Relaxing

If you're really tense or upset, get it out first. Exaggerate it, swing to the extreme. Express the feeling: cry, scream, punch (the air or a pillow!).

Then, or if you're not too tense, find the tension in yourself, hold it for a second, and let it go. Get in tune with your body, find any strain, feel it for a moment, then let it go. Keep letting go.

Don't interpret the story happening around you and don’t identify yourself with it, just let it be what it is. Watch. Stay alert but relaxed and act from there.

Find the tension and let it go. It keeps coming back. It is creative energy. It is love! Release it and do not resist life.

Find the tension, feel it for a moment and let it go. Keep relaxing as you express yourself. Be creative with the flow.

Keep relaxing into the flow. Allow yourself to dissolve. Let the river of life take you where it wants to go. You are not separate from it! You just think you are. You just think. Thinking is not the river. Letting go is.

Now, when something happens, you have your wits about you. You are present, relaxed and alert. You do what you have to, what comes to you spontaneously, and keep relaxing.

What's really going on reveals itself to you. You see things as they are. You become yourself.

Excitement is energy: find it, feel it, and release it. Creativity takes over. The flow fills you. Act from here, act with it.

Fear is energy: find it, feel it, and release it. Creativity takes over. Act with it. Trust life. Enjoy it! Have fun.

Fear is blocked excitement. Pain is resistance or blocked energy. Life is coming all the time.

Relax into it, you'll love it.

Understanding

Understanding is everything. It is life itself.

You are inseparable from your understanding. The two are constantly becoming one.

The intensity of your growth and actualisation is in this moment, and it all happens in the furnace of understanding.

It does not come cheap, it requires totality. You must feel fully. You must be here now. You must weep and rejoice in a single sentiment. In that crescendo, realisation and love burn you away and leave just purity.

The rest is just thinking about life. Understanding is living it.

Yes, understanding can sometimes drift into sentimentality, which is, of course, no longer understanding but indulgence. It’s understandable because understanding is so scarce the way we live, but sooner or later it swells into prominence and overcomes the over compensation it brings in its early days.

Feeling is its foundation and we have to swing this way and that to settle into the continuous soaring of nothingness. Understanding is a state of nothingness.

You are no longer, just completeness remains. Separation has come home and oneness has welcomed it. The prodigal has become the unpolluted. The self has come and gone and awareness rings into the heavens, silently. Innocence is restored.

Tears can sting and tears can sing. Patience can be forever. Love can take over. Love can burst from all seams and sides and overwhelm. Love can break all bounds.

Love is understanding.

Have you travelled far? Have the roads been rocky? Has your burden been too big to bear? Have the shackles of your ‘self’ brought you to your knees?

Has the sweetness of surrender shown you the way? Are you standing alone on a cliff with arms outstretched, crucified and elevated on the wings of love?

I understand.

Reserved

Remain reserved. Keep what's meaningful and magical to yourself, close to your chest.

Keep it in your chest, in your heart. Bury your beauty there. Plant what's special about you, what you hold dear, in a private place deep in your centre. Let it integrate and grow there. Let it permeate your person.

Reach deeply into yourself. Invest your energies internally, as a process of self-discovery and as a form of self expression.

It's paradoxical but you express the most by keeping it to yourself. If you put it out there, it dissipates, like seeds scattered on barren ground.

When you keep it in, it grows inwards and fills you, plus it then surrounds you as an aura. On the outside, you seem quite commonplace, nothing special or outstanding, because you are not building up an ego, but inside you are very wealthy.

That wealth, everyone wants. You cannot buy it, you cannot steal it, you cannot fake it, and you cannot escape it. That is what we are all here to find and to live and to bring.

But we bring it by being it, not boldly proclaiming it. Big displays simply mask inadequacy. Attempts to convince simply prove a need to compensate.

When you are truly wealthy, there is something supremely understated about it. A hungry eye might not see it but an open one cannot miss it.

You have arrived home. You have no need to try or pretend. You are as you are. Everything takes care of itself.

Remain reserved. Keep yourself to yourself. Enjoy who you are in the greatest love affair possible, the one with you know who.

The romance will radiate around and pull people towards you. Yet they will always remain mesmerised by the mystery.

Your love for life will inspire other seeds to grow.

Scared

My aunt is dying. We are all dying but she is in the frail care section of a hospital just over the hill from where she grew up in the nineteen forties and fifties.

As I looked out of the window of her little ward, I saw a storm over the suburbs in the valley below. Inside the room, my aunt’s energy, her whole life as she lived it, was in the air.

Her choices, still being made, were in her circumstance. The taste of them lingers with me as I write.

I went to be with her as she approaches death. I thought, hoped, that there might be some connection.

“I’m scared,” she said.

My ears pricked up. I looked her in the eye. Hers were clear and light blue. Was she taking the opportunity to speak things through, to open up, to connect as she goes to die? “Why are you scared?” I asked.

“I need the nurses to change my clothes and I’m going to get into big trouble,” she said. “Everything in here is computerised.”

She was not there. She was mad. She was not talking about being scared of death. We couldn’t get onto the level.

She was still obsessed with trivialities. Her feelings were still projected onto trivialities. Death, even, is not going to change her. Death will come when she is not looking. She will not be there when it happens.

I walked around the ward. Not pretty. Nearly dead bodies in beds at dusk. Silhouetted humps in a place to die. Crumpled frames talking to themselves in wheelchairs down dark corridors. Television sitcoms illuminating some rooms. What a place to die. What a place not to be dead yet.

Is she really scared of dying, yet unaware that she is dying, and so scared of just anything, something made up, like the rest of us? Or can she look at life straight on?

Can we turn in to the truth?