Recently, I was meditating and asked a strangely simple question: What was I in another person's life? I know what they were in mine... so, my intent was to find a whole picture...  I wasn't looking for a prediction for future. That part of my life has already given me enough predictions, interpretations, hopes, disappointments, signs and counter-signs to last several lifetimes. I know how it unfolds typically. I was interested in something else. I wanted to look backward and understand the function of an experience that had been so important to me. What was it actually doing there? 

I was actually an entrance into another life. There was happiness there, love, a different kind of relationship, maybe an entirely different way of living! But getting there required something first.... Death... Not physical death, of course, but the death of an existing structure: stability, comfort, certainty, an identity organized around keeping life controlled and predictable. The focus kept returning to the same point. This was a person who lived through their head, who calculated carefully, protected stability and did not simply follow something because it called them. The possibility of another life may have been there. Walking toward it would have required leaving the shore they already knew... They didn't, of course. Out of gazzilions of possibilities, one was chosen.  For a while, that seemed like the important part of my life for quite a bit....  Now I am not so sure. I have spent years interested in the question of how choice actually works. We say we want something, sometimes desperately! We pray for it... Visualize it... Talk about it... Cry over it... Tell another person that we love them, miss them, wish circumstances were different. We can be completely sincere when we say these things and still construct our lives in the opposite direction. There is a thing though.... the universe responds to our vibration rather than our words. It is often explained through quantum physics, frequencies and electromagnetic fields. I don't need to borrow physics to make the observation useful. Ordinary life gives us plenty of evidence. Reality has more than our words to work with! It has our behavior.

If I say I want freedom and repeatedly choose security, my life becomes more secure, not more free... Can you find surrender to it? Sure! it's security after all! right?! If I say I want intimacy but conceal myself whenever intimacy has a cost, I create distance... Can you justify it? of course you can! See the security wish above...  If I say I want different work but continue giving all of my time and energy to the old one, the old life keeps growing, not the new life I only talk about. If I say I want to leave while renewing the lease year after year, avoiding the conversation, making another investment and arranging my circumstances so that leaving becomes increasingly difficult, then whatever my heart may be saying, my life is receiving a very different set of instructions. 

This is something I understood painfully well in relationships I have had, because in those for years I kept returning to the discrepancy between words and actions. When I was told that love was there, I believed it was. I still do. But I kept looking at the scoreboard and saying: Your actions are not moving in the same direction as your words. For a long time, I experienced this discrepancy as a problem that needed to be solved. Maybe more time was needed. Maybe fear was temporarily stronger. Maybe circumstances really were extraordinarily complicated. Maybe one more conversation would finally bring the internal truth and the external life into alignment. Maybe another retreat... another therapy... another trip... another something...  I treated the words as the deepest reality and behavior as an obstacle standing in their way. 

I see that differently now. What are words, really? Words are already manifestations. To speak, we have to breathe: we breathe in, and something that existed only inside us leaves the body on the breath and enters the world. Thought becomes air, vibration, sound; something private becomes something another human being can hear. There is something ancient in this relationship between breath and speech. Air is the element between heaven and earth, between the invisible and the material; it keeps the body alive and carries the voice, and sound itself cannot travel through a vacuum. Maybe this is why so many traditions give such importance to the spoken word. The Gospel of John begins, “In the beginning was the Word” — Logos, not simply something said, but a principle through which something comes into form. So I no longer want to say that words don't matter and only actions do. Words are actions. When I speak, I have already moved something from the invisible into the visible world; I have given breath to an intention. But manifestation cannot stop at the mouth. If I repeatedly speak in one direction while my body, decisions, time and behavior move in another, I am manifesting two different realities. Maybe integrity begins when they finally move together: what I feel, what I say, and what I do.

So... back to the choices... Behavior wasn't standing in the way of the choice. Behavior was part of the choice. This doesn't make the words lies. That distinction matters enormously to me. A human being can genuinely want two incompatible things. We can love one person and protect a life built with another. We can long for freedom and be terrified of losing security. We can want transformation while organizing every day around preventing it. Conscious desire is only one voice inside us. Fear has desires too. Attachment has desires. Loyalty, guilt, habit, identity, money, family, belonging and the nervous system all vote.

And they don't vote with words. They vote with behavior. Maybe that is what people are trying to describe when they say the universe responds to our vibration. I would put it more concretely now: life responds to what we repeatedly participate in.

This also means that fear is not some spiritual contamination that automatically attracts the thing we fear. I don't believe the universe punishes us for being afraid. I have done some of the most important things in my life while terrified! The interesting question is not whether fear is present.  The interesting question is who gets the body? Who gets my feet? Who gets the phone call, the plane ticket, the difficult conversation, the resignation letter, the boundary, the money, the morning when I get out of bed and begin?

I can be shaking and still walk toward what I want. You see, desire is not bad. Desire is a call from your future, a signal that somewhere ahead there is something asking you to move toward it. When you hear that call, you can respond from your own authority and strategy, and then you begin walking toward it, step by step. Fear doesn't have to disappear first. Fear can come with you. The question is which one determines the direction. Fear may be present, but desire has received action. I can also speak beautifully about what I want while arranging my entire life around avoiding its consequences. The desire may be completely sincere, but if every decision protects me from the risk of following it, then fear is still running the logistics.

That distinction has changed the way I understand courage. Courage isn't a high vibration. It isn't the absence of fear. It is the moment when something I value becomes important enough that fear no longer receives the deciding vote. And this is where the story becomes considerably less flattering to me. Recently, while doing my reprocessing practice with my teacher, I returned to one of the earliest memories from one relationship. I began with a familiar story. I had been humiliated. I had not been fully chosen. I had been given enough to remain attached but not enough to feel secure. There were limits that belonged to another relationship. There was shame that I interpreted as being about me. There was exclusion. Silence. Ambiguity. I remembered lying awake already knowing, or believing I knew, that none of this could lead anywhere good. Each time I returned to the memory, however, something changed. Under humiliation I found hunger. Under anger I found the desperate need for clarity. Under the demand for clarity I found something even less comfortable: the need to make another person move. I wanted recognition. I wanted completion. I wanted a decision. I wanted a beginning or an ending, anything that would resolve the unbearable suspension of not knowing. And when life would not move fast enough, I tried to move it.

This was difficult to see because manipulation does not always look calculated or cruel. Sometimes it looks like a reasonable question asked with an answer already hidden inside it. Sometimes it looks like disappointment. Sometimes it looks like explaining another person to himself. Sometimes it looks like creating a confrontation because at least confrontation produces movement. Sometimes it looks like demanding clarity when what I really cannot tolerate is the open space before clarity arrives. Sometimes we call this honesty. Sometimes it IS honesty. And sometimes it is anxiety with excellent project-management skills. I had spent years asking why another person's actions did not correspond to their words. I had been much slower to ask whether my own actions corresponded to mine. 

I said I wanted another to be free, yet I also wanted their freedom to produce the choice I preferred. I said I wanted truth, but sometimes I was provoking an answer because uncertainty was intolerable. I said I wanted another person's authentic decision while repeatedly trying to influence the conditions under which that decision would be made. I said I wanted love, while somewhere underneath love there was also an enormous hunger to receive through another person something I did not yet know how to hold securely in myself. And I was fighting for love! Not loving, but fighting for it... well... lost the battle...  

And I began to see something else. There are people from whom we keep demanding a particular form of certainty because we have decided that certainty is the proof of love. A promise. A declaration, a decision, a plan. We may spend years trying to extract this currency from someone whose entire structure keeps showing us that this is precisely the currency he cannot reliably give. Then we take another person's inability to give it personally. We push harder. They retreat further... And eventually both people have accumulated evidence for their original fears. This does not absolve anyone of responsibility. Adults are responsible for the promises they make, the boundaries they cross, the ambiguity they create and the consequences of their choices. But responsibility becomes much more interesting when I stop assigning all of it to the other side.

During this reprocessing, one of the strangest shifts came when I returned to moments I had interpreted for years as evidence of my own humiliation. Maybe another person's shame was not actually about me. Maybe another person's silence was not a statement about my worth. Maybe their inability to explain themselves did not mean that I had failed to ask the question correctly. Maybe I would never know exactly why another human being wanted what they wanted. And maybe I didn't need to know. The body relaxed around something the mind had been trying to solve for years. It occurred to me that maybe my body had received exactly the experience it needed. I don't mean that suffering was assigned to me by some cosmic authority or that painful relationships are secretly gifts we should be grateful for. I mean something more specific. This particular experience exposed structures in me that a more comfortable relationship might never have reached. It exposed hunger... Control... Sexuality!  Shame associated with it. Dependence! Power and powerlessness. The need to provoke movement. The need for another person to confirm something in me before I could completely trust it myself.

And maybe the deepest challenge was never whether another person would make me whole. Maybe it was discovering what happens inside me when they don't. We are relational creatures. I don't believe maturity means becoming so self-contained that we no longer need anyone. Other human beings awaken things in us that we cannot awaken alone. We discover ourselves through attraction, conflict, tenderness, abandonment, frustration, sex, friendship, jealousy, loss and love. There may always be parts of me that require another human being in order to become visible. But needing relationship for revelation is different from needing another person's decision in order to complete myself.

That distinction changes everything. It also changed some insights about my earlier meditation and "predictions". At first I "heard": You were a door into another life, and they did not walk through it. There is something seductive about that interpretation. It gives one person the role of possibility and the other the role of fear. One becomes the door. The other becomes the one who lacked courage to enter. Life is rarely that clean. Maybe I was a door. Maybe they were one for me too. Maybe some people enter our lives precisely because our usual mechanisms stop working with them. Charm doesn't work. Intelligence doesn't work. Sex doesn't work. Anger doesn't work. Withdrawal doesn't work. Explaining them to themselves doesn't work. Even love doesn't give us authority over their choices. At first, that can feel like powerlessness. Later, it can begin to look like freedom.

For years I also believed that I knew what the obstacle was. There was something standing between a person I loved and the life I thought he could have. I had a very clear idea of what was healthy, what was fear, what was obligation, what should be left behind and what should be chosen instead.  Today my teacher said something to me with a smile that stopped me...  We should be careful deciding too quickly who was whose punishment. I laughed. Then the sentence stayed... Because we know remarkably little about the function we serve in another person's life. I can experience someone as the obstacle preventing another person from becoming free. From another angle, I may be the disruption that forces him to discover what he actually values. Someone I consider trapped may be exactly where his repeated choices continue to place him. Something I consider unhealthy may be held with extraordinary determination because, at least for now, holding it serves a function I cannot see from outside. People sometimes hold on hardest to the very structures that limit them. I know this because I do it too.

And that is where spiritual certainty becomes dangerous. The moment I decide that I know what another person's path is supposed to be, I can turn my desire into destiny and my frustration into evidence that THEY ARE resisting the universe.  Maybe they are, maybe they are not. Maybe they ARE choosing! Maybe I am choosing too. Maybe the universe is considerably less interested in adjudicating between us than I once imagined. This doesn't mean every situation is secretly good. It doesn't mean people should remain in damaging relationships because there must be a lesson there. It doesn't mean fear should be obeyed or that love requires endless patience with ambiguity. It means I have become much less certain that I know what another person's life is supposed to look like.

Which brings me back to the universe. Maybe life is not rewarding the brave person and punishing the frightened one. Maybe it is not standing outside us deciding whose desire is spiritually superior. Maybe it simply keeps responding to participation. What do I keep feeding? What do I repeatedly return to? What do I protect when protection has a cost? What do I risk when desire has a cost? What do I continue to build while telling myself I want something else? What do I keep alive through my attention, time, body and choices? Eventually those answers become a life.

This is why words matter but cannot carry the entire weight of intention. “I love you” can be completely true. “I want another life” can be completely true. “I am afraid” can also be completely true.  Human beings contain contradictions. The question is which truth receives our participation. I understand now why I spent so many years talking about actions. I could feel the contradiction between what was being said and what was being lived. I was right to see it. What I did not understand was that the same standard eventually had to be applied to me. Where do I say I want visibility while hiding? Where do I say I want expansion while resisting the conditions expansion requires? Where do I say I trust life while provoking events because I cannot tolerate waiting? Where do I ask another person to choose freely while secretly needing their freedom to produce my preferred result? Where do I call something intuition when I am actually trying to eliminate uncertainty? 

At one point in that old memory, I had been lying awake thinking with absolute certainty: This will not lead anywhere good. For years I remembered that thought as intuition. During the reprocessing, I suddenly saw another possibility. I didn't know! I actually did not know! I was frightened, uncomfortable and trying to make an uncertain future knowable. My mind had taken one possible branch of reality and declared it the future. So I changed one sentence - I don't know where this will lead. Something in my body became quiet. That may be the most important thing I learned from revisiting the memory. Healing did not require making the past beautiful. It did not require deciding that everything happened exactly as it should. It did not require turning another person into a villain or myself into an enlightened witness to his fear. It required giving up some of my certainty about what everything meant. Their shame did not automatically mean my humiliation. Their silence did not automatically define my worth. Their staying did not prove that another life was impossible. Their love did not obligate them to choose the life I imagined. And my desire did not make me the authority on what their path should have been. There is tremendous freedom in this.

Another person gets their choices and I get mine. Other people get theirs. And maybe some doors appear because we are meant to walk through them. Maybe some appear so that we can discover that we cannot push another person through. Maybe some remain open for years because we are still standing in front of them trying to determine what somebody else should do. I no longer want to spend my life with my hands on someone else's back. There is another direction in which those hands can move. Back toward my own life. So now, when I say I want something, I am becoming less interested in how intensely I want it and more interested in what I am actually doing. Where does my body go? Where does my attention go? What receives my time? What am I building? What am I protecting? What am I willing to lose? What am I willing to begin even while afraid? Maybe the universe does not listen to what we say we want. Maybe it watches where we walk towards what we want. And the question I once spent years asking another person has finally turned around and come home to me:

Where am I going?