Archives for September 2020

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
~Oscar Wilde

Note: Please join my upcoming weekend retreat. I’d love to see you there! Click here for details.

Our desire for embodied conscious living asks us to make a deep dive into our present moment experience.

And this includes all the little moments of daily life, the ones we take for granted, the ones we walk through under the veil of same, old same old.

Some ways of reacting are so familiar that we don’t even think to stop and question them.

Awakening into the reality of things is all-encompassing, including everything. No stone is left unturned as we notice all the times we turn away from openness and into habit and robotic living.

Noticing these moments is rich with possibility…

When we live in our conditioned patterns, we’re steeped in fear and separation…not love. There’s a sense of an inside and outside—a person in here who lacks comfort, attention, or safety, and a world out there that we strive to control to fulfill our needs.

We’re like hungry ghosts, terrified of our inner emptiness while focusing desperately outside ourselves:

• Seeking approval and recognition;
• Scanning for danger so we can protect ourselves;
• Trying to measure up to meet others’ expectations.

We’re ill-at-ease and feeling divided…from ourselves and from life.

While searching out in the world for the peace we long for, we’ve neglected to include an essential part of the unified whole…our own inner experience.

That’s why living from the inside out feels so right. We shift our attention back to being aware of ourselves and perceive the world from here. We open to:

• How we react in our nervous systems;
• How our conditioned patterns color our view;
• Letting ourselves feel how our hearts are touched by the people and situations around us;
• Melting into the peace that’s possible when we stop the tendency to move outside ourselves.

We may not realize it until we begin to notice our own experience, but we are sensitive beings. We react to what goes on around us, and these reactions are full of insights.

You’ll discover you judged someone because you were scared. You find the tender places within that need your loving care…not your avoidance. You feel the benefits of slowing things down so you feel less stressed…and more present in your life.

If you’re not aware of your inner experience, it’s a guarantee that your conditioned patterns will be in charge of your reality. And your life, the real one here right now, will pass you by.

Consider living from the inside out. Touch everything you notice with your loving attention. The lines between inside and outside begin to blur as you open to the oneness of all.

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“We cannot solve problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
~Albert Einstein

If you’re part of the human race, then your mind probably compares. It’s the nature of thoughts to divide the world into this and that, good and bad, better and worse.

The comparing mind tells you you’re not good enough and that others matter more than you. Comparing leaves us irritable about the weather, wishing for a better childhood, and striving for perfection.

Take a moment to feel into your comparing mind. How does it tell you that now is not good enough? How does it convince you of “if only”…if only your reality were different, then you would be successful, approved of, or just plain happy.

I have studied this comparing function in myself and many others, and here’s what I’ve concluded—comparing never makes us feel good.

Usually, we come up lacking. And even if we convince ourselves we’re special or better than others, we’re still caught in a story that makes us feel disconnected.

Check out how your mind functions for the next few days. My guess is that every time you feel badly in some way, you’ll find that comparing has taken hold.

In my experience, the comparing mind is harsh and makes us feel tense…and sad. Who wants to live feeling like others have the key to happiness while we’re left lacking?

So how do we find our way out of comparing and back to peace, love, and harmony?

It’s important to know that you won’t find the solution by staying entangled in your thoughts. This is the “if only” strategy—if only I were thinner or more successful, then I would feel better and stop comparing.

The solution is not in hoping to achieve something that you feel you don’t have now, as this will keep you striving forever. So, as Einstein says in the quote above, another approach is needed, which is to turn away from the whole comparing function of the mind so these thoughts don’t create your reality.

Comparing thoughts are veiling your true nature as peaceful, whole, and perfectly okay. When you don’t put your attention onto these thoughts, what happens? You realize you’re here, breathing in this moment, alive to your senses, not thinking about yourself and what you think you’re lacking.

Yes, the thoughts will probably return…and that is another golden opportunity to ignore what they tell you and open again and again to the reality that’s actually here…not the false one in your mind.

Don’t think yourself into being. Instead, stay still. Don’t move your attention into stressful thoughts. Look closer than the comparing mind to the living, expansive vibration of this now moment.

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