The thing you need (when you don’t know what you need)
I’m sure a language somewhere on Earth has a single word for that feeling.
The German’s have some cool words. I like hintergedanken, which means “a thought way, way, way in the back of your head.”
As for now, I’m unaware of a word for ‘the thing you need when you don’t know what you need.’
I’m horribly familiar with the feeling though.
A yearning.
A longing.
But rather than desperate, it is a grasping tinged with a reassurance that there actually is something that will be found to meet the need.
Eventually…
Speaking of hintergedanken, can you remember what water tastes like?
I can’t.
But I can remember what it was like to be thirsty, passed out from drinking too much, clawing around in the early morning for a water bottle.
The first sip of water would bring instant relief, though it would also bring back the taste of whatever was eaten in a drunken stupor on my way home.
I don’t miss those days.
Back then, I wasn’t so much searching for something, but running away from parts of myself that made me uncomfortable. I ran for a good decade before it caught up with me.
And when it did, it clipped me behind the ear and knocked me down. Hard.
This was the moment that meditation entered my life.
At first, it was brutal. 30 minutes felt like a lifetime.
But during my daily sit, I gradually learned a thing or two. I watched the insanity of my mind, but also caught glimpses of its divinity.
I listened to the body scream, but occasionally it felt like it dissolved in bliss.
Now I am learning that somehow, in a highly improbable way, that the thing I needed that I didn’t know I needed, was simply to sit still for a damn moment.
When I did this, I learned to feel.
A connection was made. A little spark joined from me to something beyond the immediacy of my own struggle.
“Ah the helplessness of it all.” I began to recognise there was nothing that could be done. That I would simply just have to sit, and learn to be.
This is surrender.
It is an exhilarating, frustrating, annoying, blissfully painful path, the one that we share at Kailash Ashram.
All of our offerings are permeated with this contradictory, ineffable element… we also call it the Soul.
Hands down, the thing you need if you don’t know what you need, is what you already are.
It is the Soul that you seek, and when you feel that, the unidentified thirst is quenched.
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To learn some practical ways of eliciting this inner strange inner feeling called satisfaction, you may wish to join us for our upcoming Soul Retreat.
September 21st – 25th is almost full (Grand final long weekend, get in quick!) and we are about to open bookings for October 19th – 23rd
