Just Enough

A practice for contentment & an on-the-go energy clearing

Photo by Anukrati Omar on Unsplash

A Story…

There is a story that one day an enlightened monk went to stay at a temple. When he got there, all the other monks became excited that they might get an answer to their most pervasive question: when will I reach enlightenment?
One monk who had been in the temple for many years doing rigorous practice and study asked the visitor this question, and the enlightened one’s response was, “For you, eight more lifetimes.” The monk was shocked and angered at this response, and even questioned whether the visitor was enlightened at all.
Another monk came with the same question, and the answer he received was ten lifetimes. For another the answer was fifteen.
Finally, a servant who had never been taught, had never studied and had never practiced asked the visitor the same question. The visitor said, “You will not achieve enlightenment for many many lives.” To which the servant asked, “But it is possible for me?” The visiting monk affirmed for the servant that indeed it was possible, and when he heard these words, the servant became filled with such gratitude and contentment and joy that he had even the smallest chance of reaching Nirvana that in that singular moment, he achieved this state to which all the other monks had aspired. He became an enlightened being and the guru of the monastery that he had cleaned, unnoticed, for so long.

Goldilocks Without A Bed

For me this story illustrates many spiritual lessons — the obstacle of attachment being the most prevalent. But this story also reminds us that contentment is something we decide to lean into rather than something achieved through creating specific conditions, or fulfilling specific desires.

When we get down to it, we are all searching for a sense of being content. We all want to feel peaceful, happy, fulfilled and free. This is not only because we are humans full of desire. On a deeper level, we desire to exist in these states because they are our true nature. (The truest part of what we are — the breath, soul, atman, rigpa — is a loving awareness that is more akin to these qualities than it is to any stories or darkness the ego-mind might create. In Sanskrit, our true nature is called Satchitananda, which translates to Truth, Consciousness and Happiness or Bliss.)
The problem is that what gets in our way of experiencing contentment are our ideas of what we need to be happy. More than that, once we get those things, rarely are we as content as we were sure we would be, and so we set another goal of what will give us the feeling we are so eager to receive. Nothing is ever just enough. We are like a sisyphean Goldilocks for whom the right bed, or porridge, or whatever doesn’t exist — everything is forever and always too much or too little. And so, we create the conditions of our own suffering by trying to achieve what we think will take that very suffering away.
Because we are hopeful, we set new goals and stay in this cycle. Because we are spiritually unaware and confused, we can’t see that it’s in the act of the setting of those goals that our current suffering persists and our future suffering is born.

Have you ever gotten exactly what you thought would be enough only to find your life circumstance have shifted leaving you with the feeling that contentment will come from something else? When contentment is relative rather than a way of being, there will always be something just out of reach.

Just Enough

But what if we worked on living with the attitude, as Ram Dass suggests, of “just enough?” By an attitude of “just enough,” I mean that we put in effort towards what we need instead of more than we need, and we make the internal decision that whatever we get — life circumstances, food, enlightenment — is just enough because if we were meant to have more we would have more, and if we were meant to have less we would have less.

“Just enough,” is an attitude of having faith in the divine light that is guiding our lives. It is an attitude of humility, graciousness, and gratitude.
Humility is our awareness that we cannot know in an absolute way what should or shouldn’t happen, and we acknowledge that there could be a force at work far greater than our ego-minds.
Graciousness is an effort to remain kind and loving to all beings as we can never truly know the suffering of another.
And gratitude is the appreciation we have for every part of our human experience because every part is a lesson from the curriculum of our soul’s journey of the highest education.

For most people, gratitude is the easiest thing to start to cultivate because there is a simplicity to the practice. With humility, we have to sometimes do intense battle with what we think we are sure is true; and with graciousness we often have to make ourselves extremely uncomfortable as we are made aware of our judgments, anger and perception that we are better than the other when trying to remain kind.
Gratitude, however, can be an attitude that is built by starting with concrete things that we truly feel blessed to have: friendship, love, a job, a house, a car, a pet etc. Once we get into the practice of being grateful, like begets like, and our ability to expand our gratitude to even the most difficult things takes root. More than that, when our awareness is centered in gratitude, our hearts are more full and therefore less defended. With an undefended heart, being in the unknown that goes along with a humble mindset feels easier, and remaining kind is more easily at hand.

So… what if everything was just enough? Not too much and not too little? What if everything could be just right because otherwise it would be a different?

with love,
Susannah
Soul Guidance | Intuitive Astrology

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Below you can access a recording I made just for you to go along with Saturday’s New Moon and partial Solar Eclipse: an on-the-go full body energy clearing and healing so you can take action and initiative from a deeply healed place.
xo