The Path Was Always There

Years ago, while hiking a familiar trail near home, I lost the trail.

Or at least I thought I had.

Leaves covered the ground. Fallen branches lay scattered across the forest floor. What had been an obvious path only moments before seemed to disappear completely. I stopped and looked around, searching for some sign that I was still headed in the right direction.

Then I noticed something I had overlooked.

A weathered blaze painted on the trunk of a tree.

A few steps farther, another.

Then another.

The path had never disappeared.

Only my ability to recognize it.

That experience has returned to me many times over the years.

There have been seasons when I believed I had lost my way—not only in the woods, but in life. Times when certainty vanished and every decision felt hidden beneath a covering of questions.

Looking back, I don’t think the path was ever gone.

I simply couldn’t see beyond my own uncertainty.

Meditation has revealed something similar.

We often imagine we are trying to find awareness, as though it were waiting somewhere beyond the next bend in the trail.

But awareness isn’t something hidden.

It is what has quietly accompanied every step.

Like the forest trail beneath the fallen leaves, it never stopped being there.

Only the mind lost sight of it.

Perhaps that is why the Yoga Sutras speak so little about becoming and so much about remembering.

The path does not ask us to create it.

Only to notice it again.

Sometimes all it takes is one quiet moment…

one deep breath…

one glimpse through the leaves…

and we realize we were never as lost as we believed.

The path was always there. We simply forgot how to recognize it.