DW's Blog

The Juice

by DW Green — December 11, 2025

“The flower doesn’t struggle with being both beautiful and medicinal. It doesn’t wonder if it should focus on aesthetics or healing. It simply expresses its complete nature moment by moment, allowing all its qualities to emerge naturally from its essential being.”

I understand why people walk away from this conversation.

When someone suggests that the separate self—the ‘me’ you’ve spent a lifetime building, defending, improving— might be more like weather passing through the sky than the sky itself, it can sound like an invitation to disappear. To give up everything you’ve worked for.

To trade a life rich with meaning for some blank, blissed-out emptiness.

Why would anyone do that?

The separate self has juice. Tremendous juice. It offers a story with you as the protagonist. There are stakes, struggles, villains to overcome, victories to claim. There’s the thrill of becoming someone, of getting somewhere, of progress you can measure. That narrative is compelling. It gives life drama and direction. It builds résumés and legacies. It matters.

So when the mystics come along saying ‘you’re already whole, there’s nowhere to go, no one to become’—it sounds like being asked to trade a thrilling movie for a blank screen.

I get it. I resisted it too.

But here’s what I’ve come to recognize: the invitation isn’t to subtract yourself. It’s to notice what remains when the noise settles.

And here’s the surprise—there’s juice there too. A different kind of juice. One you’ve already tasted, though you may not have had words for it.

Remember the last time you lost track of time? Maybe you were absorbed in something you love—golf, gardening, painting, cooking, a conversation so engaging that hours passed like minutes. Remember how alive that felt? How effortless? The narrator in your head went quiet, and there was just… this. Just doing. Just being.

That was the other juice.

Or think of a moment when beauty stopped you mid-stride. Sunlight catching a dented garbage can. The particular green of new leaves. Your grandchild’s laugh. For an instant, there was no ‘you’ observing beauty ‘out there.’ There was just seeing. Just beauty beholding itself.

That was it too.

These moments don’t announce themselves. They don’t add to your story or build your identity. The separate self can’t claim them because the separate self wasn’t running the show when they happened. That’s precisely why we often overlook them—they don’t feed the narrative.

But if you’re honest, aren’t those moments among the most satisfying you’ve ever experienced? Don’t they carry a sweetness that achievement never quite matches?

Here’s what I’ve noticed: accessing this other juice requires something the separate self resists. It requires humility.

Not humility as self-deprecation. Not thinking less of yourself. But humility as right-sizing— recognizing your actual place in the enormity of things.

Have you ever stood at the edge of the Grand Canyon? Or beneath a night sky so full of stars it hurt? Remember what happened to you in that moment? The smallness you felt wasn’t diminishment. It was relief. For a breath or two, you didn’t have to hold it all together. You didn’t have to be the center of the story. You could just receive.

That’s humility. And it’s a doorway.

The juice of the separate self is the juice of inflation—becoming more, rising higher, standing out, positioning ‘me’ at the center of everything. It’s intoxicating. But it’s also exhausting. The burden of being the protagonist of the universe is relentless. There’s always more to prove, more to protect, more to become. The goalpost keeps moving. The pressure never lets up.

Humility offers rest.

There’s an old saying I love: ‘All streams flow to the sea because it is lower than they are. Humility gives the sea its power.’

The sea receives everything precisely because it doesn’t try to be the highest peak. It gets low. And in getting low, it becomes vast.

This is what fine-tunes the seeing. Not effort, not achievement, not spiritual ambition—but a humble willingness to receive life as it is. To stand before the enormity and beauty of existence and simply say: thank you. To recognize the gift of being present with it at all.

Bold? Perhaps. The separate self might hear this as demeaning—being asked to step down from the throne. But those who’ve tasted it know the truth: the throne was a burden. The crown was heavy. What looks like loss is actually liberation.

I’m not asking you to give up your story. Stories are beautiful. The infinite loves expressing itself through the particular drama of your life—the struggles, the loves, the losses, the becoming. That’s sacred too.

I’m only inviting you to notice: you’ve already tasted what you are when the story pauses.

You already know this placeless place where time disappears and life meets itself directly. You’ve stood at the edge of something vast and felt the relief of your own smallness.

The separate self advances itself as the whole anatomy of being human. But maybe it’s more like a character the universe is playing—wholeheartedly, beautifully, temporarily.

And you? You’re also the audience. And the screen. And the light that makes the whole show visible.

The juice is in the recognizing. And the doorway is lower than you think.

Here’s what waits on the other side: beauty. Everywhere you look.

Not because you’ve traveled somewhere special. Not because you’ve achieved some spiritual rank. But because humility opens the eyes. And with open eyes, you begin to see what was always already showing itself.

The dented garbage can catching morning light. The face of a stranger on the bus. The ordinary miracle of your own breathing.

Beauty is divinity making itself visible. It’s not hidden. It’s not rare. It’s everywhere, always, pouring itself out with breathtaking generosity.

The only thing required is a witness humble enough to receive it.

Get low like the sea. And watch the whole world become holy.