Hand

How much do you love when you hold a newborn's hand? How overwhelming, powerful and pure is that feeling? It comes from somewhere sincere, not superficial. It isn't considered, budgeted or logical. It is not from the horizontal plane. 

It shoots through you from deep in your core, restoring your sense of the vertical, the veritable, the vital. Holding a baby's hand reminds you of who you are and how to love. It reconnects you with the essential. 

How much do you love when you hold an old person's hand? Brittle and vulnerable, it carries such gentle power, such wisdom, such grace. It has seen and done so much, helped so many for so long. It has touched lots of lives and survived many trials, yet it remains more tender than ever. 

The feeling overcomes you, cuts away all callousness, gives you great knowing of your true nature along with your frailty. It makes you grateful and reverent. It shows you love. 

How much do you love when you look at your own hands? How old are they? How far have they come? Do they contain elements of a newborn and qualities of an aged body? 

Are they still as sensitive as the pads on a puppy's paw? Do they still hum with life force and beauty? No matter the circumstance, vitality endures like a new morning. Freshness is always in the ether. 

You are worthy of your true love. 

We forget how to live and who we are, as the worldly tries to swallow us up every day. When we do have glimpses, we still find it easier to love others than we do to be true and close to ourselves. We have hands and hearts but we lose touch with them, which makes us unwell in the world. 

Loving heals. The way home is to return to love. 

How much do you love when you hold a newborn's hand? How much do you love when you hold an old person's hand?

This is how to love yourself. 

Vision

Where are we going? We are about to find out. Where is the world heading? We are choosing right now.

Who is choosing? That's up to you, to us. Are you proceeding in authenticity and full awareness? The time has come to live a total yes.

Something completely new needs to be born. Are you its birth? If not, you may be dying. Things are certainly changing. We cannot keep going the way things have been misled.

People are waking up. They are perhaps not sure how to proceed or how to speak up, because of fear or feeling isolated, but every single step by every single individual is significant. Your choices are transformation itself. Simply be the new, now.

Don't be afraid to be yourself for a living.

How will this look? You will find out by doing it. You will create it by walking it. You already know in your heart.

You already see clearly around you the nature and consequences of the false. You can see the corruption and the crumbling. Face the facts.

Come from your inner core. Lift the heavy weight of your head and step forward from your soul. Step out of the dark shadow and into your light.

Drop the slavery and prostitution of the past and be uncompromisingly true to yourself in your vocation and your moment-to-moment existence. Drop conformity and realise authenticity.

Don't expect the answers before you take action, let them arise from your courageous and total presence. The new emerges in presence.

Be this vision for you, your immediate loved ones and for all of humanity. Do it for life itself.

Take your stand.

Resolve

You have more resolve than you realise. You will only discover it under duress. 

You will be challenged, beaten down, disrespected, disregarded, exploited, ignored and left to stew in the pain, frustration and self pity. Only when you are fed up enough and pushed past your limits will you dig deeply and find what you have in store. 

Resolve is on the other side of tears. You have to break before you become unbreakable.

In this world, you are going to get bullied everywhere you turn, in the classroom, the boardroom and the bedroom. Used, abused and then blamed as if it was all your doing. 

You were born into subversive slavery and your kids have already been sold. It is a fight at every turn for your dignity. 

It may not be entirely your doing but you are still responsible. Those are the two key words: responsibility and resolve.

People are weak. People are cowards. People are crooks. People are corrupt. People are lost. People are violent. People are unconscious. People are revolting. 

Yet people are supremely strong. People are fearless. People are just living by their highest values at the time. People know in their hearts what is true and right. People are loving and gentle. People are aware. People are beautiful.

You are fully legitimate. You are fully deserving. You are the ocean in a drop, the whole universe in a single cell. 

You have everything within you.

Claim it.

Permission

Being yourself for a living comes down to giving yourself permission. Doing that is a lifetime's work. The issue is there with you every step of the journey. 

What are you allowing? What do you grant yourself? Do you feel worthy? Do you do things for the right reasons? What have you given yourself permission to experience and enjoy in life? How much are you holding yourself back?

Permission is there wherever you turn. What did your parents and teachers allow you to do, think and feel? Who did they let you be? Have you ever had permission to be yourself?

Are you upholding the limits taught to you by others? Are ancestral patterns preventing the actualisation of your individuality? Are you unconsciously telling yourself no?

Are governmental and corporate values defining your life? Have you signed over your power to the system in exchange for a false sense of security? Are you keeping yourself a child by avoiding responsibility? Are you stuck at a juvenile stratum of emotional development? 

Permission clips our wings. Permission puts us in a cage. Permission comes from the outside but then sets in as a prison we lock from the inside. We give power mongers permission to control us. We give ourselves permission to be poor. 

Once you are on the path of being yourself for a living, though, the issue of permission comes boomeranging back and kicks you in the teeth. How can you consciously continue killing your greatest gifts? How can you be true when you are living a lie? 

How can you grow up when you are staying stuck? How can you live the dream if you won't wake up?

Being rich comes down to giving yourself permission.  

Leaving

Getting out of town isn't easy. Getting on a plane isn't plain sailing.

Getting everything ready to go; getting everything organised for while you're away; getting yourself dislodged from routines and comforts; getting your goodbyes said and the dirty work done; getting so many decisions made and so few bags packed with so much in such a short space of time; getting through the roller coaster ride of emotions; getting to the airport on adrenaline; and, getting your threadbare self into that upright seat, is a long list to get through.

You only just make it, every time. It takes some trusty thrust to get over that threshold.

Leaving is seldom light. It carries the burden of endings. It wears the weight of sizable spiritual and emotional work. It holds you down until you work yourself loose and lunge into the new and unknown. Leaving comes at a price. It cannot be taken lightly.

It's like a death; a symbolic and psychological termination; a rushing as time seems to accelerate; a sorting out as you race towards a dwell point in the imminent future. It presents you with issues and insights that you would normally not notice. It stirs up tensions you usually gloss over.

It puts you in touch and makes you sensitive. It makes you more alive. Leaving takes you along with it as you get sucked through a porthole into...

You have to leave and find out.

Dreamy feeling

You know that state that overcomes you, unannounced and impossible to conjure, where you seem suddenly to slip into a dream? 

A woman sits nearby and the scent of her perfume swirls into your nostrils with the first breath, then with the second and deeper inhalation it fills your whole body, turning it into a dreamy tingle, as if you are in a trance.

It's a feeling you used to have often as a child, one of the great pleasures of being alive. You disappear into it, becoming that scent and the deep self that it speaks to. The presence of something softens you, dissolves you into your being.

It reminds you of how you feel when you are between worlds, in the womb, falling asleep or surfacing. It's like twilight or first light. You close your eyes and savour it or stare transfixed, gazing into inner space.

You feel. It's a state of feeling. Like in a dream, feeling is foremost. It's as if an angel lover is caressing you, a touch is transporting you. Something is reaching out from the ether, reaching into your essence.

You are the interface between everything and nothing. You are a momentary membrane, a wisp of warmth, the perfume of the great mystery, a scent in the air.

You are eternal.

Promised Land

She invites me to her villa for martinis on the pool deck
To meet her twin sister and to work out if they're Poles or Czech
I say I'll think about it and she slips a scented envelope
Through her tanned cleavage and down past my periscope

Right into my hands
as the sun starts to rise over the promised land

Feeling fresh and cool and driving slow and gently
I leave home in my Jag and arrive there in my Bentley
Their butler sees me coming and is waiting in her skirt and lace
Her legs and her stilettos lead me up the stone staircase

Right into their hands
as the sun starts to set in the promised land 

Summer Spirits

A drop of water on a leaf in the moonlight
Is dancing naked in the night like an insight
Wet air after raining all day
Summer spirits are high

Silence chimes out signifying midnight
Soft sheets and some writing by lamplight
Joy hovers like a moment at play
Summer spirits' lullaby

A hot breeze fans the flaming sunlight
Blows shade, spellbound by the Fahrenheit
Roses reach, giving scent away
Summer spirits are why

Ready

Are you ready for personal growth? That's the only real question to ask.

You need to be standing steadily on the precipice of profundity, ready to surrender all to the ultimate, which keeps on unfolding and revealing mystery after mystery.

The revelation is in the surrender of the self. This is personal growth: disappearance.

You need to be ready for nothing else. All else is a phantom. Caving inwards, crumbling away, is closer to home, where the real happens. Out there is illusion, in here is real.

The work is in here. The work is finding the form, the solid, the shape, and letting it go. Whatever has structure within, is being reflected without. Work within, observe and release it, and you transform within and without.

Within is closer to home than what's out there, but it is still not home. Beyond the walls of inner structure and obstruction, beyond the real, is the truth.

Here, there is nothing. No self, no structure, only space. No sound or voice, only silence. No movement, stillness.

Still, silent space hums with eternal sound, vibrates with infinite energy, and brims with fullness. It is home.

Be ready every moment to see and surrender what keeps you from yourself.

Be ready for the discovery of who you are.

Bread

We were walking back to the hotel this evening in downtown Tehran, after viewing it from the snow down the sides of the mountain. The city was swarming, an avalanche of lights.

I stopped to look into a little window - a hole in the wall, really - about four foot square, to see that it opened into a bakery. Inside there was a tray of balls of unbaked bread being rolled by a man in flour-coloured clothes. Out of the window, another baker was leaning and calling to us.

Our host approached him and bought an oval loaf of flat bread, still warm from the oven. She passed it to each of us to tear off a strip. It was crispy and slightly salty, with a sprinkling of sesame seeds. Plain and perfect. I tore off a second strip as we strode through the sights and streets.

The bread and the moment were everything. To call them the simple things in life would be an understatement, as it would be to call me wealthy in my experience of them.

We can live by the moment alone.

Sharing

Whatever you are is what you will share.

The work to be done is on ourselves, then whatever we share has the quality of our highest selves at that time. The work is not out there, it is in here. Out there follows.

You will see, if you are sensitive, where someone is coming from. They may be very polite, charming, but you can sense their motives. Their intentions are in their energy, their aura.

They are ambitious, or greedy, or needy, or subversive and cunning. They may be saying all sorts of seemingly beneficial and helpful things, but they are really sharing where they are coming from. A clear eye can see.

What are your motives? What energy do you bring to bear with your presence? Are you at home in yourself?

You share what's there.

Available

Don't seek, make yourself available.

Whatever is ideal will come to you, be ready. Be aware, present, able to respond.

The work is on yourself. All wonders pour into you when you are available.

When you seek, you leave the moment in search of some fantasy. It may be a beautiful dream, a profound vision, but pushing towards anything pits you against the way things are.

Rather bring yourself back into harmony with what is, and look. Everything is arriving, no seeking is required.

Be available, that's all. Take care of the area beneath your feet, the space you take up, and don't interfere with anything else. Attend to your consciousness, no more, no less.

Concern yourself only with your domain and get that right. This includes becoming available. The effect is readiness, optimal occurrence, and total experience.

Your conception was not a goal you set. It happened. Your birth was not your achievement, attributable to your ego, it came to pass.

Your life does not belong to you, it is an act of grace. So stay graceful and flow with it.

Some self-styled ambition can never surpass surrender. The part can never outsmart the whole. Be the whole. Be available to all of it.

The more available you are, the more everything arrives.

Real

Being real is sexy. People love it.

It's an art, of course, and not as rough as it may sound. Being direct means being discerning as an extension of being real. It speaks to the hidden urge in others for authenticity, and it seduces them with its artfulness, too.

People long for intelligent communion. When you express yourself sincerely, you speak to them - and for them - by putting purity onto the table. This feeds the flow of self-insight and articulation.

It's a turn-on for everyone locked in a world of appropriateness. They feel the liberty of release and the thrill of openness. Tension turns to tingling.

There may be some ambivalence on the threshold, some turbulence during transition, but steadiness is assured. Nature will prevail in its wild and windy wisdom, a thunderstorm of sensuality, a paradox of perfection, at once spiritual and physical.

People are afraid and aroused, beguiled by the bridge, succumbing to their need for seduction, stepping out of their shadow ...

Dwelling on their dew point, they are drawn into the dance of transformation. They want nothing more than to surrender to spiritual precipitation.

Being real is an irresistible invitation to allow the evaporation of their sense of separation.

Alchemy is in the air.

Spring

Warm sun
Cool breeze
Bright colours
Happy sounds
Sweet scents
New music
Frisky feelings
Magnificent days
Slow motion
Few words

Wonder

The degree of wonder we experience is inversely proportional to the knowledge we have.

The more we know, the heavier we get, and the less able we are to engage life directly. What we see, then, is what we think, not what is.

Knowledge is the enemy of awareness, and a false substitute. It gives the impression of understanding and it closes the consciousness.

Real knowing is an openness and realisation that all is unknowable. This brings understanding and insight, plus the capacity to see, which just brings more wonder.

Understanding is not knowledge, it is awareness. It is a disappearance of the self, a merging into the mystery.

In innocence, we become wonderful.

Inconvenience

Pause when inconvenience appears. Two things have happened.

First, an opportunity has presented itself; and second, your preconceptions have been confronted. So pause and, in that gap, move through your reaction, then explore what awaits you.

Your reaction is based on existing understanding, a limited and outdated view, your comfort zone. You don't want that disturbed. You act unconsciously. Some issue is bothering you and you are irritated. But wait ...

When you see that you are reacting and, therein, resisting, you immediately let go of the bubble of bad vibes. Now you see the situation with new eyes. It is not what you interpreted it to be, it simply is. It has presented itself and you accept that. You trust it. There may well be something in it, too ...

So you move into the opportunity openly. You are mindful and conscious as you encounter whatever it is. This is already enlightening because you are awake. That is always primary.

Then, the circumstance unfolds optimally because you are empty, offering no obstacles. And, as it reveals itself, you experience it in alert acceptance. Nothing but more good can come from it.

The inconvenience has taught you about yourself. It has helped you release your inner obstructions to life. So it has been an awakening.

And, of course, it has turned into a path of possibility, an uninterrupted manifestation, for your pleasure.

Staying centred, you effortlessly enjoy the emerging mystery.

Uneasiness

Your problems do not exist outside you, they are within. They are all facets of one problem, one factor.

You are uneasy with yourself. This is the only problem there is.

From uneasiness, we act, and everything is an expression of the inner feeling. Our relationships with the world are uneasy encounters with projections of our uneasiness. And every encounter is an attempt to resolve the discord and settle the anxiety.

But, of course, that never comes to pass. The problem needs to be seen and solved at the root, where the uneasiness arises. There, we realise that there is no problem.

There is only uneasiness. But why? Why are we so unsettled inside ourselves? And how can we calm our inner waters?

There is uneasiness because you are at war with yourself. You feel inferior, inadequate, and you do not look into the feeling. You act it out and try to compensate.

Every action is a compensation. That's why you want to win, to be the best. You want to conquer, achieve, make money, and be famous. You want power because you feel empty. You cannot just be at home in yourself, so you are constantly at odds with the world. It's an endless struggle.

You want to change everything, control everyone, and own the world. And if you did ever attain such things, you would be more miserable than ever! You would then realise that you have gone to the ends of the earth and found that you started in the wrong place on a wasted journey in search of the wrong things. You would have to start again.

So stop right now and start again.

Start with the uneasiness and bore into it. Stop exploring option two, which is the long way round, the lost route. Get down to the root of the only real option and sit with your inner dissonance. Address uneasiness directly. What is it? What is troubling you?

You are unhappy with who you are. You don't know who that is. You cannot simply be. You cannot settle into complete acceptance with no need to do anything, go anywhere, or become anyone.

Your sense of self is synonymous with struggle and searching. That is all that's wrong. Your mind will argue that there are worldly reasons but you know that you are avoiding the issue. You cannot face yourself.

The endeavour to become somebody is really all about avoiding being nobody. And nobody is who we are. Emptiness is our essence. And this emptiness is fullness.

Everything is as it should be. If you can see and accept that, all uneasiness unravels. All endeavour evaporates. There is nothing to run from, nothing to work towards, no fear or desire, no past or future, no problem and no solution. Everything has already arrived.

You are here and nothing more is needed.

Friction

When you are at war with yourself, it generates a friction within you, which is reflected outwards in circumstantial conflict.

The inner friction and outer conflict waste your energy. And you need that energy.

You need energy to change and grow. Just to see things as they really are, you need tremendous resources. In fact, you need all of your attention in the here and now. You need to be total. That brings transformation.

Life as we have known it in human history has split us within ourselves. We have not been allowed by society to be who we are, and to grow into our potential. We have had our authenticity ignored and invalidated, and a host of ideals imposed on us.

So we have never tasted what it is to be natural. We haven't even begun to bloom. We are against ourselves, which uses up and wastes almost all of our life force.

To regain access to our energy, we need to see and accept ourselves as we are, the good, the bad, and the ugly. We need to observe the beautiful and brutal within us, with no judgement, no preconceptions, and no avoidance.

Our full attention needs to be brought into the present, and the light of this awareness needs to be shone into our being in one total act of seeing. No time delay, no thinking, no analysing. No steps or sequence. Complete clarity in an instant.

Only this way can we move from the energy-sapping ego to a state of insight. We go suddenly from split to whole. We move from being wasted to being integrated. Here, a new energy can be felt.

This fresh resourcefulness is our natural state that we have lost touch with. Reconnection results in freedom from conditioning and psychological bondage.

It aligns us with the greater intelligence, dissolving the separate self and mobilising the flow of unifying energy.

This energy, we can call love. We can call it truth. It is live-wire awareness, a state of unclouded consciousness. In it, we begin to function as we are intended to.

Internal friction is gone, so outer conflict cannot continue. Energy is no longer lost, so we are no longer empty. Cleaned out by total clarity, we are at home in ourselves. Finally, we feel full, brimming with essence.

We are no longer separate selves. Just the whole remains. And with that, intelligent living ensues.

Friction-free, we come to be.

You

You are part animal, part human. The animal is your history, the human is your potential. We are all in an internal struggle between the two, and this inner conflict is manifest all around us.

We are both base-level beasts and beauty from the beyond. Within us and around us, there is brutality and divinity.

The dissolution of this conflict lies in the individual, in you and me. We want to shed our animal heritage, because it isn't working for us and the world, plus we know what we hold within.

We know we are one with all existence. We know we are filled with love and joy. We want to get on with ourselves and one another, and share our humanity. We dream of it, long for it. We are aching with affection, bursting with light.

But we are still fighting, with ourselves and one another, openly and subversively. We are racked with rage, caged by guilt, and inhibited by instinct. So we pretend to be good while acting badly, living as hypocrites, hurting and betraying ourselves and each other in a state of masked anguish. It happens in our hearts, our homes, our businesses, and our politics.

The stakes have got so high now that we can take no more. The cracks are chasms, gaping gorges. Leaders are liars, systems are crimes, and the planet is a ball of pain. It is also a glowing orb of possibility. Each of us can relate to how it feels. You can relate.

Never before has the need been more urgent to live our potential. Never before has the inner anguish been more pressing, and the outer situation more obvious. Never before have we been turned in on ourselves with such ruthlessness. Never before have we been violated to such a degree by the powers that be.

It is time to harmonise ourselves as individuals and become whole. We are each responsible for our consciousness. The outer will continue to reflect the inner, so the world will heal with our awakening. You can feel it happening. Everything is pushing you into your core, your truth.

Scientists can discover and explain the mechanical workings of life. Poets can open the chambers of you heart and lead you in. Mystics can clear the cobwebs and show you the way to the light. But only you know.

You know.

Situations

It can feel, at times, like you are lost in the deepest darkness, making your way who knows where through the thickest fog.

The ground beneath your shaking feet is shifting. You are emotionally overwhelmed and entangled in externals that draw you away from yourself.

Just to know where to step next, you have to find yourself first. Everything depends on you knowing who you are so that you can proceed. You are searching.

You have always been searching, one way or another. Choosing to believe in a religion or a political leader is an easy way out, a pretence. It gives you a false sense of security, which means you can go off to other pursuits, to do well in the world.

But deep down, you are still searching and you know it. Believing is not going to help. Only awakening in your own right will make a real difference. You will continue to search until you do that.

Sometimes the search will seem to overcome you. It's as if every false form of security forsakes you. The subliminal quest becomes central and, intentionally or not, you become consumed by it.

That is when you are feeling your way through the fog. Then, your lifetime of effort seems to be in the balance. Everything is culminating, cresting and crumbling.

Moments move from meaningless to momentous, from destitute to divine. Slowly you make profound progress.

In the context of all this tension, situations arise that shift you. All your searching has prepared you and an insight happens. Then another.

Your being quakes into place. Some circumstance synchronises with your state, and you jolt into awakening. You see where you are and who you are in an instant. Everything has been your preparation.

The situation galvanises you. Maybe someone suitable gives you a push. You learn to fly.

You remember who you are.