This Word Is Impossible To Find Online, But It Will Instantly Change Your Life

One little word holds the secret to a life of peace and harmony, but nobody knows about it.

There’s a word that will change your life, but if you search for it on Google, you’ll only find five relevant results. They barely even scratch the surface, but defining this word is a tall order.

One search result page, my favorite, contains only a seven-word definition:

The ultimate nature of the effects of things.

The irony is, humans don’t see the ultimate nature of things. It’s not due to lack of effort, it’s because we can’t. It isn’t just information you can learn to possess mentally, it’s a practice of being open to new perspectives and ways of seeing things, which are constantly shifting.

What we should do more often is contemplate the meaning of “the ultimate nature of things,” because this is a better, more fruitful experience.

You’ll meet people who claim they can see the ultimate nature of things, and they’ll be eager to prove their own ability or prove to you that you can. They might offer to teach you how to do this, probably for money.

Here’s the rub though:

Once you think you’ve grasped the ultimate nature of something, you’ll have lost it.

Your best shot at seeing the ultimate nature of the universe, or the meaning of life, true love, destiny and fate, or even your ultimate purpose (the list goes on…) is directly tied to your ability to let go and open up to what’s happening around you and inside of you.

We are at our best when we stop chasing and hold on loosely.

There’s a sanskrit word that describes this concept, apraṇihita, or in Tibetan, smon pa med pa.

Roughly translated, these words mean “wishlessness.” Wishlessness is all about having a healthy attachment to your desires and how you accomplish your goals.

How to Have A Life of Harmony (In One Easy Step)

For most of us, it’s not practical to release all desires and aspirations. There’s a reason they exist, and they’re designed to be a driving force in our lives. In fact, if you didn’t have any desires or motivations you’d likely be describing uncomfortable experiences like “depression,” “heaviness,” or “low libido.”

These sound more like unhealthy drug side-effects than spiritual freedom. There’s a reason we feel compelled to medicate these things and call them disorders too, it’s because they’re incredibly uncomfortable and disheartening experiences.

Additionally, desires and motivations help you stay in tune with life’s very realistic demands; the needs of your body, emotions, and mental health. Most of us spiritual people with secular lives want just one thing deep down, anyway:

Harmony.

To strike a harmonic balance between productivity, honoring your purpose, and staying open to the spiritual flow of life and the universe, there is a practice called “wishlessness.”

A good friend of mine uses a similar phrase that helps to restore a sense of wonder. It, too, remedies the difficulties and flat feelings that can accompany first striving, then reaching a self-created “destination” in life just to create another one:

“There is no “there.”

This describes the heart of wishlessness, which is learning how to honor the mysterious and open-ended nature of life’s journey without cramming it into some neater-to-look-at but ultimately stress-inducing box.

A box where it should go without saying that life will not fit into.

I first learned about wishlessness from a Buddhist-inspired guide to chronic illness written by Toni Bernhard. Her book is called “How to Be Sick.”

When I began reading Toni’s book, I was bed-bound in the hospital and trying to figure out if I would make it out alive. I was too sick to do much of anything, even watch TV, but I found some comfort in Toni’s words which I read in very short bursts.

When I made it to her section on “wishlessness” it felt like a breath of fresh air. It turns out, you can have strong desires, no problem. Mine at the time was a will to live and figure out my health.

The problem occurs not when you have desires, but when you have a shitty relationship with them.

Do your desires make you feel urgency, pressure, or anxiety? It’s time to break up with those desires and start dating them again.

If you date your desires rather than trying to force them into a white picket-fenced life, you’ll find that like with any relationship they need time to open up. No relationship goes well when you propose on the first date, call all of the time, and stalk the person’s social media to figure out where they are.

This stuff starts throwing off the whole vibe, even if you do it nonchalantly.

You can’t nonchalantly obsess about the future, it just isn’t possible.

So, I asked myself, how much am I fretting about wanting to live? It turns out, quite a lot. I also noticed I had a habit of urgently worrying about every desire, aspiration, or project from the moment of inception to the time of completion.

I had a lot to unpack there emotionally too, which is an important part of this process if you don’t want to bypass it all and have a mental breakdown later. Keep that in mind.

While my urgency sometimes gave me the drive to complete something faster, it just as often clouded my vision and put me further away from my goal. And, even when I completed my goals, I noticed my emotional tension and stress level was higher.

This was taking a significant toll on me, even pre-illness, so I started to consider whether I was subconsciously addicted to this adrenaline cycle and if I had been relying on it to function.

Getting sick helped me change all that. I was bed-bound for months, I couldn’t walk unassisted, and I had to heavily rely on unpredictable medical interventions to stay alive.

I knew I’d either need to adopt a healthier, more wishless mentality, or succumb to the all-consuming sensation of stress and fear about my future. This has been the most important step in learning how to cope with a permanent chronic illness and find my purpose post-diagnosis.

A Journey of a Thousand Stumbles

Often I’ll fall off the wagon, but I have learned how to put the truck in reverse and perform a hard reset. I can fall a thousand times, but what I value more is learning how to get back up. I’ve found that this is true freedom, not avoiding uncomfortable experiences in favor of “attainment.”

Attainment is fragile.

When it comes to refreshing your supply of wishlessness after a stumble, you can start by re-analyzing the relationship between your desires, motivations, and sense of urgency all over again.

Most of us don’t get a crash course in philosophies as I did through my near-death experience, and when we do they certainly don’t instill mastery. We all benefit, though, when we learn how to practice something. Everybody can use a little practice.

You can also pay more attention to what you value and hold dear.

The challenge is, do you see something as “simple” as healthy attachment (changing your relationship with your stress, anxiety, motivations, and desires) as important to your growth and well-being?

With a little help from this word which has managed to elude the entire internet, even in late 2023, you could change your life and experience a more widely talked about Buddhist phenomenon:

Liberation.