Hello and welcome back to practicing human, the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life.

I'm your host, Corey Muscarara, and in today's episode we're going to talk about why you should

forget about Enlightenment.

More to come on that in a moment. First, let's settle in together with the sound of the bells. D'N So the title for this podcast, Forget About Enlightenment comes from the title of a poem called Forget About Enlightenment by John Wellwood, the late

John Wellwood.

John Wellwood.

John was a psychologist and he did a lot of cool work in writing and teaching around the concept of spiritual bypassing, which is this idea that people tend to try to rise above the raw messy reality of their life in pursuit of some higher ideal without first making peace with the full

dimensions of who they are. It's sort of like a glorified form of fake it

till you make it, but it ends up causing us to not address

and make peace with and befriend the deeper parts of us that we often just want to run away

from quickly. So I'd like to read you the poem

that he shared again titled Forget About Enlightenment. Sit down wherever you are and listen to the wind singing in your

veins. Feel the love, the longing, the fear in your bones.

Open your heart to who you are, right now.

Not who you would like to be, not the saint you are trying to become, but the being right here

before you, inside you, around you. than whatever you can know.

Breathe out, touch in, let go.

I think my favorite four lines in that

are open your heart to who you are right now, not who you would like to be, not the

saint you are striving to become, but the being right here before you, inside you, around you.

You know, if you've been following this podcast, you know this is a theme that I bring in, I, brought in from the very beginning, this idea of meeting,

befriending, accepting, embracing more of who we are in the present moment and how that is just foundational to a

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