Dr. Gail Brenner

Sacred Space for Awakened Living

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Start with One Small Action

“I want to unfold.
Let no place in me hold itself closed, for where I am closed, I am false…”
~Rainer Maria Rilke

​​​​​​​I’m going to say something utterly profound. Are you ready?

Here is it: if you want something about you or your life to change, you have to actually make the change.

Change isn’t going to happen by hoping it will happen. It won’t happen by reading that next self-help book. It won’t happen by talking about how miserable you are and how much you want to change.

How Does Change Happen?

Change happens when you take action—when you do something that’s different or unfamiliar, when you step out of your comfort zone and into the possibility of freedom.

  • If you want to stop smoking, you need to not pick up the next cigarette.
  • If you want to be more present, you have to stop listening to your mind starting with one second.
  • If you want to trust yourself more, you need to turn your attention inward rather than obsessively look outside for approval and validation.
  • If you want to lose weight, you have to not put that next cookie in your mouth.

I’ve been a psychotherapist for a long time and have studied many theoretical approaches. And in the end, it all boils down to one essential point. If you want to change, you’re going to need to do something differently.

I know it’s not rocket science, but it’s a vital truth you need to know.

Reframing Fear

So start contemplating: what small action can you make?

For many people, change is scary. We get used to our patterns—and stuck in them—even if these patterns bring us stress and unhappiness. Doing something different feels terrifying.

So let’s call this fear something else. It’s the excitement of stepping out into the unknown. It’s part of the path out of our perceived limitations. It’s the aliveness of truth and authenticity and the end of self-betrayal.

Right in this moment, you get to choose: being limited, stuck, and self-defeating or excited, real, and free.

Getting Practical—Do One Small Thing

I find it useful to think of small changes as experiments. You don’t need to change forever. You just change one thing one time and see what happens. You try something new and see how it goes. Simple, right?

My friend, Angie, constantly asks other people for their opinion. What should she wear? Should she go for a walk or see a movie? Should she eat now or later?

Her mind spins in whirlwinds of self-doubt. She’s lost complete trust in herself.

Of course, the answers to all of her questions are within, but how can she discover that?

She needs to do an experiment. Just one time, when she’s ready to pick up the phone to call someone for their opinion, she stops instead, and looks beyond the urge to reach out.

From a place of curiosity, she goes within and wonders if maybe she already knows the answer to the question she feels compelled to ask.

And that’s the beginning…

Come Up with an Experiment

If you want something to be different in your life, do an experiment. Make one small action, and see what you discover. Because when you do, you’ve just set the stage for wondrous things to happen.

Often, the best first action is a non-action, which is to stop. The patterns we carry out unconsciously are the source of our suffering. So the change is to not follow the pull of the pattern, and stop.

Stop and take a breath. Go within to connect with the wisest place in you. Take a look and see if want you want or need is already here.

Here are some more suggestions for one small action.

  • Just once, do a familiar conversation differently. If you tend to tell the other person how right you are (and how wrong they are), be quiet instead. If you tend to put up walls, say one vulnerable thing about yourself or give the other person a sincere compliment.
  • If you tend to judge—outwardly or within, put your hand on your heart and have a moment of compassion instead.
  • If you engage in a compulsive behavior, stop, breathe, and connect lovingly with what is happening in your body. Don’t do the behavior, so you can see what is driving it.
  • If you’re self-absorbed in your own mind or blocked and cut off, go to a cafĂ©, and silently offer love to each person there.

Making one small action is a huge start. But for things to fundamentally change, you need to keep at it.

Make your happiness a priority…one action at a time.

What About You?

What action will you take? What experiment would you like to do that takes you outside your zone of conditioning? Feel free to say in the comments below. I’d love to hear…

What You Need to Know About Emotions—Part 1

“Open your heart to who you are, right now,
Not who you would like to be.
Not the saint you’re striving to become.
But the being right here before you, inside you, around you.
All of you is holy.”
~John Welwood

Whether you are well established in knowing the peace of your true nature—or you’re new to the spiritual path—if you’re human, then you experience emotions.

We grieve and feel sad, we’re fearful at times, or we feel the burn of anger and maybe even explode. So far today, I noticed a jittery feeling in my chest when I woke up, and I felt the immediate rush of frustration in response to an email I received.

Emotions Are Normal

Our human bodies are designed to react to the outside world. Here’s how it works.

Our brains process information that comes in through our senses and sends signals out to the rest of the nervous system to prepare us for fight or flight.

If what we perceive is familiar and comfortable, we relax. But if there’s danger, the nervous system goes on high alert, ready to react.

Things get complicated when our thinking minds try to make sense of what’s happening. This leads to rumination, worry, confusion, and irritation.

And for those of us who’ve had traumatic experiences when we were young, our nervous systems are highly sensitive and subject to strong reactions such as terror, rage, hate, and chronic anxiety and hopelessness.

Returning to Being Aware

If you’ve made it a practice to study your emotions with curiosity and meet them with deep acceptance, the emotions won’t grab hold of your reality—and the natural state of peaceful awareness illuminates quickly.

Emotions still occur, but you notice them like clouds floating across the sky—and they don’t disturb you.

This happens to me a lot with fear. Fear is a highly conditioned reaction in my mind and body. I’ve studied it and felt it thousands of times, so usually when I notice it, I take a few breaths with the sensations in my body, then move on. The fear doesn’t create an inkling of a problem, and there’s peace.

Turning Toward

Emotions are asking for our tender loving care. Left unexamined, they leave us in pain and are the culprit behind behavioral choices that get us in trouble.

We’re frustrated because we want them to go away, but we just don’t know how to make that happen. They detract from our quality of life and block us from knowing the peace and happiness that are available in any moment.

So let’s take emotions out of the shadows and bring them to the light of consciousness—even the hard ones. Because only then will you be able to learn what to do with them so they don’t overtake you.

A Slow and Conscious Breath

We’ll be talking about emotions in the next couple of Fridays, as there is a lot to say. What I’d like to leave you with today is the simple practice of taking a conscious breath.

Whenever you feel tense or grabbed by an emotion or any conditioned pattern, stop and take a slow, conscious breath. Put your attention on the breath and take a slow inhale and exhale. You might put one hand on your heart and one on your belly as you breathe. Enjoy a few breaths as it feels right for you.

Conscious breathing is a reset for your experience and right away brings your attention back to the here-and-now. What’s happening? You’re just here breathing, and all is okay.

It’s a very helpful tool for when you’re caught by an emotion. By taking a conscious breath, you’ve stopped the momentum of the emotion and you’re in a position to let love and wisdom show you the way forward.

For more—and a guided audio meditation to support you, you can check out this article.

Wishing you expansion beyond your problems to the peace and ease of this now moment…

What About You?

Do emotions overtake you? How do you relate to them? I’d love to hear…

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I have a few openings for one-on-one sessions. If you’re interested, please click here for the information or reply to this email. I would love to work with you—and you can be anywhere in the world! Our conditioned patterns can be very embedded and tricky. Conversations tailored just for you and the ways you get stuck are so useful! Private sessions have been—and still are—an essential part of my path.

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Healing at the Source of Shame

“Nothing makes us so lonely as our secrets.”
~Paul Tournier

The more I speak to people on the spiritual path, the more I become aware of the hidden shame that many of us carry.

We’re ashamed of our bodies, our thoughts, and the feeling that we’re odd, defective, or abnormal.

Shame is a form of secret suffering that we keep in the shadows of our being. It’s like a bruise that keeps getting re-opened over and over. Simply said, shame hurts.
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Shame is a source of unhappiness that thrives on inattention. Ignore the shameful feelings, and they’ll poke at you forever.

But turn toward them with your loving and curious attention, and the pain of shame begins to soften.

Befriending Shame

You get to know the story of shame and the way it takes up residence in your body. And your heart begins to open with compassion to the sense of the one who feels so hurt.

And what opens to this hurting part of yourself? It is you being aware of shame, watching it like a movie on the screen.

This is so important to know: the you who is aware of shame is simply noticing, untouched by the shame itself.

This is how you find freedom from the shame. You discover the gap between the experience of shame and you as the observer of it. In the moments when you rest as this observing presence, the wave of shame subsides.

Now you’re relating to shame in a completely new way. Instead of being lost in it, you study it to see what it is—and realize that it doesn’t have to define you.

You become tender toward the shame, feeling its pain, while also knowing that something in you is strong, whole, and perfectly okay.

Can you find that sense of being okay? Maybe it will help to take an expansive, conscious breath. Even if that being okay is a tiny seed, it’s in there, I promise you.

Softening Into Our Humanity

The more we befriend our own perceived imperfections, the more tender we are toward others.

In our humanity, we know at some level that we’re all messy, awkward, and unsure. We all have vulnerabilities that show the richness and diversity of living the human life.

So in a sense, anything that we experience as shameful isn’t personal to us. In the silence of shame, you might convince yourself that you’re the only one who feels the way you do.

But dig one inch below the surface, and you’ll find that everyone is vulnerable in the same way. It’s the nature of the human condition.

This invites us to meet our own and others’ vulnerability with love, compassion, acceptance, and lightness—and not judgment. Judging doesn’t serve, but love and presence do.

Be the loving presence for whatever arises—whether in yourself or someone else.

Intimacy from No Longer Hiding in Shame

Then, with deep acceptance of your own experience, the fear of judgment starts to fall away.

  • You show up with others open and vulnerable.
  • You share what you’re experiencing because you no longer need to hide it.
  • You break down walls and open the door to so much intimacy and deep understanding.

It’s a sacred path.

Ignoring shame will keep you lonely and disconnected. Meet it with curiosity and a tender and open heart, and you’ll wake up to yourself: peaceful, boundless, and one with all.

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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

​
“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.

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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