Pain

Pain is how we really learn.

You can study something or work to remember things, but to truly transform, you must pass through pain. Pain is the portal.

There is the pain we choose, the sting we induce by selecting certain perceptions and behaviour. From this we sooner or later learn that we have the power to make of life what we want.

We have the freedom to experience and make of it what we will. We are creating in every moment and when the payoff of pain becomes too costly, we drop it. Pain helps us see.

There is the pain we do not choose, the agony that arises from being born, living and dying. This pain is an even bigger and more beautiful teacher.

It breaks down the constructs we cling to, shatters illusions and strips away our form. It is the labour of the mother and the arrival of the child, both of them ourselves. It is the deep joy of total living.

It is in pain that we surrender. It is from pain that we stop and reconsider. It is through pain that we sit with ourselves.

It is in acceptance that pain subsides. It is from growth that pain reveals its blessings. It is through transformation that pain releases us.

Look back and all the growth for which you are most humbly grateful has its roots in pain. It truly is the most gracious gift.

Pain is healing.

Resolution

Are you looking for ways to resolve life? Can you feel within yourself an inclination to wrap things up?

Are you uncomfortable with process and the energy of presence?

Are you trying to hold existence in your tight little grip and squeezing the life out of it for yourself?

I noticed this in myself this morning while working with a client and glancing briefly at the backdrop of some personal relationships at the moment.

I wanted to interpret them conclusively and reach some settlement. I could see, though, that this was just my urge.

The relationships are what they are and life is what it is. I cannot fathom it and I cannot control it, but I can live it.

I don’t want to fathom or control it and I do want to live it, so I let it be. People are who they are, where they are. The whole is what it is and I am who I am, here and now.

There is no resolution in that but there is great freedom. All I need to do is be, and everything will be as it should be. It’s simple.

The urge to resolve is a resistance to what is, an emphasis of the self over the whole. It is a function of mind, which does not like creative tension or surrender.

Mind likes control and the sense that it is not only the centre of the universe but the omnipotent container of everything! When you become aware of it, through seeing your urge to resolve, or any other way, you become conscious.

When you are conscious, you allow the mystery to sweep you with it.

Change

Have you ever considered that life is change, always in the direction of the evolutionary impulse of the universe?

Have you considered that all is absolutely good and that change is always for the even better?

Have you realised that your resistance to it is a misinterpretation of the nature of life, and the cause of your agony?

We get in the way of growth and realisation. Through unconsciousness, we self-sabotage.

We prefer where we are, which is usually relatively miserable, to what beckons mercilessly with the ever dawning now. We resist growth.

Hear that. We continually resist the inevitable, the essence of life. We resist who we are.

Like toddlers asserting the discovery of the word ‘no’, we stay small by trying to be big. We affirm our egos at the expense of our intelligence, happiness and self-actualisation.

Some go large and do it with wars, corporate towers and bold brands. Others are even more ‘successful’ by denying themselves all pleasures. The biggest resisters are passive aggressive.

Surrender to life. Let yourself grow. Allow your wonder to manifest.

Stop denying yourself everything you have ever dreamed of. That is the only real choice.

Resisting your magnificence is a false assertion, a stupid victory, another turn on the recurring cycle of realising that you can truly live without worry.

Ongoing change is the pinnacle of being, and it is happening.

Contentment

There is only one way you will be content in life, and that is to be yourself.

Goals and their achievement, money, status, respectability, power, and everything external will be a painful distraction, a detour.

You will go through it and then still be unfulfilled and eventually find the truth. Be yourself.

Accept and love who you are, as you are. Immediately contentment arises. The struggle with acceptance is one of the biggest yet simplest barriers in the human condition.

Awakened people throughout history have pushed themselves to the very limit to get past their falsities and finally surrendered, at which time enlightenment has descended upon them. Accept and love yourself.

Allow the seed within you, the life force that has you here in the first place, to germinate and bloom. Give it freedom and fertilise it to flourish. That is the other key.

First, be yourself as you are. Second, allow your being to fully be, for a living.

The blossoming and flowering of your being brings the only true contentment.

Sobriety

Life in all its wondrous intensity is best savoured sober.

It is best responded to in a clear headed state.

It is intoxicating enough without the cloudiness of indulgence getting in the way.

It is a matter of life and death every moment and should be addressed with the utmost presence.

I am a sentimental fool by inclination, which can make my living rather romantic. I can see life in rosy hues and seek to do so.

I catch myself injecting legend into every encounter, either positive or negative, with a hunger for the former and default propensity for the latter. It can make for a distorted and unnecessarily rocky ride, plus it is unrealistic.

There is nothing lacking in the real. Romanticising it arises from an egoic need to add personal significance to the story, when there is no need for personal significance or story.

Life is whole, complete and total. As you become conscious of the urge to enhance it, the fictitious and dramatic self subsides, which allows life to reveal its true nature.

Life is clean and crisp, not drugged and drowsy. It is vast and open, yet full.

You are in it but not of it, looking down like the sky while walking barefoot in the sand. When you are aware of the transcendent and the tactile at the same time, life is both overwhelmingly fulfilling and distantly detached. Life is beautifully balanced.

As you mature, your need to sedate or stimulate your experience should subside. To make the most of your living opportunity, grow in presence and let life be what it is.

Stay sober and relish in consciousness all that life has to offer.

Flowering

There are some rose bushes in my garden, visible from my window. They just do not stop flowering!

One after the next, the new shoots rocket from the plant, buds form and explode into fragrant and colourful wealth.

The roses just want to bloom, to flourish. Just as they come like fireworks into the sky, so they go too, losing their thrust and falling away into dust. But before they are gone, more are coming, fresh and abundantly alive.

Life does not stop. It cannot come to an end. It can fall away in one form so that more can find form, but life itself is infinite.

The real you cannot die, you can only keep flowering.

Postponing

Are you postponing your life?

Do you tell yourself that you have plenty of time to do all you want to? Are you using logic to override immediacy?

Logic is a problem! It does not overlap with presence. You are either here now or living in your head.

If you are thinking, you are missing. If you are being, you will move with the moment. You will not postpone.

One moment of being is worth more than many lifetimes of missing. And you are living a lifetime of missing! You are thinking and talking yourself out of living.

You can be here now, so feel it. Seize the moment by filling it. Access the ultimate, the essence in the now and live like there is no other.

It is not a comparison between thinking and being, because comparing is thinking. You are either there or here and when you are here, there is meaningless.

When you are there, here is lost. Be here, be here now.

If you had just one day to live, all the trivialities with which you occupy yourself would fall away and you would do what matters. You would connect with your essence.

So do it now anyway as if you have only the now. You do!

Trivialities are a way of avoiding. They are a postponement. You are choosing the payoffs of martyring your life for being egoic, of choosing to be right rather than happy.

You are putting process above presence. You are missing. You have a handful of arguments but you know it's true.

Postponing your life is not living it or loving yourself, plus it spreads a resistant rather than reverent energy to others.

Love

Love is silent, unspoken. If you are filled with it, you will be quiet.

If you are sharing it with someone, you will not be voicing it. You will both know it, feel it, and be it, but you will not be saying it.

‘I love you’ almost always means something else. It may mean, ‘I want something from you’ or ‘I feel guilty’.

I could also mean, ‘I am scared’ or ‘Please don’t hurt me’.

It seldom if ever accompanies true love. So watch yourself when you say it, and see the process of it.

Then move deeper into yourself until you realise that you are pure love. There you will emanate it and never have to put it into words.

Words and what we have understood to be love both exist on the superficial plane of our awareness, on the circumference. We have lived there as a species and identified with who we are not.

If there are no words for something, we doubt or miss its existence. If we feel something powerful, we try to put it into words to validate it.

But love is the very nature of everything in and around us. It is the eternal, the mystery, the creative force, the evolutionary impulse. Love is the space between everything.

Love is all. You cannot put that into words. If you are in words, you are not in love.

From love you may occasionally use words but those words will have a totally different quality to them. They will be an extra sprinkle of stardust around the adoring and compassionate gratitude filling and surrounding you.

Once you distinguish between process and presence, you are through the gate and on your way home.

Slowing down

Lately I have found myself doing a few things at once.

I have spotted errors in e-mails when I revisit them. I have woken in the morning with a mind as busy as when I went to sleep.

I have found myself caught up in ego, feeling inflated about all the good that is happening rather than simply good.

My false self is trying to make this all about him. He is finding ways to do so because I have been moving too fast and drifting out of touch with my core.

My head has been too full and I have been resident in it. It has been controlling me, rather than taking its rightful place in a balanced being.

My reality has not been radiant, it has been dreamlike. Too much has been happening too quickly and I have not been here now.

I have been craving chocolate! There has been an urge to take time out and another to speed up, and I have been unsure of which to follow.

I am here writing now, which is a good sign. I am writing about slowing down, which is an even better one.

Slowing down, right down, is the solution. There is no need for speed. In slowness, there is presence. In awareness there is grace.

I am finding myself, hearing the birds, breathing the breeze.

Outside it is late summer, not to be missed. There is a stillness about, not to be missed.

Everything is perfect, with no need to rush or push or struggle or doubt or fear, not to be missed.

The here and now is here and now, not to be missed.

Things to do before you die

I often see lists of life experiences to have before your time is up.

There are books and occasional newspaper articles giving suggestions. All of them, though, are things out there, places to go and worldly experiences to have.

None of them address or even acknowledge the ultimate. None of them talk about what’s in here.

This is indicative of the consciousness from which we are emerging. Our lives so far have been about the external.

Amazing as the external is, it is not that important. Without experiencing it from an internal presence, it is largely meaningless.

Outside experiences are like drugs if we have no home inside. They are a substitute, and any highs they bring are sensory rather than spiritual.

What is the Grand Canyon but a reflection if you are empty within? What is the Amazon river if you are not flowing home to your soulful sea?

What is a trip around the world worth if you cannot take the journey into your inner mystery for free?

Why does a men’s magazine feel that it is more important to date an older woman, ask for a raise and catch a fish than to discover your true self?

Why does it encourage readers to do reams of silly things and leave out the only one that is real?

We all know why! The publishers and readers are lost. Idiots. Sad but true.

I say there is only one thing you should do before you die and that is be yourself. Swim into your inner depths and explore who you really are.

Find yourself. Find presence and allow it to fill your life. Then you will not have wasted it.

Be blissful and all you do in the world will be a bonus.

Energy

Your energy is your own. It belongs first to you.

If you choose to give it, wonderful, because energy in motion is love and life. But first you must feel it for yourself.

I am back to writing. I have been working with clients for the last week, thriving on different aspects of what I do, and so I have not been disposed to being a writer.

With all the doing and interacting has come a fatigue that brings me back to quiet solitude. Here I find myself writing again.

If I do not write, my life goes awry. If I am not in the space for writing, I need to get back to it quickly because it has become central to my well being.

In fact, the space in which I write is well being. It is this space that I take out into the world and that reaches out to people.

I am back where my energy is my own, mine to merge with and enjoy. I am my best company.

When deprived of my own resources, I begin to give from the surface. This is exhausting and a sign that I am starting to run out of reserves. I need to come home and be with myself again.

My energy is my own. It belongs first to me. I must feel it for myself, which I am doing.

Time for breakfast and a quiet day.

Can you feel it?

Can you sense that there are different dimensions to your being? Tune in for a moment.

Can you see that there things out there? Things to do, things to think about. There seems to be an endless stream of things needing you.

Can you feel that you are not only on the level of things, of form? There is something behind that.

Can you become aware that you are really just consciousness? Your consciousness ‘in here’ is the backdrop to the things ‘out there’.

When you stay in touch with your consciousness, you do not get lost in things. You do not identify with them or feel that they have taken over your life.

When you stay in touch with the conscious dimension of your being, you maintain perspective. You bring a quality of insight and wisdom to the things out there.

Time opens up and you do not run around in a spin. Synchronicities increase and more happens in the natural flow rather than through your frantic efforts.

You are calmer, more alert, discerning and resourceful. You trust your own and the greater intelligence, which comes through more in what you do.

The way to find the spiritual dimension to your being is to tune in to the space between things. There are the things and then there is the space between them.

You are really the space between. You are really presence. Tune in to the now and find your true self in it, which is synonymous with infinite space.

Things come and go, space is eternal. With awareness of space, you bring a quality of the eternal to the things.

Your work goes to a whole new level and you are much happier and more effective.

Spiritual Growth

You cannot pursue spiritual growth. It is not a goal.

If you make it into one, you miss it. It then becomes an occupation for the ego and spiritual growth happens beyond ego.

It is not an achievement. It may take tremendous and sustained work, careful attention day by day throughout your life, yet it is not an accomplishment. That, too, is of the ego.

Spiritual growth may be the essence of your life but it is not of your doing. It happens of its own accord.

The more it happens, the less you are there. The more you surrender, the more it happens.

When your spirit is thriving, you are at one with it, not separate, and so there is no ‘I’ and no ‘me’.

All you have to do is get out of the way for spiritual growth to happen. It is inborn to flourish and most of what we know as life or living is merely us getting lost in trivial pursuits.

These trivial pursuits then also become part of spiritual growth, albeit indirectly. The more lost we get, the greater potential there is to rediscover the truth.

The more agony we induce by being separate, the greater the possibility becomes for a breakthrough to oneness through presence.

Spiritual growth does not result from fasting, abstaining and depriving. It comes from being natural, total and in tune.

It does not arise from ritual, chanting, following someone or obeying. Trying these things is just a detour on the way back to yourself, which is where spirituality lives.

Spirituality is not belief, it is being, here and now.

Ideals

Why do we have ideals? What function do they serve?

Ideals are not good! They are created by the mind, the most superficial and least mature part of our being. They are at the root of misery.

People who say that we need ideals to grow and improve ourselves are wrong. Our capacity to grow is inborn, there is no need to do anything about it but let it take its natural course by living freely and joyfully.

Each human is a seed full of potential that will manifest if they are allowed and encouraged to be themselves.

People who believe in ideals do not believe in people. Mental constructs are their gods and they see themselves and others in a negative light relative to these. Their view is that people would be lazy, useless and destructive if not given social or religious guidelines.

The opposite is true. Social structures destroy the individual. They put the mind and the past above the soul and the present. Their effect is to undermine innate intelligence and beauty and limit the natural growth we are all here to experience, enjoy and share with everyone else.

Ideals create a gap between who we are and who we ‘should’ be. The bigger the gap, the bigger the pain.

Bliss comes from acceptance and integration. It comes from growing naturally, vibrantly and freely, and from love of who we are.

Why not drop your ideals and be yourself?

Rain

It is a Tuesday morning in January. The summer solstice has passed and the cool hint of approaching winter has been in the air since.

The tide has turned. It is melancholy in midsummer with the promise of reprieve from too much magnificence.

My doors and windows are wide open and outside the grey sky is pouring down. The music inside is the perfect accompaniment. I am so moved.

Rain brings joyful scents and stirring moods, soaking the earth and my soul with adoration. Music distills from the same place, precipitating like blessings from the eternal.

Birds are back on the lawn now that the sky water has subsided, celebrating the bread I put out for them, flapping, hopping and chirping colourfully, almost as happy as me.

And the music, oh, the music!

Sometimes you can write like rain, for no reason at all.

Originality

Are you being original in what you say and do? Are you being yourself?

It is easier said than done. There, I’ve just used a cliché.

Language is an external construct that we learn and then use with our personal voice, and so it is not truly original. But it is prudent to use language consciously and to speak truthfully.

To articulate your experience your way, you need to pay attention. You need to be alert to pressures of conformity and collective thinking.

Are you a clone? Are you picking up sayings because someone else, who picked them up like the clap, is slinging them around? Cute as they may be, they may not be you. Woo hoo! They may feel fun but do you just use them to impress? But I digress...

No, I don’t! That’s another right there that many people use in their writing. Why digress, especially in written form? Why then admit to it instead of editing the detour out? Why think it’s funny?

Maybe the first person who said it was ingenious and hilarious, but on every other blog? Rather find your own voice.

Tune in and speak sincerely. Write the real thing. Make it a meditation. Presence and spontaneity draw you towards originality and thinking takes you away from it.

Be aware of the superficial self and its propensity for mimicry. Let it go, and go deeper.

Feel what you feel and let words find themselves for expressing it. Say those instead. Why? Ooh, that’s one of my least favourite!

Writing and speaking are living art, make them original.

Returns

Life is not a business. Living is not a trade.

The important things have no value and are at the same time priceless. So if you understand them in terms of exchange, you miss their essence and make them mundane.

If you give love and expect something in return, it is not love that you give and it is not true giving.

If you do things because you want something back, you are living an ego-based existence, dependent on other people for your fleeting happiness.

You are mired in manipulation. Everything in your life becomes conditional. And that’s no fun!

It makes you just a merchant, market-bound and missing the natural wonder. Tallying is your religion and feeling cheated an inevitable consequence.

That, of course, makes you prone to sneaking a little bit extra here and there for yourself. And why not? You aren’t getting anything true or beautiful from the transaction.

Next thing death comes and it doesn’t do business, it just declares you bankrupt. Everything breaks even in the end and if you didn’t realise that along the way and live for the miracle not the money, you missed out with no refund.

If you tried to conduct your relationships as an enterprise, you realise that you let those pass you by, too. Most of all, your inner wealth went untapped.

Ironically, when you live with unconditional love, giving for the sheer joy of it without expecting anything in return, and being happy and fulfiled in your own being, the harvests are boundless.

Life’s a celebration not a struggle, a dance not a deal.

Your calling

Your calling is unlikely to come out of something you already know.

We try to solve our situations with the known, but that is such a small piece of what is. Our calling merges with what is, but it emerges from the unknown and the unknowable.

Our ability to live fully is in our ability to stop churning through the known and to surrender to what is beyond it. You calling is calling from beyond.

I am listening to mine. I have no idea what it is. It is deeper than my current awareness, unfathomable to me yet accessible. I am listening.

I am clearing the deck of my little ship and letting the oceanic depths of my being speak to me. And I am listening.

Hearing happens when speaking stops, when the noise dies down. There is a gap between thoughts where the whole of existence suddenly speaks in silence.

It fills you with such tremendous insight, inspiration and joy that doing becomes absurd. All that feels appropriate is being fully alive and spreading consciousness. You become a fountain of beauty.

Your calling is something new. It may express itself using the tools you already know and have, but it has no form at this point.

It is being born, coming into manifestation. Can you feel it? Dig deep and be, stop thinking and feel.

Your calling is in your being.

Stories

How you feel about your life is largely a function of the story you tell yourself. This is living unconsciously, which makes you a character in a drama, the victim of narrative.

Social mythology would have you understand yourself in terms of the tale others tell you and you subscribe to, which is not unfounded, but you are not really that.

On one level, the sequence of events are a story playing itself out and we are each on the journey of living it through interpretation. On a deeper level, we are just consciousness.

Stories are not present, they are in the mind, understandings comprising the constructs we have gathered from society. When you are in your story, you are not here now.

It’s like being in a cinema watching a movie. You are following the story but it is just projected light making a certain sense on your inner screen. The here and now - the seat you are sitting on, the darkness of the room, and the person sitting next to you - is not in your field of attention.

Most of the time, most of us are absorbed in an emotionally charged drama that is hardly real, while reality surrounds us just out of sight. Have you ever turned around while a film is playing and looked at the people sitting in rows? They are transfixed by fantasy, riding a rollercoaster of identification with illusion.

In the cinema, they are escaping real life and living vicariously through a fictitious character. In the realm of narrative, what they would call real life, they are doing the same thing! The fictitious character is the false self they feel is them.

Real life is outside the story, in the present. It is detached from drama, which is still there but not dominant. The conscious self is not lost in identification with the illusion.

When you access the present, it frees you from attachment to the story and its histrionics.

Space

Space is spirit. Life is not in things but in the space between them.

The solution to problems is in accessing the space in and around you. The key to being yourself and connecting with others is in space.

So first, access the space everywhere. Look at the room you are in, it is essentially space. What makes it a room is the room in it. The walls and roof create a form but it is the nothingness that makes up most of what is, or isn’t there.

When you become aware of the space rather than the things, you invert your attention, which makes you available to what is possible rather than what has already formed.

Second, give yourself space. We strangle ourselves with tension, anxiety and expectation. Let go of that and allow the space that is within you to be.

You are not the molecules that comprise your body, you are the emptiness between and inside them. You are not your personality, you are the mystery. Sit with that.

Third, give other people space. They have been beaten into submission their whole lives and denied freedom to be who they are, and you know exactly what that is like.

From your awareness of space, extend that gift of the eternal to them. Let them be, be themselves with you.

When you feel the space that makes up everything, you open to the wonder of who we really are.