Dr. Gail Brenner

Sacred Space for Awakened Living

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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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What Does It Mean to Accept Your Present Moment Experience?

“Transforming yourself is a means of giving light to the whole world.”
~Ramana Maharshi

I talk a lot about accepting your present moment experience. Someone recently asked what exactly I’m inviting you to accept, ​​​​​​​and I’m sure she isn’t the only one with this question.

  • Should you accept abusive situations?​​​​​​​
  • Should you accept that you don’t know how to stand up to others?​​​​​​​
  • Should you accept that you’re single when you don’t want to be?​​​​​​​

If you accept everything, does nothing ever change?

Accept and Welcome Everything

Acceptance is not about giving up and resigning yourself to staying stuck in painful situations. It’s not about putting up with anyone or anything and being miserable.

It’s a full-on welcoming of what is true right now that shows you where you’re stuck—and it paves the way forward to freedom.

Say you feel frustrated with yourself because you let people take advantage of you. If this is your experience, I imagine you’re suffering because of it. Do you just have to live with this way of being forever?

Here is what’s arising in your in-the-moment experience:

  • ​The feeling of frustration, and​​​​​​​
  • The belief about yourself that you can’t say no or set appropriate boundaries.​​​​​​​

Explore deeper into your present moment experience, and you’ll probably find a fear of rejection or of not being liked.

Putting any story about your feelings aside for the moment, the invitation is to fully accept the fear and frustration that are present. Without analyzing anything or trying to problem-solve, you simple open to the feelings that are here, sitting quietly and noticing the sensations present in your body.

If you offer this acceptance to your feelings for a little while, you’ll probably start to feel more peaceful.

Right away, you can see that the stressful feelings come from believing your thoughts. And when you put the thoughts aside for a moment and just be with the pure feelings, all is well.

Shining the Light on False Identities

If you’re suffering because you let others take advantage of you—or for any other reason—you’re living under a limiting and false identity that keeps you locked into relationships and patterns that aren’t working for you.

Deep acceptance of your present moment experience and the insights it brings is the opening you need. You start to recognize where your conditioning has taken hold—and how you can be more aligned with your true nature.

Wise Behavior Change

Accepting things as they are now, how can you shift to a more authentic way of being? You take bold and powerful steps infused with truth. This is wise behavior change.​​​

  • You can let the stories go and welcome your feelings.​​​​​​​
  • You can stay connected to your deepest desire to be free of conditioned habits that aren’t serving you.​​​​​​​
  • You can practice saying no to requests that make you uncomfortable.​​​​​​​
  • You can stay connected to yourself and what you really want rather than worrying about disappointing others.​​​​​​​

A Fresh Beginning

Acceptance isn’t a dead end—rather it’s a fresh beginning.

You may not like seeing how you’ve been stuck in programmed patterns or that you’ve made choices that don’t support your happiness. But when you accept, you are opening the path to a truth-based way of being.

Like an alcoholic getting sober, you get fed up with the pain of your conditioning and vow to find another way that feels better. And there always is one.

This path of truth is fierce. If we want to be happy, we need to be honest with ourselves.

​​​​​​​Acceptance of what is right now is the starting point to begin the realignment with truth.

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

Finding Your Inner Coach

“At a certain point, we need to grow up; we need to look inside ourselves for our inner guidance.”
​​​​​​​~Adyashanti

I was speaking to a friend the other day who is often caught in a mindset of lack. His mind seems to love reciting all the things that are missing from his life, especially a relationship with a woman.
​​​
But this time something different happened. Instead of being taken down this sad and lonely road of lack, this golden phrase appeared: “Wait a minute!”

“Wait a minute”— it completely woke him out of the dream of lack and brought him into the reality of the present moment.

  • Then he began to question:
  • What is present?
  • Is everything okay right now?
  • Do I have to wait for a partner to do the things I want to do?

It was a spontaneous and fresh offering of universal intelligence showing him the way to freedom.

Accessing the Inner Coach

For a while on my journey, the phrase that arose was, “Go in.” To me, that meant to let go of all the thinking in my head and bring my attention down into the body to welcome sensations. Then I sat with great peace, just being this space.

Saying, “Go in,” short-circuited the swirling thoughts every time, and eventually they stopped taking hold.

Someone else I know says, “Go back.” This phrase tells her to let her attention fall away from the world of people and situations—and the world of her own thoughts and feelings. She stops feeding her anxiety and trying to figure out what others need.

She comes back to herself…to the space behind her eyes…to the breath…to being grounded in this now moment.

Help for Discovering Your True Nature

These phrases are a sign that your inner coach is alive and well. It’s the voice in you that knows your personal “I” thoughts don’t serve peace and happiness. It’s the one who is already awake to the magnificent aliveness of your true nature—beckoning you home.

Your inner coach guides you from contraction to creativity. Another friend was stuck in a grabby, fear-based thought pattern. All she could see were scary outcomes with no satisfying solution.

Then, “Hey, wait!” appeared. She took some moments in stillness, and then became aware of a number of practical solutions to the problem she was wrestling with, and the fear disappeared.

Programmed habits often hold on tightly because they’re highly reinforced. We’ve been thinking them and acting on them for most of our lives.

This is why we need skillful means to awaken out of them. And your inner coach is one ally in this process.

What About You?

What is your inner coach saying? How is it helping you? And if you’re reading this by email, please click here to go to GailBrenner.com and to comment.

The Pain of Judging Thoughts

judging_thoughts_post“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”
~Rumi

Any belief that we hold onto makes us feel separate. We blame, criticize, and divide the world into right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable.

The pain of the judging mind runs rampant.

Every day I hear of people judging the decisions they made when they were younger, judging their appearance, judging every word that comes out of their mouth, and judging what other people say and do.

How Judging Thoughts Affect Us

How does it feel to judge? Check in with your own inner experience. You’ll find that you feel sad, contracted, shameful, separate, and alone.

Judgments contain a solid sense of the personal “I” who thinks it knows what is right and wrong.

  • I’m right in thinking he should have acted differently.
  • I know everyone’s looking at me and thinking there’s something wrong with me.
  • I know she’s shouldn’t be so negative.

Do you want to be right or do you want to be close, connected, and aligned with the truth of things?

Finding Another Way

My invitation to you today is to turn away from judgments that appear in your mind. Why? Because it’s kind.

I know that might sound hard to do, but give it a try. Notice judging thoughts, but know that if you follow them, they won’t take you to happiness.

Say, “No thank you,” to the pain of judging thoughts.

What do you do instead? You find another way.

Instead of staying stuck in right and wrong, look beyond those thoughts and bring compassion and understanding to the moment.

If you’re judging someone else’s behavior, get curious. Wonder why they’re doing what they’re doing. What’s the feeling or intention behind the behavior?

Use the opportunity to break down your own mental ideas that divide and separate, and connect with the tender humanness of the other person. Can you simply say OK to them as they are?

And if you’re judging yourself, you already know that it doesn’t serve your peace and happiness.

Whatever you’re judging about yourself needs your love and care. Hold that part of you like a loving mother holds her child. Bring compassion to the one who is hurting, to the one who is doing her best.

Be supremely kind with your own inner experience.

Leaning Into Love

One day as I was driving, I noticed that the car in front of me had a vanity license plate that sent a message about the driver’s self-importance. A harsh judging thought arose in my mind about how conceited that person must be. And immediately I felt a strong, almost physical stab of sadness and separation.

Letting that feeling be, I looked for another way.

I felt deep compassion for the human condition—the one who judges and the one who chose to publicize their views about themselves on a license plate. Did that license plate really matter to me?

This seemingly trivial experience led to a huge heart opening that included everyone and everything. My internal dividing walls collapsed, and I fell into an ocean of love.

It’s the nature of the mind to judge, but you don’t have to give those judging thoughts any of your interest and attention.

You don’t have to engage with them at all.

Let them float off like a cloud moving across the sky. And find your way to your huge, natural, loving, open heart. You’re going to love it, I promise you.

What About You?

Do you notice the pain of judging thoughts? What’s another way? I’d love to hear…. And if you’re reading this by email, please click here to visit GailBrenner.com and to comment.

Stop Resisting Anxiety

stop_resisting_anxiety“The brain can only assume its proper behavior when consciousness is doing what it is designed for: not writhing and whirling to get out of present experience, but being effortlessly aware of it.”
~Alan Watts

“I just want to be happy and calm and not feel anxious anymore.” These are the words from a comment on a recent post, and I’m sure this reader isn’t alone. She goes on to say, “Is there any hope for me that one day the anxiety won’t even bother me at all anymore?”

Anxiety starts to lose its charge once you know how to relate to it in the moment when it arises. And this is very good news.

You don’t need to be concerned with anxiety disappearing forever. Once you bring acceptance and understanding to the experience of anxiety, it stops haunting you.

Remember that what you resist persists. If you go into the story of how you dislike anxiety, you’re resisting it. So do this instead:

  • Take a few slow, conscious breaths;
  • Center your attention in the peaceful field of simply being present and aware;
  • Then open to the physical sensations you’re experiencing. Love them like your children and welcome them like a long lost friend.

The sensations of anxiety may still be there, but you’ve made peace with your present moment experience. This is how to come fully alive to your messy, scary, brilliant life—one moment at a time.