“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
~Oscar Wilde
Note: Please join my upcoming weekend retreat. I’d love to see you there! Click here for details.
Our desire for embodied conscious living asks us to make a deep dive into our present moment experience.
And this includes all the little moments of daily life, the ones we take for granted, the ones we walk through under the veil of same, old same old.
Some ways of reacting are so familiar that we don’t even think to stop and question them.
Awakening into the reality of things is all-encompassing, including everything. No stone is left unturned as we notice all the times we turn away from openness and into habit and robotic living.
Noticing these moments is rich with possibility…
When we live in our conditioned patterns, we’re steeped in fear and separation…not love. There’s a sense of an inside and outside—a person in here who lacks comfort, attention, or safety, and a world out there that we strive to control to fulfill our needs.
We’re like hungry ghosts, terrified of our inner emptiness while focusing desperately outside ourselves:
- Seeking approval and recognition;
- Scanning for danger so we can protect ourselves;
- Trying to measure up to meet others’ expectations.
We’re ill-at-ease and feeling divided…from ourselves and from life.
While searching out in the world for the peace we long for, we’ve neglected to include an essential part of the unified whole…our own inner experience.
That’s why living from the inside out feels so right. We shift our attention back to being aware of ourselves and perceive the world from here. We open to:
- How we react in our nervous systems;
- How our conditioned patterns color our view;
- Letting ourselves feel how our hearts are touched by the people and situations around us;
- Melting into the peace that’s possible when we stop the tendency to move outside ourselves.
We may not realize it until we begin to notice our own experience, but we are sensitive beings. We react to what goes on around us, and these reactions are full of insights.
You’ll discover you judged someone because you were scared. You find the tender places within that need your loving care…not your avoidance. You feel the benefits of slowing things down so you feel less stressed…and more present in your life.
If you’re not aware of your inner experience, it’s a guarantee that your conditioned patterns will be in charge of your reality. And your life, the real one here right now, will pass you by.
Consider living from the inside out. Touch everything you notice with your loving attention. The lines between inside and outside begin to blur as you open to the oneness of all.
