The Lineage of the Pathless Path

I felt raw and deeply troubled in the face of world events this week.

There’s a quote from the Tao Te Ching: “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” In most of the circles I travel, having a lineage is how we become recognizable to others, find a tribe, stay safe, and purify our ego.

I have bushwhacked my way through many expressions of methods, faiths, and affinity groups without a guru. And after decades of wandering, I have found myself affectionately tethered to the LINEAGE of the PATHLESS PATH or LPP.

The LPP doesn’t come with the usual signifiers. There is no teacher, no success, no praise, or promotions. It is a slow and confounding ascent where trail markers tell us we’re on the path, but never which way to go.

As I sat with the tumult and listened, I recognized that many of us were turning up on the Pathless Path without a clear sense of how to hold ourselves, our beliefs and our context. Suddenly, we were forced out of our patterns and into the LPP.

The hardest part, for many of us, was navigating our disorientation. Because the Pathless Path has no discernible beginning or end, anywhere is an expression of HERE, and any time is an experience of NOW.

At first this is outright disturbing but the LPP is not without its charms.

HERE and NOW are powerful anchors to the present and can be used to stabilize the mind when we need to recognize and recalibrate our emotions. They are a modern invocation to aliveness. The LPP reminds us again and again that we don’t need to know where we are to be connected to who we are and to each other.

I pray that all struggling beings can remember our interconnectedness without the obfuscation of hate, history, and horror. We are never lost on the pathless path, we just don’t know where we’re going.

Sending love, care and support.

With folded palms,

Jennifer