Joy goes to work for you when you release it! Start your week off with this “Joy Bomb” from SoulPancake, and let yourself smile. The powerful energy of expressed joy is a magnate for like energy. May this small moment of joy grow exponentially in your life.
One more for good measure:
My friend, and wonderful artist, Greg Turiya Liotta shared this incredibly simple and lucid piece by Nithya Shanti via social media recently. The moment I read it I knew I had to pass it on. The understanding demonstrated in the following piece has the power to transform individual lives, as well as our human community. May it bring you the peace and clarity that it did me.
“Five Biggest Virus Thoughts of Humanity:
1) I am not good enough yet
(I am imperfect and behind schedule)
2) We are all separate
(Races, religions, cultures, beliefs and species, divide and separate us)
3) There is not enough for everyone
(People are greedy and resources are limited)
4) There is so much more to be done
(Our to-do list is endless and seems to never get done)
5) I am here to work hard and survive
(Life is a serious, dangerous place)
Notice how each of these thoughts feel in your being. If it tightens, stiffens and contracts you at any level, it indicates that your inner being is telling you not to believe these lies!
Five Powerful Antidotes to these Thoughts:
1) I am enough
(I am perfect and endlessly improving)
2) We are all one
(Like fingers in a hand and waves on an ocean, we may appear different, but we are all made of the same one substance and are throughly interconnected and interdependent)
3) There is plenty for everyone
(There is enough for everyone’s needs, deep down everyone just wants contentment and our creativity and resourcefulness is unlimited)
4) There is nothing to be done
(Our ‘to-be’ list is always complete and everything in nature happens spontaneously, by itself, at the right time)
5) I am here to play, thrive and have fun!
(I don’t take life so-o seriously, for I know I’ll never get out alive! When I am having fun, everything easily gets done)
Now notice how each of these thoughts feel in your being. If it calms, relaxes and expands you at any level, it indicates that your inner being is telling you that this is closer to the truth.
Remember:
“What the thinker thinks the prover proves.” This means any thought we repeatedly think will start to appear self evident and true to us. Our outer world always matches our inner perceptions.
So if you have been habituated to any of the virus thoughts, these antidotes may not appear very convincing. However if you say them to yourself until you begin to feel them in your heart and do so everyday for a month, you will certainly experience a beautiful shift and your outer experiences will mirror these improved perceptions.
The Practice:
So put your hands on your heart, look at yourself in the mirror and say this aloud everyday:
‘I am enough’
‘We are all one’
‘There is plenty for everyone’
‘There is nothing to be done’
‘I am here to play, thrive and have fun!'” (Nithya Shanti)
It is common to tell someone to, “take a deep breath,” when they’re on the verge of becoming distraught. This next advice goes far beyond well wishing and explains how the breath can actually work for you in times of trial:
“The wonderful way of charging yourself with nectar is just by breathing. Breath is our life. Breath not only builds up the body, it also builds up the mind. If you regulate the breath, you have regulated the mind. To give an example: Suppose somebody looks at you and uses a very bad word. The person used nothing but a sound, but you got really disturbed. You become angry. Just a little agitation of the mind agitated your whole body. And what happened to your breath? That is the secret. The agitation of the mind brings agitation of the breath. So take the clue and say, ‘To calm the mind, calm the breath.'” (Swami Satchidananda)
Today I slept extremely late. Having a day free from work and obligations is a beautiful thing and I usually relish it. But today, instead of enjoying the time off, I decided to make a big “to-do” list to keep unsettlingly at the forefront of my mind, while feeling completely unmotivated to accomplish any of my tasks. I kept wishing I had the motivation to get things done while I actually had the spare time. At the same time I felt nervous knowing that if I didn’t complete my “to-do” list today, I would be in a panic later on when I would be busier.
Does this sound at all familiar? Have you ever woken up in a funk? Have you ever wished you could just feel better or feel more motivated?
This morning, in my day-off funk, I decided the least I could do was watch some videos on YouTube in the hopes that something inspirational would pop up. If you’ve ever watched an Eckhart Tolle video, and if you read this blog regularly you most certainly have, you will know that each video starts with the sound of a bell, a high-pitched “ping,” which is coincidentally now the iPhone alert for a text message.
The second I heard the “ping” I realized what I had been doing all morning. I was hoping that at some point the feeling of motivation would overtake me, and I’d get up and take action. I was waiting for this feeling to happen. But feelings don’t just fly through the ether and enter in through your ears. They are created and experienced from within your very self.
All morning I was waiting for an emotion to happen to me, when the only way to feel that emotion was to create it myself. Waiting to feel motivated is a trick. It won’t happen. You have to make the decision to invite that feeling forth within yourself. The good news is that this is not as big of a task as it may seem.
Feeling the way you want to feel only takes one small step in this one moment you are experiencing. That small step may be washing your face and brushing your hair, or going to a cafe to get some tea or coffee, or searching YouTube for an inspirational video.
With that being said, I now relinquish my big “to-do” list, and am finding my motivation right here with this one task of typing words on a keyboard. The next step will take care of itself; the next task will happen in the moment that it happens. Until then, I will work on creating the way I want to feel in each small act.
Understanding that emotions are created within, and choosing which emotions you want to feel, are the first steps to getting out of a funk. I invite you to make that choice with me. What inner feeling do you want to cultivate today?
Eckhart Tolle has a “secret formula” for navigating the myriad of changing forms we call life. I’m going to give it away, even before the video: what is is. Ok so the formula is no secret, it is pretty obvious that this moment is how it is. Such a perspective could not be more basic. But when you actually feel that “what is is” a momentous transformation takes place. You have allowed your experience to be as it is, and in surrender have placed yourself at the seat of power. You can now witness your situation and allow the highest potential response to emerge from that awareness. Burden and effort are replaced by ease, spontaneity, and creativity. In the following video Tolle offers how to enter this state in any given situation:
I rarely watch television news, but that wasn’t always the case. For one year in college I was a news junkie. Throughout that transformative, yet tumultuous, year in my life, I watched hours of news programming each day.
This was partly a form of comfort. While immersed in the news, the voice in my head was temporarily replaced by that of the news anchor. Instead of learning about the nature of my mind, and the suffering created by thought, I was trading in an unsatisfactory identification with my life situation for a new identification with the stories on the news.
The energy of past pain, the pain body, that is strengthened and experienced anew by the energy of current suffering, was awake within me and relished this new identification with news stories. After all, those stories carried the same low frequency energy of the past pain; they were its new lifeblood.
A few nights ago I felt compelled to watch Anderson Cooper 360. After hearing several stories and endless commentary I realized why news commentary is often detrimental and unhelpful to the situations they discuss.
What do Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, and even local news have in common? They all consist of people discussing the ins and outs of other people’s situations. To the ego life is a mental screen of thought. Yet, real life is that which is felt, witnessed, and experienced by an individual. The surest way to pass on those uniquely experienced and understood life lessons is to share from the depths of your own experience, or as a commentator to reflect on your shared human experience.
When we hear commentary trying to assess, label, and judge a situation we get further and further away from any real meaning. Commentators transform into voices identified with mental positions, and are no longer engaged in a discussion about a real human being’s unique life experience. News commentary is the collective ego, strengthening the ego in all those they debase to a mere story.
What is really going on in any given situation can never be fully understood. Without that felt realization, news commentary will continue to be void of conscious awareness, ignorant of the beings it has turned into objects, and continue to strengthen the collective human ego.
Full disclosure, I am writing a commentary on why the current state of commentary is unhelpful. While I attempt to offer the best and most honest areas of my current understanding, I too know the excitement and strong appeal of purporting opinions on the lives and actions of others. With that in mind, I acknowledge the state of the exchange of ideas that we are currently experiencing in this day and age, which I am not separate from, but wholeheartedly envision a world of communication with a remembrance of the unity and profundity of each human being.
When studying poetry in college I often heard, and posed, the question, “what does this mean?”
One of the more commonly frustrating aspects of poetry is that, as a reader, it is natural to want to know the meaning of a poem when the meaning can be fluid and not obvious. This begs the question, what is the meaning of poetry altogether?
It was only through the act of writing poetry that I began to truly understand the answer to that question. More intelligent and creative poets are able to articulate their answers exquisitely, and while I cannot yet satisfactorily answer that question through prose I nonetheless have the understanding, the essential first illuminating step that precedes a verbal explanation.
What does this have to do with spirituality? Like poetry, spirituality can seem elusive, vague, and unsatisfyingly fluid in its meaning. But just as the act of writing a poem can help a person understand the meaning of poetry better than any cerebral exercise, the practice of spirituality is the basis for gaining a real understanding of the meaning of that word. In the following video Eckhart Tolle beautifully articulates where the true meaning of spirituality can be found:
What runs through your mind five minutes before sleep? I used to be in the “can’t stop my mind from racing so I can’t sleep” club and am very relieved to have stepped down as a member many years ago. Even if you don’t have a problem falling asleep at night your thought pattern right before sleep is affecting your waking life more than you may have realized. Sleep is the time where our subconscious mind reigns. We go back to the spacious ether from whence we came for regeneration, and emerge with fresh life force energy each morning.
I recently finished reading Dr. Wayne Dyer’s Wishes Fulfilled, which I cannot recommend enough, where he talks about the ways in which we train our subconscious mind with the thoughts we have right before sleep. The subconscious mind is the deep end of the mind, which contains all that we have learned and programmed ourselves to know automatically, like driving a car, riding a bike, or answering “Well, and you?” when someone asks how we are. The subconscious mind acts through us without us having to vocalize the instructions with thoughts. The actions prompted by the subconscious mind creates the majority of our experience. Dr. Dyer calls it our “automatic pilot.”
So what is important about the five small minutes before falling asleep? According to Dr. Dyer, “In this brief portion of your day, you are going to tell your subconscious mind how you feel and what wishes God (the universal one subconscious mind) is to fulfill upon awakening from your deep slumber. This five-minute segment of time in your bed, about to enter into your subconscious and marinate for the next eight hours or so, is the most crucial segment of your entire 24-hour day,” (Dyer 136).
I am not taking Dr. Dyer’s word for it. I’m going to embark on a 30 day before-bed challenge, in which I use the last five minutes of my waking day to imagine my wildest dreams and assume the feelings of those dreams as if they were already my reality. Will this change what my subconscious mind manifests throughout my days? Will those positive emotions merely cause pleasant dreams, or will they permeate my waking experience?
I encourage you to join with me on this 30 day before-bed challenge, and see how five minutes can change your whole reality. It may be helpful to make a list of the thoughts and emotions you will fill your mind with before bed, and recite them to yourself each night right before sleep. If nothing else, this nightly ritual will surely help those of you still in the “can’t stop my mind from racing so I can’t sleep” club to resign your membership and embark on your new journey in the “wishes fulfilled” cohort!
There haven’t been many days in the new year as of yet, but this video deserves the title, “Best of 2014.” Pema Chodron can save us all years of heartache and hard learning through this simple, transformative, universally pertinent answer to “This Lousy World.”
The inertia of my long winter break has a gravity that I find very inviting. It is easy to want to stay at home in my robe and slippers; in fact it isn’t something I can talk myself out of desiring.
Last night I asked myself if there were any job in the world I would feel like going back to after my year-end break. I could not think of one. If Professional Netflix Watcher were a job I would probably be okay with going back to that, and do quite well, but that is not (yet) in the realm of possibility.
I had two extra days off from work because of the bitter cold here in Chicago, and while I relished the prolonged period of rest, I found that my anxiety about returning to everyday life grew. The inertia of stagnation is powerful. This object needed a force to act upon it.
I decided to commit to listening to another round of “Deepak Chopra’s 21 Day Meditation Challenge,” since any step forward would begin to create my future. While my winter break mentality still lingers quietly in the periphery of my consciousness I can act upon my own state of being by taking just one small positive action at a time.
There is nothing too flashy or exciting about spiritual growth from the outside. In fact everything on the outside seems to get a little bit quieter, even slower. The same is true of the inner experience of spiritual growth at times when you are making the quiet effort to regain balance in life. During today’s meditation the voice in my head was noisy, my eyes even fluttered open a few times. There were no flashes of enlightenment or miraculous insights.
This is the quiet road to experiencing the true, inherent fullness of life. It is in these internal pursuits that the real work of your soul, with its experiences, karmic obligations, and purposes can come to fruition. The blossoming of your full potential is made possible by faithful tending to your inner state. When you ask what lesson you are meant to learn in each life experience, you set yourself on the road to “graduation.” You embark on the path of your reason for being.
In this small moment in my life where I am gently being guided back to balance I am reminded that the only necessary step is this one step. What happens next, what will be required of me, is not my business. My business is the present moment.
Whether it is focusing too much on “the big picture” or losing focus altogether that is causing stagnation in your life, choose one small step to gift to yourself. Each conscious attempt truly will be a gift to your life, and the lives of everyone else, whom you are intrinsically connected to.
Let Yourself Learn 