“Generally, between two people there is very little real meeting. There is only the coming together of two patterns. This causes conflict and boredom.”
~Jean Klein

These powerful words in the quote above by Jean Klein call us into a deep exploration of how we show up in our relationships.

When we come together with others, steeped in our patterns, we bring expectations, judgments, needs, and hopes. We feel fear, loss, and separation.

We come ready to project our past history onto the current interaction, seeing the other through a veil of mistrust or longing. We’re terrified that we’ll be rejected or ignored. We’re primed to be triggered by the other person.

How does that feel in your body? Edgy…stressful…anxious…sad…?

What I love about this path of truth is that we take nothing at face value. A spacious exploration of the patterns we bring to our relationships reveals this: deeply held fears that developed when we were young that landed in our minds and nervous systems.

Within just about all of us, there is a young part who feels alone and scared. And from those tender feelings develop strategies of withdrawing, shutting down, or seeking love and approval. These are intelligent reactions in the situations we were in years ago that helped us to cope.

It’s not the illuminated freedom of our true nature that withdraws, shuts down, or seeks love and approval. It’s the pattern. And knowing this invites a new relationship with these conditioned thoughts and feelings.

Rather than living as if they are true, we can observe them, which is a powerful shift. Then we’re free to turn toward our emotions with welcoming, attuning, soothing, and reassuring. We’re giving them the loving attunement we’ve all wanted when we were young.

Almost like a miracle, we feel these delicate emotions, and at the same time have the space to stay present. This is how we show up in our relationships free of patterns.

Then our hearts are truly open, and we’re intimate with ourselves and others.

This quote goes on to say, “Your neighbors and friends have ideas about you. Do not be taken in by these ideas or in turn have ideas about them. Don’t imprison people in your memory.”

Everyone with unexplored patterns is projecting them. We have ideas about others, and assume they’re true. Others have ideas about us, and we assume they’re true.

The invitation is to come to our relationships—with ourselves and with others—free of the past. This means acknowledging whatever separates us—resentments, judgments, hurt, fears—and holding them in love. We’re not imprisoning ourselves or others in our memory, as this is limiting…and fundamentally false.

Can you reflect on bringing this possibility of freedom from the past into your everyday life—with your partner, children, parents, friends, and colleagues? What arises for you?

Jean Klein finishes with, “So live in your surroundings as if for the first time. Be without qualifications. In this nakedness you are beautiful and every moment is full of life.”

This doesn’t mean that our patterns don’t appear. They do, and we get caught in them.

The beauty of exploring the nature of reality is that we realize we don’t have to identify with the patterns. We don’t have to live in the world—and in our relationships—as if we are small, needy, and fearful, expecting others to reject us.

Underneath these limitations, when you explore deeply enough, you discover the illuminated essence of who you are…fresh, alive, and free of memory.

And this is where intimacy with all is possible.

image credit

“The Master does his job
and then stops.
He understands that the universe
is forever out of control,
and that trying to dominate events
goes against the current of the Tao.”
~Tao Te Ching by Lao-Tzu

If you’re living a human life, then you will experience change and loss. Maybe you’ll be diagnosed with an illness and experience physical pain and difficulty with daily functioning. Or you’ll break your leg and lose your ability to walk for several weeks.

Aging will creep up on you with changes in how you look, move, think, and feel in your body. People close to you will die.

In the course of life, we lose things we rely on and even take for granted—people, physical capabilities, our health, and eventually our vitality.

There’s a basic truth about reality…if it comes, it goes. There’s a free flow of experience in form that arises within the field of conscious awareness, and all of it, ALL of it, is temporary. This means that loss is an essential part of the human experience…and we feel it intensely when we are attached to forms.

Without even realizing it, we define ourselves by the most common experiences in life—relationships with our partner and children, our roles, our health, the choice to move about freely, and our dependence on the most basic abilities to see, hear, walk, and breathe.

We think things will last forever as they are…until our expectations are disrupted by the mystery of life showing itself…

Feeling into the reality of change and loss, we realize where we’re attached. Are you attached to having control? Do you cling to things staying the same? Are you petrified when change is on the horizon?

Then you are being invited into an exploration of the nature of of reality. And what you discover is the temporary appearance of forms arising in the ever-present boundless field of alive awareness.

Here you open to the possibility of experiencing the unfolding of life not by having your happiness dependent on forms remaining the same, but by being the spaciousness in which they come and go. This is where freedom lies.

You may grieve when your hair starts turning gray or your children leave home or you can’t see and hug your loved ones, but you also know the wisdom of resting as unchanging aware presence, letting the objects and situations of everyday life come and go of their own accord. Then you’re in harmony with things as they are.

Letting go of stories that make us desperately grasp what we want, we settle into the fact that we have little control over what happens. Miraculously, we’re now available to be fully present with what’s here.

No longer veiled by the fear of loss, we’re completely fresh in the moment, free to notice, feel, appreciate, be intimate, and love. Our hearts are touched over and over as we celebrate what is, just as it is, with abandon. We stay in harmony even with our shared grieving. So authentic…and tender…

Know this: what comes, goes. You have what you have for the time that you have it. Reflect deeply on this truth, and follow the mystery that life offers you…

Embodied Awakening Intensive Upcoming course starting Tuesday, April 13. Please click here for details. Join the free info call on Saturday, April 10 by clicking here.

image credit

“When personal identification vanishes, all that then remains is a sense of presence without the person, which gets translated into a feeling of life as total freedom.”
~Ramesh Balsekar

Did you ever notice how much we think about ourselves?

Track your thinking for even a few minutes, and you’ll probably notice a constant flow of self-focused thoughts.

• My opinion is…
• This is what I think should happen.
• This is what I want to happen.
• I want…
• I need….
• I don’t want…
• I don’t have…
• I’m comfortable.
• I’m not comfortable.
• I’m nervous, scared, angry, or sad.
• I’m inadequate and unlovable.

The common thread in all these thoughts is me, me, and me. We’re the star of our own story with our ideas about ourselves shining in neon lights.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but if this self-focused thinking is not serving your happiness, it deserves your exploration.

I was once in a yoga class, and the instructor started with this brilliant suggestion, “Don’t think about yourself for a while.” Why is this a helpful suggestion? Because thinking about ourselves is usually stressful.

Self-focused thinking separates the world into me and others, good and bad. It constantly reminds us of what is missing or not okay. And it leaves us living under a cloud of negativity.

Check it out in your own experience. What do you think when you think about yourself? How do you feel? Do these thoughts bring you ease and joy.

Then try not thinking about yourself for a while and see what happens.

I’ll share a little secret with you. You don’t need to think about yourself much at all to function well in life.

You don’t need the judgments, worries, and analysis to know what to do and do it well.

In fact, without these “me” thoughts taking up your mental space, you’re quiet, aware, and available to what the moment is offering you. There’s room for wonder and insight, ease and creativity.

You move from problems and drama to openness and allowing.

And you know what else? You can’t take things personally because there’s no limiting “me” thought endlessly finding fault with what people say and do.

Notice how your self-focused thoughts affect you. Then lose interest in them. Know that they’re taking you down a road you don’t want to go, and leave them be.

Then expand into the spaciousness of your present moment experience. Without the story of me, what’s revealed? Effortless ease and a heart overflowing.

image credit

“Wisdom is knowing I am nothing, love is knowing I am everything, and between the two my life flows.”
~Nisargadatta Maharaj

Note:  Please consider joining the upcoming mini-retreat on October 17 and 18. I would love to see you there! Click here for details.

I am fascinated by the intersection of the truth of nondual reality with our experiences as humans in our everyday lives. This is where the spiritual rubber meets the road.

It is a knowing beyond words to realize formless, timeless unity as eternally present. Beyond stillness…beyond silence…the pure Isness of existence…

And then someone annoys you or you’re facing a difficult conversation or a pandemic hits and changes all your plans. What then?

If nondual reality is true, it’s not just present in the blissful experiences of oneness with all. It’s here right now—in this irritated feeling, this disappointment, your reaction to your partner’s anger, loneliness and the longing for connection.

How to live from the truth of reality in these very human moments? This is a powerful question, as it invites us to be as aware as possible of what arises in us in our own direct experience.

And it brings into focus the lens through which we live: our underlying limiting beliefs…and unexplored emotions and triggers from longstanding conditioned patterns.

Sometimes the aliveness in the moment is obvious. We effortlessly feel happiness, delight, gratitude, creativity, and expansion. Without thinking, we see things clearly, a response emanates from us, and we’re generous, caring, and courageously authentic.

This is the free flow of being creating itself in human form…unfiltered and natural.

But when things feel more complex, we’re invited into deeper awareness of our present moment experience and into a process of discernment. How can we navigate what is here in this moment, not from programmed reactivity, but from the fundamental truth of essential unity of all?

Here’s a real-world example. A while ago, I wrote about bringing attention to the comparing mind, which creates a belief in ourselves that we’re lacking something. I received an email from one of our readers telling me she compares herself to others as a strategy to reach her goals. The sense of competition motivates her, and she was asking how to be on this path of realizing oneness while setting and accomplishing goals.

If we approach this question from the belief in separation—that who we are is actually a separate and limited self and not an expression of the singular unifying force—then comparing and competition make sense—and may actually help us to succeed. In this case, “succeed” means to meet our goals (for example, money, recognition, a sense of being “better than,” goals that may boost our sense of self).

But if we know, even conceptually, that the source of all forms is the one abiding vibration of life, then our whole perspective changes. Because there is no “other,” only the one source manifesting in different forms.

Coming from the belief in separation, our goals are self-focused, designed to feed our personal ideas about ourselves. But in the light of truth, they’re an expression of the whole.

Rather than trying to do better than others, we might contemplate how our goals contribute to the interconnected web of life. How do they serve the collective?

And instead of competing, we take in apparent others as no different from ourselves, feeling joy for their successes and wishing for their well-being as well as our own.

We move out of a mindset of limitation and embrace the totality of unlimited potential. We consider action informed by this knowing.

Simply said, we meet everything in love…the fragmented parts of our own inner experience, the pain and humanness of others, the earth, nature, our breath, even the COVID-19 virus…everything…and we move forward from this deepest connection with all.

By its nature, separation creates the other…and the need to protect and control. We all know how that feels.

Consider the radical possibility of seeing everything through the eyes of love. Expand out of the mindset of separation and into the all-encompassing field of clarity and love…where everywhere you look you see yourself. It’s humbling to the personal self and touches the heart endlessly.

How can you bring this perspective to practical everyday situations? There are treasures here just waiting for you…

image credit