Live What You Know

Waking up is more than it seems. You KNOW more than you've ever been "taught"! You chose to be here now. Make yourTRUEself proud!

Tag: Thought

September 11, 2013

Staying Home

Once we understand that the best place to BE at home is within ourselves and that we can be at home whenever and wherever we are, we just need to practice actually doing it.  For today, I want to share a quick tip for staying at home within when distractions arise.

The term being at home is really about inner peace.  Somehow “being at home” sounds a bit more attainable than inner peace, kind of like a stepping stone to the real deal.  Plenty of being at home within will take us toward inner peace…where else would it lead?!  The path toward peace begins with quieting the mind.  There are many stages and paths and practices that help with quieting the mind.  Different things work for different people.  I want to just give a quick tip today that might help us all stay home well this week.

Let’s identify a few of the many things that take us from our true home and fill our mind with noise:

  • Worrying
  • Rushing
  • Resisting situations, wishing things were different
  • Thinking about the future and what may happen
  • Wishing something hadn’t happened
  • Being annoyed
  • Stress in general

To be clear, we are meant to live a peaceful life and feel at home within ourselves all the time.  So, anytime we are not experiencing utter peace, we have left our rightful home and chosen fear instead.  Most people live in constant stress, so they may be surprised to hear that what many consider to be “normal” stress is actually not living at all and a complete waste of energy.

Knowing our home is within we can use our bodies to anchor us there.  A little thing I like to do throughout the day when I feel my mind stray or stress begin to take hold is to simply shift my attention towards some part of my body.  If I am walking when I notice the mind activity, I simply change the thought to “I am home” and feel my foot hit the ground or floor with my fullest attention, then I keep my attention there for my next steps.  Repeating the “I am home” thought again, I then notice more of my body.  I soon notice my heart feel good and a smile always comes to my face; when you stop to notice your heart feel good, it is impossible not to smile (try it).  As you keep walking, you find the quiet mind and peace again.  If I were doing the dishes or writing when my mind went towards noise, I would bring my attention to my hands and do the same thought replacement and feel my heart relax and inevitably feel a smile on my face.  It really works and can bring you right to where you are most at home…in joy.  You can use an arm movement, notice your fingers, stretch your neck or simply stand still…anchor yourself anywhere in your body and out of your mind…it will bring the peace of being at home within.

On this wonderful Wednesday, I just have to say…I wouldn’t wish happiness on anyone.  That may sound strange, let me explain.  To me, happiness means something has happened that brought it and inevitably it swings to the opposite at some point.  What I wish for everyone is true peace that comes from within.  I wish it for you with all my heart!  Try this little tip to anchor your attention in your body and you will love how it feels to quickly and effectively quiet the mind and all the trouble it likes to create.  When I first started watching my thoughts years ago, I remember I would often find myself counting my steps.  It was as if my mind was so used to constant noise that it couldn’t just be quiet, it had to count.  It was okay, I just went around counting steps and stairs…it passed.  The quiet is where life is at…I am so grateful for the quiet.

I hope this little tip helps you enjoy the quiet.  I am sending you love and peace!

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August 29, 2013

The “Sweet Little One” Inside Me… and You

I can remember a time during childhood (well, it lasted a long while) when my mom would say to me after some silly choice, bad decision or rude interaction, “What happened to sweet little Stacy?”  I heard this for a long time whenever I kind of got out of line or needed some parenting I suppose.  In the beginning this question really upset me and made me feel like I wasn’t a nice person.  Over time it haunted me even more and I began to ponder it myself.  Had I quit being sweet?  Was I a bad person?  During adolescence I distinctly remember her asking this question again and I had this fury inside where I screamed, “She NEVER existed, all I have ever heard is ‘where is she?’, she was never here, it’s just me, quit asking.”  (I don’t think I had the courage to say it aloud to her, I think I imagined I did, but didn’t…I probably played that scene in my head over and over, I’m really not sure if I ever discussed it with her).

Now I am the mom to an eight-year-old daughter.  I sometimes wonder what has happened to her.  I wonder where my sweet baby has gone.  That is how I became reminded of the question about “sweet little Stacy” above.  I am truly grateful I had the experience of thinking about who I was.  I am so glad my mother asked this of me and especially now, at this point in life, I am truly grateful my mom continued to direct that question to me.  I can go really deep with this question now and I am thrilled with the answer.  I almost feel like picking up the phone to call my mother and tell her that I found her after all these years…I have found Sweet Little Stacy.  She is there in me and she is in you too!  I will explain…

First, let me say, my daughter is amazing.  She is so many wonderful things…too many to list here.  Because I am her mom, I also see another side to her.  The mom gets to see it all.  I can see she is growing and changing.  Because of all the reading about spiritual things I do, I can see that the ego is trying to take hold and her identity is changing.  I can see when it happens and I am also painfully aware that I am the one she is most comfortable lashing out at.  She is so kind in her heart…its just me she will melt down with and show another side to, growing up is tough.  I have heard myself say to her so many times, “you would never treat anyone else that way, only me.”  Sounds a lot like the question my own mother had of me.  I am sure I have said even worse to her in tough moments (forgive me sweet girl).  This parenting stuff is not easy.  When I can lean back and look at things I can see what is happening and not take it personally.  Other times, it hurts so bad.

It’s tough to juggle knowing if we’re parenting or judging.  I have been thinking about this recently and trying to watch it with her.  I don’t want to judge her or make her into me.  I want to help her be the best version of herself.  I want to honor her growing and help her learn to make good choices.  If she feels judged by me, she won’t be able to feel my love, she will turn towards her fear instead.  Oh, how I want to be the mother that doesn’t judge.  I am so trying to figure out how to parent well without judging.

Recently, she lashed out at me because she was struggling learning something.  Often, when something seems hard, her fear brings out the worst.  Understandable.  Anyway, like I said, I struggle with allowing her to be herself and still guide her towards making good choices.  After appealing to her with explanations of kindness, etc., she just kept pushing, I allowed her actions to hit my buttons and I decided she needed a break and told her she would be in timeout.  In fact, I gave her a double timeout.  This would mean 16 minutes to think about her actions.  As she stormed down the stairs in anger, I had a change of heart.  I sent her brother to tell her that mom had changed her mind, this gave me a minute to breathe and pause and choose well (that non-reactionary living I am striving for).  When she returned to me, I said to her, “You get to choose who you want to be.”  That was all I said, she returned to her work.

Within a few minutes, she came to me and gave me a sweet kiss and hug and apologized.  She had found her “sweet” and turned towards love.  I knew she could do it!  We talk to the kids so much about character and our choices.  We explain that your choices make who you are.  We have so many ways of explaining it to the best of our ability.  I also believe that people treat you how you let them treat you and I don’t want to raise kids that are rude and disrespectful to their mother.  Not just for me, but I know they won’t feel good about themselves if they choose that.  Allowing my sweet daughter the space to find who she wants to be on her own with just the right amount of guidance and a big dash of modeling my own good choices seems to be the recipe.  For now.

I am going to continue pondering parenting without judging.  I think it’s worth the effort to try.  As I embrace the freedom from being right or wrong, I do want to impart some of this concept to the kids.  It is tough because they so badly want to be right…all the time.  I told them recently that I really don’t want to parent every single little thing and be right and make them wrong…but what I do want to do is parent for peace.  I explained that even when they are corrected or get in trouble, they really haven’t done anything wrong, but we must try to work towards creating more peace and harmony.  If we’re behaving in a way that creates more peace and harmony, then there won’t be much chance of getting into trouble.  As we discussed this more and exactly what harmony means…we were turned to look outside at nature and observe the perfect harmony all around us.  I love how the answers are always there in the perfection of nature.

Mom – THANK YOU so much for guiding me towards finding “Sweet Little Stacy” – slowly over time I am finding her in the essence of my true nature.  What a gift it is to know she does exist and she is there in the purest form in me just as she is in everyone else.

Wishing you all a quiet moments with the Sweet Little One inside you.  Joy!

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August 27, 2013

Seeing The Unfamiliar In The MOST Familiar Things

It is a shame how familiar we become with so much of our lives.  It would seem that we would find comfort in the familiar…that is not the case.  We completely check out and become numb to what is happening around us.  We can’t see the people or places around us that have become too familiar, we see it all through a veil of our past observations, images and experiences.  With the MOST familiar people and places in our lives it can do the most damage.  We can be completely missing what is right in front of us…the very thing we love the most, we sometimes give our attention to the least.  Learning about this concept from John O’Donohue in Anam Cara, A Book of Celtic Wisdom was a gift in my life.  The gift of seeing the unfamiliar in the most familiar things can wake us up to life.  Life takes on a whole new energy when you can really do this.  I have had experiences where I felt as if I snapped into attention and really saw my child’s face for the first time in too long.  Children’s ability to notice this right away is really something to behold.  I cherish those moments when I was really looking at them with unfamiliar eyes.  I have also been thrilled to look at my husband and see him as if we were just getting to know each other; it’s so fun to experience the excitement of the early dating days…it just takes a little shift in attention.  It takes practice to dwell in this for any length of time, but it is so worth trying to improve at it…life changing when we can do it.

Seeing the unfamiliar in the most familiar things doesn’t mean trying something new to wake you up.  It is quite the opposite.  It means really watching where you put your attention and what conditioned responses are running in your head.  It takes watching your thoughts and not identifying with them.  It takes letting those thoughts pass by so that you can create new and fresh ones that are found in the unfamiliar or the fresh moment.  The truth is that no one is ever exactly the same as the last time you met them.  I know for sure I am not.  Sometimes I could just cringe at running into someone I knew well ten years or so ago…I think, oh my gosh they know me from two lifetimes ago… Even when we see people once a week, they are never the exact same person they were the last time you saw them.  Allow this freshness to be there and try to see them fresh in the moment.  With our MOST familiar people and places it takes the most heightened focus, but what it can do for those relationships and experiences is miraculous.  Seeing only the familiar takes all the excitement out of life.  Dare to see those closest and most familiar to you in new and unfamiliar ways.

I realized with my own children recently that I am the MOST familiar thing in their lives.  I am the thing they have been the most familiar with for the entirety of their lives.  I used to wonder why they would say and do things to me that they would never dream of doing to someone else.  I struggled with why they save their exquisite manners and politeness for everyone else.  It finally dawned on me that I am the MOST familiar thing to them and they are also the MOST familiar thing to me.  We could spend our entire day responding to our ideas and images of each other rather than actually seeing and experiencing each other fresh in the unfamiliar.  I want to really stop and listen to them and see the new expressions that cross their faces and the new things they are excited about.  Just because I am so very familiar with them and so involved in everything they do doesn’t mean I am really seeing the unfamiliar and allowing myself to look at them with fresh eyes to spot new changes and truly hear what is important to them.  It is something I have to practice, especially if I want them to do that for me.  It is a terrible feeling as a mom to feel like you repeat yourself a million times and no one is listening.  Argh.  I think I have stumbled into a great truth.  If I want them to look at me with fresh eyes and see me, then I must do that for them.  This is true for the MOST familiar people and places as well as everyone and everything else too.

Wishing you the profound joy and fresh aliveness that comes with experiencing the unfamiliar in the MOST familiar things.

Below is one of my favorite passages from Anam Cara, A Book of Celtic Wisdom, by John O’Donohue.  What a gift!

Behind the facade of our normal lives eternal destiny is shaping our days and our ways.  The awakening of the human spirit is a homecoming.  Yet ironically our sense of familiarity often militates against our homecoming.  When we are familiar with something, we lose the energy, edge, and excitement of it.  Hegel said, “Das Bekannte uberhaupt ist darum, weil es bekannt ist, nicht erkannt”– that is, “Generally, the familiar, precisely because it is familiar, is not known.”  This is a powerful sentence.  Behind the facade of the familiar, strange things await us.  This is true of our homes, the place where we live, and, indeed, of those with whom we live.  Friendships and relationships suffer immense numbing through the mechanism of familiarization.  We reduce the wildness and mystery of person and landscape to the external, familiar image.  Yet the familiar is merely a facade.  Familiarity enables us to tame, control, and ultimately forget the mystery.  We make our peace with the surface as image and we stay away from the Otherness and fecund turbulence of the unknown that it masks.  Familiarity is one of the most subtle and pervasive forms of human alienation.

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August 25, 2013

The Universe Went To A Lot of Trouble To Create This Exact Moment For You…Come To The Party

The Universe (God, Life, Love, All, Everything…) went to a lot of trouble to create this exact moment that you are experiencing.  It has been arranging millions of things and designing perfection for you.  It has then invited you to come.  That is the case in every moment.  Always.  Each moment is perfectly created for exactly the right circumstances for you and the evolution of your soul.  All we need to do is simply be there in the moment fully to experience the perfection we are meant to have.  Unfortunately, we often skip the moment entirely by bringing past issues or experiences and future worries or stress with us in our minds that keeps us preoccupied and unable to BE where we are at fully.  The moment that the Universe worked so hard for us to have is completely lost on us, we just can’t feel it.  We are more blessed and loved than we can imagine because the Universe (God) loves us so much that at the very  moment we miss yet another of its precious gifts it had picked out for us, it is already working hard to create another one to invite us to that is just as perfect.  It lines up infinite details to create divine experiences for us and no matter how many moments we miss, it continues to invite us to the next one.  Continuous understanding, compassion and invitations.  Amazing!

Imagine if a loved one had decided to throw you a special party…they organized every last detail to make it the best celebration of your lifetime and you just didn’t show up.  You just never went.  When we live with constant distractions, mind chatter and stress, we just aren’t showing up at the party the Universe has planned for us.  Lucky for us, the Universe will go on planning, arranging and coordinating the perfect experience for us…but, our soul longs to skip the detours and delays.  It will all work out just as it should, but perhaps by understanding what we are missing we can truly focus on figuring out how we can show up at the party now.  Let’s do everything we can to go to the party the Universe has planned for us…the joy.

Wishing you joy today and always!  I know you can get to the party and feel the joy; my faith in you helps me feel I can dwell in the joy more often myself.  Let’s Live It!  We have people to meet, things to see, stories to hear, love to create, adventures to encounter…the joy is always waiting for us.

 

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August 22, 2013

Loving Yourself Through Failure

This isn’t what I thought I would post today.  I have been working on something else entirely.  But, yesterday I wasn’t exactly living what I know…it was more like forgetting what I know.  Then as I was writing that other post, a third option occurred to me…writing about what you know.  I don’t want to just write about what I know here…I really want to live it and I know that is what the universe wants for me…it is the same impulse.  I couldn’t post something that wasn’t truly in the energy I am in.  The other post will have to wait until I am ready to live it more fully.  That time will come soon enough.  The blessing is that the words don’t really come unless you’re vibrating in that space (meaning, it’s not well written at all yet).  I am grateful for that…it is a wonderful practice.

Yesterday, my personal best wasn’t so great.  I was losing my patience, taking things personally, basically just living in a state of reaction instead of presence.  All these little choices turned into a not so great day.  I allowed all those choices to happen and created suffering for myself and for those around me.  Basically, I let fear take over and thoroughly take me off track.  I kind of stayed in the mode of feeling down and upset with myself for not choosing to live all that I know.  I felt exhausted, scared and sad.  I didn’t really resist it, it just took over and I let it.

I stumbled into an old present moment reminder midday from Eckhart Tolle TV that said:

‘Life isn’t as serious as my mind makes it out to be.’ Eckhart Tolle

I smiled.  My heart let out a little sigh of relief and I began to heal.  I didn’t really rush myself, I just turned towards love as I decided to love myself through my failure.  I know that being hard on myself will help nothing (I have done that enough).  I knew that the next day wouldn’t be like this one and I would learn from it.  There was a lot of learning going on throughout the day.  Our failures can show us so much if we are willing to look directly at them.  As I nurtured my soul a bit and allowed myself to do whatever comforted me, I realized how lovely it feels to dwell in a place where you really do know that All IS WELL.  Even if you have let illusions of fear creep in, they will pass.  You can really feel that all is well even as you feel like you failed because all is well and it all happens just as it should.

This morning, I feel rejuvenated and ready to choose from stillness again.  I chose the unfamiliar this morning as the kids and I ate breakfast outside and enjoyed all the sights and sounds of nature.  We all experienced a fresh new look at the day and a renewed energy towards really living what we know.  So, was it really failure after all if it takes you to a morning of watching your kids and yourself delight in dragonflies and hummingbirds?  If it was failure, then perhaps a new way of looking at failure is in order.

Whether your failure is big or small…love yourself through it.  It is there to show you something.  Be kind to yourself in success and failure, for all that really matters is love.

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August 20, 2013

Master Listening — Master Living

How Do I Listen?

How
Do I
Listen to others?
As if everyone were my Master
Speaking to me
His
Cherished
Last
Words.

-Hafiz

Perhaps the best practice today would simply be to listen with the fullest possible intensity and attention to everyone and everything around me.  Maybe this simple act would ground me so deeply in the amazing flow of life and the perfection the universe has picked out for me that I wouldn’t hear any mind chatter and I could stay perfectly in the actual moment that I have been invited to dwell in.  Maybe by really hearing what is being said and what isn’t being said in the silence in between and the stillness that surrounds me, I would feel only joy and spread pure joy to others.  Maybe when you master listening, you master Living!

I can’t imagine being able to answer the question above the way Hafiz did.  Amazing!  I can imagine how it feels to have a conversation like this or even one moment where you really touched the essence of life and heard what the universe is saying.  I have experienced this kind of listening and it is absolutely breathtaking.  Knowing this and experiencing this divine feeling, I still fall back regularly into the rush and let day-to-day life keep me from living with this level of attention.  I think that once we know how important truly listening to life is, living in any other way is exhausting for our spirit and soul.  I have a hunch that a deeper practice of listening to life with my fullest attention is just what my soul needs most.  The joy of really hearing someone and really seeing them fresh in the moment feels so good to us and to them, it heightens the energy level of everything and allows us to be much more of ourselves.  Truly hearing and experiencing the sounds around us with wonder can only bring more peace.  Listening to the stillness behind everything is nurturing for our soul.  I am ready to nurture my soul and replenish through listening to the best of my ability.

I think we’re all starved for fuller attention from others and for opportunities to give our fullest attention to others.  I believe truly listening is the most amazing gift we can give or receive.  We can help someone hear what their soul really wants to say, just by purely listening.  I would like to practice living in a way that honors all that listening really is.  I don’t want to show up with my veil of perceptions, distractions and reactions, I want to be there fully and listen with my whole heart.  I believe if done well, listening can change the way we see and experience the world.

Once you start the journey of quieting the mind and opening the heart, it’s a shame to give the silence away and fill it up with your own words and your own distractions and reactions so easily!  Surrendering our attention so readily to so many things without placing it purely on what is right in front of us now is like numbing ourselves to life where we can no longer truly experience anything.  It is surrendering the beauty and joy that life has to offer.  Our attention is sacred and must be cared for and treated with reverence.  I don’t need to hear more of my little thoughts or my voice reacting to things, I want to listen to what life really has to say and truly live from there.

Simply put – listening really really well to all of life could save us all a lot of trouble and bring us all a lot of joy.

God help me listen, speak, breathe and be from stillness today and always!

I wish you a day filled with generous listening — others to you and you to Everything!  I also wish you love, smiles, laughter and fun!

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August 18, 2013

Let Beauty Awaken Your Soul

“When our eyes are graced with wonder, the world reveals its wonders to us. There are people who see only dullness in the world and that is because their eyes have already been dulled. So much depends on how we look at things. The quality of our looking determines what we come to see.”
―John O’Donohue, Beauty: The Invisible Embrace

Beauty.  What is it?  Where does it come from?  Why does it touch us so?  What happens to us when we experience it?

When we experience true beauty, everything stops.  We take it in.  We experience the stillness that it came from.  I believe that we remember where it came from and it feels like home to us.  It awakens us from our daily life for a moment and takes us somewhere else.  It moves us.  It thrills us.  It is love sent to remind us of who and what we are.

When we experience a beautiful song, a masterful dance performance, a great poem, a theatrical production, a scene in a movie, a sunset, a beautiful piece of artwork, even an amazing sports moment…anything that has true beauty, we are changed in that moment.  Beauty can wake us up to more of life, it takes us out of the ordinary and out of our thinking mind — into our senses fully and it is a gift when it does.  We stop thinking, we have no worries, we aren’t planning or distracted or bored…we are really there experiencing the beauty and relief in being taken to a more meaningful moment.  We all have experienced those precious moments when we sit in awe of something so beautiful, we feel it deep inside.  Remember it and you can feel it now.

That moment is always there for us.  We must remember that stillness and invite it to visit more often.  We can bring more beauty into out lives, we simply need to be open to seeing it.  We need to add enough space to let it in.  Beauty is all around us.  It is everywhere, not just in the so-called works of art.  There is magical beauty in the smallest of things everywhere.  Everything was created in that stillness.  The truest of beauty is in the lines on an elderly face, the wag of a dog’s tail, the way the sunlight hits the sink full of dirty dishes, laughter, smiles, eyes, the book in your hands, the sound of your child calling “Mom”, kindness in any form, the mess you made having fun…beauty is everywhere.  We don’t have to wait for the sensational, we can see it everywhere.  We can let it wake us up to more of Life.

Today, in many ways, beauty has been reduced to idealized notions of what society deems beautiful.  It is actually rather frightening to see what is happening in the name of beauty.  That is not what we are talking about here.  We are talking about true works of Life.  God is experiencing himself in so many ways and through that experiencing, comes beauty.  We can bless our lives by looking with fresh eyes that are open to the beauty that surrounds us all the time.  We can help others see the beauty too.

Let’s take the time to touch beauty in a more meaningful way today and see how it changes our experience of life.  Let’s not wait for the big obvious moments, lets find it in the imperfection that is called Life.

Have fun seeing the beauty around you today, your soul knows how…today is the perfect day to spend more time with your soul.  Your soul is pure beauty!

Below is my son’s favorite poem, Little Things by Julia A. F. Carney.  The beauty in his five-year-old writing and the sweet joy he gets in reading this poem and knowing he is one of my favorite little things is simply stunning…to me, better than any masterpiece or work of nature I could ever encounter.

Little Things

Wishing you lots of joy in the beauty found in little things today and always!

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August 15, 2013

Spread Love Today…Everything Else is Fear

“The human emotional system can be broken down into roughly two elements:
fear and love.
Love is of the soul.
Fear is of the personality.”
~ Gary Zukav – from “Seat Of The Soul” ~

I distinctly remember the moment I learned that hate is fear.  It’s intriguing.  Even if we have never felt hatred, we have all seen it in its various forms.  It’s just fear?  Yep.  And then you go on to figure out that all those other behaviors and emotions that go along with anger, resentment, jealousy, sorrow, spite, judgment, arrogance, even loneliness (it’s a long list)…they all come from fear.  Once you connect those dots, it’s no longer just intriguing, it changes everything.

First and foremost, when you begin to see what is behind all of those terrible behaviors that come from fear based emotions, you can open your heart with forgiveness immediately to almost anything (truly anything as we get better and better at it…it takes practice).  When I deal with these less desirable attitudes and behaviors in people or just things you see around you that stem from them, right before I judge it or react to it, I do my best to remember what it really is.  I get a helpful little visual to remind me of what it really is…I picture a scared little child running to its mom for help.  Maybe it’s the mom in me, but I think of how awful it feels to be scared and how children instinctively run for mom when something frightens or hurts them.  Fear creates all kinds of toxic reactions when really the person just wants to be comforted by love.  Next time you are faced with toxic behaviors, remember that person just needs some love.  They are having a moment in fear…your love could bring them right out and you have plenty to spare…the more you give, the more you have to give.  You will know best how you spread love.  You don’t have to tell them you’re providing love for their fear (in fact, don’t do that, they don’t know it’s fear), you can give love simply by not judging them, by being a calm pure loving presence.

Practicing forgiveness in this way changes you and opens your heart.  Next place to practice it is with yourself.  Forgive yourself for your fear based emotions, attitudes and behaviors.  When we realize that all that stuff we sometimes think or feel, and even our actions that we are not proud of,  all just came out of fear…we can love the scared little child in us too.  Give yourself some love and move on.

Creating space around our choices and actions will allow us to practice spreading love and forgiving everything else.  When you put a breath or just a moment of stillness around your choices, you can choose love.  You can picture yourself standing in the middle and you can decide if you want to turn towards love or towards fear.  In every single thing you do, you can choose love or fear.  Even the thoughts you think, do you want them to be love-based or fear-based?  You can even choose the thoughts.

Another term for fear that I loved learning about is powerlessness.  Whenever you choose fear instead of love, you have chosen powerlessness and given your power away.  Your soul wants to live in love and knows that it is the most powerful force in the universe.  Your ego chooses fear and creates suffering for you and others.

There is no need to explain the behaviors and emotions that come from love, we all have a deep knowing and connectedness with those…they just feel good…your heart delights in them and your soul remembers them well.  Today, and always, let’s spread LOVE and forgive fear EVERYWHERE!  Have fun experimenting with how you spread love!

I am sending YOU so much love!

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August 12, 2013

Mental Movie Making – Make Movies in Your Head or Live in Stillness and Inner Peace

“We can learn not to keep situations or events alive in our minds, but to return our attention continuously to the pristine, timeless present moment rather than be caught up in mental movie making.”
–Eckhart Tolle

When I first heard Eckhart Tolle talk about mental movie making some years back, I can’t say that I got what he meant right away.  It took some time and lots of mulling it over.  I remember hearing him give a talk and trying to figure it out on a conceptual level rather than the knowing inside me that would have understood right away.  Funny, I am sure the ego was wrapped up in all that mind chatter.

In a recent conversation I was having with a friend, I heard myself explain it so clearly.  I had been listening to my friend and feeling compassion for her suffering.  I was just really listening presently, I wasn’t thinking about what I would say, I was just really in the vibration of stillness and non-judgement and when it was my turn to respond to her, these words explaining the concept of mental movie making came through.  As she reacted with enthusiasm and excitement about how true and helpful that was, I also heard it and understood it so much deeper than I ever had before.  I heard my own words (or words borrowed from stillness really) and learned something more deeply from them.  It was like one of those hugs from the universe I believe in when you just feel so connected to everything.  It was such a lovely lesson that I thought I would share it here.

My friend had been describing dealing with a hard situation with a family member and sharing her disappointment over their actions, etc.  She felt very sure of her position and even more sure that the family member was doing others wrong.  The suffering she was creating for herself was obvious.  I wasn’t judging her for doing that or judging the family member for her actions (which can be easy to do), I was really just listening in presence and feeling compassion for her and then the right words came.

I said to her – We get to decide how we let things effect us.  When we interact with others, they have their perception of the situation, we have ours.  Neither one is true ultimately and neither one actually happened.  None of this “stuff” is actually happening, it is all in our minds.  It’s all a movie we are creating as we look through the veil of our perceptions.  In our movie we are the star and we have our supporting characters and guest appearances, etc.  In the other person’s movie, they are the star and we are their supporting actors or maybe just an extra.  Depending on the veil we look through and all the past experiences we bring with us, we decide how to interpret things and how much importance to give them.  Sometimes things just roll right out of our awareness and sometimes we obsess and keep the movie running and running and running.  We can make it get bigger and worse and keep it alive with all the movie creating in our heads.  None of it actually happened.  At about this point in the conversation she said “wow that is amazing, I never thought of it that way.”

We went on and had a lovely conversation, it is hard to explain the added depth in the discussion, it was just there.  When we concluded our conversation, I felt so peaceful and I had this knowing that we had really shared a moment of glimpsing a truer reality.  It was special and I was grateful.  Conversations and moments like this when we can ease suffering and grow consciousness are miraculous.

It can be easy to get caught up in mental movie making, it’s even thought to be normal and people go on consoling each other and adding to each others movies by agreeing with their version, etc.  Even in the exact moment of the very thing we think we are upset about, it didn’t happen.  It was just the way we created it in our head and someone else created a different version in their head.  No other mind saw it exactly the way we did.  Once we understand this we can step back and begin to figure out how we are creating these movies and keeping situations alive in our minds that never even happened.  We can begin to watch this happening and explore other options.  We can free ourselves from this false reality and gain peace and learn to dwell in the power of stillness rather than an ever-changing movie.

As I mentioned before, I had heard Eckhart talk about these things many times and I had been reading The Four Agreements and applying all of that wisdom as well.  I am so grateful for all of the great teachers presenting this information in so many different ways, yet saying the same thing.  We can continue to grow and grasp the teachings and then we can learn to live it.  When we hear ourself explain something more clearly than we had ever understood it, we know we tapped into the stillness that is Everything.  If we can listen and be still and let that voice come through then we can truly become more of our essential self and much less of our reactionary self…one response at a time.

I believe our judgements can block the real answers from coming through.  If I had been judging my friend for her feelings or the family member for hurting her so much, we may not have had that special moment when we could grasp a deeper truth.  It’s so worth all the searching and practicing and trying to chip away at the ego to have true moments of stillness like this one.  It wasn’t the little false sense of me that was able to stay away from judgments and touch the stillness, it was the big Me that is connected to everything.  It was the one that I have been trying to spend more time with and get to know more in stillness.  It was beautiful.  I highly recommend it and I know that it is always there waiting for us to enjoy.  We ALL have the ability to touch that very same stillness!

As we go out into the world today and always, lets practice living in stillness and turning towards presence rather than creating movies in our head that trap us in the past or take us to future worries.  Wishing you all love and joy!!!

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August 9, 2013

Make Your Weekend Last Longer and Have More Joy – With Timeless Presence

“The ego’s greatest enemy is the present moment, which is to say,
life itself.”  –Eckhart Tolle

We can all agree that it would be wonderful to have the weekends last longer.  Lets try it this weekend.  It is a good idea (or the most important thing in life…depending on how you look at it) to practice living in the moment whenever you can.  We all hear the buzz on it and try to do it at whatever stage in our journey we are at, maybe we can kick it up a notch this weekend.  Practicing presence can take the time out of the weekend and make it last so much longer.   It can bring more joy and peace to us and bless everyone and everything around us.

Ego work is required for true growth.  You can’t battle your ego, it will just grow with the extra attention and even if you do seem to win for a bit, it sneaks in the backdoor and grows itself by assuming the new identity of the one with the smallest ego and the most presence.  I want to use Live What You Know to share and try little ways of chipping away at the ego.  I believe that you can shrink your ego simply by turning the other way – towards love.  This weekend, lets turn completely towards the greatest enemy of the ego – the present moment.  In doing so, we will access Love and Life.  Everything will feel better and time will cease to exist, hence a longer weekend.  I know that true presence doesn’t know it’s the weekend…but, since our thinking mind does love a weekend, lets just give it a try!  Yay!

Wherever you are in your path of discovery, you can always improve your ability to access stillness in the present moment.  You may be simply noticing the silence between the words in a conversation or adding a breath before you speak or you may be meditating for two hours every morning.  We are all at the perfect place in our journey!  I am not an expert on these things but I have been profoundly interested in adding more present moment awareness since I heard about it seven years ago.  I have read and heard many of the experts and masters on the subject and I want to share their wisdom in little doses here whenever I can, both for bringing more peace and joy to others and also to keep myself in the spirit of growth and presence.

Knowing this stuff because I read it and heard it from the masters and living it are, of course, two different things, hence the whole Live What You Know focus.  To practice truly living what I know about presence this weekend, here are some helpful little tips I would give myself (and you if you’re open to the idea):

  • Meditate first thing in the morning – whatever skill level you are at, even one minute to touch stillness to feel what it is like to return to it throughout the day.
  • Pray – set your intention for presence and awareness, ask for help to stay in that vibration and truly experience each moment in awareness rather than mind activity.
  • Listen – use listening for a presence practice. Truly listen whenever anyone is speaking.  You can keep a present energy in the background and feel that while you listen, let any thoughts that try to creep in just float by.  Don’t think about what you are going to say next, just listen without thinking and still feel some presence.  Don’t give all your presence away while listening, just enough to listen well and stay present.  Great practice – changes how you experience yourself and others…and everything.
  • Breath – add more breath all the time.  It’s not really adding breath, because you’re already breathing, its noticing your breath.  Noticing one breath before you speak can take you from reactionary living to present living.  It is a great practice to remain present and be.  Reactions are not present, they do not have the power of presence behind them.  Reactions to what others say and do give your power of presence away.  One breath to bring you to presence before reacting or speaking can change everything.  It’s a great way to take the ego out of your interactions.
  • Joyful Living – get all the way into the moment and find the joy there.  It is there!  I promise.  Even if it’s tying your kids shoe or doing the dishes, there is something to enjoy.  You can look your kid right in the eye and get a giggle and a connection as you tie their shoes or you can appreciate the way the water feels on your hands and the sunlight comes in the window as you do the dishes.  Whatever you do, the joy is there somewhere.  Isn’t it awesome that it was designed this way.  Do the joy experiment all weekend, you’ll find it.
  • Doing Meditations – You can turn anything into a meditation.  You just pick what it is and practice staying completely present the whole time.  It may be sorting the laundry, vacuuming the living room or brewing a cup of tea.  It may be a walk or writing a poem.  You truly can turn anything you do into a meditation.  Let any thoughts float by, you are the sky and the thoughts are the clouds – they pass.  Don’t jump on any of the clouds (thoughts), don’t resist them either, just watch them float by and your peace of mind increase.  This is also a great way to start watching your thoughts without being attached to them – they’re just thoughts…only the power you give them or don’t give them makes them what they are.
  • No waiting – waiting is awful.  If you find yourself in the situation where it seems like you’re waiting for something – a long line or the time for your next event, etc., just don’t do it.  BE instead of waiting.  Enjoy the present moment and realize the perfection in it as it is.  Realize that you do not need to add anything to it and life will not start once you are done waiting.  Life is already happening, waiting takes you out of it.  Not waiting is a great practice, you can focus on the breath or smile or just be and observe without adding a bunch of thoughts to it.  Waiting gives time so much power and takes you right out of the present.
  • Try something new – get into the unfamiliar.  It brings a heightened focus to what you’re doing and takes you out of the thinking mind.  Even if you just cook a new recipe that challenges you or take a walk on a new path, anything that is new and unfamiliar will bring more presence.  Simple excitements in the little things are the best!
  • Create – write, draw, color a picture, anything creative.  Releasing your creative energy and making something in presence is like offering a prayer.  The still place inside you is incredibly creative, touch it and be with it and see what happens.  Even just looking up how to draw something on the computer and following along can be a great experience if you’re not super confident in your artistic abilities.  Just make something, even a fabulous meal is a creative endeavor.  Touch the joy of creating!
  • Look without labeling – practice looking at the world around you without the lens of judgement.  Try to let go of labeling good or bad or even naming everything.  Even on a drive in the car, just be with all the things you see going by, you can experience the world in a whole new way without labeling what you see.  You can gain a lot of energy too because all the labeling we do is exhausting, just being and seeing without labeling can be a really comforting feeling and can bring us to a heightened sense of awareness and presence.
  • Embrace the uncomfortable – don’t turn away from feeling uncomfortable.  Often we feel a little uncomfortable and we cover it up quickly with one distraction after another.  Don’t resist the uncomfortable feeling, sit with it a minute in silence and watch it transform into joy!  It will!  The joy is in the stillness!
  • Smile – I love the simple practice of smiling.  When you truly feel your genuine smile, it does something to your heart.  You feel it deep in your heart and it changes how  you see everything.  Smile a lot and smile at everyone and everything!

Okay, that is my incomplete list of some tips that may help us have more joy and presence this weekend.  We may be able to have an ego-free weekend if we are doing all of this stuff.  Wouldn’t that be lovely!  Remember, presence isn’t something we can get better at later or when we’re more evolved.  The only time to get better at presence is NOW.  Flexing this skill and embracing these ideas can only have positive implications for the effects on our weekdays!  But, we will deal with that in that moment.

I just have to take a moment to thank you for reading this!  I am so very grateful for this platform and opportunity to share myself and encourage myself and others in this way.  I am just getting started and I can already feel the difference in my life!  I am so very grateful to you for taking the time to read my words from the heart…it is my true to desire to help us all live with more peace and joy!  I am also profoundly grateful for connecting with others who find these topics meaningful!  Thank you!

I send this with so much love!  I think I will read it several times this weekend to help me stay in the moment too!  I hope it helps you find more peace, joy and love!

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