Life Dancing

If all your actions are based on the pursuit of happiness, why is it that so many things you do yield anything but happiness?

By Phillip Moffitt

To practice nonclinging does not mean forsaking what you value—that would be indifference. Instead, it means practicing nonattachment to outcome. There is a subtle distinction between indifference and nonattachment, and it is crucial to understand this distinction if you are to have genuine happiness in your life. If you are indifferent, you have no value base—you literally don't care how life unfolds. This is cynicism disguised as "cool" or karmic apathy. Nonattachment means that you act from your values but are not fixated on the outcome. This perspective is taught in most spiritual traditions.

When Jesus said, "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and render unto God what is God's," his words contained this wisdom of acting according to your values. Jesus made this statement in response to a question intended to trick him into giving an answer that would result in him being charged with sedition. Instead, he used the question as an opportunity for spiritual teaching. There are people and responsibilities in your life that you care about. Render unto these people and responsibilities your best efforts, but do so without identifying with the results of your actions on their behalf. In Jesus's teaching results are God's business, not yours. Certainly you must learn to be skillful and alert to what works and what doesn't; however, this is different from judging yourself by the results. Your sense of self, of meaning, arises from your values and intentions. To experience life in this way is to know inner happiness. The mystics tell us that to live in this fashion is to know a harmony with life that is beyond description.

Don't Take It Personally

Having been unavailable for communication because of the retreat, I spent the following Saturday receiving calls from individuals with whom I work. For hours I listened, mostly silently, to stories of fatal cancer and illness, betrayal, miraculous healing, loneliness, and despair. The last phone call came from someone who had just received a big lesson in how unreliable it is to cling to the good things in life. Something he cherished and relied upon had unexpectedly and unfairly been taken away. He was so distressed, and at the end of the conversation when he was feeling less fearful, he asked, "But what does this mean about me?" "It's only life dancing," I said. "It's not personal; it isn't about you."

Life dances and you have to dance with it, whether it is taking you on a wonderful ride or is stepping on your toes. This is the necessary price and transcendent gift of being incarnate—alive in a body. But it is just life dancing. Life will move you in the rhythm and direction of its own nature. Each moment is a fresh moment in the dance, and if you are lost in clinging to the past or clinging to your hopes or fears of the future, you are not present for the dance.

The concept of nonclinging almost always draws two protests. One is from entrepreneur types who irately point out that they have to measure their lives by the outcome because it's their job to produce results. I always smile when I hear this—parents say it, doctors too, even elected officials say it as though they are the only ones feeling this pressure. If life really worked in this manner, if you could control outcomes, then why don't things turn out just the way you want them? It isn't that you shouldn't work to accomplish your responsibilities; people should be able to count on you to do so with honesty and your best effort. But it is sheer hubris to think that the outcome is entirely dependent on your efforts or that you can be sure of what is the best outcome. Life dances with you, and when you are fortunate, your perseverance and good work meet with receptiveness and you succeed; if not, it doesn't work out.

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