There’s a meme that I see quite often, and I understand why so many people find comfort in it.  It features a wide-angle view of the Milky Way and an arrow that points to a tiny speck, with the words “You and Your Problems.” 

This notion used to give me a reassuring sense of perspective, but over time, it stopped serving as a salve.  I thought, “Yeah, but grief still hurts, cancer still sucks, depression is still real.”  Being a tiny meat puppet on a rock flying through space just reminds us that our personal suffering is a minuscule part of a complex and enormous puzzle, but it doesn’t remove the suffering of said meat puppet.

But recently, I found a book with a slightly different approach to the notion of a broader awareness, one that has managed to do what the Milky Way analogy couldn’t: it’s given me a sense of solace.   The book is Skymind: The Radical Path of Open Awareness by Charlotte Rotterdam and Pieter Oosthuizen.  While I’ve heard about the concept of Big Sky Mind from both Buddhists and the Beats, this book is the most practical and powerful presentation of it I’ve encountered.  

Skymind is a practice that invites one to view direct experience with a sense of spaciousness.  If that sounds a bit esoteric, perhaps a more accessible explanation is “seeing ourselves as part of something greater, rather than seeing ourselves as something very small in a vast world.”  Skymind invites connection, and an understanding that we are engaged in an interdependent dance with everything and everyone.  It’s about realizing our very human conditioning to cling to ego, and the luminous and liberating exercise of learning to let go of ego, storylines, and the illusions that do not serve us. Like so many spiritual teachings, Skymind is about simply waking up. 

The book, based upon the teachings of 11th-century Tibetan yogini Machig Labdrön, threads connective tissue between short verses from her texts and our lives in the Western world of the 21st century.  In other words, Skymind doesn’t require long meditations in a Nepalese cave, but rather being present for day-to-day living in our contemporary warts-and-all world.   It also requires a certain courageousness, as it invites the practitioner to become intimate with contraction, fear, and our own shadow self.  Nothing is excluded with Skymind.  It’s pure open awareness of our total human experience. 

So, where is the comfort in something that demands such unflinching attention?  I have certainly mastered the arts of avoidance, distraction, and ego-clinging.  However, I find that, in doing so,  I’m constantly stuck – four flat tires on a mud-drenched road – in self-perpetuated samsara (our ongoing state of suffering).  I’ve spent decades proclaiming an appreciation for groundlessness and am only now finally learning, from my own firsthand experience, just how essential it is.  It takes boldness to explore a wakefulness that turns toward one’s demons, instead of playing hide-and-seek with them.  

For example, one way my anxiety manifests is through insomnia.  Recently, sometime around 3:30am, my body wakes up with a jolt.  From there, my brain accepts the invitation to ruminate – money, health, our kids, our divided nation, uncertainties, fears, and other assorted hobgoblins. I begin to feel the weight of it all and there’s a sense of suffocation that arises.  At this point, my nervous system has been hijacked and my chances of getting back to sleep are greatly diminished.  But when I have remembered, I’ve silently muttered the term “Skymind” as a mantra, reminding myself of the spaciousness available to me.  A sense of open awareness gives me permission to cut my ego out of the equation.  Perhaps not for long, but long enough to return to a sense of okayness.  The hijacking is aborted, my worries dissipate for the moment, and sleep returns. 

Ironically, when I’m not in bed struggling for slumber, the very aspiration of Skymind is to do just the opposite:  wake up!   Wake up to my true nature, to a spiritual confidence that comes with noticing (however briefly) that we are a part of something greater.  With that sense of confidence, things feel more workable.  It’s a constant practice of severance, of cutting through ego-clinging so we can stop seeing everything through the lens of I, me, mine” and see it with greater openness, clarity, and care. 

The book’s authors guide readers through the Skymind meditation, as well as other pure awareness exercises.  However, like so many practices, Skymind must be done on the cushion so it can be applied consistently off the cushion.  It’s not about becoming a more seasoned meditator, but becoming a more skillful human, and, as Rilke said, “[Letting] everything happen to you: beauty and terror.”   Whichever way life’s winds might blow, it is possible to be responsive, not reactive. Engaged, not entangled. 

There are not many books that call for both a pen and a highlighter, but Skymind has been one of those reads for me.  Of course, like so many wise teachings, from the Sermon on the Mount to the Stoicism of Marcus Aurelius, the real question is never “Can I mark up the pages?”  It’s “Can I live the lessons?”    Can I soothe myself back to sleep at 3 AM with Skymind practice…and can I wake up during the daylight hours with a consistent practice of breaking the habitual act of ego-clinging? 

The wonderful, treacherous thing about life is that it keeps giving us opportunities to practice.  As stubborn as my ego-clinging can be, it’s encouraging to know that Skymind offers a beguiling alternative: living in the vast spaciousness of open awareness and, in doing so, seeing myself as part of something bigger.  

So, the next time I see that Milky Way meme, I’m not going to dismiss it as labeling my problems as “small.”  Instead, I’m going to love how it includes me in the vastness of everything and how connected it all is.