Why leave behind the seat in your own home to wander in vain though the dusty realms of other lands? If you make one misstep, you stumble past what is right in front of you. ~Dogen Zenji
Soten and I just returned from a trip wandering the dusty lands of Peru. We helped lead a three week Amazon Rainforest immersion, Zen retreat, and plant medicine intensive. One of the realizations some people had during this retreat was that the powerful explosive experience that they had traveled across the world to obtain was not actually what they most deeply wanted. What they actually wanted was healing and the simple happiness of a sane and healthy heart-mind that was at home with itself. It is true that intense and unique experiences and healing modalities like foreign travel, meditation retreats, and plant medicines, can and do often have the capacity to open us up. However, it is perhaps even more true that all we really need to do is recognize the fact that we are already whole and complete and that, that which we have always longed for is and always will be exactly right here.
We will never find our happiness in experience. We only find happiness is the end of seeking a particular experience and settling into that which is right in front of us. As long as we think it is somewhere else we will never find it. It is enough just to be alive, to sit, to walk, to breathe, to hear, to see color, to feel, to think. If our travels and interesting experiences don’t help us to appreciate the fundamental peace and joy of simply being what is, then we should question whether or not they are worth it.