Be The Banyan Tree

My clients often feel they need to “catch me up” on the details of their lives. I let them share as much as they want, but honestly, I see their stories about their jobs, relationships, and apartments as only a small part of who they truly are. I’ll often say: Can you slow down and feel your words? You're not just the facts of your life. You’re also the awareness you bring to them.

But identifying with awareness is hard in a world seduced by “content” — that godawful word social media and capitalism use to convince us we’re nothing more than packets of information to be exchanged. And yet, the more we seek ourselves in content, the more flattened our humanity, interiority, and vision become.

Above all, the price we pay for turning ourselves into content is deep loneliness. Content can only be consumed, not witnessed. The more we think, "I am what I can show," the more we feel chewed up by the world around us. True connection requires identifying more with presence than performance: letting there be spaces between your words, and speaking from a felt sense rather than from your résumé.

Jung used to talk about two types of consciousness. The first is familiar: the part of us that knows how to function in the modern world and manage our identities. But the second, “Consciousness No. 2,” is older and quieter: the deep current of awareness beneath our stories that dreams, intuits, and knows itself from inside.

The Buddha said it slightly differently. A person who identifies with awareness, he said, becomes like a great banyan tree, to which all sorts of birds and creatures flock. In other words, the more you drop the content-game and listen to the voice within you, the more connection, opportunities, and fulfillment will come to you.

Slow down. Be the banyan tree. Your branches are wide enough to receive the whole world.

Charles D'Oyly, "Banyan Tree" (1848)