Sitting

At a certain point, perhaps the pinnacle of boredom with life or the pit of despair, or even the height of ecstasy, you may see that all you have been doing, one way or another, is avoiding yourself.

Every activity has been a dodging of who you are. You may have been keeping yourself busy while your life passes you by.

Sometimes you exhaust all avenues and end up with nothing fulfilling enough to satisfy your sinking spirits, nothing real enough to keep you going, nothing convincing enough to overcome the enormous argument that something inside you is having with the way you are living.

Those avenues are all avoidances, beautiful, beguiling and businesslike, and that something inside is who you are.

It knows something that you don't but are bound to find out, even if it is only in your dying moments. It can be put off for a lifetime but eventually you will sit with it.

Perhaps and preferably, you will face it sooner rather than later. You will sit somewhere silently and just let it be.

You will not reach for the TV remote, not get up to work, not drink, smoke or have sex. You will not bury yourself in a book, not clean the house, and not tackle that endless to-do list again.

You will not shop, eat or even listen to music. You will stop talking, stop pushing, stop trying. For once, you will just sit.

Sit with yourself. Let yourself be. Let life be. Do not run away, do not resist.

Do not act on the urge to get going again. Do not. Just sit.

It can feel like hell at first but when you have avoided so much that avoiding feels worse, sitting is all you have left. Then even hell is a welcome relief.

It is the doorway to life that you have turned away from, now opening.

Sitting with yourself is the start.

Discomfort

The more aware you become, the more sensitive you will be, and the more attuned to discomfort you will be, too.

Of course, your relationship with discomfort will then evolve.

When you are unconscious, your discomfort will rule your life. You will act on it without being aware that you are doing so or even feeling it.

You will be identified with and lost in the layer of your being where urges and actions are synonymous. You will also be susceptible to manipulation, deliberate or otherwise, by others, the media, social forces and the like.

Discomfort is part of life and the more accepting you become generally, the more at home you will be with the tides of duality. You will not resist them and you will not be swept by them either.

You will be increasingly centred. The world will carry on around you and you will be the inner silence. The wheel will keep turning and you will be the hub.

From here you will allow energies to move, to build up and release. You will understand discord and euphoria to be different states of the same flow, the same discomfort, and you will attach yourself to neither. You will just watch and allow. You will be free and wise.

The trick with discomfort is to be aware of it first, then to let it go. Nothing lasts forever, or even for very long, so there is no need to panic, fight or try to change what you perceive as circumstance.

Just let it be and let it move through. Immediately as you do, it will feel different and begin to shift. Sooner or later, it will reveal its potential.

See it, sit with it detached from it, and discomfort will turn into transformation.

Watching

Watch yourself. As you go about your day, watch what you do. Be the doer but be the observer, too.

Gradually, the observer will become more prominent until the weight has shifted from the unconscious self to pure consciousness. Watching will put you in touch with presence.

Watch your thoughts. They are not you, although you have identified yourself with them for so long.

They are little impulses of energy, pictures on a screen, mental sounds and words, but they are not your consciousness. They float or flash within your consciousness but you are the container not the contained. You are the observer, not the observed.

Watch your feelings. They are deeper than thoughts but they are still the object when you are the subject. Watch them come and go. Watch them rise and fall, go up, down, left and right.

They are e-motions, energy in motion, but they are not you. They are intense, experientially overwhelming sometimes, but you are the awareness that transcends them. You can enjoy and use them and, through them, know yourself, but you are not their slave.

Watch your habits and learned reactions. Watch your susceptibility to the influence of others, plus the insecurity and self-doubt on which it is based.

Watch the part of you that gets irritable and can be pushed and pulled around by circumstance. See the part of you that seems separate from existence.

Watch more and more, and bring yourself back to watching every time you remember to.

Use opportunities when you have to wait for whatever reason to become more of the watcher and turn 'wasted' time into the most profound spiritual growth.

Watch yourself in everything you do because the one who is watching is the real you.

Surfing

I have never surfed in the sea, so I am speaking metaphorically with no existential authority about the metaphor.

Just thought I would make that clear upfront. If that precludes me from sharing my insight in your eyes, perhaps now is a good time to swim to shore. I am going to take the risk and keep writing.

Writing is, in many ways, like surfing.

You make your way out into the ocean, which is the great universal sea of consciousness. You are vulnerable but, somehow, through surrender to the whole, and through awareness, you are able to stay afloat.

You are alone but all one, both at once. It is not up to you whether you surf or not but you head out and prepare yourself anyway. It’s very likely that sometime you will be in the write place at the write time and a wave will find you.

You know how to surf to some degree, no matter your level of experience, and you are at the same time clueless, also regardless of your ability. It’s paradoxical but creative tension is your territory.

Sometimes something happens immediately, or you even head out seeing beforehand that there is motion in the ocean.

Sometimes there are no swells to speak of, so you wait. You float and feel and let yourself merge with the enormous mystery.

Then, when a wave swells, you spring into action, stand up on your keyboard and, using your skill, instinct, and alertness, and in boundless and humble delight, you ride it home.

Surfing must be like writing in many ways. You can’t predict it, you can’t control it, but you can work with it.

You need all your wits about you but it’s not you who does it. You are always learning. If you think, you fall, so you have to flow. It’s a way of life.

Now and then you find yourself on a crest.

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.