hours remaining? What’s going on here?
That little blue line was maddening. For a while, it sucked me into an alternate reality where technology was my enemy. I blamed the computer malfunction for my anxiety and frustration, because it triggered the growing fear that I wouldn’t be able to meet my promised deadlines.
Then I stopped, took a few deep breaths, and found a place of rest in the middle of things. I realized that I was telling myself a story based on my preferences, pointlessly fighting what was going on. With a simple shift of mind-set, I could counterbalance my instinctive defense reaction with gratitude. I recognized how fortunate I was, actually. I had remembered to back up my old computer the night before, so I hadn’t lost that much work. Not only that, but I had the financial resources to purchase a new computer right away. It wasn’t always that way, and who knows if it ever will be again in the future? I reminded myself to appreciate my gifts now, in this moment.
Everything was okay. Gratefulness filled my heart. I felt present again. I had rediscovered my peace of mind.
Taming our riotously active minds is a bit like training a wild horse—not easy, but not impossible. Gradually, the tamed horse calms down and can be put to useful work. Then we can enjoy some degree of balance and rest.
When you’re able to do this in a relationship—whether with someone who is dying, or your boss, spouse, or child—you will find that you have a capacity to experience life in an entirely different way. You can see the causes and conditions of the situation and skillfully interact with them in order to alleviate your own and others’ suffering. You can be the calm in the storm.
It may be necessary—skillful, even—to shift some of the causes and conditions of your life deliberately, rather than just floating along as a hapless passenger. I’m not saying you shouldn’t take action. You may need to leave the job with the abusive boss, or get help for an addiction. But when you’re on the surface of your mind, all you can do is react. You’re at the total mercy of the storm, being tossed about like a tiny rowboat in a wild sea. When you travel into the calm depths, you can act from a place of wisdom and compassion.
The philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote, “I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.” The deeper we go within ourselves, the more expansive we become. We allow everything to show itself, even what is buried in the unconscious. There is no need to repress the unwanted parts of our situations, ourselves, or others. We realize that everything is a product of our dynamics, our histories, and our reactivity—and that it’s all part of the human condition. We can allow thoughts, feelings, ideas to come and go without being swept away by any of them.
When I am withfamily and friends or at the bedside I try to create a warm, open, and nonjudgmental space in which whatever needs to happen, can happen. This is best done if I can first become a refuge to myself. I can pause and call on the better part of my nature as a shelter from my habitual defensiveness, reactivity, or neurotic tendencies that cause me to be overwhelmed by the chaos surrounding me. We cannot always eliminate difficult conditions, but we can use our acquired skills to transform obstacles into opportunities. We can be that one calm person in the room.
In doing so, we can be a true refuge to others.
Samuel was a guest in our hospice. He had AIDS and was frail as a bird. At twenty-eight years old, he weighed just eighty-nine pounds. His friends decided to throw him a birthday party. They brought champagne and truffles and strawberries, balloons and music, and lots of good cheer. They were having a grand old time. Samuel was not. He seemed to be shrinking into the bed, his already tiny frame almost disappearing. His friends meant well, but Samuel appeared to be drowning in the stimulus.
Just then, Ray, a volunteer massage therapist, entered the room. Ray pulled a chair up to the foot of the bed, grounded himself with a few deep breaths, and nodded to Samuel with a slight smile. The gesture was something between “Nice to see you again” and a bow of respect, conveying Ray’s attention and asking permission to touch.
None of Samuel’s friends seemed to notice Ray’s presence. The massage therapist’s hands found their way under the covers to Samuel’s foot. I couldn’t see his movements; they must have been slight. I don’t know if Ray was pressing on some special points or doing reflexology, but there was no mystery to this foot rub. What mattered was the deep contact made through touch itself. The connection between the two men was undeniable.
For half an hour Ray “listened,” reassuring, exploring, responding to Samuel without a word being said. The hubbub in the room went on, but now Samuel was floating instead of drowning. Ray removed his hands slowly and deliberately. He sat back and paused. Samuel blew him a kiss, closed his eyes, and sank back into the pillow, at rest.
The conditions remained unchanged. The party was still going on. People continued to eat truffles and drink champagne. Ray and Samuel didn’t even speak. Yet Ray helped Samuel turn down the volume of his emotionally charged state and his body’s resulting agitation through caring touch. We often underestimate the comfort of silence and the value of simple human presence.
Similarly, while I was recovering from my heart surgery, my old friend Martha deBarros, the co-founder of Zen Hospice Project, often would come to my home to support me in the practice of meditation. She would end our sessions with a lovely ritual, one which she had been teaching for years to people in prison. She invited me to place my right hand on my heart and my left on my belly and repeat the phrases, “I am here now. We are here now.”
Here and now is the only place of rest.
* * *
One night after my heart surgery, I awoke at two o’clock in the morning from a painful, fitful sleep and a difficult dream. I felt frightened and resistant to my suffering. Then I heard a voice. A voice from my soul. It was giving me guidance. Offering me my own words. “Find a place of rest in the middle of things,” it said.
I thought, Okay, Frank, just try to rest.
Then I smiled.
The thing is, trying to rest is not resting; it’s just more trying. Effort is necessary in life. You can’t lift your bag into the trunk of a car if you don’t extend effort. Yet when we apply this same sort of effort to resting, it backfires. We can’t seek the deepest rest through striving to change the way things are. We can only relax the activity that obstructs our contact with rest.
When we look closely, we see that desire is almost continuous. It’s a fire that is always burning within us, and it ignites and fuels our seeking. Being a seeker—an identity I myself have been proud to adopt at times—is an inevitable step on the spiritual path. It can easily become a hindrance. Energetically, seeking feels agitated, restless. It implies that I am deficient, disconnected from something essential in my life. I think something is missing, and that belief perpetuates my seeking.
Agitated looking won’t ever connect us to our true nature. And trying to get rid of our desires, to stop seeking, doesn’t work either. That’s just more seeking, more effort, and more trying.
This is the real paradox of the spiritual life: that which can save us also can drive us mad. Don’t get me wrong. Seeking has a place in this world. It isn’t all bad. In order to begin our spiritual journeys, we must be motivated by seeking a better life—deeper connections with ourselves and others; explanations for our existential questions; relief from our pain and suffering. Yet too often our quests for peace and fulfillment get entangled with striving. We read books, seek out teachers, and go looking for our tribes. We accumulate practices, beliefs, and strategies as we seek solutions. We continuously search for answers outside of ourselves when in fact we already have everything we need, here, within us.
There is one form of seeking that I find useful. I call it wholesome desire. This is the desire to be free, to know what is true and be completely ourselves.
Wholesome desire does not feel agitated. In fact, it removes the restlessness because we stop looking outside ourselves for approval or satisfaction. It feels more like love. We love our true nature, we love presence, and because we so love it, we want to be close to it, to get intimate with it. It’s a kind of love affair with truth. It’s like when we are with our partners, we long to see them with as few clothes on as possible. We want them as they are, naked. Just so in spiritual life, we long to see the naked truth, unobstructed by preferences or the clothing of our treasured beliefs.
“I am here now. We are here now.”
One of the qualities of a truly open mind is deep restfulness. We come to this restfulness by accepting and understanding our desires, not by rejecting them. We surrender our strategies and resistance.
Lying in my bed that morning, the desire machine churning and belching out all sorts of preferences, I felt discouraged, caught up in my effort to find rest when it eluded me. Then I remembered a lesson from my many thousands of visits with dying patients. How I always pause at the threshold of the room, because that pause breaks the momentum of habit. It gives us a choice.
That choice, the only choice we have really, is to be open or closed. Open to what is unfolding or selective in our acceptance of it. Actually, I don’t even like the word acceptance—it has too many moral overtones. The word allow is better suited to what I am describing. It’s a softer word, a word that takes us beyond the concepts of accepting and rejecting altogether. It releases us from the whole idea of comparison, preference for or against, hope and fear. It is a true resting place.
And so I found myself resting in allowing. And in that moment, there was no disconnection, nothing missing, and therefore nothing left to seek. Lying in my bed, I dropped like a stone falling through thick liquid until I came to lie at the bottom of the dark, silent ocean. I gave myself completely to rest. Body at rest. Heart at rest. Mind at rest. Consciousness at rest.
Seeking doesn’t end by finding. Seeking just ends. It ends when our awareness comes to rest in the peaceful depths of our essential nature. Then, like the sweeping monk, we can go about our daily activities while still functioning from a place of inner calm.