Taking Off the Tight Shoe

There are voices that don’t just speak to your mind, but to something deeper. A place beyond the chatter of daily anxieties, beyond the ego’s constant demands. Ram Dass speaks to that place. He calls it a “communication of soul to soul.”

And what is the language of the soul?

“It’s love, love, love,” he says. “Because the soul loves everything.” God after all is Love!

This isn’t a sentimental, greeting-card kind of love. It’s a radical, all-encompassing love that doesn’t pick and choose. It’s a state of being. Ram Dass teaches us that we can learn to live in this state, but it requires a profound shift in perspective—especially about the one thing we’re taught to fear most.

The Prerequisite for Joyful Living

We spend so much of our lives running from an imaginary enemy. We build walls of denial, spend our precious energy fighting a battle we can never win. Ram Dass presents a radical alternative:

“The appreciation of death and the spiritual journey after death is the prerequisite for living life joyfully now. Death does not have to be treated as an enemy for you to Delight in life.”

Think about the energy we use up in denial and we teach this at our inpatient treatment centre in South Africa. By keeping death present in our consciousness, not as a morbid obsession but as a “great mystery,” we infuse every moment with a richness it wouldn’t otherwise have. We see the world as nature shows it to us: a constant, beautiful cycle of “Life, Death, Life, Death.” We are part of that cycle. Resisting it is like resisting the tide.

Loving Your Aches and Pains

This acceptance allows for a love that seems almost impossible. Ram Dass, who experienced a debilitating stroke later in life, embodied this teaching in the most tangible way.

“I love my wheelchair. I love my aches and pains. I love the clouds. I love the grass. I love all and everything.”

This is the ultimate practice of letting go of control. It’s the understanding that the universe isn’t happening to you; it’s just happening. And in that happening, “everything is composed with love.” The challenge is to perceive it. To stop judging experiences as “good” or “bad” and simply see them as part of the whole. To become, as he says, “immersed in the ocean of love.”

Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends – 1 Corinthians 13

Imagine feeling more love from someone than you have ever known. You’re being loved even more than your mother loved you when you were an infant, more than you were ever loved by your father, your child, or your most intimate lover—anyone. This lover doesn’t need anything from you, isn’t looking for personal gratification, and only wants your complete fulfillment.

You are loved just for being who you are, just for existing. You don’t have to do anything to earn it. Your shortcomings, your lack of self-esteem, physical perfection, or social and economic success— none of that matters. No one can take this love away from you, and it will always  be here.

Imagine that being in this love is like relaxing endlessly into a warm bath that surrounds and supports your every movement, so that every thought and feeling is permeated by it. You feel as though you are dissolving into love – excerpted from “Be Love Now”.

The Two Halves of Goodbye

Ram Dass beautifully illustrates the process of letting go, as we do in the first step of the Paradigm Process, with his description of the dying process. He breaks it into two halves.

The first half is the ego’s panicked cry: “Doctor, save me, save me!” It’s the clinging, the fear, the fight against the inevitable. It’s the part of us that identifies with this body, this personality, this story.

But then comes the second half. The soul’s surrender. Awe replaces fear.

“Wow… Wow… Wow.”

It is the recognition that this isn’t an end, but a transformation. It is, in his most perfect metaphor, simply “taking off a tight shoe.” The soul, our true essence, isn’t afraid of this moment. The soul knows it’s just going home.

Your Practice: A Mantra for the Soul

How do we begin to live from this place of the soul, even amidst the chaos of life and the fear of the unknown? Ram Dass offers a simple, powerful tool. A mantra to change your point of reference.

Sit quietly. Breathe. And repeat to yourself, gently, over and over:

“I am loving awareness.”

Let the words wash over you. Don’t try to force a feeling. Just state it as a fact.

I am not my thoughts. I am not my fears. I am not this body’s aches.

“I am loving awareness.”

This mantra for a Ram Dass Guide to Loving Everything is an anchor. It returns you to the witness, the calm center that can hold both the joy and the pain, the life and the death. It is the voice of your soul.

Don’t get so caught in worshiping life that you lose the balance. Live it fully, richly, and deeply. And when the time for transformation comes, go towards it with openness and love. Because when you identify with the soul, there is nothing to be scared about.

You are a soul. I am a soul. And this is a communication from soul to soul.

You are loving awareness.

The practice of Loving Inquiry for healing & Life Transformation 

This work that is A Ram Dass Guide to Loving Everything, and the practice of Loving Inquiry for healing & Life Transformation designed by Mark L Lockwood  has been designed as a way shower. It is a close companion, a highly spiritual and wise friend who you can walk with towards authenticity and to the love of life. Whenever I am confused, fearful or suffering I can turn inwards and do the work of Loving Inquiry. 

How do we heal from fear?

In order to heal we need to move from separation to integration. In this way we no longer fragment and project but rather face our fears and in doing so dissolve them. Fear is by nature false evidence appearing real. Fear can appear real and it can feel, look and taste real but it is not necessarily true. This is where the process of Loving Inquiry becomes useful. We need to question what we think, feel and believe. This is how we heal. We heal by allowing the truth to set us free. 

Loving Inquiry teaches us that fear can only be surrendered to. We find the courage (heart) to surrender and accept when we stay emotionally open and heart-brain coherent. We literally slay the dragon with the emotion of love by asking ourselves what we are thinking we believe and then we do the contemplative questioning work of examining our belief systems to look for thinking-errors. Examples of these can be he is a bad father, I dislike all immigrants, woman are bad drivers, she died way too young, he will never amount to anything and she never let’s me get a word in. Only when we examine these beliefs will we be sure that we are not falling prey to false beliefs that create our pain and suffering in the world. 

Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“Wherever your heart is, that is where you’ll find your treasure.”