It's Not About You

My mother died ten days ago. When I heard the news, my first reaction was a friendly welcome. A feeling of welcoming a very dear friend.

Now, that reaction may strike you as being completely odd, even inappropriate. You may be now wondering: "Alex, where is the sadness and the sorrow that every living human being must feel upon learning that their mother passed away?" Here is why I think my knee-jerk feeling of sadness was almost instantaneously replaced by the feeling of embracing a new, long awaited friend:

It's not because I didn't love my mother, or because I wasn't close to her, or because we had unresolved issues. No, I've been close to my mother my entire life, and we cared for and deeply loved each other. It's also not the case of witnessing someone suffering long and unbearable illness, and wishing for a swift mercy death. No, my mother was healthy, in good spirits. She died suddenly, from a heart attack (even though she was only 74 years old).

But an event as significant as my mother's death revealed something to me that was a lesson worth learning. Instead of taking this sad event as the tragedy that unexpectedly happened to me, I was blessed with the insight that could be summed in the following sentence: "It's not about you, it's about her!"

There is an enormous feeling of liberation whenever we manage to leave the world of personal convenience and neglect our puny egomaniacal concerns, and place our selves in other people's position. My mother's dying instantly put me into that position. All I was concerned with was her own situation, not mine.

This feeling helped me tremendously in solidifying my own convictions that self is irrelevant, and that the meaning of life can only be found in seeing through the falsity that is masquerading as self, or ego. This is why I consider my mother's death as her gift to me. She gave me the gift of life, she gave me the gift of teaching me how to survive, and now she gave me the final gift -- the gift of knowing how to die.

So, no matter what happens, it really helps if you carry with you a strong insight that it's never about you. You, as a separate being, are irrelevant. If you can clearly see that, then there will be no more obstacles to stop you in releasing your lion's roar of liberation!