Dr. Gail Brenner

Sacred Space for Awakened Living

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Do This to Bring Harmony to Your Relationships

harmony-to-your-relationshipsNote: My website at GailBrenner.com is completely redesigned. It’s fresh, new, and packed with information just for you. Please click on over and take a look.

“Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.”
~Rabindranath Tagore

I can see now that I missed a crucial insight when it came to relationships. Thinking I was doing it right, I thought I had to communicate every feeling and concern, continually have “the talk” about what’s going on, and endlessly process what happened when an interaction became difficult.

I was trying to be a good communicator and keep everything out in the open.

Now, an honest, open relationship is a beautiful thing, and I wouldn’t accept anything less. But it doesn’t all hinge on good communication. Because here’s what I’ve learned.

When we don’t own our emotional reactions, we bring tension, conflict, and separation to our relationships.

Own Your Emotions

Instead of taking a breath and meeting our own experience when we feel frustrated or hurt, we blame, criticize, fight, manipulate, and spend our precious time rationalizing our opinions to ourselves and everyone around us.

We’ve moved away from the solo activity of being present with our experience. The effects? We’re driven to engage when we’re emotionally charged, not calm. (Not a good plan.) And our minds spin in judgment and confusion, trying to make sense of it all.

Is this what you really want? Do you want to foster friction and divisiveness—or do you want to meet the people in your life with an open, loving heart and mind?

Turning Toward Your Inner Experience

The beginning of a bold and courageous way of being is to turn your attention away from the other person and directly into yourself. You stop seeing others through the veil of your own pain.

What happens? Compassion naturally arises—for others and for yourself.

Your reactions to other people are a beautiful invitation for your awakening. They reflect back to you areas of unexplored emotion and show you how you hide from yourself.

Here’s what’s possible: Being triggered by others becomes a time of celebration. You get to see where you’re stuck so you can be free. Then you show up open and kind in your interactions. When you start reflecting on your own inner experience, you make some amazing discoveries.

  • If you lash out at your partner in anger, you might realize you’re actually afraid.
  • If you judge and constrict your children, maybe you feel helpless as a parent or scared about what might happen to them.
  • If you’re waiting for affection, you may be missing the opportunity to know yourself as already whole and complete.

Take any relationship that causes you stress or discomfort, and like a trail of breadcrumbs, follow your reaction back into yourself to its source. I can guarantee you your discovery will be illuminating.

Meeting Your Reactions for Harmony in Your Relationships

Often, the strong feelings that arise in our interactions echo an unresolved relationship from our past. If you were criticized by an overly demanding parent, it won’t take much for a boss correcting your work to seem like a tyrant in your eyes. If you were abandoned in your youth, a friend calling to cancel plans at the last minute may cause you to feel like you’re five again.

Any reaction that seems too intense for the situation at hand has undoubtedly triggered some old, undigested feelings.

What to do when these emotions are revealed? Acknowledge them. Experience how they feel in your body. Own them so they don’t complicate your interactions.

Learn how to be with your experience. It’s absolutely the most loving thing you can do for yourself and everyone else. For more on feelings, check out these in-depth posts here and here.

When you meet your emotions within yourself, you bring harmony to your relationships. You’re no longer sensitive and reactive. And you’re available to the deepest intimacy with all that is.

What About You?

How do you deal with your emotional reactions in your relationships? What happens when you own them? I’d love to hear… If you’re reading this by email, please click here to comment and to visit the new and improved GailBrenner.com.

Always in love,
Gail

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Lovingly Being with Fear—A Video

This series on fear has raised some questions which I’m addressing in this video. How do we meet fear? What is the path through it to peace? I’m happy to hear your comments and questions.

You can find the previous posts for the series here:

And if you’ve received this post by email, or you can’t play the video, please click here to go to GailBrenner.com and to comment.

Always in love,

Gail

5 Welcoming Ways to the Peace You Long For

welcoming-ways“Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don’t know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever.”
~Jack Kerouac

Awakening to your true nature means that you realize the absolute truth about yourself. You know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you are not the limited, separate person who lacks, strives, needs, and defends.

You realize with every cell of your being that you are the endless peace that includes everything. You know that your true nature is love itself.

You don’t become anything different. The only change that happens is that you consciously recognize what has been true all along. Your attention was just too distracted to see it.

When you know this truth, you realize that you are, and always have been, effortlessly aware and at ease. While you’ve been busy resisting your experience, wanting things to be different than they are, there’s been an undercurrent of okayness with everything that you’ve simply overlooked.

Just take a moment to be still. Can you feel it?

Imagine that your whole life has been played out on a stage. You’re in the audience, maybe enjoying the drama, but you’re able to walk out of the theater undisturbed by it. The deepest part of you has watched your life story play out, but it’s pure. It has never been touched by anything that’s happened.

Knowing this, you’re in the world, but you don’t take it all that seriously. You see through emotions so they don’t grab you. You no longer spend energy defending, denying, or looking elsewhere for happiness. You’re simply here—fully alive in your humanity, fresh and innocent, free and receptive to what life offers.

How do you come to consciously know this truth? It’s revealed in its own time. But don’t wait until the clouds part and grace illuminates your true nature. Orient your whole life to living beyond your limited ideas of yourself and the world. Be persistent in your daily life by inclining yourself toward peace.

1. Be Deliberately Aware

Living unconsciously leaves you churning in automatic habits. You play out conditioning without really knowing what you’re doing or why. It’s an agitated way to be.

The medicine for this dis-ease is to be deliberately aware. Take some time every day to simply, consciously be alive to your present moment experience. It might look like:

  • 10 minutes or more of daily meditation where you sit as open space, allowing your experience to come and go;
  • Take a breath when you realize an emotion is present and welcome it, especially helpful when you feel stressed, frustrated, or defeated;
  • At the end of every day, reflect on how habitual patterns caught hold – what feelings were behind eating that bag of cookies when you didn’t want to, working to get someone’s attention, ruminating about things that make you sad or worried?

Our culture beckons us to distraction and busyness. Whenever you remember, do the radical thing by just being still and aware.

2. Open Your Mind

Become very familiar with the beliefs you hold that structure and resist reality. Then play with letting them go.

What if you didn’t expect anyone to do anything? What if you forgot to believe that you’re fearful and unworthy? What if things are just fine as they are without your trying to control them?

Every day, keep inviting your mind to open…open…open. Let it be clear like the sky. Entertain the possibility that all this thinking is unnecessary.

3. Get to Know Your Body

Many of us live in our heads, consumed by trying to figure everything out. But there is a whole realm of your experience that you’re missing.

The experience of all emotions and unconscious habits includes sensations in your body. While you’re worrying about all the things you need to do, there are places in your body that are tense and contracted. If you feel sad, your body may be heavy, dark, or vacant.

Simply experiencing physical sensations supports you to break through automatic habits. Always include them when you become aware of programmed ways of being.

How do you do it? Notice and consciously experience the physical sensations that appear. When?

  • When you realize you’ve been engaged in a tsunami of thinking;
  • When you’re consumed by emotion;
  • When you’re bored, lost, or confused;
  • Anytime.

Open to all of your experience with great awareness. It’s delicious to be alive to what’s actually happening. And, if you stay with it, it brings you home to the ease of pure presence.

4. Don’t Know

How often do you show up like a robot, saying the same words you’ve always said, expecting the same reactions from others? Try this instead.

Show up fresh, without knowing what will happen. Make the space for things to unfold naturally, not as you expect them to.

  • Stand before a loved one forgetting any history;
  • Be with someone who triggers you with your mind on hold and your heart open;
  • Be in a familiar environment, seeing it for the first time;
  • Taste, touch, see, and hear things freshly;
  • Wake up in the morning and spend a few hours not knowing what you’ll do or say;
  • Open to the possibility of experiencing awe and wonder in the simple things of ordinary life.

5. Notice Awakened States

Knowing who you are is the experience of effortless relaxation, ease, peace, happiness, joy, creativity, and fulfillment. But there’s no need to wait. If you tell the truth, aren’t there moments of these experiences that naturally occur in your daily life now?

Awakening is already who you are—whether you consciously know it or not. So the simple act of noticing what’s already true aligns your mind, body, and heart with the source of all, which is life.

As you go through your day,

  • Notice, and enjoy, when things go well;
  • Recognize when your heart opens in the face of beauty, tenderness, and love;
  • Be appreciative when creative ideas appear;
  • Surrender your desires and dissatisfactions into peace and happiness.

Just like the true nature of a wave is ocean, your true reality is the infinite splendor of the universe. Remind yourself that nothing is personal to you—it all appears by grace. Then you’ll bow down in gratitude to everything.

What About You?

What is it like to come home to yourself? How do you return? I’d love to hear…

And if you’re reading this by email, please click here to comment and to visit GailBrenner.com.

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The Glorious Practice of Becoming Unglued

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“The choiceless truth of who you are is revealed to be permanently here permeating everything. Not a thing and not separate from anything.”
~Gangaji

If you rely on your mind to tell you about how things are, you’re asking for trouble. Because it’s the mind that divides, compares, judges, and evaluates.

It tells you that you’re not good enough, that you’re better than, that you’re lacking or insufficient. It makes you feel confused and anxious in your daily life. It seduces you into thinking that others are here to threaten you, annoy you, or withhold the love you long for.

It makes your feelings spin out of control.

Misunderstanding Who You Are

When we define ourselves by our thoughts, we forget the truth: that we are immeasurably vast, that peace is our very nature, that everything is connected, arising from the one universal source.

We forget that—before any thoughts have taken hold—we are awake, aware, and fully alive. We are pure existence minus the content of thoughts, without any form or personal definition.

So how do we go from this idyllic state of infinite awareness to these limited, separate, troubled entities we believe ourselves to be? Why don’t we live what is actually true?

Through the power of conditioning, limitless awareness gets glued to thoughts.

  • We are told from birth that we are separate and individual.
  • Our personal view of ourselves is reinforced by others and by our own thoughts.
  • We identify as a person with a name and gender who has goals, needs, fears, and desires.
  • We live this misunderstanding of who we are, incorrectly believing that thoughts are the true description of our reality.

The joy of simply being present is lost as we scramble to protect ourselves. We think we are lacking so we try to find happiness in the future that never comes. We strive to get our needs fulfilled—our thoughts deterring us from realizing that everything we want is right here, perfect as it is.

The Practice: Becoming Unglued from Thinking

How to unglue your lovely essence from thinking? How to live the truth of who you are?

Lose interest in thoughts. Ignore them. Don’t take what they say as truth.

You simply let go of focusing on the energy and content of thoughts. And you realize that you are aware and free, boundless and awake. You have no personal identity to protect or condemn. It’s so relaxing, so effortless to give up focusing attention on anything.

You flow like water.

Losing interest in thoughts is an invitation for your attention to disengage from thinking. You don’t need to stop thoughts or change them. These are strategies that take way too much effort to sustain.

Instead, see that thoughts are simply appearances in the expansiveness of presence. They don’t essentially mean anything—unless you believe them.

Losing interest in thinking means you turn off the switch to everything you know. If you’re honest, it hasn’t been working for you anyway. Then,

  • You can’t feel inadequate.
  • You can’t be caught in anxious thinking.
  • You can’t worry about what the future might bring or ruminate about the past.
  • You have no capability to doubt, analyze, judge, or ponder, no repetitive mental patterns to distract you.

When you rest in presence as spacious awareness, thoughts may appear, but they don’t agitate you. They can be present or not—but either way, here you are…aware, undefended, peaceful.

This is true freedom. Reality re-created fresh in every moment. You: innocent, pristine, whole, undivided.

Always Here: Unattached and Free

The habit of thinking is so powerful that forgetting will happen as awareness again attaches to thoughts. You may miss the pure aliveness that you are many times. Be concerned only with freedom in this moment.

Your clue is that you suffer. Be patient—it takes time to erode this connection. Be kind—take a breath, and let the thoughts go, every time.

You are instantly, consciously, gloriously aware.

You already know that peace is right here waiting for you. Deep happiness, joy for no reason, gratitude that can’t be contained, wonder, awe, stunning clarity…these are glimpses of a crack in the thinking armor that lets in the light of conscious awareness.

Notice these. Live here.

The challenges of life still happen. Practical thoughts will appear just as you need them. And here you are—unattached and free.

What About You

Have you become unglued from thinking? Do you think your thoughts are real…or not? I’d love to hear…
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Is It Time to Come Out of Hiding?

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“Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”
~Soren Kierkegaard

It takes so much energy to hide from yourself. And it’s such a relief to let yourself be seen.

You realize that you’re essentially whole, that who you are has never been broken or lost. Coming out of hiding is the choice that will begin to set you free.

Discover the Hidden Core

Hiding from ourselves is at the root of all suffering. Are you suffering? Then it’s guaranteed that you’re avoiding some part of your inner experience.

If you’re caught in feeling shameful or inadequate, if you feel alienated, confused, or alone, if your relationships are fiery or shut down—then some thought or feeling is there in you that hasn’t yet seen the light of day.

Do you find yourself playing out unsatisfying habits, even with your best intentions not to? There is a hidden core that remains unexamined.

  • You’re avoiding feelings that you’re afraid to experience.
  • You ignore the signals that appear in your body.
  • You take for granted that you’re small, limited, and lacking.

And the amazing secret is: you’re not only hiding from your feelings, you’re overlooking your true magnificence, the natural aliveness that is the essence of you. Yes!

Hiding Creates Inner Division

If you hide from your experience, you set up imaginary walls that determine which feelings are acceptable and unacceptable. A feeling arises, and your inner guard is on alert. Is it okay for that feeling to be experienced? Is it too painful and scary? Do I need to push it away and pretend it’s not there?

You end up feeling fragmented and insecure. And you spend your precious energy protecting, defending, and figuring out how to stay safe.

Coming Out of Hiding

Is it time to come out of hiding? Be fierce and gentle at the same time. Find the willingness within yourself to let everything be seen. It’s so freeing! And bring love and care to your experience as you shine the light on all your nooks and crannies. Be courageous, even fearless, with whatever you discover.

There’s really nothing to it, once you’re ready. Instead of turning your attention away into compulsive thinking, an activity, conversation, or any other way you know you distract yourself, turn your attention toward your experience. Just be curious to see what’s present.

When you have an emotional reaction to something or someone, rather than going into your mind or lashing out, be quiet with your own direct experience. It’s been given to you, so you have a choice: ignore or welcome, defend or embrace.

Ground yourself as the expansive field of presence that includes everything. Then feel what appears. Let your attention fall deeply into the sensations in your body. Simply be with them.

This is where the heart of any stuck emotion lies—in the physical sensations.

Each time an emotion arises, feel it in your body. You might start with 30 seconds, then a minute, then as much time as you need. Allow the sensations simply to be in the sacred embrace that accepts all.

True Welcoming

Sounds simple, right? Now, here’s the paradox. Welcoming emotions in order to get rid of them is not true welcoming. It’s like receiving a friend at your door and telling her she needs to leave as soon as you don’t want her there anymore. Doesn’t sound too friendly, does it?

There’s no goal other than to let things fully be as they are in the moment. That’s the way to freedom, the way out of hiding.

Have no preference for what appears—just allow it as is. Don’t choose this and not that. Don’t separate your experience into what’s okay and not okay.

Be so patient as your long-lost feelings emerge from the darkness of your inattention. Don’t worry about the time it takes. Every moment offers the invitation to be completely at one with yourself.

When you give up the fight with your experience, what becomes apparent is this: the peace of being, the simplicity of pure presence. Your inner guard no longer has a job because there’s nothing to protect or defend.

You’ve come out of hiding. The veils are gone. And here you are—peaceful, alive, and at ease.

What About You

Have you come out of hiding? Are you resisting? Please share in the comments. I’d love to hear…

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