Liberating Metaphors for Our Lives

Of all the paradoxes we encounter on the spiritual path, often the hardest to reconcile is the coexistence of the personal and universal dimensions of ourselves—I know it has been for me. How do we merge the very mundanely personal reality of our daily lives with the vastly impersonal realities of deep spiritual experience? Said differently, how do we integrate the first two and second two turnings of the wheel?

One day we’re in the grind of negotiating challenges at work, juggling dozens of minute details. The next day in meditation, we’re having an expansive, heart-opening experience that dissolves the boundaries of self. Again and again on the path, we oscillate between feeling contracted and defended and fluid and open. If we’re not careful, this can further aggravate our aversion as we try harder to grasp the spiritually pleasant and push away the unpleasant of the mundane. However, if we see it as a classical spiritual paradox, we know that somehow the density of our lives and luminosity of spiritual experience must just be two sides of the same coin.

To embody a paradox like this, we must forfeit our usual strategies. It won’t help to try harder, analyze the problem, or avoid the challenges of life. Instead, it asks us to release our mental fixation and drop into the inclusive field of the heart. We are asked to welcome everything in our experience equally without distinction.

When we do, we can hold multiplicity with grace. We can witness two or even more opposing views simultaneously or sequentially without clinging to either as the ultimate truth. This is an essential skill for integrating deep spiritual truths amid our lives—not to mention for navigating life, in general.

Image and metaphor can be particularly helpful here. They can seed our minds with understandings that relax our dualistic frameworks of true/false, agreeable/disagreeable, pleasant/painful, etc. In turn, they can help us feel how the multiplicity of our selves or of a moment coexist as complementary aspects of the same unified reality.

Like a Radiant Diamond

I like to think of any moment, or this practice itself, like a rotating diamond with many facets. Each side reflects a different understanding, yet the diamond is always singular, whole, and complete. In this way, a single moment can be seen from our surface-level narratives, from the depths of our subconscious, from the perspective of the collective, or from the universal.

Take a simple meditation. On the surface, we are perceiving ourselves as just sitting and watching the sensations of the breath. On a deeper level of our psyche, we are interpreting whether this is a safe or unsafe activity, subtly scanning the environment and communicating with our physiology. On the collective, our breath is an echo of everyone who has ever breathed and a hologram of everyone breathing across the globe right now. In the universal, our experience is just vast, empty space breathing itself into existence. All aspects can coexist peacefully.

Like a Deep Lake

The truth of any moment can be thought of like a deep lake. Its surface ripples and waves with the impacts of life, like pebbles thrown in. Underneath, larger creatures move within the deeper currents of our subconscious. On the bottom, the remains of the collective past rest. The water itself is the universal medium through which we experience life.

A pebble thrown into a puddle is much different than a pebble thrown into a deep lake or a vast ocean.

I love the fluid feeling of this metaphor, especially the sense that our awareness is more like a living liquid than an empty space. It’s an energy and substance that flows around every part of us, helping us feel buoyant and connected. This is actually resonant with some of the newest unified field theories in physics that, at the infinitesimally small scale, the vacuum of space is actually a fluctuating river of energy.

There’s also a reflection on equanimity here. A pebble thrown into a puddle is much different than a pebble thrown into a deep lake or a vast ocean. The initial impact is the same, but the effect is worlds apart. The wider and deeper we allow our heart-mind to be, the more space the impacts of life have to reverberate within before churning up the water.

Like a Vast Ecosystem

We might imagine ourselves like an ecosystem. Our personal heart-minds are like a node in the web, perhaps a single tree. The interactions of all the nodes combined is the collective, like the community of an old-growth forest. The universal is the space through which the ecology evolves and information is transferred around the web.

In ecosystems, each node is interdependent with everything else, just as our personal lives are interwoven with everything around us. Every thought we think is dependent upon the ecology of the moment, the multiplicity of moving parts. Instead of us acting upon the environment, we and the ecology cocreate the shared, collective experience in each moment. And all of this creation moves effortlessly through the limitless space within and around us (i.e., the universal). In sum, we are both the elements and space; we span life and death.

So when our personal heart-minds are affected by life, we can imagine allowing the web of connections we’re embedded in to help absorb those impacts. Just as in the metaphor of the pebble in the ocean, an impact contained in a small space is much more dramatic than an impact that is transferred across the web of life. This view itself can catalyze a marked difference in our felt experience.

Like a Great River

I also like to imagine the totality of who we are to be like a great river flowing to the ocean. The wide banks and river bottom (i.e., the universal) gracefully hold the torrent of life energy (the collective) flowing across the landscape. On a far edge, a powerful eddy forms, taking on a unique shape and form (the personal). Our individual embodiment is like this eddy: the same substance as the river, just suspended temporarily as a vortex of energy. We seem solid and continuous because we have a center of spin that funnels our perception inward. However, we are never made of the same water from one moment to the next, constantly infused with the larger energy of the river of life. It’s only a matter of time before the currents shift and we will be released back into the flow. In this metaphor, and the others before it, we are reminded that we can’t ever fall out of life—not even in death. We can’t get out of the river or the web or the lake of life. Death is just the universal dimension of who we already are.

We are the elements themselves always in the process of transforming into something else.

We are the elements themselves always in the process of transforming into something else. So when we become entangled in a thought or emotion that constricts or divides us, we can pause and simply remember the larger flow of energy that’s moving through us. When we can graciously hold the wholeness of a moment without pitting any of the parts against each other—and then relax there—a sacred alchemy occurs.

♦

From The Dharma of Healing © 2025 by Justin Michelson. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO. www.shambhala.com