Dr. Gail Brenner

Sacred Space for Awakened Living

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Archives for November 2021

Are You Attached? Here’s the Way to Freedom

“The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.”
~Rainer Maria Rilke

If the world out there doesn’t feel safe and welcoming to you, if you can’t be peaceful inside no matter what you try, then you may want to take a look at what you’re attached to.

What is it like to be attached?

  • You can’t be happy unless others respect, love, or approve of you;
  • You’re waiting for someone to apologize so you can be at peace;
  • You think your contentment in life depends on the right job, relationship, or family;
  • You expect other people to listen to and understand you—and get upset when they don’t.

We’re attached when we want someone or something outside ourselves to give us what we think we need to feel happy, whole, or peaceful.

Here’s the reality of being attached: we’re caught in a story of what we don’t have or what we lack, and we’re left waiting, hoping, and ultimately disappointed. We feel like a victim, putting our precious happiness in the hands of something we can’t control—what other people say or do and our life situations.

So how to get unstuck if you’re putting off your happiness waiting for something outside yourself to change?

If you want to be happy (who doesn’t?), you’re called to approach the problem from a different perspective.

As Einstein wisely said, “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”

The new level of consciousness that is needed is to turn toward your experience and look within. Forget about looking out to the world, hoping to get the love or apology you think you need.

Instead,

  • Identify the story you’re telling yourself because it is a story designed to make you feel separate and lacking;
  • Experience how it painfully limits you; and
  • Experiment with losing interest in this story and bringing your attention fully into the present moment.

Rather than focusing on the loop of the story playing over and over in your head, take a breath and come back to what’s here and present right now.

Turning inward, what you might notice first is the pain you’ve been living with. For most of us, it’s the despair of a young child who didn’t get the love and care she or he needed. Putting the story aside, there’s the physical experience of this pain.

Now you’ve gotten to the root of the problem—the emotion that’s been lying here unexplored. And by noticing it, loving it, breathing with it, and letting it be present, it eventually begins to lose its power. It can’t hold up to the light of loving awareness.

You stop justifying the pain and waiting for resolution…and form a friendly and loving relationship with your own experience. This is how you become free of longing for something you don’t have and find the peace and happiness, right now, that you’ve wanted all along. It’s an incredibly kind way to be.

The painful feeling of not getting what you think you need will probably return many times, but each time is an opportunity to lovingly welcome your inner experience.

Being attached to an outcome you can’t control creates division that reinforces the idea that you’re separate and lacking—and it just doesn’t feel good. Turning toward what arises in you invites love, clarity, and compassionate understanding.

Instead of living in lack, you discover acceptance, celebration, and the simple joy of being alive.

Give Up Control—and Be Kind Instead

“Everything that kindness touches relaxes into its true nature.”
~ Pamela Wilson

Are you stuck on needing to be be in control? You’re definitely not alone.
As humans, our brains are constantly finding problems with ourselves that need to be solved. By instinct, we notice what we think is wrong—then get busy trying to change, control, or fix it.

  • If you worry too much, you plan for every possible outcome.
  • If you don’t like the way you’re feeling, you try to move on and ignore the pain.
  • If you feel badly about yourself, you try to make everything perfect.
  • If you don’t like how someone else makes you feel, you do everything you can to change them.

All of these efforts seem to make sense. If you don’t like the way things are, then why not make it better or different?

However…seeing the world in terms of problems and solutions is fundamentally flawed, and here’s why.

  • It reinforces the belief that right now is not okay. It makes us feel like we’re lacking, inadequate, and missing what we need to be happy.
  • It makes us believe that something is wrong with this moment that needs to be fixed or changed.
  • And it makes us hope for happiness at some future time, which keeps us searching endlessly to fix ourselves.

This belief that there’s something wrong with our present moment experience is good for business. People spend literally billions of dollars a year on books, retreats, workshops, and programs to learn to fix what we’ve been led to believe is broken about ourselves.

But here’s the amazing news: there is a better way, a radical way, and it’s available to you for free, right now…and in every moment.

Right now you can give up all the effort to change, control, and eliminate your troublesome thoughts and feelings. You don’t have to wait one more second hoping you’ll eventually find your way to peace and happiness.

What you can do is turn toward yourself and form a kind and friendly relationship with your inner experience. Here’s where you’ll discover you’ve never been broken.

Think of it like this. Whatever is arising in you—mental resistances, difficult emotions, energy in your body—these aren’t problems. They’re like friends knocking on your door that want to come in for a visit. So the question for you is: how do you meet them?

Do you ignore them hoping they will go away? Do you reject them and ask for better friends instead?

I don’t know about you, but for me, that approach hurts. It feels like I’m turning away from my humanity, rejecting the tender and young parts of my experience that want to come to conscious awareness.

It creates an inner war, a divided sense of self, and a sustained feeling of anxiety that something isn’t right.

Do you feel stuck in a recurring pattern? Then there’s some part of your inner experience that’s waiting for your love and care.

Welcome these delicate parts that arise in you—grieving, fear, pain, tension in the body. Give them the space to breathe and be. Let them just be here, invited into loving awareness…welcomed home endlessly…

When we turn toward ourselves, we get to be infinitely kind with all that arises…and we start to feel whole. It’s what we’ve always wanted.

See how there’s nothing to fix, control, or change? Simply be here, relaxing as the welcoming presence for whatever arises, saying a warmhearted “hello” to all of it.

Now there’s space for the free flow of whatever comes…and there’s harmony, peace, and the end of inner conflict. No longer caught in efforts to change and improve, you’re here…available, inspired, present, and free…