Last week I decided to simply quit spinning it around in my mind and emotional center and to simply go within and meditate. In meditation, I did a few main things:
Withdraw attention, energy, and interest from thought and emotion
Return awareness back to awareness itself
Surrender away all else without resistance
The key is not to try and fix ANYTHING, but to literally sit as the Self (conscious awareness itself), and allow everything else to fall away by offering it no resistance.
This may sound like it’s not accomplishing anything, as if no problems are being adequately dealt with, but believe me, this will impact you on an entirely different level…
There’s this idea that surrender means giving up, waving a white flag, and proclaiming our own weakness and sense of inability to accomplish our goals. This is NOT what is meant here. By surrender, I am simply saying to fully allow things to be the way they are and to let go of resistance. Be fully open without closing down.
After maybe 20-25 minutes of sitting in meditation, something amazing opened up and I realized a deeper part of my being, of who I truly am.
Beneath this idea of a little “me” and all the emotions and thoughts and stories it conjures up, there’s this infinitely more amazing world. Read More …
Last night I listened to an Adyashanti satsang called “The Three Phases of Awakening” and in his talk, he brought up some traps which really resonate with me, traps which I’ve found myself getting caught in.
The trap is that once you get a taste of the Absolute and realize that all is perfect, then who cares about the world of the Relative because it’s all perfect anyways. Who cares because it’s all an illusion? At this point, you even have the choice to sit back let the body waste away and not really engage the world because hey, it’s already perfect. What more could I do?
Let’s examine this together and see exactly what’s going on.
Fear of Life
Many of us have a fear of death, yet there’s another fear that’s not talked about as often: fear of life. For some people, fear of life is even more intense than fear of death.
It’s like when we’re born, there’s all these bright lights, people pulling us this way or pushing us that way, lots of commotion, and then we get slapped. What an entrance. Perhaps there’s a part of us that says, “Man, I don’t like life. It was better before I was born. All of the sudden I’m suffering.”
It’s almost like some people don’t like life right from the get-go and this never quite heals.
Escaping Life
This is a very common experience for people since life can be so unpleasant. Some people will try to escape life through drugs, alcohol, music, sex, food, sleeping, or whatever other distraction works for them.
Perhaps people get into spirituality with the hope that when they become enlightened, life will suddenly become magical and wonderful. It will be the solution to all my problems!
So they take this (inaccurate) idea with them, proceed down the spiritual path, and eventually they find themselves abiding in the Absolute reality.
Hiding in the Absolute
In the Absolute, everything is as it is. Perfection is. What we call “real life” is seen to be totally an illusion and nothing really happens. Everything just is. It’s pure beingness. There’s nothing we could do to make life better or worse. Even the Hitler’s and diseases of the world are seen to be part of the perfection.
Now it is true that the world we live in is illusion and ultimately unreal, but there is still an element of experiential reality to it, is there not? It’s like, no matter how enlightened you are, if you get hit in the head with a hammer, it’s still gonna hurt.
The understanding that this world is an illusion and not real is an excellent instructional understanding, but there’s still a sense of practicality that needs to be integrated alongside this understanding. This is the part where we become “in this world, but not of it.” Rather than abiding in the Absolute as a way to escape the life of suffering, we recognize that All That Is INCLUDES the world of the relative, illusion or not. Read More …
I’d like to share with you a simple technique to really connect to your own heart. It’s called heart breathing.
Often times we spend so much time in our heads thinking without really getting in touch with this moment and what’s going on in our own bodies. What are we really feeling? How often do we neglect even our own selves?
Let’s honor ourselves and spend a little time coming to know what feelings are really being experienced just below the surface. Let’s accept this often overlooked area of ourselves.
Heart Breathing
Place both hands over your heart
Close your eyes
Relax your body and your face
Now breathe deeply into your heart and out through your heart
Really connect to and feel your own heart
Do this for 2 minutes. You may certainly notice changes within even the first few breaths, but keep going and allow yourself to be in this space for a longer period of time. Don’t run away or cut yourself short. Remain in this space and offer yourself this gift.
So a question came up recently about looking at the world without mental distortion. How do you look at the world without getting the ego involved? How do you see beauty where there is so much ugliness?
The short answer is to simply look without judging, labeling, categorizing, or adding any sort of mental commentary. Allow awareness itself to be aware and allow attention to rest solely upon the witnessing itself. Thought doesn’t enter into the picture whatsoever. Just look.
I was watching TV with my mom the other night. When she asked me about seeing beauty, awareness kicked into high gear.
I explained that there is a difference between human beauty and divine beauty, human love and divine love.
The mind has its preferences and reasons for why it deems something beautiful or worthy. The mind has its reasons why it loves someone. The reasons are its conditions and thus the love is conditional.
The human definition of beauty requires that something appeals to us for whatever reason. Divine beauty, on the other hand, shines forth when mental commentary is withdrawn. Pure essence becomes visible instead of mere appearance.
I can’t describe what’s being seen, but there’s an intuitive understanding that you’re looking purely at what is. A flower is seen to be just as beautiful as garbage, for literally no reason at all. Just because it is. Thought actually muddles over this realization, distracts from it.
Beyond thought, there is a recognition of the formless Unmanifest expressing itself as manifest form.
Everyone has this capacity, including you. Yes you. There’s no need to try and see this, to learn to develop this skill, or look for what I’m describing because it shines forth automatically when you stop putting everything into little mental boxes and attaching descriptions to and creating stories around what you’re seeing.
Just look, as purely and innocently as possible. Allow the looking itself to do the looking. Awareness itself is witnessing, not you. Read More …
Prayer can be a very powerful activity, both in terms of making things happen in the world, as well as simply opening yourself up to feeling better.
Group prayer seems to be even more powerful, for when two or more people gather together, the total is greater than the sum of the parts. That is, people are even more powerful together than they are individually.
Something you can do with a group of people is to gather together and spend some time in group prayer. Focus on one person at a time and progress around the circle. For each person, say something like this:
“John, we now send you Divine Love. We set the intention for you to have the clarity and wisdom to see beyond your current level in order to understand how to evolve to the next level of consciousness.”
Notice how we’re not praying for the person to somehow be lifted up. Instead we pray for them to be opened to understanding how to better lift themselves up. (Ego transcendence is something you have to do yourself. No one is going to save you. Nothing outside of yourself will.)
The feeling of prayer seems ever more noticeable when others are praying for you. You can actually FEEL the Love flowing into you.
Love energy is transmitted through the heart chakra in the center of your chest. It is sent out from the front of your chakra and received from the back of your chakra. When praying for someone, you intend to send Love out from the front of your heart chakra.
As you open yourself up to receive Love from others, you can literally actually FEEL the back of your heart chakra starting to well up with beautiful loving energy.
To make the prayer even more powerful, hold the TAT pose while sending energy. In short, TAT is a technique allowing you to release emotional trauma. While holding the pose, we’ve found that it’s much easier to open yourself up to the flow of energy. The “stuckness,” so to speak, is much more quickly let go of.
If/when you pray, how do you do it?
What suggestions can you share with us regarding what has been effective in your own personal experience?
I’m sitting outside in the garden now looking around at all the “form” that surrounds me… plants, flowers, trees… cars, homes, bees… statues, stones, leaves…
After a relatively brief meditation session, I opened my eyes and began looking at my surroundings, simply observing without allowing the mind to hop in and insert its commentary and labels. Just looking and allowing all color, form, shape, and movement to flow into my eyes as one seamless flow of light.
Suddenly I realized what I was seeing and burst out laughing.
Underneath all form is a dance of formless energy. Nothing is solid, real, or permanent. What we call physical and tangible is simply a dance of impermanence.
The building blocks of all form is the formlessness of pure non-physical energy.
It’s like this…
Look at this picture. What do you see coming from the light? Smoke. A dance of wispy smoke. Frozen in time in this image, we could look at this smoke and say it has a distinct, definable form. It has a structure, shape, color, and size. In fact, we can keep looking at it and it doesn’t move. It must be permanent!
As we know, however, the shape of smoke is constantly subject to air currents and the flow of all of life itself. It’s constantly moving and evolving. Despite any appearances of form or structure, we know that smoke is truly formless. It has simply takes on the appearance of a particular form in every changing moment.
Every thing you see in life is just like this smoke. It is the appearance of form created by the formless.
Nothing is truly concrete or solid, despite outer appearances.
Look at a growing plant without mentalization and what you see is the dance of formlessness. It is a formless flow of energy temporarily taking the shape of a plant.
Everything in life is like smoke, just moving a little more slowly or more quickly. Some things are physically more dense so they move more slowly. The smoke from a flame is not very dense so it moves relatively quickly. A human body walks around somewhat more slowly. A stone cathedral, which is very dense, changes even more slowly.
Yet given enough time, they will all equally be reduced to dust.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
There is an inherent vulnerability in all form. When we see someone or something putting up a protective shield, be they the thorns of a plant, the anger of a person, or the walls around a castle, we recognize that these defenses are simply the result of “something” being fearful of its own dissolution and subsequently doing whatever it can to solidify its sense of permanence.
Yet what we often recognize as most beautiful in life is that which is vulnerable… the petals of a flower, the breeze over the ocean, the gracefulness of a ballerina, the body of a young woman, the fluidity of a symphony, a sleeping baby, the chirping of a bird, a siren’s song, curves.
Vulnerability is the true strength, for it is in alignment with the permanent impermanence. That which is vulnerable can never be destroyed. It can certainly change forms and evolve, expand and contract. It always will, and recognizing this fact, one may let go of trying to maintain their current state and allow their own light to shine forth from within.
This awareness comes from beyond the mind. The true strength of formless vulnerability can not be seen by trying to look for it. It’s the timelessness of all that is. It’s the gentle touch and the powerful crash. It is that which can not be named, for it is simply just something that is. It exists. You can talk about it, but you can not say what it is.
Its presence arises naturally as the mind goes quiet and stops noisily covering up that infinite vastness.
It is a peace, yet beyond the most infinite peace you can imagine. It is truly beyond all imagination, beyond your wildest dreams.
You can tap into it whenever you wish. It is always there, lovingly awaiting your conscious return.
What do you do when someone offers you a compliment?
An example: I was cooking and the roomie told me that it looked/smelled really good. A couple of thoughts floated through my head. “Yea, I’m an amazing cook.” “It’s just good ingredients.” “Cooking is really big in my family; my mom taught me everything.” “I hope it’s good.” None of these really work for me. Blame a false sense of humility, the ego, or whatever. None of those responses capture what I want to say, “Thank you, God has blessed me with a wonderful family that taught me how to cook and tonight he provided excellent ingredients and gave me the insight to make a delicious meal. It’s nothing, yet everything at the same time. And anyone can do it.” That seems a little much to say, especially if I start doing something similar for every compliment. I think I just said yea and offered some to her. Any help?
Thanks,
J.
My response:
Hey J,
It’s funny how often times when we ask a question, we already know the answer.
Deep down, our hearts always know what to do. What’s needed is not the answer, but the willingness to allow ourselves to be authentic, genuine, and open with people.
Now, as far as what to do, there is no right answer. The mind is always looking to do either this or that and to find the rules of life that says when to do this then that. Every situation depends on circumstances, context, personality, intention, and many more variables. Even if we were to see what someone else does in a situation, such as an enlightened master, for example, their response may or may not be the “best” choice in all similar situations. Thus, it’s “best” to simply listen to your heart and allow it to speak through you.
Simplicity
That said, often times the best thing to do is to simply respond with a genuine, “Thank you.”
It’s not always necessary to explain yourself and all and to give all your reasons for doing what you do. Just be yourself and share Love with others. The other person is taking the advantage of the opportunity to acknowledge you and your unique qualities so give them the pleasure of you fully accepting and appreciating their gift.
In this physical world, the highest frequency we experience is that which is commonly called Love. Interestingly, Love and Appreciation are actually the SAME frequency. So, by responding with genuine appreciation, this is a demonstration of Love.
As for keeping things short, it’s not the Academy Awards. No need to go down the line thanking everyone you can think of. It is certainly true that there is some sort of higher power that works though us, yet a genuine heart-felt thanks is often all that’s necessary. Read More …
You Are Truly Loved features content designed to guide people towards enlightenment, unconditional love, and living a life of joy through Self-realization and proper application of the Law of Attraction.
Many of us have a fear of death, yet there’s another fear that’s not talked about as often: fear of life. For some people, fear of life is even more intense than fear of death.
Prayer can be a very powerful activity, both in terms of making things happen in the world, as well as simply opening yourself up to feeling better.
I’m sitting outside in the garden now looking around at all the “form” that surrounds me… plants, flowers, trees… cars, homes, bees… statues, stones, leaves…
That said, often times the best thing to do is to simply respond with a genuine, “Thank you.”