The last couple of months have brought with them so much fun and so many valuable gifts that I think I'll call July and August two of my best friends. While I've been listening to music, admiring beautiful art, and breaking bread with friends, I've also been learning and growing so fast it makes my head spin. One of the interesting teachings I've received is this: to coexist with the duality of being able to have something and not being able to have it brings with it peace and harmony.
Havingness is the ability to receive the full beauty and grace of something--fame, wealth, friendship, love, or anything else. For example, a person might be wealthy in financial terms but constantly feel that she is going to lose it all and one day have to beg for money on the streets. She is not in a place where she can have her wealth. Another person can be relatively poor in financial terms but feel wealthy because all of his basic needs are met and he enjoys what few possessions he does have tremendously (think Gandhi).
Someone who can't take a compliment is a perfect example of a person who is unable to have. Perhaps you can relate? Have you ever denied it when someone told you that she admired your taste in clothes? Have you countered that compliment by immediately complimenting the other person's taste, whether or not you believed what you were saying? To fully have everything good that life brings you seems like it would be easy, but it can be surprisingly difficult. Being able to have can take many karmic lifetimes of practice.
And THEN, once you FINALLY learn to have, you have to learn how not to have. What? This sounds crazy. But if you are equally comfortable not having that thing--fame, money, love--in your life, you make space for it to come into your life in all of its glory. Think about that woman who has oodles of money but spends her whole life thinking about how someday she might not have that money. She hasn't learned to have, and she hasn't learned not to have.
Where are you on your journey?
