Archives for November 2010

Are You Ready to Choose Sanity?

sanity “Embracing our humanness is what actually delivers us beyond attachment and non-attachment and into the vastness of true freedom, love, and compassion.”
~Adyashanti

Here are some people I’ve come across recently.

A man whose light shines so brightly. He wants to end a relationship that is no longer joyful, but feels he doesn’t deserve to get what he wants.
Two competent professional women who are overcommitted, hyper-responsible, unable to set boundaries, and burned out.
A man so intent on “making it big,” that he squanders his family’s savings and ends up in debt with his wife on the verge of leaving him.
An amazing young woman, happy and content in a long relationship with her boyfriend who treats her like gold. Her mother judges them because he doesn’t fit her idea of a suitable partner, driving a wedge in her relationship with her daughter.

These are normal scenarios, you might say. This is how life is. Most likely, we all know people who are struggling with everyday situations such as these. Maybe you are one of them.

But when I feel into each of these circumstances, my heart aches. Doesn’t yours?

The Disease

Well, I am here to tell you that what we call normal is insane. What happens when we cling to beliefs about ourselves, other people, and the world that dictate how things should be? What happens when we resist fear, when we need to be right? We bring stress and unhappiness to our own lives and the lives of those around us.

Can we please stop doing this?

The Cure

There is a cure for this disease of normal insanity. It is called willingness, longing for truth, courageous honesty.

And the treatment is investigation, taking a curious and penetrating look at your beliefs and fears to see what is actually true. What brings stress? What serves? What is a belief, a feeling?

Don’t investigate your inner experience to save the world. Don’t worry about taking care of anyone else.

This is the cosmic joke: The only one to pay attention to is you. Place your own happiness and peace foremost in your mind. Do it for you and your personal well-being. Embrace your human suffering completely. Get to know it intimately. Break it down to see what it is really made of.

You will see that it is a gateway to realizing the totality of existence, love in overflowing abundance, laser-like wisdom that sees things clearly. Beliefs collapse like a house of cards. Fear is experienced as just physical sensations. And the pain of separation melts into effortless compassion and generosity.

Next time you feel the momentum to carry out an old habit, stop, feel the intensity of the urge, breathe, and let sanity guide you. Every single time. Abandon the big picture, and bring your attention to your moment-by-moment existence. Here is where the juice is, the traps and the possibility for freedom from them.

Normal insanity is not a problem – it is an opportunity. Do you feel separated, righteous, powerless? These are your signals to pause. Study your experience, receive yourself with oceans of compassion, and make the peaceful choice.

How about you…Are you ready to choose sanity? What attachments get in your way? I’d love to hear…

image credit

Grateful for You

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone. I am so grateful for each and every one of you and appreciate that you are in my life. My Thanksgiving was awesome this year.

I was recently asked by Abubakar Jamil to participate in the Personal Development Face-Off, where two bloggers answer the same questions and readers vote for their favorite. Although I appreciate being asked, it’s not really my thing. But I figured, “Oh, why not.”

I invite you to click on over to AbubakarJamil.com. Aileen from KaizenVision and I respond to some very thought-provoking questions about beliefs. It’s interesting to see the similarities and differences in our responses.

And if you haven’t read this week’s post yet, you might want to take a look: How Does Your Garden Grow? A Gentle Guide to Nourishing the Best in You. As always, the comments are so heartfelt and moving. You are more than welcome to join the discussion.

Love to you,

Gail

How Does Your Garden Grow? A Gentle Guide to Nourishing the Best in You

istock_000000589354xsmall “What shape waits in the seed of you to spread its branches against a future sky?”
~David Whyte

If there is one thing I’ve learned, it’s that things happen in their own time. No matter what the self-improvement blogs tell you, you can’t make your passion appear on demand and you can’t control the circumstances of your life.

But you can plant and fertilize, nourish and water. You can live in the willingness to breathe life into the natural expression of the seed of you. Are you ready to find your inner gardener? Here’s how.

Don’t know

Don’t pretend to know what you don’t know. And don’t stress about not knowing. Move your attention away from the big picture. Stay close to the bone, and you will know exactly what you need to know. The signs are all around you: what thrills and enthuses you, what lands as a “yes,” what you are drawn to, what repels you, what moves you. Noticing these brings nourishment to the starving parts of you.

Untangle

Take each and every knot of resentment, fear, and deficiency. Welcome it, love it, and ultimately, don’t believe it. Entertain the possibility of liberation from everything that weighs you down.

Shed

Learn how you box yourself in. What beliefs do you live by that constrict your growth? What reactions happen in a split second that mask your happiness? Become familiar with your conditioning, and allow all the skins to shed. Get down to the bare bones, and discover that everything you ever needed is here, in your nakedness. Let the ashes of your knotted self fertilize the kernels of truth that are sprouting within you.

Forgive

I’ll let you in on a secret: I don’t get the idea of forgiving someone. But I do know the freedom that comes when anger, hurt, and self-righteousness are met with love and understanding. Don’t let your feelings about past events haunt you any longer.

Do the work; seek out the help that will free you. Any story of being wronged only keeps you stuck, keeps you from sharing your light with the world.

Surrender

Surrender has been on my radar recently. I see how clinging to any thought form or wish or object takes so much effort. And inherent to the clinging is a subversive story of “me.” I want, I need, I expect, I think, I should. It’s exhausting and endless. Unless you surrender.

Letting go of the attachment to “me” is so relaxing, like floating in space. By surrendering, you put down your defenses and realize the power of being one with now. You enter the flow and let life be lived through you.

Trust

You are allowed to trust what you know, to want what you want. Before self-doubt creeps in, there is a moment of knowing shining like a laser through the fog. Find your way back to the knowing, and nurture this precious seed. You can trust yourself to stay present to the truth of you.

Pray

No, I’m not getting all religious on you. But I do know the value of putting our deepest longings into words. Do you want clarity, freedom, understanding? Don’t be shy. Open yourself fully to your deepest heart’s desire. Speak it. Shout it out. It’s OK to be on fire.

Be

This is about the call of silence. Let yourself be still. Retreat from stimulation and rest. Witness your thoughts, and notice that that which is witnessing is silence itself. Realize that silence is the ultimate creator.

Commit

Total and immediate transformation is extremely rare. Most of us need time to simmer, stew, and even boil. We are captivated by delusion and unconsciousness, so the seeding and nurturing require commitment. You get to decide: How willing are you to commit to nourishing the seed of you?

Have you been gardening lately? Any reactions, stories, insights? I’d love to hear…

The Art of Discovering the Space In-Between

trapeze “There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.”
~Leonard Cohen

Even if we don’t notice, there are spaces in-between everything. There is space between thoughts, between breaths, between all things.

See how the environment you are in right now is filled with space? Your attention is undoubtedly drawn to the objects in it – a table, a pen. But notice how much space there is between the objects. Focus on it for a moment. There is so much space. Quiet, silent, existing, huge, not needing anything.

If you sit in meditation, you might first notice a flurry of thoughts, and no space. But eventually, the thoughts settle, and you recognize space, the ground of being from which everything else arises.

Relaxing

Space is at the core of relaxation. We move our attention away from the busyness of our lives, we pause from all the efforting, we move from doing to being.

It takes effort to engage with the objects that draw our attention. Physical forms and thought forms pull us away from our center, away from the stillness, the ground of being.

Several years ago, I was lying on a chaise lounge, enjoying the sun. My mind was so quiet. As a thought arose, I moved my attention into it and felt tension in my body. This made me curious. I switched back and forth a few times, between thought and no-thought. I saw that the effort of thinking created tension and effortlessness was relaxing.

It was a lightbulb moment, as I saw that even positive thoughts were subtly stressful. I discovered the power of the space in-between to open the door to so much happiness.

Experimenting

No matter how much we are filled with forms, space is always present.

What forms fill your awareness? Can you notice the space in-between?

Try relaxing your attention away from the forms, just for a moment. See what it’s like to experience space. It’s not about the past or future. The space is here, in this right-now moment. Can you feel it?

Allowing

Of course, it’s fear that keeps us clinging to our treasured objects. Whether thoughts or people, money or stuff, we have the illusion that if we keep our attention on these, then we can control them. We are scared to let them go because the known feels so much safer than the unknown.

But staying in the known is ultimately confining. It’s not enlivening or liberating. We live in the boxes (cages?) we have constructed and avoid the possibility of wide open space. We choose tension over relaxation, habit over potential. We accept “good enough,” while turning away from everything we truly long for.

As Eckhart Tolle says, we are constantly chasing forms by thinking, doing, and reacting against.

And in every moment, there is space – breathing space, quiet and clear. Right now.

I recently spoke with a friend who is cracking open so beautifully. He cannot contain the love that is emerging. He is seeing through the objects of his mind and discovering space overflowing with love. He is surprised at how he is naturally kinder – in his interactions, while driving. These changes are coming effortlessly.

The fear is that space is empty. Yes, it is empty of forms. But it is filled with formless intangibles – joy, love, freedom, generosity, kindness.

It takes surrender to relax into space. Letting go of what we know, allowing ourselves to hang between the trapeze bars.

But how else to open to wonder, creativity, life?

The spaces in-between hold all the possibility.

What have you discovered about the spaces in-between? What keeps you from going there? Let’s talk…

The Secret Is Out: How to Improve Any Relationship

muslimcouple “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there.”
~Rumi

There is a simple way to improve any relationship. And it’s called listening. I don’t mean listening while you are formulating your response, or listening but assuming you already know what is going to be said, or listening while you are answering an email or watching TV.

I mean listening – with openness, with curiosity, with your heart wide open. When you show up as empty, aware presence, miracles happen.

I recently sat with a client who was sharing some difficult feelings. I automatically went into fix-it mode, offering suggestions to help her move through the pain, and she thankfully resisted every one. “Just relax,” I told myself.

I turned away from any need to save or help, and softened into the vast space of being that allows everything as is. As I followed her lead, supporting her exploration, her own connection with infinite wisdom guided her to exactly what she needed to know.

I got out of the way and listened.

How to Be Present

Living as aware presence in our relationships is so rare. It asks us to slow down, to put aside our opinions and dilemmas, to inhabit questions rather than answers. It is an offering we can make that is free, available, and holds the potential for so much healing.

We melt any personal barriers, which creates the space for true intimacy, where we meet in the one heart of love. Deep listening is one of the most loving things you can do for another.

As aware presence, we arrive to our interactions clear and clean. We are empty of our:

Needs
Stories
Beliefs
Desires
Expectations
Judgments
Hopes

We are filled only with loving space that receives, that wants to know.

Being There for Another

Imagine being this space with your partner or child or parent. You erase everything that has happened in the past, and you see the person before you as if for the first time. You might wonder:

What is important to you?
What are your fears?
What do you need?
What thrills and elates you?
What is your experience in this moment?
What else would you like to say?

And you listen to each response with rapt attention. “Oh, I see, it’s like that for you.” You are perfectly in rapport, accepting the other unconditionally. You are empty, aware presence.

Have a conversation like the one I am describing and let me know if your heart doesn’t break open.

Now take this way of being to your workplace, your gym, your neighborhood, the post office and grocery store. Can you open your heart to everyone you meet – no separation, no distance?

You Have the Power to Be the Healing Balm

In this day and age, many of us feel alienated from ourselves. We crave attention, control, and security to assuage our fears. We strategize to get what we want from others because we resist meeting our deepest feelings.

The result is a painful lack of intimacy that keeps us isolated. We long to be accepted for who we are, but fear being rejected if we were to reveal the whole truth about ourselves. This is the root of all our relationship struggles.

Loving presence is the healing balm. When you are empty and aware and offer others your unconditional interest, the walls begin to crumble. There is a return to wholeness, acceptance, and clarity and a welcome sense of relief from no longer having to maintain a protective vigil. You and the apparent other relax into the space where you meet as love.

My challenge to you is to take one interaction – with anyone – and show up as empty, aware presence. Ask questions from a place of curiosity, and let the answers drop all the way into your loving heart. It doesn’t have to be a heavy discussion. An everyday, seemingly superficial interaction or one with a stranger is the perfect place to start. You will make someone’s day, I promise you.

And you are likely to find what I have discovered – intimacy, connection, happiness, a heart overflowing.

I’d love to hear how it goes…

Note: I am honored to have been asked to write a chapter in Leo Babauta’s new book, Focus: A Simplicity Manifesto in the Age of Distraction. My chapter addresses how to overcome fears of focusing. I don’t receive anything if you buy the book, but you will undoubtedly benefit from tons of practical suggestions that support a sane and happy life in these crazy, overstimulating times we live in. I highly recommend it.