Dr. Gail Brenner

Sacred Space for Awakened Living

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5 Welcoming Ways to the Peace You Long For

welcoming-ways“Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don’t know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever.”
~Jack Kerouac

Awakening to your true nature means that you realize the absolute truth about yourself. You know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you are not the limited, separate person who lacks, strives, needs, and defends.

You realize with every cell of your being that you are the endless peace that includes everything. You know that your true nature is love itself.

You don’t become anything different. The only change that happens is that you consciously recognize what has been true all along. Your attention was just too distracted to see it.

When you know this truth, you realize that you are, and always have been, effortlessly aware and at ease. While you’ve been busy resisting your experience, wanting things to be different than they are, there’s been an undercurrent of okayness with everything that you’ve simply overlooked.

Just take a moment to be still. Can you feel it?

Imagine that your whole life has been played out on a stage. You’re in the audience, maybe enjoying the drama, but you’re able to walk out of the theater undisturbed by it. The deepest part of you has watched your life story play out, but it’s pure. It has never been touched by anything that’s happened.

Knowing this, you’re in the world, but you don’t take it all that seriously. You see through emotions so they don’t grab you. You no longer spend energy defending, denying, or looking elsewhere for happiness. You’re simply here—fully alive in your humanity, fresh and innocent, free and receptive to what life offers.

How do you come to consciously know this truth? It’s revealed in its own time. But don’t wait until the clouds part and grace illuminates your true nature. Orient your whole life to living beyond your limited ideas of yourself and the world. Be persistent in your daily life by inclining yourself toward peace.

1. Be Deliberately Aware

Living unconsciously leaves you churning in automatic habits. You play out conditioning without really knowing what you’re doing or why. It’s an agitated way to be.

The medicine for this dis-ease is to be deliberately aware. Take some time every day to simply, consciously be alive to your present moment experience. It might look like:

  • 10 minutes or more of daily meditation where you sit as open space, allowing your experience to come and go;
  • Take a breath when you realize an emotion is present and welcome it, especially helpful when you feel stressed, frustrated, or defeated;
  • At the end of every day, reflect on how habitual patterns caught hold – what feelings were behind eating that bag of cookies when you didn’t want to, working to get someone’s attention, ruminating about things that make you sad or worried?

Our culture beckons us to distraction and busyness. Whenever you remember, do the radical thing by just being still and aware.

2. Open Your Mind

Become very familiar with the beliefs you hold that structure and resist reality. Then play with letting them go.

What if you didn’t expect anyone to do anything? What if you forgot to believe that you’re fearful and unworthy? What if things are just fine as they are without your trying to control them?

Every day, keep inviting your mind to open…open…open. Let it be clear like the sky. Entertain the possibility that all this thinking is unnecessary.

3. Get to Know Your Body

Many of us live in our heads, consumed by trying to figure everything out. But there is a whole realm of your experience that you’re missing.

The experience of all emotions and unconscious habits includes sensations in your body. While you’re worrying about all the things you need to do, there are places in your body that are tense and contracted. If you feel sad, your body may be heavy, dark, or vacant.

Simply experiencing physical sensations supports you to break through automatic habits. Always include them when you become aware of programmed ways of being.

How do you do it? Notice and consciously experience the physical sensations that appear. When?

  • When you realize you’ve been engaged in a tsunami of thinking;
  • When you’re consumed by emotion;
  • When you’re bored, lost, or confused;
  • Anytime.

Open to all of your experience with great awareness. It’s delicious to be alive to what’s actually happening. And, if you stay with it, it brings you home to the ease of pure presence.

4. Don’t Know

How often do you show up like a robot, saying the same words you’ve always said, expecting the same reactions from others? Try this instead.

Show up fresh, without knowing what will happen. Make the space for things to unfold naturally, not as you expect them to.

  • Stand before a loved one forgetting any history;
  • Be with someone who triggers you with your mind on hold and your heart open;
  • Be in a familiar environment, seeing it for the first time;
  • Taste, touch, see, and hear things freshly;
  • Wake up in the morning and spend a few hours not knowing what you’ll do or say;
  • Open to the possibility of experiencing awe and wonder in the simple things of ordinary life.

5. Notice Awakened States

Knowing who you are is the experience of effortless relaxation, ease, peace, happiness, joy, creativity, and fulfillment. But there’s no need to wait. If you tell the truth, aren’t there moments of these experiences that naturally occur in your daily life now?

Awakening is already who you are—whether you consciously know it or not. So the simple act of noticing what’s already true aligns your mind, body, and heart with the source of all, which is life.

As you go through your day,

  • Notice, and enjoy, when things go well;
  • Recognize when your heart opens in the face of beauty, tenderness, and love;
  • Be appreciative when creative ideas appear;
  • Surrender your desires and dissatisfactions into peace and happiness.

Just like the true nature of a wave is ocean, your true reality is the infinite splendor of the universe. Remind yourself that nothing is personal to you—it all appears by grace. Then you’ll bow down in gratitude to everything.

What About You?

What is it like to come home to yourself? How do you return? I’d love to hear…

And if you’re reading this by email, please click here to comment and to visit GailBrenner.com.

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A Lovely Interview—Soul-Style

soul-styleI love being interviewed. So I was happy to participate when longtime reader, Lexie Oneca, invited me to respond to some questions. Lexie blogs at ChicagoNow, where this interview was originally published. And if you have any more questions for me, please feel free to share in the comments.

Love,
Gail

20 Questions — Soul-Style

1. Who are you?

I’m assuming you mean this in the conventional sense. I’m Gail Brenner, PhD, psychologist, blogger, author.

2. What do you do?

My work offers a bridge between common psychological problems that people experience and true spiritual understanding about the nature of reality. I’m most interested in the ways that people get stuck and helping them to shed false identities so they can know how beautiful they really are. From that foundation, I see people individually, I facilitate a group with the theme of living in truth, and I write. My forthcoming book is, “The Way of Yes: Finding Peace and Happiness Right at the Heart of Your Messy, Scary, Brilliant Life.”

3. Why do you do it?

I find that trying to answer any “why” question brings a contraction to my mind as it searches for an answer. I do what I feel moved to do, what gives me joy. It’s natural.

4. How did you find your way to it?

Psychology has been an interest of mine since the beginning of college. I was always looking for answers to deeper questions and always wanted to figure out how to be truly happy. Traditional therapy didn’t help much. But I was eventually led to teachers and teachings that showed me the way. I was on fire to know the truth about how things are — it was the whole focus of my time and activities.

5. How do you feel when you do it?

Very much in the flow. “I” am out of the way, so there is just the emerging of whatever happens, with no resistance. It’s very spontaneous and light.

6. What is the joy that keeps you up at night?

Simply being, ideas I want to write about, ideas for new projects.

7. What is one thing you still have to practice every day?

There’s nothing I feel I need to practice every day. Sometimes I’ll feel stressed, which is a sign that my mind has left the present and has created an imaginary urgency about what needs to be done. It’s an opportunity to unwind that thought pattern and return to the ordinary peaceful state of being. And when I’m triggered in interactions with my partner, I get to stop and feel the frustration and what’s behind it.

8. What are you always searching for?

I used to search for lasting peace and happiness. In the way I experience things now, I no longer search for anything. There isn’t one thing missing, nothing to add to make this moment better. It’s living in loveliness.

9. What have you found after searching?

Fulfillment, abundance, deep rest, effortless peace, ease of being, joy — all without end or boundary.

10. How do you stay connected to your inner core of peace?

I am not separate from my inner core of peace. I know that who I am is not this person with a name, history, gender and personality. I have discovered that believing that I am this separate individual was the source of unhappiness. When these false ideas fall away, I know that I am spacious, whole, transparent, the life force itself. And, at the heart of it, all forms — me, others, objects — are this as well.

The fundamental fabric of the universe is peace — you can’t get away from it, although your mind can be very good at convincing you otherwise. There is only life experiencing itself everywhere. It may appear that there are distinct forms, but pure reality is undivided. Knowing this is peace itself.

11. What makes you feel led or guided?

I have given up the idea that “I know.” So I surrender all my personal needs and desires. I listen and let myself be led.

12. What do you do when you can’t hear God (or the Universe, or Source, or your intuition) speaking to you?

I stop and find inner silence. I listen with no expectation whatsoever and with a great willingness to act on what I hear.

13. What is the difference between resistance and fear?

Resistance is saying “no” to what is. Usually, people resist because they’re afraid to allow what’s true to be as it is. This is the dynamic behind compulsive thinking and behavior patterns.

14. Where does the idea come from that we are broken, unworthy or undeserving?

It’s conditioned usually from past experiences. If unexamined, it becomes an identity that is so painful for many people. Investigating this identity reveals that it is made up of mental stories, feelings, and physical sensations. It’s learned and temporary — not real or natural — and it actually doesn’t define who you are.

15. How do you move past that to connect with others on a soul level?

There are two ways. One involves a process of investigating these thought/feeling patterns until you realize that they’re false. Unexamined, they have power. When you untangle them, they start to collapse. Like a scientist, you step back from them to see what they’re actually made of — thoughts, feelings, physical sensations — and how they operate. Then you begin to have a choice to not let the pattern control you.

The second is the direct way. You shift your attention away from any thoughts, feelings and sensations, and you realize that these arise from aware presence, simply being. Living here, the idea of a problem or identity doesn’t exist. There’s only peace. Once the pattern loses power, you are available to “others” with nothing in the way.

16. How do you stop and pull back when you notice you’re analyzing or comparing rather than using your “beginner’s mind”?

Sometimes I feel the pain of contraction, fear, or separation that comes from mental activity such as analyzing or comparing. For me, it’s a signal to stop and return attention back to its source.

17. If fear is just the ego talking, an illusion, what is the quickest way to clearing it?

Fear is an illusion, but until you know that directly in your own experience (not just as a mental concept), it’s asking for your attention. Otherwise, you skip over it, which leaves it still powerful and influencing your behavior.

Here’s how to approach it. Abandon the story about it and even the label of fear. Let your attention be one with the energy and physical sensations that you feel. Be completely allowing of the physical sensations with no expectation whatsoever that things will change. The sensations may still be present, but what you call “fear” is seen to be non-existent.

When you meet any emotion as friendly attention meeting physical sensation, the angst around it dissolves. Don’t worry about doing this quickly. It’s not about doing, it’s being, and it happens outside of time.

18. Where is the sweet spot between accepting ourselves as we are and the simultaneous desire to learn and grow?

Acceptance is the most loving starting point. There is a great relief that comes from saying Yes to what is because you give up the fight with your own experience. And when you say yes to things as they are, it becomes clear what needs to change. Then the change comes from a place of love and non-resistance, rather than fear or lack.

Say that you think you’re overweight. If you beat yourself up about it, your weight loss experience will be a struggle. But if you accept the fact that you eat to hide from feelings, and you choose to be more aligned with the wholeness that is your natural state, then change comes with a greater sense of ease.

If you feel moved to learn and grow, then follow that impulse, but always know that the process is about coming home to yourself and realizing that nothing was ever missing.

19. How can I practically start learning to simply be “present” without constantly trying to protect myself at the same time?

If you’re protecting yourself, then fear is your present moment experience. Start there. Meet whatever is showing up in your experience with love and acceptance. This is what being present is. It’s not always rainbows and butterflies. It’s about allowing what is to be as it is, and it’s the most loving way to be.

You get to make a choice: do you want to be ruled by fear, or any other unseen emotion, or do you want to be free?

20. When I start to notice that I’m being defensive, what is the path back to kindness and self love?

Noticing that you’re being defensive is the moment of celebration because you become aware that you’ve been acting on an emotion — fear, guilt, shame, anger. In that moment, open to your experience without judgment, without a story. Notice the feelings and allow them to be. This is kindness and self love. You’ve returned home.

Any more questions—or comments? I’d love to hear…

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Recovering the Lost Art of Everyday Wonder

everyday_wonder“The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.”
~Henry Miller

Is life feeling dull, boring, and ho-hum? Then I invite you to connect with everyday wonder. Wonder? What is that? And how do we find it in the midst of our routine daily lives?

It’s Not in Your Mind

Wonder is available to you right now, and always. It’s here in this very moment—not as a concept, but as your living reality. It’s the mixture of surprise and awe we feel when we encounter something amazing, unexpected, and new. We come alive to what’s actually here, not assuming anything or taking things for granted.

Here’s what’s important to know about wonder: it’s experienced outside the limited space of your mind. If your thoughts control you, what’s your experience? Ruminating about what you should have done, brooding about what isn’t going right, and worrying about the future.

If your attention is lost in your mind, the possibility of wonder seems a million miles away.

Every moment is always fresh and new. This moment, as it is right now, has never occurred before and never will again.

If this is so, then why do things feel familiar, routine, and stale? Where is the freshness, the wonder?

Present at the Heart of Everything

If things seem familiar to you, you’re experiencing them through the lens of your memories, not as they actually are.

Take a look at a common object, say a table. How do you know it’s a table? Your mind has learned that tables have certain characteristics that match the object you’re looking at.

What if, just for a moment, you could forget the word table and all your memories about tables? Now, take a look at it and see it directly as it is.

You’ll notice a completely different experience. You don’t know what it is or what it does. You’re curious and open. It comes alive to you!

Now, imagine forgetting all your memories, including frustrations, resentments, and worries. How would the world look to you then? What if you didn’t carry the past or future into your present moment experience?

Zen Buddhists speak of “beginner’s mind.” When we stop seeing the world through memory, we are always beginners, innocent and open, just like a child. We have a visceral experience of everything that is undeniably real. We are infinitely curious.

Problems and stresses dissolve, if only for a moment—they can’t exist without memory.

Wonder is pure experiencing without labeling, comparing, or analyzing. It’s closer and more available than you could ever imagine—at the heart of everything once you ignore your thoughts about it.

When you directly experience things, without the veil of thought, you feel them, sense them, and come to know their aliveness.

Experiencing Wonder

Life is right here, always available to be experienced as it is. In celebration of wonder, forget what you know, and try these:

  • Eat a raisin. Place a raisin in your palm. Experience it through your senses, not your memories, then take a glorious bite.
  • Close your eyes. Enter a familiar room, and close your eyes. Move around the room touching objects as you go. Be curious about what these things are actually like.
  • Open your heart. Be with someone you know as if for the first time. Forget all your memories, and stand before them with nothing in the way.

As you can see, wonder is less than a nanosecond away. It turns the ordinary into something absolutely extraordinary. Let yourself know nothing…and reality sparkles with everyday wonder…

A version of this article was first published on the Huffington Post.

Being One with the Effortless Unfolding of Life

effortless_unfolding

“How can I be still? By flowing with the stream.”
~Lao-tzu

“To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle. Every cubic inch of space is a miracle.”
~Walt Whitman

Whatever your preferences, needs, desires, or expectations, life unfolds with such grace. Have you noticed?

We have an amazing word to describe it—serendipity, being pleasantly surprised by events that occur, seemingly by chance. They just happen.

I’ve been the recipient of serendipity myself recently. I’d been traveling the past few weeks and had to change my plans at the last minute due to a long flight delay. Instead of having to wake up at 4:00 am, I could now sleep until 7:00—except that I bolted awake at 5:00, realizing I had mistakenly made a train reservation from London to Paris instead of Paris to London.

I figured I was out the money for the wrong train ticket until a lovely agent arranged for my refund—without laughing at me for my mistake.

Could I have planned any of that or made it happen? I could have been more diligent about checking the reservation before clicking “reserve,” but by the time I realized it, the cards had been dealt. What’s the use of criticizing my actions when they were already done? As for the rest of it…serendipity!

My point is not that we shouldn’t be responsible for our actions, check our reservations before we confirm them, or learn from our mistakes. But if we don’t spend our time crying over milk that’s already spilled (what’s your version of that?), we’re available to consciously experience the effortless unfolding of life.

It’s happening anyway. Why miss it?

The Way Things Are

This post is not about doing—it’s about noticing. We notice what is, as it is, in its absolutely exquisite perfection. And we surrender our personal need to control things.

Because not one of us could even come close to creating the marvelous array of forms and occurrences of all kinds that we call life.

As I write this, I’m on the (correct) train from Paris to London. How did this come to be—this complex set of machinery traveling at 180 miles per hour? How did it happen that the farmland I see out the window so abundantly produces just what we need? How could my “mistake” be rewarded so generously?

And what about all this beauty, this tenderness? It’s so palpable everywhere!

I know there are answers to some of these questions. But even when we know the answers, there remains the ineffable, the essence of life that just is. It can never be known by our minds, never adequately explained with thoughts or words.

It’s so here—in every breath, in everything you see, hear, and feel—the light behind all of it.

And when everything in form falls away, we realize this is who we are. Simply life itself with no separate person here making any effort to do anything. Just pure being.

Notice the Unfolding

When we resist life, we miss it. We’re caught in the should be’s and might have been’s that are filled with anxiety and sorrow. And at the same time, here is life, perfect as it is, effortlessly unfolding.

Just for a moment, can you put aside the fight with what is and just notice? It’s okay, you can let go of the self-berating and story-telling. It will still be there if you want it.

Instead, open your mind and heart, and simply notice.

  • What is here? (Pause…feel…experience…)
  • What do you know to be true?
  • Without judgment, where is beauty?
  • Without history, where is tenderness?
  • For a moment, consider that you may not be separate from any of it.

Being one with life…effortlessly unfolding…

What About You?

What do you notice when you allow life as it is? What gets in the way of noticing? I’d love to hear… And if you’re reading by email, please click here to share in the comments.

A few announcements: I was interviewed about relationships by Bill Weil at LovePong.com. You can listen to it by clicking here. And I’ve gotten some great feedback on this interview at InspireMeToday.com. Finally, Jenny Li Ciccone interviewed me for her free series on A Journey to Joyfulness. You can sign up here any time and watch 21 wonderful interviews, mine is on Day 8.

The Glorious Practice of Becoming Unglued

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“The choiceless truth of who you are is revealed to be permanently here permeating everything. Not a thing and not separate from anything.”
~Gangaji

If you rely on your mind to tell you about how things are, you’re asking for trouble. Because it’s the mind that divides, compares, judges, and evaluates.

It tells you that you’re not good enough, that you’re better than, that you’re lacking or insufficient. It makes you feel confused and anxious in your daily life. It seduces you into thinking that others are here to threaten you, annoy you, or withhold the love you long for.

It makes your feelings spin out of control.

Misunderstanding Who You Are

When we define ourselves by our thoughts, we forget the truth: that we are immeasurably vast, that peace is our very nature, that everything is connected, arising from the one universal source.

We forget that—before any thoughts have taken hold—we are awake, aware, and fully alive. We are pure existence minus the content of thoughts, without any form or personal definition.

So how do we go from this idyllic state of infinite awareness to these limited, separate, troubled entities we believe ourselves to be? Why don’t we live what is actually true?

Through the power of conditioning, limitless awareness gets glued to thoughts.

  • We are told from birth that we are separate and individual.
  • Our personal view of ourselves is reinforced by others and by our own thoughts.
  • We identify as a person with a name and gender who has goals, needs, fears, and desires.
  • We live this misunderstanding of who we are, incorrectly believing that thoughts are the true description of our reality.

The joy of simply being present is lost as we scramble to protect ourselves. We think we are lacking so we try to find happiness in the future that never comes. We strive to get our needs fulfilled—our thoughts deterring us from realizing that everything we want is right here, perfect as it is.

The Practice: Becoming Unglued from Thinking

How to unglue your lovely essence from thinking? How to live the truth of who you are?

Lose interest in thoughts. Ignore them. Don’t take what they say as truth.

You simply let go of focusing on the energy and content of thoughts. And you realize that you are aware and free, boundless and awake. You have no personal identity to protect or condemn. It’s so relaxing, so effortless to give up focusing attention on anything.

You flow like water.

Losing interest in thoughts is an invitation for your attention to disengage from thinking. You don’t need to stop thoughts or change them. These are strategies that take way too much effort to sustain.

Instead, see that thoughts are simply appearances in the expansiveness of presence. They don’t essentially mean anything—unless you believe them.

Losing interest in thinking means you turn off the switch to everything you know. If you’re honest, it hasn’t been working for you anyway. Then,

  • You can’t feel inadequate.
  • You can’t be caught in anxious thinking.
  • You can’t worry about what the future might bring or ruminate about the past.
  • You have no capability to doubt, analyze, judge, or ponder, no repetitive mental patterns to distract you.

When you rest in presence as spacious awareness, thoughts may appear, but they don’t agitate you. They can be present or not—but either way, here you are…aware, undefended, peaceful.

This is true freedom. Reality re-created fresh in every moment. You: innocent, pristine, whole, undivided.

Always Here: Unattached and Free

The habit of thinking is so powerful that forgetting will happen as awareness again attaches to thoughts. You may miss the pure aliveness that you are many times. Be concerned only with freedom in this moment.

Your clue is that you suffer. Be patient—it takes time to erode this connection. Be kind—take a breath, and let the thoughts go, every time.

You are instantly, consciously, gloriously aware.

You already know that peace is right here waiting for you. Deep happiness, joy for no reason, gratitude that can’t be contained, wonder, awe, stunning clarity…these are glimpses of a crack in the thinking armor that lets in the light of conscious awareness.

Notice these. Live here.

The challenges of life still happen. Practical thoughts will appear just as you need them. And here you are—unattached and free.

What About You

Have you become unglued from thinking? Do you think your thoughts are real…or not? I’d love to hear…
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