A personal page

First I learned to build.
Then I learned to be still.

I'm Reynaldo Enriquez. I trained as an engineer, spent ten years in Oakville, Ontario making things work, and I live in Spain now. For a long time I thought the building was the whole of it. Sitting quietly every day is what showed me the rest.

This page is not a pitch. It is just what I have come to believe, written down.

Based in SpainEnglish · Español

Engineer by trainingSheridan College, Oakville

A sitting practicestillness, then everything else

The story

How I got here.

2012

Ten years in Oakville, Ontario

I studied software engineering at Sheridan College and stayed in Oakville for the next ten years. Engineering gave me a habit I still use every day: break the problem down, build the system, measure the result. It is an honest way to think. It is also, I found out later, a poor way to live if it is the only way you know.

A decade

Head down, and pushing

I worked. Genuinely, relentlessly, for years. I was good at it, and being good at it hid the problem: I had quietly decided that I was worth what I produced. That belief will run a person for a very long time before it presents its bill.

The turn

Learning to sit down and do nothing

Meditation came to me the way it comes to most people who are not looking for it. Something was not working and no amount of effort was fixing it, because effort was the thing that was broken. What I found first was Osho on witnessing, and then Sadhguru on the mind as accumulated memory, and both of them were saying the same inconvenient thing: the problem is not out there. So I sat still instead. Badly, at first, and for very short stretches. It was the hardest simple thing I have ever tried to do.

Now

In Spain, quieter and more useful

I live in Spain these days, in a rhythm that puts the table, the long meal and the people around it above almost everything. I still build. I still like the work. What changed is what sits underneath it. I am no longer trying to prove anything with it, which strangely made me better at it, and it freed up the part of me that actually wants to be of use to somebody.

What I believe

Three things that took me years to learn.

The mind is a servant, not a master

Osho put it plainly. The mind is a beautiful servant and a dangerous master. Mine had been the master for about thirty years and I had never once questioned the arrangement, because the voice giving the orders sounded exactly like me.

Sadhguru describes that voice as accumulated memory playing back. Not insight, not truth, just old material on repeat, arranging your future out of your past. Once you have watched it do that a few hundred times you stop taking it quite so personally. You are not the thought. You are the one who noticed the thought.

The only way out is in

That line is Sadhguru's and it took me years to stop hearing it as a slogan. If your wellbeing is manufactured outside you, by the deal closing or the number landing, then you have handed the controls to the weather. I did that for a decade and called it ambition.

The shift is not that you stop working. It is that the work stops paying your rent emotionally. And when your joy is no longer coming out of a fixed supply, being useful to somebody costs you nothing. Service stops being a sacrifice and starts being the overflow.

Yoga means union

Not the postures. The word itself means union, and what it points at is the boundary you keep drawing around yourself. That boundary is not anatomy. It is attention, held in one shape, every waking minute, until it feels like a fact.

Osho said you are not an island, you are part of the ocean, and you can hear that a thousand times as poetry before you feel it once as an experience. Sit still long enough and the edges stop being obvious. What is left is not emptiness. It is everything else.

On identifying with the whole

The kindest idea I know.

Almost everything that makes a person cruel comes from the same place: the conviction that they are here and everyone else is over there. Once that line is drawn, other people become weather. Something to be managed, gotten past, or beaten.

Sadhguru asks a question I have never been able to put down. Where exactly does your body end and the rest of the existence begin? You breathe the air out and it becomes somebody else's breath. The line you are defending is a convenience, not a discovery. It is a habit of attention, and habits of attention can be loosened. That is most of what a practice is for. Not to make you peaceful on demand, but to sit with you long enough that you notice how much of your suffering depends on that one border being held.

Osho was blunter about the method. Do not concentrate, witness. Concentration narrows you down to one thing, which is a useful skill and the opposite of what is needed here. Witnessing widens. You stop being the actor in the scene and become the space the scene is happening in, and you cannot do that and stay tightly bordered at the same time.

When it loosens, and it does loosen, nothing mystical happens. You just find that being generous costs you less than it used to. Someone else doing well stops registering as your loss. You get patient with people you used to find unbearable. It is not that you became a better person. It is that you stopped defending a thing that was never under threat.

I am not finished with any of this. Most days I am a beginner at it, and I am borrowing both men's words for experiences I have only touched the edge of. But it is the direction I want to keep walking, and it is the closest thing I have to a reason.

“You do not have to become part of the whole. You have to notice that you never left it.”

First I learned to build.Then I learned to be still.