Stand Still: Poetry on Finding Your Path Through Self-Doubt

How do you know that you're on your path?

Because it disappears, that's how you know.

How do you know that you're really doing something radical?

Because you don't-- you can't see where you're going.

That's how you know. Mm. Um, but everything you have leant on for your id-identity, um, has gone. Mm-hmm.

And so you are going to enter, um, the, the, uh, black contemplative splendors of self-doubt at the same time as you're setting out on this radical new path.

So you need to know how you know where you are.

Poetry shows how incredibly, incredibly precise it is in there.

Mm-hmm. Um, that w-- it was a story that would be told to a young boy or girl that would ask the question, "What do I do when I'm lost in the forest?" Mm.

Here's the answer that the, the elder gives.

You can feel from this how precise the teaching is.

The elder says, "Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you are not lost.

Stand still." What do I do when I'm lost in the forest? "Stand still.

The trees ahead and bushes beside you are not lost.

Wherever you are is called here, and you must treat it as a powerful stranger.

Must ask permission to know it and be known.

Listen. The forest breathes. It whispers, 'I have made this place around you.

If you leave it, you may come back again saying, here.'

Stand still. The forest knows where you are.

You must let it find you." You see, what's astonishing about that poem is you can say there are three things in this poem, you see, that are absolutely clear. First of all, the elder says, "You cannot sleepwalk your way into your destiny.

You must wake up and pay attention. Stand still.

You know, the trees ahead and bushes beside you are not lost.

You must pay attention."

Second stage is that, uh, is that in this, uh, in this teaching from the elder is this incredible feeling of silence.

That unless you have this silence in your life, and you feel the silence in the poem where he says, "If you leave it, you may come back again saying, here."

And I think, uh, what the elder is saying there is that, uh, if you pay real attention, unless you have silence, a, an ability for silence in your body to do that, then you will get too frightened.

Because all the voices inside you will drown out any real change. Mm-hmm.

They'll-- You have a hundred reasons not to do to make any real change, you see.

And you've got all the voices and all the reasons not to do it.

And so the ability profound-- for, for profound silence is being called on here.

And then that attention can, can flower into something else. Mm-hmm.

The poem seems to be- Yes ... attempting to awaken a, a kind of intuitive sense.

The poem seems to be- Yes ... attempting to awaken a, a kind of intuitive sense.

That's right. And then this amazing last line: "The forest knows where you are.

You must let it find you." Yeah.