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Sunday, 23 August 2026
The Myth of the “Right Time”: Why our External World will Never Calm Down First.
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I often fall for the “right time” trap.
In fact, I’ve lived inside that illusion for as long as I can remember.
It’s easy to fall into that trap because it feels so logical and right: when my outer world is busy, loud, or chaotic, I can’t focus on my internal world.
“I’ll start journaling once this week ends.”
“I’ll tackle that hard conversation at home after this busy week at work.”
“I’ll go back to therapy when life isn’t too overwhelming.”
We treat healing like an extra project—something we only do when life is calm and easy. But I’ve learned the hard way that if we wait for the mess to clear, we will wait forever.
I’ve recently realized the shift that needs to happen isn’t in our environment; it’s in our mindset.
We put our personal growth on pause and convince ourselves that peace arrives from the outside in. But stability in our external world is never permanent. Even when things feel happy, balanced, and predictable for a short time, life’s natural rhythm inevitably kicks in. Uncertainty re-enters. Surprises happen. Just when things start to settle, life throws something new at us.
In Buddhism, we recognize this constant impermanence as the foundation of existence. Life is full of ups and downs. Expecting ourselves to only make meaningful, internal changes during the “up” periods isn’t just unrealistic; it deprives us of the tools we need to survive the downs.
Real growth doesn’t require a quiet place. It requires us to go with the flow of life, learning to adapt whether things are smooth or stormy. We cannot pause our boundaries, freeze our healing, or delay our self-awareness until the discomfort ends. We don’t wait for the storm to pass before we decide to improve our relationships, commit to therapy, or finally make that hard life transition.
What actually needs to happen is much braver: we have to learn to walk through the discomfort while making those internal changes.
We don’t ignore the chaos, nor do we pretend it isn’t exhausting. Instead, we recognize it, make sense of it, and completely reframe what self-work means. Inner peace isn’t a reward for a calm life—it’s the anchor that keeps us grounded when life is anything but calm.
If you are waiting for your external world to settle down before you start tending to yourself, consider this your permission to stop waiting.
The “right time” is an illusion that will always stay out of our reach. Life will always offer another deadline, another transition, another period of uncertainty, and another reason to delay looking inward. But when we stop expecting our circumstances to change first, we reclaim our power.
Please know that we don’t need a quiet world to build a quiet mind. We just need to take one small, intentional step right where we are—right in the middle of the mess, without waiting for a single external thing to change first.
Now tell me, when are you going to create the “right time”?
~
author: Elyane Youssef
Image: Jessika Arraes/Pexels
Why I Now have a Different Relationship with Non-Dual Teachings.
In late 2021 and 2022, my entire perspective on myself, others, and the world took a monumental shift from perceiving everything and everyone as solid and separate to understanding that all beings and objects in the phenomenal world are essentially vibrating energy that emanate from the same one Source.
At the time, this change in perspective meant the difference between a sense of aliveness and relative peace, and a soul-shattering depression that clutched me with a death grip. Prior to this new way of seeing, I was often sad, lonely, and filled to the brim with a subtle existential malaise that kept me unhappily ruminating about my life, a lack of meaning and purpose, and a feeling of not belonging—although you’d never really know it just by looking at me.
In fact, it went deeper than that: not only did I believe that everything was a fragment or expression of the one Source, but I also believed there is no “self.” To me, the idea that a character by the name of “Sarah” existed independently of thought and perception was absurd. How could I, or anything else, exist other than as a concept? After all, my sense of “self” is derived from ideas, and an idea is relative, transient, qualified, and conditioned.
Furthermore, “I” had no localization. Where, exactly, was “I”? Even the most renowned thinkers of the modern age debate whether thoughts originate in the physical brain. In addition, the classic question regarding where consciousness resides is also under intense debate, and a vast majority of scientists and philosophers disagree that consciousness is a mechanical process. So, where was “I” and where did “I” come from?
Over the course of the next two to three years, I attended copious non-dual meetings, often referred to as satsangs, and practised self-inquiry. The whole time I did this, however, I was waiting for that massive and irreversible moment of clarity: that moment when it finally and irrefutably dawned on me that no concept really mattered and that “I” didn’t really exist. And here’s the thing: even though I intellectually agreed with all of that, it made little to no difference in how I actually lived my life. At the end of the day, I still had bills to pay, work to do, appointments to attend. Whenever I interacted with others—something I largely couldn’t avoid—I still had to put on a kind of performance and wear a social mask in order to relate with them. After all, everyone else believed they are a “self” that exists and, in turn, they believe that I too must be a “self” as well.
Furthermore, this broad intellectual understanding did not seem to shelter me from pain and suffering—the only difference was that I could now successfully gaslight myself into believing that there was nothing personal about it, and that “pain” was just another empty concept.
But no matter how many “satsangs” I attended, after the initial wave of peace wore off and I interacted with the “world” (including other people) again, I felt like a small, separate self in a society where non-dual understanding didn’t matter. People claimed to know me, remember me, or call me by name, and by necessity, I did the same things. “Emptiness” seemed to have consequences. All phenomena and events, I was told, were empty, but the bank still called me when my bill was late and threatened interest. I knew that seemingly “empty” phenomena could severely impact my credit score.
I still strolled through the “empty phenomena” of what we call a busy urban street and saw other “empty beings” begging for food and cash because they were literally sitting on their last penny and had nowhere to go. The “empty thing” we call the planet we inhabit seemed to be in a state of crisis: hurricanes, wildfires, violent storms, massive heat waves, dangerously cold winters, microplastics in our bodies and in the ocean, and the threat of extinction for an entire species.
Living beings, including myself, still felt incredible pain, still suffered, and investors and shareholders still sat on top of the human food chain and hoarded the bulk of the “empty phenomena” we call money, which seemed to have horribly punitive consequences for the majority of people who were, by consequence, forced to work themselves to absolute depletion just to pay rent and keep food on the table due to rising cost of simply being alive on planet Earth.
By and large, when confronted about these issues, many non-dual teachers had little to nothing to say about any of this that I felt carried any real weight or substance. In fact, some of them even seemed to be in a state of passive acceptance, framing me as the “problem” because I was well-aware of societal inequities and felt genuine despair over them. Over time, I gradually became a bit disillusioned with the teachers and the practices. Surely, I thought to myself, there must be more to “ultimate reality” than this.
So, once again, in my disillusioned state, hungry for answers to some of life’s biggest hurdles, I began to read the works of Albert Camus, Friedrich Neitzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and other philosophers. Sometimes I even started reading and rereading memoirs about the specific experiences people had—something I stopped doing altogether when first introduced to radical non-dual teachings, because I thought reading these kinds of books would pull me back into a limited “story” and a “self” again.
After all, I thought, although I know better, I am not so sure I will ever entirely escape the feeling of having a “self” who feels anxiety, dread, injustice, and pain ever so deeply,
And with that, I gradually stopped reaching for this elusive thing called “enlightenment.” Life seemed banal and flat once again.
At the end of 2024 and the beginning of 2025, I lost several friends on the “non-dual” path. We no longer saw eye-to-eye on the meaning and purpose of life. To them, nothing really mattered—consequences be damned. To me, nothing mattered only in theory but not necessarily in practice, and the consequences of the “nothing matters” philosophy seemed to me to carry some gravity.
In fact, most recently, I was having a text-based conversation with a couple of acquaintances on a spiritual awakening path. At the time, I was feeling an intense wave of grief and lamenting over a certain facet of the human experience along with my own personal struggles. I shared my thoughts and experiences with them in three vulnerable voice notes that captured my voice cracking due to tears. Within the hour, one of these people replied with a link to an “Om mani padi hum” music video and asked me to listen to it. Then, she proceeded to comment on what we were talking about before I mentioned my own personal struggles. A sentence later, she wrote: remember only the ego suffers. It also causes the suffering. The soul just observes.” (This is something I’ve heard over and over again for the past four years on this path.) Then, we were off to the next topic like rapid-fire.
The ego causes suffering.
I couldn’t deny that she and others certainly have a point—I still believe that to this day—but in that precise moment, I was dealing with something long-standing that felt real to me and was hoping to be met with some other perspective I could easily sink my teeth into, or at the very least, some basic human empathy. Instead, I received a sentence that reeked of spiritual bypassing. With hardly anything said, I left the group chat, never to return.
In a short message before blocking her, I said: “If someone’s family member passed away, you wouldn’t tell the remaining family members that death isn’t real, would you? Or if someone had cancer, would you tell them it’s only the body and to just forget about the pain? Even if you know, deep down, that there is an essential part of us that is beyond pain and suffering, why would you frame it like this when someone is clearly distressed? Perhaps some basic emotional maturity and real-world social skills weren’t properly developed and you’re using non-dual concepts to bypass a felt sense of discomfort….”
Speaking of death, amid my reverence for radical non-dual teachings, I bypassed my own feelings about my beloved feline companion, Alice, after her death in late 2022. For a short time, my belief that “no one actually dies because there is no self” seemed to help me cope. In many ways, it genuinely did. However, I was still aware of the fact that what I thought was my beloved cat was no longer in sight; that consciousness had been lifted from her physical vessel and that the illusion would never return. I cried myself to sleep, at times, for eleven solid months. Even an understanding of death as illusory wasn’t enough to quell the pain of the illusion itself. In those raw and tender moments, I was once again reminded of how challenging it is to escape the human experience, no matter how many satsangs you attend or books you read.
I have also noticed that some of these so-called “friends” and acquaintances on the non-dual path often carry massive residual unhealed trauma at a cellular level, including attachment trauma, that sometimes, unbeknownst to them, oozes out of them while they either intentionally or unintentionally convince themselves and others that they’re just “filled to the brim with light, love, peace, and good vibes.” It’s all an appearance. Sometimes, in my opinion, it looks like these same people are performing a version of “look-at-me-I’ve-achieved-the-American-dream, except-I-am-in-lotus-pose-with-dreadlocks-and-eating-tofu.” They’re selling a hyper-capitalistic veneer of “health,” “prosperity,” and “success” and calling it “spiritual.”
I have met yoga teachers who didn’t practice their yamas at all: in fact, I have met some “nice, vegan” yoga instructors who deliberately violated satya (truthfulness) and lied through their teeth about other people, myself included. They also didn’t really display ahimsa (non-violence or compassion in thought, word, and action) when they proceeded to write cold reviews or messages to people who didn’t really do anything wrong—at least not deliberately—and actually needed some guidance. They enjoyed using their spiritual practices as a sort of accessory, but certainly didn’t seem to embody a state of true unconditional love and compassion for all beings. I began to see the hypocrisy in some “spiritual circles,” and once again, this slowly but surely turned me off.
What’s more, the same person who sent me a link to “om mani padme hum” video when I was in physical pain actually told me she feels she doesn’t need a job because “I can’t work when I am in ego death” and “we actually need very little, anyway…less really is more.”
“I believe that less is more too,” I said, “and I would love to live off-the-grid in a tiny cabin like Henry David Thoreau, but sh*t costs money. Food prices have risen 25 percent in the past couple of years, and not everyone is lucky enough to be able to grow their own food…Even so, we still need some things, and those things unfortunately cost money.”
She had absolutely nothing to say to this.
I rest my case.
To conclude, it isn’t that I do not believe in non-dual teachings anymore; I clearly still do. I also find it incredibly helpful to rewatch documentaries like the “Samadhi” series or read Ram Dass, Rupert Spira, Michael Singer, or Eckhart Tolle when I find myself going too far in the other direction and getting too caught up in the human experience.
However, my relationship to the teachings themselves has changed. I do not use the teachings to bypass my own or other people’s experiences like I once did. I also think they sometimes fall short in explaining documented phenomena like near-death experiences and downplay the importance of thoughts and beliefs in creating our experience, however illusory—especially the radical teachings on “no-self.” Clearly, radical non-dual teachings have their limitations, and we have to be aware of them.
In the words of the great William Shakespeare,
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
~
What Happens When you Stop Living the Life you’re Supposed to Live?
Driving from Boulder to Denver the other day, I started thinking about how much of life depends on staying in the lines.
Literally.
Denver has multiple lanes of traffic, cars flying along beside each other, and I thought, sh*t, if one person looked at their phone right now, zoned out, got too tired, drifted just a few feet outside their lane—there could be disaster.
So we stay in the lines.
We obey the lights. The signals. The order.
And for good reason.
But somewhere along the way, I think I learned that the rest of life was supposed to work that way too.
Stay in your lane.
Get the job. Find the partner. Buy the house. Save for retirement. Know where you’re going. And perhaps most importantly, by a certain age, for God’s sake, stop wandering around trying to figure it out.
I’m 48.
And lately, I seem to be doing the exact opposite.
A few days earlier, I’d been notified that I wasn’t chosen for a practicum placement I really thought I would get. Honestly, I thought I was overqualified for it.
I had the most fascinating response.
Of course there was disappointment and shock, but that felt more like an ego blow than anything else.
What?! How could you turn me down?
But as I let it sink in, instead of taking it personally—which I’m sure I would have five years ago—I started seeing it as a signpost.
As the lion trackers say, it was the path of “not here.”
I have stepped outside many of the culture’s driving lanes, and it has been both terrifying and lonely. But it also feels like a calling. Like if I don’t listen to my body, my soul, my heart, then what was all of this for?
Most days, I can say with some confidence that I am learning to live by flow instead of force.
And I love force.
I love control. I love knowing. I love planning. I love feeling safe.
This flow way of living asks something completely different of me.
First, I’ve had to let go.
Let go of what, you may ask?
Everything.
The Everything Must Go Sale.
The old me went out of business. The identities, the timelines, the ways of doing things that felt familiar and comfortable. Gone. Burnt in the fire.
I still don’t entirely know why I was called to this, but I do know that if I don’t follow the soul call, I slowly start to shrink. My life force dims. I self-destruct. I probably hurt other people too.
I go back in the cage.
Although the cage feels safe, I don’t belong there.
It’s really scary out here in the wild.
But it is also exhilaratingly free.
Like…whoa. I get to do this? I get to live like this?
Don’t get me wrong, the voices still try to put me back in my lane.
You can’t live like this.
You are breaking the rules.
This is not what a middle-aged woman is supposed to be doing.
But something in me no longer completely believes them.
In the traffic-lane way of living, that practicum rejection might have felt like a full stop.
Turn around. You can’t go this way. You failed. Find the correct lane.
But in the river way of living, as I’m learning to embody flow, it was just a rock.
And water doesn’t take a rock personally.
It doesn’t stop and question its worthiness. It doesn’t turn around and head back to where it started.
It simply flows around the rock.
It allows the rock to become part of the way.
Right now, I’m in Boulder, taking a month to see how it feels. I have the privilege of being able to work remotely and not travel this month, so this is where I am.
Listening.
Watching.
Paying attention to the subtle signs. The path of “not here,” but also, perhaps, the path of maybe here.
There have been some interesting signs.
Two moose on a hike, one walking directly toward my dog and me.
Thank God I had read the sign at the trailhead about moose safety. I hadn’t encountered many moose on the streets of D.C. or the coastal cliffs of Northern California.
The sign said that if a moose approached, slowly back away. Turn around and go another way, or wait for the moose to pass.
We couldn’t really go another way. It was an out-and-back trail, and we were headed back.
So I backed up with Mocha until we were out of sight and sat on a tree stump.
No cell service. No people.
Just us and two moose.
And strangely, it felt okay.
That was the flow me.
Waiting.
Not forcing.
Trusting that I would know when it was time to move forward again.
There have been rainbows. The moon shining brightly through my window. Hummingbirds by a stream in the early morning after camping with a friend.
A whole field of prairie dogs, looking out for one another, bringing me an almost ridiculous amount of joy. I found myself admiring the way they build and protect their communities.
All dogs. Not just the ones with money or power.
I’ve also been training again at my dear friend and coach’s Muay Thai gym. He has been a rock through years of my life that were quite chaotic, and being back there has felt like another kind of homecoming.
Muay Thai obviously has force in it.
But I don’t fight like that anymore.
It’s flow.
Fun. Playful. Intimate. Vulnerable.
There is something about training with people—hitting and being hit, laughing, sweating, screwing up, trying again—that feels like one of the best ways to bond and really get to know each other.
Maybe this is what I’m learning: flow doesn’t mean nothing is difficult.
It doesn’t mean there are no rocks. No rejection. No fear. No moments when a thousand-pound animal is walking toward you and you have absolutely no idea what happens next.
Maybe flow is simply learning not to force an answer before the answer arrives.
So yes, I am still a nomad.
I still don’t know where I’m going to end up.
At 48, I’m not particularly sure this is how I’m “supposed” to be living.
But here I am.
In this body.
At this age.
My therapist says this is what my soul came here to do.
I have no idea what that means.
And maybe, for once, I don’t need to.
The river doesn’t know what’s around the bend either.
It just keeps moving.
I used to be fire through and through.
Burn it down. Push through. Fight harder. Make something happen.
There’s still plenty of fire in me.
But lately, I’m enjoying the water.
And maybe I’m finally learning that I don’t always have to burn my way through life.
Sometimes I can simply let it carry me.
~
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