Dr. Gail Brenner

Sacred Space for Awakened Living

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Follow the Intelligent Path from Anxiety to Peace

“As long as you make an identity for yourself out of pain, you cannot be free of it.”
~Eckhart Tolle

“Anxiety is loves greatest killer.”
~Anais Nin

If it happens to you, you’re not alone. It’s an experience I hear about often and used to color every day of my life. It’s that subtle undercurrent of anxiety that makes you feel ill-at-ease, restless, and on edge.

Do you know this feeling? Maybe you experience it as fear, dread, or just plain discomfort. It causes your mind to spin and fills you with doubt. Left unexamined, it governs your life, making peace seem like an unattainable fantasy.

We are speaking about the primary dis-ease of our modern life.

Have you noticed that we are constantly given messages that lead us to conclude that we need to do more, have more, be more? We live in a culture of lack that reinforces the sense of the inadequate personal self and has us looking to the past and future for fulfillment.

It breeds the toxic “if only” story: if only I were thinner, happier, in a better relationship with a more satisfying job… Taking this on, you believe that:

  • Things are not OK as they are are,and
  • You are a person who is not good enough.

These identities sit in you like an annoying guest who refuses to leave. No wonder you’re anxious.

What to Do?

What to do with this intense feeling of discomfort?

Analyzing why it’s there will not get to the root of it.

The desire to run from it is understandable, but creates unconscious behavior patterns that don’t serve and leaves you scrambling to fix everything about yourself that appears to be broken.

Just tolerating the feeling leaves you hopelessly anxious, out of sorts, and overrun by obsessive thinking.

What is needed is a radical solution. Because you can’t think your way out of this endless cycle of anxiety and worry.

The Radical Solution

Finding your way out of the discomfort of anxiety asks you to question your assumptions about everything you take to be true.

  • What exactly is anxiety?
  • What are you doing that sustains it?
  • Who is the you who is anxious?
  • What needs to happen for you to be peaceful?

Let’s start by establishing that peace is possible; in fact, peace is more available than you could ever imagine. Anxiety?  A ship passing through the ocean of you.  Realize this by following the trail of breadcrumbs from anxiety to peace.

Pick up the first one by investigating the actual nature of the experience of anxiety, which requires moving your attention away from it so you can take a closer look.

Notice that this is possible – you can be aware of this experience of anxiety and discomfort. Recognize that just with this simple shift of attention from being caught in the web of anxiety to witnessing it, you already feel more spacious.

Interesting.

Now, from this place of being aware, what do you notice? If you are like me, there are swirls of thought forms and various physical sensations in the body. And that is all.

I can get caught up in these thoughts, spending my time analyzing, worrying, and sifting through possibilities and what if’s. But if, just for a second, I stop being consumed in the content of the thinking, I notice two things:

I am aware, and sensations and thoughts are temporarily present in awareness.

Let’s explore further by experimenting.

Experiment #1:

Engage intently with anxious thoughts. Think them, make them real, and see how more anxious stories immediately spring to life. How do you feel? Probably tense, contracted, worried, and stressed.

Experiment #2:

Notice physical sensations without paying attention to thoughts. If you don’t create thoughts about the sensations, even by labeling them, there is just the direct experience of the sensation. Is there a problem?

Experiment #3:

Shift your attention away from thoughts and physical sensations, and just be aware. Is awareness spacious or contracted? Does it have a name, a gender, or an identity? Is it troubled or at peace?

What do we conclude from these experiments? When you unravel what you call anxiety, it loses its power. Anxiety thrives when your attention gets lost in thinking. When you rest as aware presence, you are at peace.

Return to Peace

When you are consumed by anxiety, how to return to yourself?

  • Disengage from anxious thoughts
  • Let physical sensations be without weaving a story about them
  • Notice that you are aware, still, alive, and full, and live here.

Rinse and repeat a thousand times a day, if necessary, as each moment is a moment of peace.

Next time you feel anxious, know that thinking won’t help you. Instead, simplify. Notice you are here, present and aware. Already at peace.

Anxious? Have you found your way to peace?  I’d love to hear…

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5 Delightful Ways to Live What You Already Know

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

OK, let’s get serious. I know that you know, even if you don’t admit it to yourself. How could you not?

In your heart of hearts, in the deepest place within yourself, you know the truth. The truth of living from love, of being free of whatever holds you back, of fullness, well-being, and contentment. Why pretend you don’t know any longer?

You might be afraid to acknowledge and live this knowing. You might be diverted by thinking your life doesn’t measure up or you’ve been dealt a bad hand or you’re a prisoner to your to-do list.

But if you go within and tell the truth, you will find this seed of possibility and turn it into the living flesh-and-blood reality of your precious life.

All you need to do is start with this very moment, then the next and the next. Let the truth expand and be alive in you – in your choices, your priorities, and what you value most. Don’t worry about what others will think; you only need to answer to yourself.

But you’re not being selfish at all. Live what you already know. You are at peace, and everyone around you gets to bask in your glow.

None of these five truths will be news to you. You know them already more intimately than you could imagine. Is now the time to start living them?

Enjoyment

Is it so hard to enjoy yourself? Yes, things can be hard sometimes, but for the most part, it is easy to make the choice to enjoy.

  • You can be caught up in your mind about all the things you should do, or you can sit quietly and drink a cup of tea.
  • You can worry about your relationships, or you can let your heart open and offer a hug or kind word.
  • You can think about everything that is missing from your life, or you can go outside and take a walk.

Recognize when you’re not enjoying yourself, and see what other choices are available. What do you choose?

Appreciation

You already know how to appreciate whatever you are grateful for. Because at the purest level of the totality of life, nothing is separate. There is just the substance of life that includes everything and doesn’t resist or reject anything.

From this point of view, you see yourself everywhere. How could you not be grateful?

It’s part of our culture to appreciate – how many times a day do we say, “Thank you?” Next time you do, don’t just throw the words away by rote. Instead, feel the gratitude in your bones. Consciously experience the “thank you” for that favor, compliment, or overture of friendship.

Then simmer in gratitude. Don’t even think about it – simply contemplate the possibility of living in appreciation. With distracting mental chatter out of the way, it’s so easy to be grateful.

Savoring

Life is bursting at the seams in every moment in an amazing array of people, objects, sounds, sights, situations. Rather than judging what you experience by dividing it into right and wrong, acceptable and inadequate, try savoring things as they are.

Don’t be concerned about liking or disliking. Come out from behind the fog of any thinking and see things as if for the first time. Like an apple, for example. Use your senses to take it in. Taste and smell it. Hear the crunch. Savor the deliciousness of this apple moment.

Now savor the experience of everything – your home, your partner, doing the dishes, walking the dog, working.

Be present with what is as it is by not rejecting one iota of it. This is it. Right here. Your now moment.

Wholeness

You might think that you are deficient or damaged, but what you already know is that you are whole. You may have had life experiences that tricked you into believing that you are not OK. Is that really the truth?

Even if it’s just a whisper, you know that before any ideas of you, you are limitless, infinite, magnificent, so full you are overflowing. Something in you believes that this is true. Because it is.

What would it be like to live from wholeness? No more fear of rejection or pretending you are a victim. You realize that every moment offers opportunities that support happiness and well-being. And you are free to choose them.

Instead of pretending you are damaged, assume that you are whole. Then the world is your oyster.

Peace

You can choose to resist what is actually here in this moment, but you are going against the grain. Because you know that reality is already at peace with itself.

You don’t need to find inner peace. If you stop battling your own experience, peace is revealed, naturally. Stop running from your emotions or believing things would be better “if only,” and, effortlessly, peace will permeate your experience.

You have to work to be at war by thinking and resisting. Do you want to be peaceful? You don’t have to do one single thing except align your consciousness with things as they already are.

A blessed, effortless life is so available when you live what you already know. Surrender everything to enjoyment…appreciation…savoring…wholeness…peace. Wake up to the truth of yourself.

Do you live what you know in your heart of hearts? I’d love to hear…

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The Wisest Choice You Could Ever Make

“The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.”
~William James

All your personal troubles are due to one simple fact:  you engage with your conditioned habits.

Do you seek approval or limit yourself?  Are you stuck in doubt or self-critical thoughts?  Do you overeat, over-buy, overthink, overdo it in any area of your life?  Then you are interested in automatic, familiar ways of thinking and behaving.

And have you noticed? What you are interested in is what is expressed in your life.

If given the fuel to run, habits will take over, and you will end up feeling like a victim of your own life. Stuck like a hamster on a wheel and wondering why you’re not happy.

Touching vs. Not Touching

But here’s the good news:  you are not your habits.  You can identify with your habits and turn them into your reality – if you want to.  But you have another option because they are not the truth of who you are.

Who you are is free of fear, unlimited, magnificent, pregnant with possibility, infinitely full and alive.

So how to know this directly in your own experience?  What to do with habits that consume your interest and attention so you can uncover the splendor of you?

Don’t touch them.

When you touch something, you reach out toward it, you interact with it and become one with it.  It is your reality in that moment.

When you touch your habits, you give them your attention.  You think habitual thoughts and feel familiar feelings.  You experience an urge or tendency and you act on it. This is the definition of suffering.

The Fog of Habits

If you aren’t happy, you are touching your habits – a lot.

  • You get lost in a story of why you aren’t getting what you want.
  • You convince yourself that you are lacking.
  • You live in fear, guilt, sadness, or regret.
  • You behave in ways that you know don’t serve you.

Habits are flat, automatic, lifeless, repetitive, compulsive, agitating.  They stir up the moments of your life into swirls of stress and unhappiness.  Are you touching these tendencies with your attention?

The Art of Not Touching Habits

If you realize that you are touching habits – the ones that make you suffer – then here is your invitation:

  • A familiar thought beckons your attention.  Don’t touch it.
  • A feeling or desire comes over you.  Don’t touch it.
  • Your mind tries to justify the need to engage with the habit.  Don’t touch it.
  • A fascinating urge entices you.  Don’t touch it.

Not touching habits means that your attention rests in presence where you stay peaceful and unengaged, but totally alive. You are open and receptive, uninvolved with the arising and passing of thoughts and feelings.  You know that place in you that is not in resistance to anything.

Your reality is all about where your attention goes, and, amazingly, you get to decide.  You don’t need to get rid of or change one single thing.

When repetitive thoughts and feelings appear, let attention melt back into this now moment.  Do it a thousand or a million times.  Who cares?  You will always arrive in the same place.  This now moment that is so fresh, so effortlessly new.

And don’t worry.  You will function just fine without habits.  What you need will appear; this can be trusted.

Try it out – don’t touch your habits. It might be hard at first, scary even. But eventually you will notice that suffering diminishes and life becomes much less complicated. And here you are: peaceful, smiling, happy.

Are your habits drawing you in? What happens when you don’t touch them? I’d love to hear…

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The Tiny Insight That Changes Everything

“You must choose between your attachments and happiness.”
~Adyashanti

I used to live in a world of “if only.” If only the right partner would show up or I wouldn’t get caught in traffic or my family life would improve. It was an endless life of arrogance – and frustration. If only things would be the way I want them to be. Like I had any control over any of it.

Yes, I was able to enjoy myself at times, but I was attached to all kinds of outcomes, large and small, and I suffered for it. Every time I wanted something to happen in a certain way, I set myself up for frustration, stress, and disappointment.

In those years, disappointment was my middle name. I was really tired of it, but I just couldn’t figure out how to be happy.

Joyful Non-Attachment

Fast forward to now, and I can’t help but smile. Because the unfolding of life is so beautiful in whatever form it takes, and the joy of openness to what is, as it is, is unspeakable. If I have a name at all, it is ease…peace…this…

As I see now, it was always this way, peace was always available, but the power of my attachments kept it hidden from view.

Do you react to life with a big No? Do you want it your way, not the way it actually is? Is Now not good enough? Then you are suffering.

Why wait one moment longer to find your way out of this mess?

When you understand the suffering that attachments bring, wisdom will erode them, clarity will show you that being totally open is sane, peaceful, and true. Frustration and disappointment about what occurs?

Eliminated.

Are You Resisting Presence?

Every attachment contains within it a seed of resistance to what is. The present moment is seen as missing something or not as good as it could be. Attachments constrict what is acceptable, rather than opening to things as they are. Consider these:

  • Hope is about being attached to a better moment at some other time in the future. Are you caught by thinking that something is wrong with now?
  • An expectation desires a specific outcome, not necessarily the one you get. Can you let go of control (which you don’t have anyway) and lovingly receive what occurs?
  • Attachment to a desire limits the infinite possibilities that could happen and sets you up for unpleasant reactions. Can you want something, and take action to get it, without being attached to the outcome?

If your happiness is conditional on things happening the way you want them to, then you will be disappointed. Because your personal desire has nothing to do with it. It is simply a speck in the vast unfolding of life.

From Personal Desire to Profound Acceptance of Life

When you discover happiness, you realize that it is unconditional, not dependent on anything. This means that whatever occurs is received as is.  There is no desire except for what reality is offering you now.

And the happy byproduct? Negative emotional reactions simply don’t arise.

When you are free of attachments, here is what happens:

  • You move from “something other than this” to “oh, this.”
  • Effort to control is replaced by pure relaxation.
  • Doing gives way to receiving.
  • Thinking and story-telling dissolve into effortless being.

Oh, this…pure relaxation…receiving things as they are…effortless being.

Don’t give up your personal attachments. Yes, you read that right.  Rather than efforting to give them up, investigate them. Tell the truth about what they are and how they affect you. Then let your natural intelligence guide you to the peace beyond peace.

Struggling with attachments? Is non-attachment your experience? I’d love to hear…

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The Art of Ending Everyday Suffering

“If you correct your mind, the rest of your life will fall into place.”
~Lao Tzu

Do you find yourself disappointed when your expectations aren’t met? Do you resist what happens because you were expecting something different? Then you are not alone.

Expectations are belief systems about how things are supposed to be. And when we believe them without question we set ourselves up for a fall.

I shouldn’t be caught in traffic, it should be sunny today, he should have called when he said he would. Expectations creep into the most mundane parts of our everyday experience and, as you well know, are a great source of stress and unhappiness.

Expectations: It’s All in the Mind

A recent commenter wrote about expectations in two important areas of her life: expecting recognition and financial reward from working hard at her job and assuming that others would be as loyal as she is in relationship. In both cases, she was burned.

She asks, “If you do X-Y-Z, shouldn’t you get the return? How do you remove the attachment to outcomes?”

Expectations seem to develop automatically as a result of life circumstances and our reactions to them. Here’s how it works. Without even realizing it, an idea forms in your mind that expects, hopes for, or thinks it deserves a particular outcome. For example, “I’m doing a great job on this project. I’m sure I’ll get that promotion when it comes up.”

Ouch! This is why you are in trouble.

  • You have a personal desire – something you want but don’t currently have.
  • Your focus is on the future.
  • You forget your right-now experience.

The mind revs up with images and stories of an imagined future where you will get exactly what you want, and that becomes your lived reality. But here’s the problem: it’s not actual reality, and we are not in control.

Reality is fresh and alive, impersonal and full of possibility. It doesn’t decide what to do based on our personal images and stories or what we desire and hope for.

You might not even realize the expectation has formed until real life wields its sword, and what you want to happen doesn’t. Then you react with frustration or disappointment, squarely in resistance to what is, thinking that life isn’t fair and wondering what you did wrong.

Untangling Expectations

Interested in finding your way out of this tangle? Then recognize and investigate your thoughts. An expectation is a thought, and every thought is worth questioning because at its core it is untrue.

Is it true that you should get the promotion or you shouldn’t be sitting in traffic or the weather should be sunny?

The way you know if something is true is if it actually happens.

Your thoughts about what should happen (expectations) have nothing to do with it.  There is thought, which is ephemeral and insubstantial, and there is reality, which is real and true.

See how it doesn’t make sense to believe your expectations?

A Lifestyle Free of Expectations

Stay conscious and alive to your moment-to-moment experience, and expectations will have nowhere to land. How?

  • Make truth and understanding a top priority in your life – in what you read, what you do, who you spend time with.
  • Set aside time every day to reflect on your reactions to see if expectations have taken hold.
  • Investigate all thoughts, and rest in what is real.
  • Surrender personal control, and receive what is offered.

If you want freedom from the trap of expectations, stop believing thoughts. Recognize the truth that you are one with the unfolding of reality. Then live here, infinitely loving, clear and grounded…fully available to life.

Troubled by expectations? What helps you to be free of them? I’d love to hear…

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