The Glowing, Unbothered Spiritual Person Doesn't Exist

A personal share and then the Letter. It is cold here atm, by Australian northern NSW standards anyway and I am so happy about it! No humidity, crispy mornings, icy grass, and often still the sun piercing through. I wish I could work out how to set our heaters to a timer for my early morning meditations - so does my very old dog I am sure, who insists no matter how cold, or how early, she join me - but I am increasingly becoming Not A Tech Person and someone who stares at remote controllers wondering WTF. I am trying to be a Good Middle To Aging Person Who Eats Enough Protein (and fibre, whyyyy are there so many things??), and so lately breakfast is chia seeds bloomed overnight in yoghurt - we eat Mungali Organic, with the thick cream on top that I live for), and then mixed through with protein powder. We eat the whey one from Mirrabooka, which Catie Gett (subscribe you won’t regret it) recommended after she told me one day that my two eggs on toast was NOWHERE near enough protein for breakfast. I would have to eat 5-6 eggs to get my mornings protein in, and that, ain’t happening. So this yoghurt protein chia concoction is then topped with crunchy granola and passionfruits from our vine, are the current go. It is delicious, especially when eaten whilst the sun is warming your body. I stripped back the last of the vine in an impatient huff a week ago, as it was strangling all our other trees, and one small plant which dominated half the front garden with vines wasn’t giving us fruit. So the fruit bearing one I plucked the last of the heavy fruit from, nearly past their point, and gave it a good haircut. I gave our neighbours a pile of passionfruit, she has three small boys and does exciting things with the fruit I give her, last time she said she made a passionfruit and lime cake - I am not doing such exciting things sadly - and then now in truth I regret giving some of the passionfruit away as they are like being kissed on the mouth by Summer. Anyways all of this is to say, remember to eat your protein haha.

The Glowing, Unbothered Spiritual Person Doesn’t Exist

I think a lot of us have a picture, somewhere in the back of our minds, of what a spiritually realised person is supposed to look like. Calm all the time. Unbothered by traffic, by difficult family members, by the washing machine breaking the same week as a work deadline. Radiating some permanent, glowing peace that never gets ruffled by ordinary life.

I want to gently take that picture away from you, because I think it does more harm than good, and because it is nothing like what any of this actually looks like once you have spent real time close to it.

I have sat with teachers who have devoted their entire lives to this work, and none of them look like that picture. What they have instead is something much less photogenic and far more useful. They still get tired. They still get short with someone they love. They still have days that go sideways. What is different is what happens next, how quickly they come back, how little drama accompanies the return, how much less of the day gets swallowed up by the aftermath of being human.

This is the question I think actually matters, more than any of the big lofty language about awakening or enlightenment or non-duality. Not what does ultimate realisation look like on a mountaintop somewhere. What does it look like on a Tuesday, in a body that is tired, in a life that still has a school pickup and an inbox and a relationship that needs tending.

Here is what I have come to believe it looks like, in the ordinary texture of an actual day.

It looks like being able to feel something difficult, properly feel it, without needing to immediately fix it, explain it, or perform your way out of it. Grief moves through, and you let it move through, rather than managing it into something more presentable within four minutes because you have somewhere to be.

It looks like catching yourself mid pattern and being able to smile at it rather than spiral into shame about it. Oh, there I go again, doing the thing. Not with self flagellation. With something closer to fondness, the way you might watch a child do something predictable and slightly ridiculous and love them anyway.

It looks like being with another person, really being with them, meeting their full humanity without hiding behind a role, a persona, a version of yourself you think you are supposed to be presenting. Not performing wisdom at them. Just being there, plainly, as yourself, which is somehow always more useful than the performance would have been.

It looks like less. Less needing to be right. Less needing the day to go a particular way before you allow yourself to feel okay. Less reactivity when someone cuts you off in traffic or says something careless. Not none of these things. Less of them. And when they do arise, a much shorter runway back to something steadier.

None of this arrives all at once, and none of it arrives permanently. I want to be honest about that because I think spiritual teaching sells people a fantasy of arrival that sets them up to feel like failures the moment they have a bad day. You do not get realised and then stay realised, floating above your own life from then on. You touch something, you lose it, you come back to it. The coming back gets a little quicker, a little less dramatic, over years, not days.

What I have found most useful, more useful than any single technique or teaching, is simply asking the question again and again, in whatever ordinary moment I am in. What does this actually look like right now. Not in theory. Not in some idealised future version of me who has finally sorted herself out. Right now, in this body, with this level of sleep, with this particular person in front of me who needs something from me I may or may not have the capacity to give.

Most days the answer is unremarkable. It looks like being here. Fully, however imperfectly, here. It looks like meeting whatever is in front of you, the good coffee and the difficult phone call and the moment your child says something that breaks your heart open a little, from something a bit more open than your usual defended crouch. Not from behind the glass of the self you have spent your whole life building and protecting. From the plain, unglamorous awareness that was there before any of that building started, and will be there long after.

That is the whole of it, really. Not some distant achievement waiting at the end of enough years of practice. Just this. Just here. Just now, in whatever ordinary, unfinished shape today happens to take.