Dr. Gail Brenner

Sacred Space for Awakened Living

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The Value of Staying – Even When It’s Hard

“When you say or do anything to please, get, keep, influence, or control anyone or anything, fear is the cause and pain is the result.”
~Byron Katie

A friend of mine took a yoga class the other day, the kind in which you stay in the poses for a really long time, and it was fascinating to hear of his experience. Bliss, relaxation, struggle, pain, comfort, resistance, release – all of it happened in a matter of minutes.

This is the value of staying – even when it’s hard. You get to actually experience reality. You get to be with what’s going on. And you get to recognize that simply being aware is the gateway to the deepest peace.

Are You a Runner?

Our modern society teaches us to run. We are masters at avoiding, distracting, and resisting. We think that if we keep moving forward, to the world out there and away from ourselves, that we will find the peace and happiness that we long for.

This tendency feeds all kinds of problems – addictions, habits, frustration, alienation, bitterness, envy, personal inadequacy. You live in need rather than fullness, lack rather than peace and contentment.

It’s an endless cycle of suffering and heartache, that maybe you are caught in. Have you ever gotten the object or job or relationship you were craving? How long did your happiness last before you weren’t so satisfied anymore?

The radical choice for all of life’s ills is to stay. Really, it’s the only sane solution. Continuing to avoid yourself and seek something other than what is here right now keeps you completely stuck. Mired in wanting. Consumed by dissatisfaction and lack of fulfillment. Disconnected from yourself and from love.

Are you happy and content? Then you are happy and content in the present. You aren’t locked into desire or distraction. You aren’t disturbed by negative thoughts about yourself or the past or future. You are simply here, enjoying the moment.

How to Stay

The instructions for staying are so simple: don’t do anything and simply be.

  • Recognize that you are aware, and center your attention in awareness.
  • Get familiar with this space of non-doing. It is open, peaceful, boundless, alive.
  • Anything can arise in it, and you stay as awareness.

It’s really that simple. Rest in non-doing for a few minutes to start, and right away your whole perspective will shift. Then spend as many moments as you like in this quiet space. Don’t make it a chore. Do it for enjoyment and freedom, for ease and well being.

As you stay as awareness, you will notice thoughts or feelings or the tendency to move into familiar habits. Instead of starting to rev up and do again, simply stay with being. This is exactly what my friend did in his yoga class. No matter what arose, he stayed and let everything be.

It might seem unnatural at first to stay, but eventually you realize that it is relaxing, effortless, and natural. Your attention rests in being, and from here, nothing that arises is a problem.

Glorious Staying

If playing out conditioned habits isn’t working for you and you are looking for a peaceful state that you think is not present now, experiment with staying. Here is what you might experience:

  • The force to carry out habits and patterns weakens. You realize you can stay and let the momentum to do run itself down rather than acting on habits that aren’t serving you anyway.
  • You are flexible and open. Running on automatic keeps you caught in one way of being. Staying offers options, insights, and clarity you haven’t had the space to see.
  • Presence shows you the truth about your experience. You see thoughts as simply mental chatter, feelings as stories and physical sensations that don’t have any essential meaning. As aware presence, you are alive, functioning well, and totally okay.

Staying creates the possibility for you to tap into being. Without the distraction of mind-made pressures, your idea of yourself as a separate person with needs and desires to fulfill falls away.

Miraculously, you realize you are one with the totality of being and intimate with all things – right now. You are endlessly peaceful, completely content, seeing and being love with no separation. This is the possibility for you.

Staying starts a revolution. Are you in?

What makes it hard to stay? What is your experience with staying? I’d love to hear…

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Does It Seem Like the World Is Against You?

“We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.”
~Rabindranath Tagore

When I was 40, I was on top of the world. I was fit and healthy, and I thought I had it all together. Until I was slammed with an unusual medical problem that required two major surgeries to fix. My overriding thought? “This shouldn’t be happening to me.”

I was carrying an assumption that young, healthy people don’t get weird medical problems. And when life showed me differently, I was thrown for a loop. I fought and resisted valiantly until acceptance set in. It was a relief to finally go along with what the world was presenting to me.

Assumptions Create Your Reality

What is an assumption? It is an idea that you project onto reality about what should or shouldn’t happen. It is taking for granted that you know how something should be, when the truth is that you don’t know at all. And it paves the way for struggle and resistance.

You are living a reality created by your assumptions, rather than the real one that is actually happening.

Consider these examples:

  • Bad things shouldn’t happen, especially to good or innocent people.
  • Things will always be as they are, or as you want them to be.
  • You expect that you will fail.
  • You assume you are right.
  • You assume you will have nothing valuable to contribute to a conversation.
  • You take your identities as absolute truth, assuming you are fearful, inadequate, entitled, or unable to be a loving partner.

Living according to your assumptions is stressful and limiting. It’s like walking around in a small room packed with furniture. Everywhere you turn, you bump into something.

When your assumptions rule, the world feels structured and unfriendly, and your passage through it is rocky.

Either you set up your life so that the world meets your negative expectations about yourself (a self-fulfilling prophecy). Or you find yourself constantly reacting when life throws you a curve.

If you want to be happy, peaceful, and at ease, you may find that holding onto assumptions doesn’t serve you.  Then you are moving with what is being offered to you rather than resisting.

Open Up Your View

You might have heard the new-age definition of the word assume – it makes an ass out of “u” and me. I don’t find this helpful – or true. But let’s explore the effects that assumptions do have.

  • They limit your view of what is possible.
  • You have tunnel vision and can’t see clearly.
  • You stay stuck in a negative view of yourself.
  • You set yourself up to feel frustrated or disappointed when your expectations aren’t met.

Keep this up, and it will definitely seem like the world is against you.

Recently, I have been giving some talks on the everyday reality of living with someone with Alzheimer’s Disease. On the surface, you might expect that getting Alzheimer’s would be a terrible tragedy, and as a family member you may doubt that you can cope.

But if you stayed with these assumptions, you would miss out on a whole other amazing, heart-opening perspective. Many caregivers of people with Alzheimer’s will tell you that it’s hard, but it is also a blessing.

You get to express love in needed and wonderful ways. You learn how to truly meet another person just as they are. You are invited to live in the moment where memory isn’t required.

And if you are lucky – or wise – you discover how to appreciate what is here rather than focus on what is missing. See how life is so full and generous?

Discover Overflowing Possibility

If you are living in a world of assumptions, you may be missing out. When you find yourself stuck, expand your view. Take the widest angle lens possible so you can see what is actually being offered to you.

Life is so fresh as it unfolds, simply bursting with potential. Really, anything is possible. Life doesn’t need your assumptions to know what to create next – it does a fine job by itself.

Maybe you will decide to do yourself a favor. If your assumptions aren’t serving you, let them fade away. Align with the flow of what is happening right now, and live, happily, as the openness that you are.

Do your assumptions serve or get in the way? What if you were to let them go?

Note:  I had a lovely interview last evening with Jonathan Mosen of MushroomFM radio. Here’s the link if you’d like to listen in.

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10 Life-Changing Facts to Heal the Pain of the Past

“Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.” ~Jean Paul Sartre

Still plagued by your past? Then this post is for you. But only if you want to be free, only if you want to know the open-heartedness and enthusiasm for life that come with making peace with the past.

As you probably know, sometimes events from the past have a mind of their own. Memories keep recirculating when all you want is for them to disappear. You are way more emotionally reactive than you know is good for you. And you are limited by distrust, neediness, and a stunted view of what is possible for you.

If you know your past is still nipping at your heels, read on. Because you will discover 10 facts that may just be the key to unlock the door to your full, unbridled, joyful, infinitely sane expression of you. Be free of the past, and you can go on and simply enjoy your life.

A Personal Example

How do I know? From first-hand experience. For many years, I had a very rocky relationship with my parents, filled with anger and resentment about the past. My mind screamed about the “should have’s” and “ought to be’s.” I kept an endless list about what I deserved, but thought I had missed out on. There were periods with no communication and many arguments as we tried and failed repeatedly to find a way of meeting. Until I saw the light.

In a moment of insight, I took responsibility for my own happiness. I saw that my anger was preventing me from experiencing the ease and well being that I desperately wanted, so I stopped feeding it. No more stories about what should have been, no more blaming or waiting for solutions. My identity as the wounded child disappeared, and what was revealed? Happiness. Peace.

The story of what happened in my past didn’t change. But what I gave power to totally changed. I stopped dwelling on the past. I stopped justifying the anger, and now, 15 years later, I have trouble even remembering the details of events that used to agitate me to no end. I am so much more drawn to ease and simplicity. Yes, my relationship with my parents has improved beautifully, but that has been a side effect and not the primary driver. What I wanted more than anything was to be free of the past and happy in the now. And, yes, I am free of the past and so deeply happy in the timeless now.

10 Life-Changing Facts

What happened to me is, without question, possible for you. Apply these 10 life-changing facts to the sticky residue from your past. See clearly, get unstuck, and move forward free and unencumbered.

1. The past isn’t really about the past.

When you look with great clarity, you will see that there is no actual thing called the past. Everything that happens happens in the present – it can’t be any other way. Memories of events are thoughts occurring in the present. Anger or hurt about the past is happening now. Your present moment experience in the now is what keeps the past alive.

What is amazing about this understanding is that it shows you that the way out of your suffering is always in the present. You can change your perspective – now, focus on something different – now, feel your feelings – as they are right now.

If you want to heal from the past, put your attention on your present moment experience.

2. Memories are not the problem.

A memory is a thought, and a thought has no power or meaning whatsoever, unless you give it power or meaning. You have many thoughts about things that happened long ago, and these thoughts cause no problems. But some thoughts are sticky. You have an emotional reaction to them and you think them over and over. You may even have beliefs related to them, for example, “I am justified in thinking this” or “I need an apology so I can move on.” This keeps them very much alive, affecting your ongoing experience.

If you want to be free of the past, lose interest in these sticky thoughts. Know that it doesn’t serve you to repeat them and that thinking they are justified only delays your freedom. Be prepared to take a look at the pure experience of your feelings without the layer of thinking that solidifies them (see #6 below).

3. “Healing” means letting go so the thoughts and feelings don’t impact you.

Your goal is to neutralize the story from the past so it loses its power over you. It becomes transparent, with no meaning and no effect. You change your relationship to your thoughts so they don’t sit like a dark cloud over you. Your goal is not to:

  • Make yourself forget about the past (impossible)
  • Stuff or ignore your feelings (creates other problems – addiction, anyone?)
  • Wait for an apology or acknowledgment (postpones happiness)
  • Wait for time to heal all wounds (you may need more than time)
  • Wallow endlessly in your emotions (oh, so painful)
  • Redo the past (you can’t change what happened but you absolutely can change your reaction to what happened)

Keep holding as possible: freedom…peace…sanity…freshness in the moment…fully alive now.

4. The path to healing opens up once you are fed up by how the stories about the past impact you.

As I’m happy to say as often as necessary, what you focus on is what will grow. If you cultivate sadness, regret, and revenge, then they will become your reality. As an alternative, be very willing to see through these stories as much as is needed. Be open to energy moving through your body rather than staying stuck. Prepare yourself to feel differently. Contemplate not defining yourself by thoughts about the past.

5. You get a jump-start on releasing the past when you take full responsibility.

Once you see that the ball is totally in your court, you have set the stage for deep letting go. Your happiness is your responsibility alone, not anyone else’s. You might be very familiar with feeling like a victim. But this is a passive, unempowered position, leaving you waiting for words or actions from someone else, something you cannot control.

Taking responsibility means being open to recognizing how your own internal landscape is feeding your suffering. What thoughts make you unhappy? What feelings are stuck in your body and heart? How do you make yourself suffer by recycling negative memories through your mind? Being stuck in the past means that a part of your heart is closed. Take responsibility for going right into those bruised and tender places. Read on to find out how.

6. Telling stories keeps the past lodged in your mind, heart, body, and spirit.

We tell ourselves all sorts of stories that bring trouble to our lives. Want to be trouble-free? Here is the medicine.

  1. Notice how entranced you can be by the stories of drama and victimhood that appear in your mind.
  2. Just for a moment, let yourself lose interest in these thought stories. (see #2 above)
  3. See that what is left is a pattern of physical sensations, maybe gripping, tension, or burning. You may never have noticed these sensations before, but they have probably been there for a long time.
  4. Now notice this: You are aware, and these sensations are appearing in your awareness. They come, go, and change, but here you are: aware.
  5. Take the perspective of awareness, and the sensations have the freedom to be. They aren’t ignored or suppressed. You aren’t so busy in the story that you don’t notice them.
  6. Now notice: Are you suffering? No, you are simply experiencing sensation as awareness.

This is freedom – no attention to the story, experience appearing and disappearing with ease. You: unchanging, clear, undisturbed.

7. Beliefs about healing can get in the way.

Besides getting stuck in the story, you might become aware of beliefs you hold about what needs to happen for you to let go. These are simply more thoughts that keep you distracted from the heart of the matter. Here are some possibilities:

  • “I feel justified in staying stuck because I was wronged.”
  • “It is someone else’s responsibility to make this better for me.”
  • “If I let go, I’m somehow approving others’ bad behavior.”
  • “I need an apology.”
  • “Life is unfair.”
  • “It was so bad that it’s not possible for me to heal.”

You life begins now, in this very moment…and now…and now. You can always start anew. Don’t feed these limiting thoughts, and you won’t need them to disappear. Proceed to discover that you were never not whole, that a part of you has always been untouched by the world.

8. Relationship troubles relate to your past.

Unless you see through all of it, you are a product of your past and the ideas you have formed about how relationships work. This keeps the past alive in the present. Do you fear rejection or commitment? Do you feel you need approval and attention? Do you isolate or push people away? Do you need to be on top and in control? Do you have difficulty trusting? If these tendencies cause you problems in your relationships, here is your opportunity.

Untangle your thoughts and feelings about the past, and live in freedom from them as you move forward.

9. The middle path is the intelligent path.

Dwelling on what happened and leaking your feelings all over the place will keep you suffering. Hiding, indulging, or stuffing your feelings doesn’t work in the long-term. Instead, bring intelligence and clarity to your direct experience. Cultivate a fire for peace and ease that serves you well.

10. Finding out who you are is the ultimate freedom.

If you define yourself by your past, you will be living as a fraction of what is possible for you. Say you think of yourself as wronged or abused or victimized. Or you see yourself as having gotten the short end of the stick.

Defining yourself by what happened doesn’t help you now. It’s like wearing clothes that never fit. Is it time to take them off?

It’s easy to believe in a mistaken identity. It feels so true to think we are the result of what happened or the sum total of our thoughts and feelings. But the truest thing about you is that you are aware. Life presents a passing array of experiences – thoughts, emotions, events, people. These all arise in you but are not you.

Live as the awareness that you are – fully alive, here, not in conflict with anything. Know who you are, and the pain of the past will barely be a ripple…on the surface…of the immeasurable vastness of you.

What have you learned about healing the pain from the past that has helped you?

Note: This is the seventh in a series of posts on Life-Changing Facts. Here are the others: fear, attachment, habits, healing the inner critic, happiness, and anger.

Note on September 26, 2014: Thank you all for your comments, which I have enjoyed answering. We have thoroughly exhausted this topic! I am closing comments on this post, but I guarantee the answers you are looking for are here, either in the post or in my responses to other people’s comments below. I love that you are interested in finding peace. It’s right here, available to you!

Always in love,

Gail

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Lessons of the Heart

“When you beautify your mind, you beautify your world.”
~John O’Donahue

“Can you explain the sinking into your heart for me?”

This is a beautiful question I received from a reader, Paul, in response to the post from a couple of weeks ago. It was about pressing the reset button – the choice that is available in any moment to stop feeding the momentum of a reactive pattern.

If you are caught in an emotional whirlwind, or if you are consumed by a flood of thinking, you can stop, pause, connect with your wisdom and intelligence, and reset. Ahhhh, sanity.

I mentioned that one of the ways to reset is to let go of thinking and sink into the heart. This is what prompted the question. What exactly does that mean – to sink into the heart?

The Value of Inquiring

I love this question because it is penetrating. You could easily assume that you know what it means. After all, everyone has a heart. But let’s make sure. Let’s inquire deeply, so you can fully understand. Let’s shine the laser on even the most obvious idea so you can drill down to the absolute truth of it.

Only then can you relax.

Your mind stops questioning, so you can live the answer.

Isn’t that what you long for?

So let’s take a deep, penetrating look. What does it mean to let go of thinking and sink into the heart?

Lose Interest in Thinking

We all know what it’s like to be caught up in thinking. You judge, ruminate, worry, plan, and tell yourself sad or scary stories. You negotiate and justify and defend. When the mind is functioning in full force, you can’t possibly be fully available to the moment.

Now the letting go part. If you make the choice to become less interested in thoughts, your attention will naturally move away from thinking. Then you are available to presence, reality. And this is the realm of the heart.

Without attention to thinking, miraculously you notice sounds and sense perceptions that were always here. You are quiet enough to realize there is breathing, the wind on your face, tension in the jaw, a feeling you’ve been ignoring.

You are waking up to what is. Mind clear and alert. Eyes wide open. Seeing and hearing from the space beyond eyes and ears.

I used to do silent meditation retreats where, after a few days, the mind would become very still. Looking out through my eyes everything was so clear and precise. There was a great sense of peace. At first, I thought something was wrong, and I would look in the mirror to see if my pupils were dilated.

Now I understand that with no interest in thinking, the reality of what is actually here in the moment becomes obvious. No distractions, no hiding, no pretending.

With nothing whatsoever in the way, what remains is infinite clear seeing, unlimited awareness. Perception of everything that is so amazingly fresh.

And in this clarity, heart-centered qualities appear naturally – compassion for people and situations, being overcome by beauty, gratitude overflowing.

A Practical Experiment

I invite you to try an experiment, just for a moment. Think about something with gusto, then let go of the thinking. Be awareness itself, fully open and allowing.

******

I just tried this myself and noticed a palpable difference in my experience. Thinking felt tight and contracted. But once I stopped feeding thoughts and opened to awareness, there was the sound of birds, the rays of sunlight dancing with the leaves, and a sweet softness and relaxation.

Live in the Heart

“Sinking into the heart” is a remembrance of our true nature, or, as one of my teachers says, our “infinite magnificence.” When we disconnect from thinking, there is somehow an unshakeable knowing that we have arrived home. Who we are is not our thoughts, not the individual entity we call the body or Paul or Gail.

Separation is seen as untrue, and what is realized is the inter-being (as Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh says) of all of life. In the realization of this wholeness of all, with nothing excluded, is the unnameable. But probably the best word to describe it is love.

The suggestion to sink into the heart is an invitation to align with life, to let go of resistance, and to know ourselves as love, as life itself.

What is your experience with losing interest in thinking? Is it hard or easy? What happens?  I’d love to hear…

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The Power of Vowing

“I pledge to meet you with openness and acceptance in the moments of our life together.”

These are the words that my partner and I will be saying to each other at our wedding ceremony next Friday. Yes, I’m getting married, and I couldn’t be more thrilled about it.

The process of creating our ceremony has been revealing in unexpected ways. Over the years, I have made commitments to myself, but speaking a vow to my beloved in front of our family and friends is potent.

After all, I live with a great deal of integrity, so if I make a vow, I intend to keep it.

But I want this vow to be freeing – not loaded with should’s and feeling like a prison. So I take it as an expression of my deepest desire: to meet all of life with openness and acceptance.

Which includes being open and accepting of myself when I fall short.

You can think of it this way: the noun “vow” is lived as a verb. It is a living, breathing, spacious, loving way of being.

So I invite you to fill in the blank: I vow to….

Take your time with this. Get quiet, bring your attention inside, and let the answer come from the deepest part of your being.

Then watch how your life aligns in unimaginable ways.

Years ago I gathered my fragmented life and committed to knowing the absolute truth, no matter what. Some areas are still a work in progress, but here I am, marrying a man who is amazing, and the right match for me, beyond anything I could have ever dreamed up.

All I can say is, “Thank you.” I am on my knees with gratitude.

Have the courage to state what this life is about. Be conscious, awake, and infinitely loving. Every moment is more precious than you could ever know. Make a vow, and you won’t miss out on what you have been given.

Now it’s your turn. What do you vow to? Say it in the comments below, let it be known with all of us as witnesses. Then live it, and the rest will be taken care of perfectly.

Love to you,

Gail

PS: I’ll be taking a couple of weeks off, and I’ll be back with you later in February.

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