Today, I am stepping back.
Not running away. Just pausing the endless, exhausting effort to fix myself.
For a long time now, I have tried to change. I have tried to shed the old habits – the clinging, the worry, the quiet fear that I am somehow incomplete. I have understood, at a deep level, that who I really am is not this restless character. I have even tasted that truth. But knowing it in my head has not stopped my heart from repeating its old dance.
I have tried so hard to be better. And I have failed. Not dramatically -just quietly, repeatedly. The same patterns rise up. The same ache returns. The more I try to push them away, the more stubbornly they stay.
This is the honest truth of where I am.
Today, something shifted. Not a solution – just a different way of seeing.
I was reminded of a teaching from the Dzogchen tradition. It calls itself the “resultant vehicle,” which is a fancy way of saying: it starts from the finish line. It does not say, “Fix yourself and then you will be free.” It says, “You are already what you are looking for. Stop trying to become what you already are.”
That hit me hard. Because I have been exhausting myself with self-improvement. And maybe the very effort to change is what keeps me feeling broken.
Then a line from Jigar Muradabadi came to me:
*“Hai Jigar, hai teri hasti ki haqeetat itni, muj mien abaad hien sab, mien kahien abaad nahien.” *
It means: “The truth of your existence is this – everything is established within you; you are not established anywhere outside.”
I have spent so much of my life feeling empty. Feeling like I need others, or the world, or some future achievement to fill me up. But this line turns it around. Maybe I am not the empty one searching for a home. Maybe everything I am looking for, and everyone I love, and all this messy life, already rests inside this vast awareness that I actually am.
But here is the humble part: I still feel the old pull. The habits have not vanished just because I understand this. I cannot promise I will transform. I cannot promise I will suddenly become steady, or wise, or easy to be around.
All I can promise today is this: I will try stop fighting myself.
I will stop trying to be a better version of me, and just sit with the me that is here. Gently. Honestly. Without rushing to judge or fix.
This is Day One. No big revelation. No achievement. Just a slightly quieter kind of attention.
That is all I have to offer right now to myself, and to the ones I care about.
Just looking.