Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night and find that you cannot stop thinking? Or perhaps you are already awake, just going about your day, and notice your mind won’t stop running in circles? As humans, we are of one mind. We all think. This short video, with Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra, offers enlightening, practical ways to take momentum away from the thinking mind:
What thoughts take you out of the present moment? For me, when I experience thoughts of fear I find it easy to lose focus on what I’m doing, my attention completely taken up by the train of thought. I was listening to Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth today and the following passage spoke so truly that it brought me right out of my thinking mind and into the present moment experience. May it do the same for you:
The most important, the primordial relationship in your life is your relationship with the Now, or rather with whatever form the Now takes, that is to say, what is or what happens. If your relationship with the Now is dysfunctional, that dysfunction will be reflected in every relationship and every situation you encounter. The ego could be defined simply in this way: a dysfunctional relationship with the present moment. It is at this moment that you can decide what kind of relationship you want to have with the present moment. (Tolle)
Today I remember that everything is, and cannot be otherwise. When you’re not attached to a thought in your mind about how your life “should” be, you are free to see and experience life as it really is with peace and equanimity. What is more, life opens up for you when you are open to life.
This means that when you allow your present moment to be as it is, without demanding it conform to your ideas about it, it begins to flow with ease. There are already solutions to any obstacle you may experience. When you allow your present moment to be as it is, you offer space for those solutions to arise. I try to remind myself in moments of stress, that if I let go the power of the universe will run its course, gently carrying me in alignment with my true purpose.
I am so excited to present the second “15 Seconds of Peace” video/music, created by my father, Peter Spero. For me, this small glimpse of stillness helps reset the busy mind back to its natural state of peace. I hope it speaks to you right where you are today:
If there were nothing but thought in you, you wouldn’t even know you are thinking. You would be like a dreamer who doesn’t know he is dreaming. When you know you are dreaming, you are awake within the dream. (Present Moment Reminder, Eckhart Tolle)
The world comes alive the moment the voice in your head ceases. Can you remember any moments in your life when you weren’t thinking? They are usually very memorable, because your awareness of the situation increases astronomically.
What is life like when your attention is not dominated by your thoughts? While it is miraculous, the only way to truly know what will happen, is to try. This video provides the all important “how” for silencing your thoughts:
Thank you Eckhart and Oprah for that wonderful Super Soul Sunday discussion! This next video I’m including as an example of how the direction of your attention drastically changes any situation. In this simple video of a father asking his child questions when she is crying, the principle of anchoring your awareness can be easily identified.
Eckhart taught us ways to shift our awareness from the voice in the head to our inner body. For this child, when her attention shifts from crying to answering a question, she is no longer in the grip of reaction. An adult mind usually has too much momentum to cease when interrupted by a question, which is why anchoring your attention first within the body helps to slow thought.
As I arrived at my place of work this morning I found the street full of huge trucks. It turned out a TV show was being filmed in the neighborhood. As I was walking home I ended up talking to a production assistant, who let me in on some of the woes of filming in residential neighborhoods. In his experience of filming in such locations he has found that people are always complaining, always angry, and always looking to get something for themselves. People want to park their cars outside their houses as usual and complain since they can’t, while at the same time they ask to watch and be a part of the show themselves. One of the most interesting insights from him, was that people always go up to the actors and want pictures, but never actually ask them any questions. All of this got me thinking about the nature of fame, image, and perception.
Why does being famous seem so fulfilling? Why does getting a ton of “likes” on a Facebook post seem important? Personally, I have had that desire for fame, for “likes” on Facebook, and admittedly, I check my blog stats all the time. When I first realized that there was a “stats” section on the blog I thought, “I shouldn’t make a habit of looking at this. After all, how many people read it has nothing to do with what I’m trying to accomplish.” What a noble thought! But to no avail. I still check the stats, and I still get that leap within when people “like” and comment on my Facebook posts. So as I speak to why these things seem so important, it is without judgment, but rather introspection.
When you’re around someone who you think has more than you, the mind will take one of two routes. It will downplay the success of the other person, and come up with reasons why they’re not so great anyway. Or it will go to the opposite end of the spectrum and feel bad about itself, coming up with a barrage of reasons why you, the thinker, are not good enough and should be better (but can’t). That approach to famous people is what I like to call “anything you can do, I can do better.” If the mind can’t come up with reasons why it is better than the other person, it will still manage to gain a sense of superiority by explaining why it is worse than the other person. Good or bad, the mind doesn’t care, as long as it can attach itself to a story.
The other approach to someone who you think has more than you, is to try to get something from them. I call this, “the human ATM.” This is when you see someone for what they can do for you. When it comes to being around famous people, “the human ATM” approach says that being around them will make you more than you currently are.
What these approaches have in common is that the ego, the mind when it identifies with things, is interacting with other perceived egos. There is no real human interaction here. It is merely ideas interacting with other ideas. The mind has an idea about who the other person is, and engages with that idea, rather than the actual person. So when a person really wants to take a picture with a famous person, but has nothing to say to them or any curiosity about them, it is really their mind attempting to attach itself to an object it sees as valuable. Or to post it on Facebook and receive “likes,” therefore making them more than they were before. When a person is well known, it is easy to see only your own ideas about them, and not the actual human being.
On the flip side of this insanity, I had an amusing thought as I was walking home. Since everything around us is completely unified and whole, when we praise famous people it is like the universe praising itself! When I build up others, I know I am really just building up myself. This principle, however, is alien to the ego. Having an intention when interacting with other people can help you to see them as they really are, and quell the ever avid ego. For example, as I was talking to the production assistant my ego would have loved to implement the “human ATM.” And I was one of the people getting their picture taken with the actors. But when I’m talking to people, especially if they’re telling me about things that are bothersome to them, it is my intention to spread consciousness, and leave them feeling great about themselves. I stay present by listening without talking in my head at the same time, and I offer helpful, loving remarks whenever appropriate. Asking questions and listening, without internal dialog, is a good indicator that you are having a human interaction and not an ego interaction. By no means am I always aligned with my intentions when interacting with others, but I attempt to remind myself of them when my ego starts to rear its ugly head. Experiencing other human beings without the mental screen of who you think they are, opens you up to a world the ego cannot conceive of. People are very different than the mind’s ideas about them. Next time your ego tries to take over an interaction, laugh at it, and then find out what happens when you see things as they really are!
“1 new thing a day challenge” update: Today, for day 6, I ate fried shrimp for the first time! For those who know me, you will appreciate the magnitude of this endeavor. I never eat anything that comes from the water, not fish, shrimp, lobster, literally nothing. This challenge has gotten me taking risks, and I am quite pleased I did! Not that I liked the shrimp, but I can finally say I’ve tried seafood. Now I don’t have to eat anything like that again (until the next challenge…). Yesterday,for day 5, I attempted a few new things. I am moving soon so I switched my address with the post office and other venues, and tried to set up the cooking gas service at my new place. I haven’t moved for five years, and didn’t have to do these things last time, so it made me feel quite the responsible person. What are your plans for the last day of the challenge?
I wrote the following paragraph a while ago, and have yet to post it until now. The reason being, that it contains a difficult truth for me to swallow. When someone says something that is blatantly untrue, or just has an opinion I find to be offensive, I will disagree and argue my point. But I know that deeper than these surface disagreements is the one true being that we all share. So I post this not to say that I am so perfect in my understanding that I can incorporate all ideas no matter what, but rather that I promise myself I will attempt to look beyond disagreement to the true self in each person, the one being we all share.
When someone thinks what you say is wrong that’s okay. If someone believes you are wrong and they are right, that is fine. While the truth is ultimately one, whole and unified, the truth manifests in all its aspects differently through form, through us. It makes sense that the truths in our worlds would be expressed differently, understood with different words, different ideas. The infinite aspects of the whole are not in disagreement, so why should we be? There is nothing that can be given or taken away from our being, so when someone has a different opinion than I do or thinks I’m wrong, I understand that is true for that world, that experience of existence. In that world the words and ideas I am using are not the same words and ideas it uses to express the truth. There are infinite ways. We are each one of them.
Now onto a brief update on day 2 of the “1 new thing a day challenge!” My boyfriend loves playing video games, whereas I do not. I never play video games with him. I don’t mind when he plays, but I am always doing my own thing in the meantime. Today, in honor of the “1 new thing a day challenge,” I decided to actually play a video game with him. I am a huge Blackhawks fan, so he chose NHL 10, and let me be the Hawks. Not only did I get to participate in something he enjoys, but I even scored a goal! Even though I was no Hatrick Kane on the ice, I enjoyed attempting a new activity with my loved one. What new thing did you try for day 2?
This morning at work I experienced technical difficulties with the projector. It was the last day of class, centered around the movie “Lilo and Stitch,” and the projector had always worked fine before. After several minutes of unsuccessful troubleshooting, and with class about to begin, I felt reaction rising up inside of me. I was frustrated and about to freak out.
The reaction I experienced was brief and subsided as I made the decision to have an enjoyable last day, and ask for assistance. Yet, however brief, the pull of reaction was strong, and it was to an inanimate object in a low-pressure situation. How strongly can egoic reaction pull a person in when the unfavorable situation is caused by another person? When other people act in a way that causes the voice in our heads to start condemning, we experience the beginnings of a reaction caused by the ego. Some people manage to live mainly through egoic reaction, and over time it deadens all of life, leaving the person unable to enjoy any situation and experience their true nature.
I love this video because it is so clear, and beautifully manages to snap me out of the voice in my head. The truth to which Eckhart Tolle speaks here, can have the power to completely change any life that has been taken over by reaction.
One night a few summers back I went to the gym, and feeling quite proud of myself decided to walk home to keep the momentum going. As I was briskly walking along, with my rainbow New Balances and a big grin on my face, a young artist who could’ve been my age asked me to look at his photographs. I admired them, complimented his artistic eye, and was about to continue on my way home. But before I could, he started asking me if I was going to buy them. I told him I had no money on me but that I wished him good luck with his work.
Instead of the usual disappointed face and goodbye, I received a totally unexpected barrage of questions. Did I really have no money at all? Couldn’t I go to the ATM? Don’t I just live off my parents’ money anyway? I admitted I was blessed and did in fact have some money to my name, but that I too was an artist, working part time. He wouldn’t stop asking questions. I could have made the choice to walk away. In my mind it was important to just watch him and see him as a human being. But when someone is completely taken over by the voice in their head, as he clearly was, the most helpful thing can be to choose a new situation, and exit.
Saying things like “I am blessed” and telling him how, as a poet, I understand how difficult it is to make money, set me up for a barrage of attacks on my religion, and my art. “Oh yeah right, we’re all poets aren’t we?” he sarcastically remarked. Along with, “If you really were religious you would go and get money right now but you’re not, so I guess you aren’t really what you say you are.” On and on he went. And I just stood there in awe, listening.
Eventually I gave it up as a bad job and walked away, tears streaming down my face. He had attacked every identification I held dear. He tore down all of the things I associated with to give me an identity. He acted as if he could not see me at all, as if I were not a real person standing in front of him. He may have appeared like many of my acquaintances from art school, with his hipster clothing and shaggy hair, but he didn’t seem to relate to me on any level.
I was in shambles the rest of my walk home; you would have thought something truly terrible had happened. But I knew in the deep recesses of my consciousness that something terrible had not happened to me, it happened to my ego. The part of me that attached itself to things and ideas had been belittled. The voice in my head that demanded others take it seriously, and believe in what is says, had been attacked with no chance of retribution. Not my true self, but the mind which seeks outside things to feel secure and to attain an identity, that ego self, had been greatly diminished. He had claimed to know me better than myself. He took everything I thought I was, and laughed at it, claimed it was all one big hoax.
Now I can say, thank God for this stranger. Everything he said, all of the parts of me he attacked, were much too specific to be meaningless. The universe is a beautiful being, who used this man, a person completely taken over by his ego, to show me the vestiges of my own ego. The universe teaches lessons through joy, but it can also use negative people and situations for your good.
Since I couldn’t defend myself after parting ways with this stranger, my ego could not repair itself. It couldn’t build itself back up, dig its heals in, and explain why it was what it said it was. Whenever the ego is diminished without being repaired, space is created for your true self to emerge, that which is beyond thoughts and emotions. Instead of defending my beliefs about who I was, I allowed myself to let go of what others thought of me, along with letting go of what I thought about of myself. No thoughts, no labels, are who I am. Nothing I can ever think about myself will ever come close to the reality of my being. That stranger was a small flame of refining fire, burning up the egoic mind-made self, leaving room for my eternal being to live more fully through me. It did not feel good. I was amazed by how truly terrible it felt. But through acceptance, the pain dissolved, along with the resilient attachments that are the ego, and I was still there. Completely whole, undiminished, and open to life as it really was. We don’t need others to define who we are. We don’t need ourselves to define who we are. Beyond definitions, we just are.
Photo by Rob Kleeman
Today I had the privilege of performing with my family band at a town festival. Waiting to perform is nerve-racking for me. But the second I’m on stage and begin to sing all of the nerves just float away, and I’m there, completely present. I love the feeling of being totally in the moment. One of my favorite aspects of presence is the experience of joy; the natural state of being that is usually covered up by thoughts and emotions.
What makes you present? What snaps you out of thinking and brings in you completely into the moment?
Presence can be practiced in any situation, but a great place to start is by finding a situation that tunes you into the now. It could be yoga, taking a walk, straightening your hair, driving, singing, anything at all! When you find that thing that snaps you into the present, it isn’t really that thing that is so enjoyable. The joy comes from being fully in the now, without psychological past and future taking up all of your attention. So give yourself a gift and begin practicing being in the now. Start with whatever brings you joy!
Let Yourself Learn 