Dr. Gail Brenner

Sacred Space for Awakened Living

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The Pain of Closing Down and the Beauty of Opening to What Is

beauty of opening“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 such an arrogant life—and so frustrating!

If only things would be the way I wanted them to be. It was all about me.

Here was life, effortlessly presenting itself, and I was too busy wanting it to be different to receive its gifts.

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.

I was really tired of the pain, but I just couldn’t figure out a way through it.

Joyfully Opening to What Is

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 opening to what is, as it is, is unspeakable.

Amazingly, peace was always available. I could have stopped glorifying these personal desires at any time if I knew better. But their power was overwhelming, and I never thought to question them.

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. I know because I’ve been there.

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

How to do it? With understanding. Understand how your personal desires bring suffering, and wisdom will erode them. Bring clarity to your life experience so you see that opening to things as they are—not as you want them to be—is the only sane and peaceful way to be.

From Closing to Opening

Every want contains within it a seed of resistance to what is. You think the present moment is missing something or not as good as it could be. “If only things were different,” your mind is saying.

But each want also holds the possibility of being free. Let’s consider two ways we close to what is: hoping for a better future and expecting things to be a certain way.

Hope is about wanting a better moment at some other time in the future.

It’s a story created by the mind, filled with thoughts about how your current situation is lacking.

Hope leaves you waiting, not living.

And your experience right now? Unhappy and dissatisfied.

New possibility:

Expand beyond the confining view of hope for a better future, and new possibilities come to light right in this moment.

  • Can you give your mind a rest from chewing on these stressful thoughts for a moment and breathe with just being present?
  • Can you say “Yes” to things as they are, even if your mind tells you it doesn’t like them?
  • Can you become aware of simply being okay?
An expectation desires a specific outcome, not necessarily the one you get.

It breeds anxiety and frustration as your mind zooms in on the one outcome you want. You miss out on an infinite number of other possibilities, and you end up resisting what actually does happen.

New possibility:

Expand beyond wanting one specific thing. Stay present and open to the possibility of all things.

  • Can you let go of trying to control life?
  • Can you open in your heart and body rather than being constricted by your thoughts and ideas?
  • Can you lovingly receive what occurs?

A Real World Example

Letting go of personal desires and opening fully to what is—here’s how it works for me in the real world.

I’m almost always accepting of how life flows, and it’s so lovely to hardly ever react to situations that arise.

But here’s what happened yesterday. I was scheduled for an hour-long interview on a live radio show. I arranged two days of plans so I could be available during this specific hour, which included asking my husband to delay his plans, which he graciously did.

Then two minutes before on-air time, I got the call that the host was canceling the interview because he was ill.

My first reaction? Not compassion for his illness. Instead, I felt anger, fear, and guilt all rolled into one. Then I worked through it.

  • I made space for the energies showing up in my body.
  • I calmly talked it over with my husband.
  • And I saw so clearly the pain of holding expectations.

Refocusing away from my agitated mind, I found peace and presence once again.

And the lessons?

Don’t expect to not get caught. There’s nothing wrong with having an emotional reaction now and then.

And know that you can find your way to peace. With understanding and clear seeing, let the boundaries of your personal self—with its wants and desires—dissolve.

And here you are…pristine…open to life…deeply at ease.

Always in love,
Gail

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10 Uplifting Questions That Can Set You Free

10-uplifting-questionsNote: I’m happy to let you know that I’m going to be interviewed on a radio show today, and you can call in to ask questions. I’d love to hear from you! I’ll be on The Self-Improvement Radio Show with Irene Conlan on Thursday, April 30 at 1:00 PM Pacific time. Please click here for all the details.

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves… Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
~Rainer Maria Rilke

Speaking of interviews, there was a time when all I wanted was to know the answers. If someone asked me a question, my mind would get right on it, working hard to find just the right response. I wanted to know and get it right.

But now, I’m much more fascinated by questions than answers. I love to swim in not knowing, to float in the space that allows answers to arise. I don’t need to know, and I’m happy to tell my busy mind that it’s okay to be at ease.

Want to try it out? Take a breath, and let any of these questions flow into your consciousness—now and whenever you feel stuck. Your only job is to be receptive, curious, and open.

10 Uplifting Questions

1. What is most alive in me right now?

2. What is life asking of me?

3. What can I surrender right now that isn’t serving?

4. What false beliefs am I taking to be true?

5. Can I say “Yes!” to what’s happening in this moment?

6. What am I avoiding that is asking for my attention?

7. Can I welcome what’s happening in my body right now?

8. Can I stop, breathe, and simply be aware?

9. Who or what am I?

10. Can I open to what is present right now?

I’d love to hear what you discover. If you’re reading by email, please click here to visit GailBrenner.com and to comment.

And if you’re enjoying The End of Self-Help, feel free to write a review on Amazon. It helps others to know more about the book. Just scroll down to the end of the reviews and click on “write a customer review.”

Always in love,

Gail

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Running and Staying

running_and_stayingNote: I’m so happy to announce that my book, “The End of Self-Help: Discovering Peace and Happiness Right at the Heart of Your Messy, Scary, Brilliant Life” will be published this Thursday, April 16. If you’ve been helped at all by anything you’ve read on this blog, you can help others by purchasing a copy on Amazon.com. As people start buying it now, Amazon will promote it to an even wider audience who will hear about its message—that peace is truly possible in any moment. This is what I’d love everyone to know!

Here is an excerpt from Chapter 4, “Running and Staying.”

Always in love,
Gail

When you run from parts of yourself, you set up an inner war. Experiences appear—feelings, sensations in your body—yet you deny them. You turn away and pretend they don’t exist or you react to them with anger and resistance. Meanwhile, you’re preoccupied with your attention drawn into stories that make up your life circumstances, roles you play out, and behavior patterns that create the illusion of your limited identity. It’s a kind of violence. You’re fighting reality, evading the truth of the moment, cutting off a tender and valid experience that’s part of the totality. And you mistakenly believe you’re limited.

Yet, in our everyday world, this seems normal. As avoidance of feelings becomes a habit, our lives feel pressured and off-track. We have to keep moving because we’re afraid to be quiet or alone. Society constantly bombards us with messages that pull us away from ourselves—to buy more, do more, be more. And as soon as we’re unhappy, we think we need pills or the next self-help fad to fix it. We’re told that reality as we actually experience it is not okay. This is what we call life.

Every time you move away from the essence of your true nature, you avoid some aspect of your experience—and end up feeling fragmented. Part of you needs to stay hidden behind closed doors, while another part stands as sentry to make sure the secret feelings stay locked away. Meanwhile, you’re out in the world—or stuck in your head—compulsively keeping yourself occupied so you don’t feel the feelings. Life seems complex, disconnected, and confusing.

Things get even more complicated when these avoidance strategies turn into ways that you define yourself. You take on an identity: unworthy one, self-absorbed one, or one who is overwhelmed or depressed. You fall victim to these ways of being until you feel like you’re imprisoned in a steel trap, and you’re completely distracted from your essential core as aware presence. Yes, you’re breathing, and the days pass. But who are you? Whose life is this? Were you meant to search and hope forever? You must be in there, somewhere.

The Root Cause of Habits

Take any problem you have—anything you do or any tendency you play out that doesn’t serve you. If you unwind it back to its source, you’ll find a feeling that you’ve been avoiding. And it’s this unexamined feeling that makes you think you’re separate. Say that you tend to be a people-pleaser. Shining a light on this tendency, you’ll notice that sometimes you feel obligated to do what others want you to do. You might tell yourself a familiar story about what you have to do or what’s expected of you. But if you look more directly at this feeling of obligation, you’ll become aware of some inner discomfort, a sense of being ill at ease. And if you investigate even more closely, you might find feelings of fear, sadness, lack, or emptiness.

So there you are, out in the world, living through the lens of believing you need to please others. You might even feel resentful or depleted because of it. All your efforts are about trying to come to a place of peace within yourself, reasoning, “If I make them happy, they’ll finally love and accept me.” But with your attention outside yourself, grasping what you think you need, you’re avoiding your innermost feelings. And you don’t realize that the deepest peace is available, right here in any moment, by turning your kind and spacious attention toward understanding the nature of these feelings. Here is where you can discover that you’re already whole, and here’s where the possibility for seeing through this painful way of being resides.

Consider addictions, self-defeating behavior patterns, or interpersonal strife—avoidance of feelings is the culprit whenever you’re suffering. Take a look at any area of your life that isn’t working for you, and you’ll surely find some challenging feelings lurking.

  • Do you limit your expression in the world? Fear is driving you.
  • Do you drink or eat too much? Some feeling is eating away at you or drowning you.
  • Do you complain? You’re likely to be irritated or disappointed.
  • Are you emotionally triggered by certain people? Do you continually make self- defeating choices? You haven’t yet discovered the feelings hidden outside your conscious awareness.

This is why you feel like a hamster on a wheel. When feelings are suppressed, they don’t disappear. Instead, they run the show from behind the scenes. You’re like a puppet, with unexplored emotions pulling your strings. These feelings push you to engage in behaviors and thought processes that falsely define you—and block the happiness you desire.

Reclaiming Yourself

The journey back to wholeness, beyond the fragments and cut-off places within you, involves shining the light of presence on emotions that have been hiding out in the shadows. You realize pure presence—not to heal or fix anything, or to change your behavior, or become a better person—because the truth of you has never been broken. These are traps that reinforce the false belief about who you are—and miss the possibility of resting in presence, available right now.

Instead, you reclaim these forgotten realms of unexplored feeling because they’re here, real, and valid. They’re an aspect of pure reality that takes shape as feelings, a sacred manifestation of the whole of life to be honored, not shunned.

What About You?

Are unexamined feelings driving you? What happens when you welcome them in? I’d love to hear… And if you’re reading by email, please click here to visit GailBrenner.com and to comment.

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This Is Your Moment

your-moment
“The thankful receiver bears a plentiful harvest.”
~William Blake

The desire for freedom from our personal suffering appears by grace. Who knows how we end up on the spiritual path?

We get tired of things being so-so, or worse. We know there must be another way. And we get intensely interested in the possibility of moving beyond our habits to know the deepest peace and to live it.

I am so moved by each of you reading this and your clear intention to be free. So maybe you have the same question that frequently enters my inbox and gets posted on my facebook page. It goes something like this:

  • But I’m still attached…
  • I do what you suggest, but it’s not working…
  • The memories keep coming, and I’m still sad…
  • How do I let go?
  • I’m still suffering. How can I be free?

And here’s my answer: the solution lies in the moment. It’s only in this moment when you’re suffering, and only in this moment when you can find your way to peace.

Your Only Goal Is Peace Now

If think you’re going to get rid of any of your experiences, if you think your challenges will go away forever, think again. No matter how deeply you know that your essence is love and that you are one with everything, in the course of ordinary life, emotional reactions, stories, and distorted ways of seeing the world will arise. It happens to me all the time.

These experiences are conditioned, and you can’t control the fact that they appear. But, in any moment, you can control what you do with them.

You can continue doing what you’ve always done that perpetuates your problems: trust your thoughts, feed them with your attention, think and talk about what’s wrong, give importance to your feelings, act out your conditioned tendencies.

Or you can take the path of truth and freedom. In any given moment:

  • Welcome the fact that stories are present—but don’t feed their content with your attention.
  • Receive every feeling—and feel how it’s expressed in your body rather than getting caught in the drama.
  • Feel the urges that pull you to engage in self-defeating behaviors—but don’t act on them.

This is what’s so amazing. You can be at peace with your experience by welcoming it, but it doesn’t have to control you.

Every Time Is a Golden Opportunity—Your Moment

An opportunity is defined as a “lucky chance” or a “favorable circumstance.” Instead of being frustrated when you find yourself caught again in the grip of conditioned reactions, or thinking you’ve done it wrong or failed, take that moment as an opportunity.

It’s a lucky chance you’ve been given to find your way to peace, a favorable circumstance that invites you to return home to the truth of you that is always fresh, whole, and at ease.

It doesn’t matter how many times you get stuck—each one is an opportunity to clear the veils and illuminate your true essence.

Next time and every time you find yourself entangled by problems, say, “Thank you” for the gift you’ve been offered. Then don’t touch the problem with your attention. Lose interest in it—it’s not serving you anyway, is it? Immediately, you’ll find yourself: innocent, undisturbed, and so incredibly alive. Every time.

What About You?

Are problems bothering you? Can you take the opportunity in the moment to untangle the feelings and stories? I’d love to hear… And if you’re reading by email, please click here to comment.

Always in love,

Gail

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The End of Self-Help—Book Now Available!

end-of-self-help

Book now available for purchase. Please click here.

“Brimming with crystalline clarity and the love of truth, Gail Brenner’s The End of Self-Help invites us to see through the illusion of the separate self and discover our inherent freedom, wholeness, and well being in the midst of our ordinary lives. This beautifully written book sparkles with vibrant insight and is a welcome antidote to the endless and errant self-improvement project!”

~John J. Prendergast, Ph.D., author of In Touch: How to Tune in to the Inner Guidance of Your Body and Trust Yourself and senior editor of The Sacred Mirror and Listening from the Heart of Silence.

I couldn’t be more thrilled to be announcing the publication of my first book entitled The End of Self-Help: Discovering Peace and Happiness Right at the Heart of Your Messy, Scary, Brilliant Life.

Writing this book has been a labor of love. I’ve completed a project that’s been in my heart to birth into the world for over 20 years. It’s taken commitment, the willingness to move through unexpected fear, and patience with myself and the process.

And at every step, you, the ones who will be reading it, have been in my vision. It’s an offering that flows straight from my heart right into yours. And I can’t wait for you to read it.

The End of Self-Help

“Until you know yourself to be essentially whole, and not the wounded and broken one who needs to be fixed, the true solution to your personal suffering will remain out of reach.”
~from The End of Self-Help

There are now hundreds of articles in the archives of this blog, but the book offers something fresh. It’s not a compilation of blog posts that you’ve already read. I’m excited to share it with you because it offers the way through your personal struggles to discover that it’s always possible to be peaceful and free. This is what I’ve found to be absolutely true.

The title, The End of Self-Help, refers to the fact that we are not damaged, inadequate, limited selves who need help. We certainly can think we are, if we take our thoughts and feelings to be true.

But here’s what’s possible. When we open to the truth of any given moment, we discover that we don’t have to believe false ideas about ourselves and the world. We don’t have to get caught up in habits and emotions that don’t serve.

We can rest our attention here, in presence. We can know ourselves as the space of pure being that is luminous, endless, and alive. We can soften into the heart and find the essence of life everywhere, knowing nothing is separate from anything else.

This is the possibility for all of us—to, as the subtitle says, “discover peace and happiness right at the heart of your messy, scary, brilliant life.”

Nothing about you needs to change for you to be happy—it takes only a simple shift of attention.

Chapter Descriptions

Here is what the book covers. At the end of each chapter is a section called, “Explorations” offering experiments and contemplations to make the content come alive in your own experience. And each chapter includes an audio meditation, which you can find here.

Introduction

The introduction describes the problem with the concept of self-help and offers the alternative: that we don’t need to look outside ourselves or wait one more second for happiness. We aren’t broken, and we’re not missing what we need to be happy. I also offer my story of how I’ve come to this realization.

Chapter 1: Finding Yourself

This chapter begins to go deeper to describe how our attention gets glued to thoughts and feelings that make us suffer. And it guides you to realize, in your own experience, the relief from freeing attention so it can rest in the simplicity of pure presence. The chapter concludes by inviting you to question your identity. Maybe you aren’t defined by  your limiting thoughts and painful feelings. It lays out the path, developed in the rest of the book, for discovering your essential wholeness and boundless true nature.

Chapter 2: Clear Seeing About Unhappiness

Together, we explore exactly why and how we suffer, including stories from the past, our current right now experience, and our belief that who we are is separate and limited. You’re continually guided to realize the effortlessness of just being, available in any moment.

Chapter 3: Showing Up Ripe and Ready

This path is radical in that it invites you to question everything you take to be true about yourself, others, and the world. This chapter highlights 6 essential qualities to find within yourself and bring to this investigation.

Chapter 4: Running and Staying

You’re guided to become familiar with all the ways you avoid and resist what you’re actually experiencing—and to be truthful about the painful effects on your life. We go deeply into the topic of emotions so you can learn to relate to them with intelligence. You’ll learn the beauty, and surprising relief, of simply opening fully to what is.

Chapter 5: The Puzzle of Thinking

Believing the content of our thoughts takes us away from what’s true, yet thinking is a powerful force that magnetizes our attention. This chapter offers many suggestions for relaxing attention away from troublesome thoughts.

Chapter 6: Kidnapped by Fear

Fear deserves its own chapter because it lies at the root of the belief that we’re the separate and limited entity our thoughts tell us we are. We learn about the subtle faces and voices of fear and how to be with the experience of fear so it’s no longer in control.

Chapter 7: Hijacked by Lack and Desire

At the foundation of the separate self who we think needs help is the belief that we’re broken and lacking. This chapter guides you to see through these false beliefs to realize that the truth of you has always been pure and innocent, untouched by anything that’s ever happened, and overflowing with infinite potential.

Chapter 8: Awake in Relationship

No longer needing to protect or defend the separate self, we’re free to show up freshly in our relationships. We discover ways to be with emotional reactions, the wisdom of seeing through attachments, and the truth about loss.

Chapter 9: Natural Curiosity

This chapter addresses important questions about change, acceptance, thinking, emotions, and spiritual awakening.

Chapter 10: Finally Home

What is embodied and awakened living? How do we live when we’re no longer driven by thoughts? In this chapter, you’ll find out about goals, stress, life purpose, and the simple joys of ordinary life.

Living It in Your Own Experience

My intention for this book is to break things down so clearly that you can’t help but realize the insanity of identifying yourself by your thoughts about the past, worries about the future, or the disease rampant in our society—feelings of inadequacy.

  • You’ll understand fully why and how you suffer—and discover another way.
  • You’ll be so knowledgeable about fear that it stops having power in your life.
  • Your thoughts about not being good enough just won’t make sense anymore.
  • And you’ll realize that you’ve always been who you really are despite your distractions—pure consciousness, spacious, open, and transparent.

Then you’ll practice bringing this new understanding to your relationships, life choices, emotions, thought processes, and quest for a life purpose. Maybe, like me, you’ll revel in the ordinary unfolding of everyday life that overflows with palpable presence and love.

This journey is radical because it invites you to question everything you take for granted—every belief, viewpoint, identity, assumption, and expectation. So I’ve offered some guidance.

There are explorations at the end of every chapter where you are encouraged to apply what you’re reading about to your own direct experience. And there are new guided audio meditations available for each of the 10 chapters.

There’s a wondrous discovery awaiting you. It’s the end of self-help, of waiting to improve at some future time, and the living, breathing possibility of peace now…and now…and now…

Always in love,

Gail