Written by Jen Liu

“Enlightenment is a practice, not a prize. Learning to recognize opportunities to touch it in everyday situations is a form of joining heaven and earth — our aspirations and immediate reality. Through moments of ordinary enlightenment, the stuff of our lives can become a bridge between the absolute and the relative, a kind of fruition we can experience here and now.”

When learning about meditation and Buddhism, we often hear about "enlightenment" as an aspirational landmark, the ultimate fruition of one's practice. As a result, many of us develop a notion of enlightenment as something that has only been reached by a handful of exceptional individuals, likely unknowable to us in our lifetime.

This can excite and galvanize us to practice. But it also might make it hard to understand how enlightenment relates, if at all, to what we see when we look in the mirror — flawed, oftentimes unglamorous humans in modern society just trying to do better.

Without reducing or distorting the classical definition of enlightenment, we can try to take stock of moments of ordinary enlightenment we experience in our everyday lives so as to feel connected to this tradition instead of outside of it. If enlightenment essentially represents fruition in the path, that can encompass so much more than being immaculately awakened, spacious, and evolved after countless reincarnations. It can also, and often does, look like breaking free of one small cycle of destructive habit or deploying one small act of kindness, right here, right now.

When we begin to draw enlightenment from the abstract realm into the tangible, we see how it's both-and: it can contain all of the lofty metaphysical goals, like breaking free from the cycle of rebirth, as well as the mundane ones, like catching ourselves in the moment we habitually reach for a sugary midnight snack we know we don't need. It can be speaking to a family member with a kinder tone of voice than our patterning usually dictates. While none of these earthly triumphs indicate full enlightenment in and of themselves, it serves us well to acknowledge these markers of progress and their place in the larger picture.

Enlightenment is a practice, not a prize. Learning to recognize opportunities to touch it in everyday situations is a form of joining heaven and earth — our aspirations and immediate reality. Through moments of ordinary enlightenment, the stuff of our lives can become a bridge between the absolute and the relative, a kind of fruition we can experience here and now.