Tag Archives: life

Peace

How To Deal With Other People

HopeWhat can you accept in other human beings?  If we look within, most of us will find that there is a certain level of “otherness” we are able to accept, beyond which tolerance dissolves.

This is more obviously the case when we examine our feelings towards people who are dangerous, break laws, or don’t adhere to societal norms of behavior.  On a more subtle level, I see it on the CTA during Chicago’s morning commute, when two people have a loud conversation instead of scrolling through their iPhones.   In that moment a humorously clear gulf is created between the quiet majority, and the atypical loud morning conversationalists.

What creates this separation between people?  It is born of thoughts and opinions in the mind that are completely bought into.  Luckily this can be overcome more easily than it would appear, even in the face of humanity’s long history of alienating others who seem too different to allow.

When you are able to observe these thoughts as they happen, you haven’t immediately identified with them and taken them as truth.  When you see thoughts of separation in the mind, that witnessing provides the choice between alienation and inclusion.  It provides the opportunity to not accept judgment of others as absolute truth.  Before peace becomes more noticeable on a societal level, this small decision will be building its firm foundation.

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consciousness

How To Know If You’re Being Present

RumiOn my walk home from work tonight I looked up at the moon and thought, “I don’t have to accept everything about my life. I only have to accept what I am experiencing at this very moment.” I then suddenly tripped over an uneven crack in the sidewalk and just barely caught myself from falling. This startlingly answered my initial train of thought: thinking about being present is not the same as being present.

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Inspiration

How To Stop Deflecting Miracles

Waterfall Is there someone in your life you aren’t completely satisfied with? Is there someone you are holding something against?

When I asked myself these questions the answers surprised me. The people in my life with whom a small sliver of dissatisfaction sometimes remains, people who I might want to do something for me or act differently, are generally not unfriendly acquaintances. Rather, they are those I love, and have the deepest connections to.

A grudge is the continued non-forgiveness of another human being, whether it is for something they did or didn’t do, said or didn’t say, or for their inability to make you feel whole and happy. Allowing yourself to look clearly at your non-forgiveness, without self-judgment, is the first and vital step to releasing yourself from the negative consequences of unconsciously wanting others to be different.

When I remind myself that fear and resentment, in whatever forms they appear, prevent my life’s purpose from unfolding, a choice is presented. In this instance I can make a new decision and choose to love being in the moment I am in. Reminding myself that this decision causes a chain reaction of miracles makes this choice all the easier.

The brilliance of this Super Soul Sunday video with Marianne Williamson is that she not only defines miracles and how they occur, but it is also made clear that allowing every individual to be on their own life path is essential to their highest potential as well as to yours. It is so easy to resent where people are at on their journeys, even more so in situations where they disagree with or harbor resentment towards you. But dealing with the consequences of your own resentment is not easy. Knowing that your inability to completely accept other people can prevent you from moving forward towards the miraculous makes the choice to love a more accessible reality.

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Inspiration

What Could Trust Do For You?

TrustGive yourself the gift of a day of trust.  When life feels tumultuous I designate minutes, hours, or even a day where my only objective is to surrender, trust, and accept.  If an unexpected obstacle arises it is often at this moment when the day turns from one of trust back into moments of worry and attempts to “fix” the situation that I find unacceptable through thinking in unproductive circles.  

This too, is okay.  It is merely one more chance to embark on another minute, hour, or day of trust.  Suspending disbelief and allowing yourself to feel that the universe, God, life energy itself is providing for all your needs, just as it had in your first nine months in your mother’s womb, offers the opportunity to experience the true effects and purpose for the practice of trust.

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Inspiration

My Big Fear

WyomingWhat do you consider your greatest burden?  What keeps you from feeling free to enjoy life?

Some people worry, some stress.  Some people have experienced trauma that never leaves their minds.  Some people don’t want to be where they are right now, while others don’t like who they are.  

Since I was a little girl the most dominant thought pattern disrupting my natural ease has been fear.  While a fear of death outweighs other fears, it doesn’t really matter what I’m afraid of.  The content of each fearful inkling doesn’t matter because after all of these years listening to a thought pattern fueled by fear I have found that anything can be used to feed its momentum. This is also why fear is my greatest teacher.

Whatever your most intrusive burden may be, it provides you with two paths.  It has the power to drive you deeper into unconsciousness and pain, or drive you out into light and understanding.  Fear is such an easily accessible fuel for my thoughts that I can either focus on the energetic train of one thought after another spurred by the initial feeling of fear, or I can use the fear to force me into becoming completely present.

The less focused I am on the reality of my immediate experience, the easier it is for old thought patterns to gain new life.  Now when a fearful thought enters my mind, no matter how benign it may seem at first, I use it to force me into focusing on my surroundings.  I visually examine whatever my gaze falls upon and make it the center of my attention.  I listen closely to the sounds around me.  Fearful thoughts still come, but they are balanced and increasingly overpowered by the intensity of presence which they trigger.

What thoughts cause you to suffer?  Even if those thoughts are justified and grounded in reality, if they cause suffering they can become your presence trigger, they can wake you up.  While joy, peace, and love are equally effective teachers of being, if you work with what you’ve got you can transform any substance into pure gold.

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consciousness

The Pros and Cons of Mind Reading

Thinking MindHave you ever wished you could read minds?  It seems like an incredible super power. There are some obvious perks: you’d do very well on game shows that ask trivia questions, and you’d know what the silent teenager across from you at the dinner table was actually thinking.  But the gilded idea of mind reading would very quickly become exposed as a major disappointment.

Our minds operate according to the same structure, with different content for each person.  The mind uses the content of your life to fuel its never-ending cycle of thought after thought. It also efficiently uses those thoughts to build up momentum for its continued operation.

Even though it seems logical to base your thoughts about another person on the thoughts they have or share with you, in reality they are a human being who also happens to contain the same thought-creating machine you do, and more often than not that machine is running on autopilot.  Mind reading would only end up telling you what content that person’s mind uses to fuel its incessant thinking, and not who that person truly is.

Can you tell which thoughts you consciously choose to entertain versus those that randomly fire of their own accord?

If I am honest and aware, I can tell that the majority of my thoughts are produced by a mind on autopilot with no actual prompting decision to engage in thinking.   I don’t consider this a failure, rather it is liberating!

When you can watch your thoughts and notice which ones were on purpose, and which ones were involuntary, you can choose to not take the autopilot thinking too seriously. The more you notice involuntary thinking, the more you are able to choose thoughts that are of some purpose for you instead.  Thoughts of worry, fear, judgment, complaints, and attachment are then seen for what they really are; firmly established patterns of the mind that fuel its autopilot mode of thinking.  They are nothing to take too seriously in yourself, or in others.  Now the mind is no longer using you, you are using the mind.

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Peace

How To Trick Your Mind Into Letting You Be At Peace

My Mom SallyIf you are like me, whenever you tell yourself that it is okay to let go of the to-do list, the worries, and your thoughts about the future, your mind comes back with some smart-alecky retort.  Quieting the mind in order to bring presence into your life, leading to peace and ease, can feel like a baseball game where you are always the Chicago Cubs.  You have a distant memory that you were on the winning side of inner peace at some point, but it was so long ago you can’t even be sure it was real.  So you keep telling yourself, “Wait till next year!” Yet year after year that sense of inner peace you know is attainable always seems one season out of reach.

I will say this about my mother’s beloved baseball team, the Cubbies sure have had a lot of practice.  Luckily, when it comes to inner peace, there is never a World Series that you are missing out on, but rather season after season of practice.  There is no way to fail, only ways to proceed and succeed.

One of the peace games that “tricks” my mind into becoming still, is called “For This Practice.”  I set rules for small actions that bring my focus away from thinking and into the present.  When I’m getting ready for bed at night I’ll say, “For this practice I don’t need to think about what I have to do tomorrow,” and proceed to wash my face and put on my pajamas paying special attention to the physical experience of each action.  When a thought pops up in my mind I’ll remind myself, “For this practice I don’t need that.” This tells the mind it can think about what it wants to afterwards, but clears a space where you can be free from thought and at peace.

What rules could best serve your experience of inner peace “for this practice?” Think about your routine activities and choose a few that you can set certain parameters for. You can also use “For This Practice” whenever your mind has gained unwanted momentum and control in your field of attention.  For example, if a worry pattern comes up, choose a simple task and say, “For this practice I don’t need to run over these worry thoughts. For this practice the object is to pay attention to…” Setting concrete boundaries for intentional moments of presence will give you more “wins” than the cubs have seen in the last one-hundred years.

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Inspiration

4 Steps For Manifesting A New Reality While Staying Rooted In The Present

Swami SatchidanandaStep One: Allow yourself to fully feel that which arises in the present moment, whether comfortable or uncomfortable.

Step Two: When that which arose has completely passed through you, place your attention on thoughts that serve you. Think the thoughts you would think if your dreams had already come to pass.

Step Three: Allow those thoughts to awaken the feelings that would be present if your dreams were currently your outer reality.

Step Four: Bring your attention to the exact space of now that you are in and allow those beautiful dreams to permeate your present world.

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You

How To Be Alone

By Eckhart TolleThe following video is not just beautiful and inspirational.  It also speaks to the heart of the human experience and the lesson we must all learn at some point in our lives, at the latest when we are about to transition from this world.  That lesson is how to be alone.  Whether you are physically alone now or not, you are the only constant in the equation of your life, all other variables change.  Now is the time to discover that constant self, and now is in fact the only place where who you are can be found.

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Peace

How To Know When You Can Finally Be At Peace

At The Airport What were you worried about yesterday? What about last month or last year?

As I woke up today with tingly feet and immediately began worrying about my them, I remembered that the day before I worried about a one-day teaching residency I’m going to have to travel extremely far for, to a part of Chicago that is as of yet completely unknown to me.   When I decided to allow the discomfort in my feet, and surrender to the present moment, my mind started thinking about finding a new apartment in September and how stressful that might be.

Sound familiar? When life is stressful the voice in the head tells us that after a certain point or after something happens we will finally be at peace.

Even though I think that I’ll be at peace after I figure out what is going on with my tingly feet, when that moment does come my mind will just as soon have an exorbitant amount of other things I’ll have to wait for until I can be at peace.

While the content of the thoughts we have differs, we all experience the same mechanics.  There is always a phantom future moment when the mind will agree to let you relax and enjoy life.  And that is exactly how that voice stays alive, in control of your attention.

Once I was able to become aware that unless I decided to be at peace now I’d never actually be at peace, I was able to choose peace now despite the circumstances.  The long standing thought mechanics in my mind still had a whole lifetime’s worth of energy to keep it going, so the worry thoughts popped up nevertheless.

Despite this mind mechanic momentum, to smile and allow yourself to relax even when your thoughts are still vying for your attention, is to take control of your life and your sanity.  In that moment you are present and the momentum gained from that glimpse of consciousness will only grow. Eventually the old thought mechanics will lose steam and peace will be all the remains inside and out.

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