Dr. Gail Brenner

Sacred Space for Awakened Living

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Die Before You Die

“When it’s over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.”
~Mary Oliver

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“Die before you die”…this is a phrase from the Zen and Sufi spiritual traditions, and I recently got to see the meaning of it up close. For a month, I watched my 97-year-old father decline, leading to a peaceful death last week.

He felt good about his life, and was initially accepting once he realized that his body was starting to change. He said he was ready…my sisters and I had heartfelt conversations with him. But as the decline progressed further and he faced the depth of letting go that death involves, he became intensely agitated. Frankly, it was hard to witness.

He was angry and demanding with almost everyone. Although he wasn’t in pain, he couldn’t get into a comfortable position. And he cried out for help many times even though he couldn’t say what he needed help with.

At one point, he yelled with shock and disbelief, “I think I’m going to die!”

Facing Death

I can’t say what was going on inside him, but it looked like the closer he got, the more he was faced with what he would need to let go of…and he was angry and terrified.

The daily routines he relied on were taken from him, as he no longer had the strength for them. He had to let go of showers, food, and sitting in his favorite chair. He couldn’t reach out for someone’s hand. And ultimately, I think he was scared to realize that he couldn’t stay in the body and that life as he knew it was coming to an end.

He didn’t know what was coming next.

A hospice organization was involved, and the nurses gave him calming medication once he stopped refusing it. So in the last hours, he appeared to be at peace.

“Die Before You Die”

The phrase that kept coming to my mind as I was watching this process unfold was, “Die before you die.” And I was taken over by a flood of gratitude for the spiritual path that has been my home for a long time.

Because I absolutely know for sure that peace comes with letting go of attachments and accepting everything as it is. Peace is right here and available when we stop relying on the mind to control what we can’t control and go with life as it is actually unfolding.

What do we die to before we take our last breath?

  • All our expectations,
  • Our needs and preferences,
  • Our ideas about ourselves and others,
  • The entirety of our personal identities,
  • Attachment to our appearance, habits, and anything that makes us feel separate from others, and
  • The familiarity of what it’s like to live this human life.

We have what we have and enjoy it thoroughly, but know that none of it lasts forever. In fact, nothing in form lasts forever—no thought, no feeling, no relationship, the world as we know it—nothing. And if we’re busy worrying about what we might lose, we can’t fully appreciate what’s here.

Celebrating What’s Here

My experience is that letting go of these attachments is not sad and it’s not about loss. Because when we’re liberated from clinging to what we have, we’re free to celebrate with no limitation. What we have when we have it becomes so fresh! We get to play in the world of form, living this human life, as long as it lasts.

And when it goes, it goes. That’s the nature of all things in form. In a sense, they’re not real because they’re temporary. And clinging doesn’t make them more real—it only feeds our suffering.

Feel into what it might be like to surrender control over everything. Then see what remains, as this is the essence of the profound spiritual life. Here is consciousness, a stable sense of ease and peace that just is. This is the boundless ever-present field of being aware that receives everything with no preference and no attachment.

It’s what is always here when all forms fall away. And experiencing this makes me not fear death at all.

This is not to say I’m not mourning the loss of my father. I honor his memory every day as a ritual right now, and tears come sometimes. But if I look at it very closely, empty of any story about what happened, the deepest peace that I know to be the truth about reality is always present.

Discovering the Sacred in Everyday Life

“Sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness.”
~Galway Kinnell

Although you may not realize it, your everyday life is already sacred. Everything arises from the one source. Everything is an exquisite expression of life, of pure being.

One of my clients reported that she is starting to become more aware of things in her life she never noticed before. She loves it when someone unexpected shows up at her door. She flows through the day responding with ease to everyone and everything. And she is attuned with all her senses when she takes a walk outside.​​​​​​​

These are new experiences for her, but this deepening awareness has always been available. Things aren’t becoming more tender or sacred. The way nature appears to her hasn’t changed.

What’s changed? Her perspective.

Rather than living in the mental noise, she’s more willing to say a friendly, “Hello,” to her reactions when she’s triggered and let them be. She is slower and quieter so there’s space to see and appreciate everything.

She’s sensitive and grateful—and her heart is touched over and over.

Discovering What’s Sacred

This is the sacred in everyday life.

When something is recognized as sacred, it is known to have a quality that is beyond the material, physical world. It’s not subject to the mind’s analysis, judgment, or interpretation.

It is illuminated by grace. It may look ordinary, but as we encounter it with nothing in the way, we stand in awe of its very existence.

Recognizing the sacred all around us—which includes ourselves, we take nothing for granted. Then everyone and everything is a gift, a surprise, an expression of the light of consciousness.

Oh, the puddles of rain outside my window! I get to breathe! I get to hold my friend who just lost her husband.

Most of us need reminders—a gentle tap on the shoulder that invites us out of the mind’s noise and into the living reality of this now moment.

And this is where rituals and practices are helpful.

A friend has an altar at home that she visits in reverence every morning. Another steeps himself in books describing the exquisiteness of being present in nature. And another starts the day with a guided meditation that grounds her in presence.

Your Rituals and Practices

There are countless ways to remind yourself of the sacred quality of everything. Here are some suggestions:

  • Set an alarm with soft chimes to awaken you to presence any time during the day;
  • Pair a conscious breath with a common action, such as standing up or feeling the urge to check your email;
  • Read or listen to something that inspires you before you turn out the light at night or just upon waking;
  • Offer a prayer of gratitude before you start eating a meal;
  • Go to a busy cafĂ© and see the tenderness in everyone (I love this one!);
  • Commit to slowing down and being aware when you find yourself rushing.

The mind may tell you that if you were really far along on your path to awakening, you wouldn’t need rituals and practices. And this is an opportunity to not listen to the naysaying mind.

Give yourself permission to do whatever it takes to absorb into the experience of being aware. Come up with actions that bring you back to the spaciousness beyond your personal self, and incorporate them into your daily life.

With each moment of consciously being aware, you’re here: peaceful, free, and utterly alive.

What About You?

What are your rituals and practices for coming home? Do you have any resistance to using them? I’d love to hear your reports and comments.

How to Make Space for Joy and Celebration

“You have the freedom, ability, and authority to love your life. Just be you, then wait.”
~Gangaji

If your attention is in your head, and you’re going over stories, worries, and resentments for the zillionth time, there’s no way you’re going to experience the joy and celebration you just somehow know are possible.

Something in you knows that you weren’t put on this earth to always feel ill-at-ease and bothered. Something in you knows that joy and celebration are possible for you—you just don’t know how to find your way to them.

Space for Joy

I saw how this works firsthand when I was speaking with a client the other day. She was telling me about complicated family dynamics involving conflict, chaos, and various kinds of dysfunction.

There was a lot of story, and I started asking myself where she was going with all of it.

I politely interrupted her and invited her to bring her attention to her feelings and the sensations in her body. She found nausea in the pit of her stomach along with sadness and resentment—and she noticed a tendency to avoid these feelings by going back into her thoughts.

Does that ring a bell—avoiding what you’re feeling by going into your thoughts?

Taking me up on the invitation to stay with the feelings instead of going back into the story, within a few minutes, her eyes lit up. She told me she suddenly felt a burst of joy and excitement about an upcoming positive event.

What We Miss

If she had kept avoiding the feelings in her body—and kept spinning around in the narrative in her mind—would she have experienced the aliveness of feeling joyful and excited? No. Her attention would have been tangled up with the endless retelling of why her family members should be different than they are.

And she would have missed out on being conscious of her present moment experience. She would have missed the opportunity to bring kindness and acceptance to what she was feeling.

And she would have missed the joy that appeared once her mind stopped chewing on so many thoughts.

For many of us, the repetitive swirl of thoughts in our minds is a familiar home base.

  • We think we’re going to find solutions if we keep thinking about the problems.
  • We think we’ll successfully avoid our emotions if we don’t let ourselves feel them.
  • We’re just used to thinking a lot and don’t consider any alternatives—even if we’re miserable.

What are you missing out on by trying to solve unsolvable situations in your mind? What is possible for you if you’re mind-space isn’t full of thoughts and the tension that comes with avoiding feelings?

There’s only one way to find out. And it’s the sacred step that sets you free.

The Sacred Step that Sets You Free

Take a breath and open to whatever you’re experiencing. Be the spacious presence that accepts whatever arises unconditionally. It’s so simple—and utterly glorious.

Your mind will tell you that you’ll be stuck in painful feelings forever. But this is the mind’s strategy to keep you thinking.

Instead, expand beyond your familiar and limited ideas of yourself. Consider a new and fresh approach, which is to open to what’s here with an overflowing generous heart.

Trust your inner knowing to guide you to explore the expansiveness of being present.

Peace, joy, gratitude, celebration, love…these are all right here, available to you when you end the fight with your experience.

But you won’t find them in your mind. And they won’t have space to blossom if your mind is perpetually busy.

Welcome your feelings fully, and soon they’ll settle. Then you’re primed to discover the spaciousness from which infinite possibilities emerge.

What About You?

Are you available to joy and celebration? Reports or questions? I’d love to hear…

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Meeting Anger with Love and Understanding

meeting anger“Whatever you resist you become. If you resist anger, you are always angry. If you resist sadness, you are always sad. If you resist suffering, you are always suffering. If you resist confusion, you are always confused. We think that we resist certain states because they are there, but actually they are there because we resist them.”
~Adyashanti

Note: In this post, I’m sharing the presentation I made at the Science and Nonduality Conference (SAND) in October, 2017. I hope you find it helpful! Love, Gail

Whether it leaves you seething inside or it explodes into your relationships, anger is a powerful emotion. But many of us are uncomfortable with anger, especially if we think we’re “spiritually advanced” enough to have moved beyond it.

How do we react to feeling angry? We fight it, justify it, deny it, or stuff it. We’re frustrated when anger overcomes us and we feel so out of control. We feel guilty if we believe it’s an unwholesome emotion we shouldn’t experience.

Anger is one of the ways the timeless, formless breath of life breathes itself into form. So let’s bring anger out of the shadows of shame and meet it with the endless embrace of love and understanding.

Anger is a normal expression of the human experience. And seen through the eyes of awakened awareness, it’s a doorway to embodying our essential aliveness beyond time and space.

We investigate the experience of anger that’s behind the actions it brings about. Anger consists of a narrative in the mind and strong physical sensations in the body.

We’ll explore how anger contributes to the pain of separation and learn ways to be with the elements of anger that are practical and enlivening.

Unexamined anger feeds the illusion of the separate, limited self. When we turn toward anger with curiosity, it’s no longer the raging beast driving us, but becomes a powerful ally for awakening and authentic living.

To download, click Download. The audio will open in a new window. Then for Mac’s, control-click, then “Save video as…”. For PC’s, right click.

 

What About You?

What is your experience of anger? What is it like to meet anger with love and understanding? I’d love to hear in the comments…

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Out of Habits; Into Freedom

“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”
~Albert Einstein

If you’re interested in finding freedom from automatic habits that overtake you, where do you start?

How can you begin to make the sacred shift back to yourself?

Just asking this question is an opportunity for celebration because it’s the beginning of a new relationship with your own experience.

Rather than being gripped by the patterns that arise in you, you’re ready to bring consciousness to them. You’re ready to move beyond same old, same old to a way of being that is fresh and free.

You’re poised to discover the stable field of ease and well-being that’s always available beyond any painful story of lack or need.

Whatever your pattern is—fear that blocks you, the need to please others, a sense of not being good enough, a tendency to criticize, compulsive behaviors or addictions—these arise in you, but they aren’t the truth of you.

How to meet these conditioned habits so they serve your awakening?

Find the Gap

If you look carefully, you’ll see it’s possible to find a gap between you and the thoughts and emotions that arise in you.

Instead of being locked into the content of your stories, notice your thoughts. Observe how emotions move in your body. Be aware of the urges behind your behavior.

Get curious about what these patterns are and how they bring about suffering.

And notice that the observing part of you, that which notices, is peaceful and problem-free.

Press Pause

When you’re caught in the energy of a habit, press pause. Habits are automatic and repetitive. They run outside of conscious awareness.

As much as you can, stop the momentum by pressing pause. Take a conscious breath. Look around you and deeply experience the present moment.

Feel the radical shift from the tension of conditioning to expansion into present moment awareness.

Now move from this sense of being fully alive rather than from the fog of conditioning.

Ask Questions

Forget the self-bashing and shame when you realize you’ve been locked into a pattern. Instead, with great kindness, ask questions. Be curious about the answers that appear.

  • What is happening in my experience right now?
  • What stories am I believing that may not be true?
  • What can I surrender right now that isn’t serving?
  • What am I avoiding that is asking for my attention?
  • Can I open to what’s happening in my body right now?
  • Can I stop, breathe, and simply be aware?
  • What is most alive in me right now?

See how you can have a whole new relationship to your experience? You don’t have to mindlessly play out patterns that take you away from peace.

Find the gap, press pause, and ask questions. No longer stuck in the story, you’re here: awake, openhearted, and fully intimate with life as it is in this precious moment.

What About You?

What is your experience with these practices? Questions? Reports? I’d love to hear.

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