How does Enlightenment help?

I overheard a girl on holiday saying that she had done her morning gym routine, yoga and meditation and should be feeling much better than she was.

That is the essence of unenlightenment.

Pema Chonron says that enlightenment does not change the messy inner world we experience. Nor does it change the outer either.

The first step of spirituality is often to seek tangible, literal peace. So we go and sit by a lotus lake.

But the ocean of Samsara is always churning and there is no peace in its choppy waters. The world does not stop for us when we enlighten.

The move is simply to stop trying to stand on the ocean of Samsara. We don't need to put out weight on its waters and we therefore don't need to thrown about by its waves. The waves are there, but we are not trying to put ourselves into them.

Like the girl at the top, we usually look to put ourselves into the picture. After all these activities I should be standing on nice feelings. Why do we even standing on bad feeling? Samara is full of bad feelings, why stand on them and why get away from them to stand somewhere else?

It's this belief we must standing in the world that is the mistake. And the cause is that we think we are a something that needs to stand there. The ocean can churn all by itself without us being in it, or indeed anywhere, or indeed anyone! Instead of trying to help ourselves out of or across the water, the magical step is realising there is no one, in fact, to help.