I’ve known him for over 35 years. Since we were teenagers actually.
No retreats. No tantra. No philosophy circles. He finishes work and goes to the bar most nights.
And over the years, through jokes and little comments and that particular kind of working-class honesty that doesn’t bother dressing itself up, he has called me out more times than I can count.
“You’re always searching for something.” “Can’t you just sit still and be normal for five minutes?”
On the surface, jokes. You laugh and move on.
But they land. Because somewhere inside them is a question I haven’t always been willing to ask myself:
What if the search itself has become part of the identity? What if constantly seeking, becoming, transforming, and evolving has also become a way to avoid simply being?
This week’s piece is about the shadow side of the Seeker — what Jung called the eternal wanderer, and what the psychologist John Welwood named spiritual bypassing.
The idea that the search, when it goes unexamined, can quietly become a sophisticated form of avoidance.
That if life is always transformation, ordinary life can start to feel insufficient. That if you are always becoming, you never have to fully arrive.
I’ve done this. I’m honest about it in the piece.
And I write about the inversion of seeking that the calendar calls “being found” — what it actually feels like, why it’s harder than any ceremony I’ve ever attended, and where I’ve actually experienced it.
Hint: not on a mountaintop.Read the full piece →
Still learning to stay,
Shiva J