Tag Archives: Thoughts

You

“Be yourself- not your idea of what you think somebody else’s idea of yourself should be.” ― Henry David Thoreau

Joey and KatieThe most vital component to your life’s purpose is being yourself.  I don’t say this to be kind or encouraging, but as a matter of urgent importance.  While you many never see it, you being yourself is changing someone else’s life.  Without you being who you truly are, the world is missing its only chance of you.

So who are you?  It is easier to start with who you are not.  You are not a bundle of thoughts.  You are not who you think you are, or who anyone else thinks you are.  You are not the name, weight, and hair color on your driver’s license.  Now that we’ve gotten all of that out of the way, what is left?

You will know who you are by witnessing yourself free from these thought-made selves it is so easy to get attached to.  You don’t have to try to be who you are, and you definitely don’t have to “figure it out.”  Who you are emerges when you untangle your identity from your thoughts and circumstances.  Allowing yourself just to be in the world, experiencing life as it is, and following your own joy in whatever way it expresses itself, will show you yourself more truly and miraculously than your mind could have ever thought up.

I love this video.  This little girl is so inspiring, not because of a particular skill, but because she is being herself.  And what happens when you are who you are, without trying to be what you think you should be in the eyes of others?  People notice you!  People think you are doing something amazing!  You bring people joy!  You don’t have to be the best at this or that.  You only need let your true self act, and it will be better at whatever it does than any amount of practice could produce:

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Inspiration

Living For The Weekend And The Secret To Joy

What is so wonderful about a vacation to the Caribbean? What is appealing about walking along a white sandy beach at sunset?  Why do we so often long for the next vacation, or live for the weekend?  To put it simply, we long for the feeling.

If you’ve ever had a wonderful experience on vacation, or a revitalizing weekend after a long week of work, you have experienced a beautiful inner feeling that keeps you coming back for more.  Many addictions begin just this way.  There is an experience of a feeling that you enjoy to such an extent that you want to feel it again and again.  What are you actually enjoying?

Your mind will tell you, “I love the margarita,” or, “I love laying on the beach in the sun with nothing to do and a good book to read.”  The mind confuses the state of joy with the outer experience it perceives while in that state.  But it is not the form of the experience that keeps you coming back for more.  It is the state of joy.  The joy of being.  I call it a “state” because it is not the same as an emotion that passes through your consciousness and then dissipates.  Joy is an inherent natural state of the being that you are.  Joy is discovered when layers of form, emotions, and thoughts are uncovered.  Joy is revealed, not created.

That longing for a vacation, or the weekend, is a longing to be back in that state of pure joy, your true state of being.  Once you have realized that what is so enjoyable about a good time is not the experience, but the state of joy itself, you open yourself up to being able to experience that which you desire regardless of circumstance.  Joy is your natural state, it is always present.  It merely gets covered up by thoughts and the “cares of the world.”  How did you feel on your last vacation?  How did you feel Friday after work was over?  Relax and allow that sensation to well up from within you, imagine you are on that beautiful sandy beach with clear waves rolling over your toes.  Joy can be uncovered at any moment in any situation; it doesn’t have to be Friday.

The following video on manifesting abundance operates under this very same principle.  Abundance, like joy, comes from within.  The experience of abundance in outer form is only its surface layer.  The state of abundance originates within you:

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spirituality

Don’t Go There…

A lot of things get to me.  If you’ve read past posts on this blog you’ll know a handful of those things.  Did someone say bugs?  Being “rubbed the wrong way” is a common human experience.  Someone says or does something that really gets you angry, or brings up past pain.  Then there are the smaller annoyances that easily damper our mood.  A few examples spring to mind: traffic, cleaning up after people, being ignored.  

One of the most prominent downers for me is tone of voice.  When someone speaks to me in, what I perceive to be, a negative tone of voice I easily feel hurt or offended.  Michael Singer, author of The Seat of the Soul, calls these our “thorns.”  What, if any, is the purpose of these thorns?  How do you get rid of them?  

The first step comes from realizing that, no matter how truly disturbing the situation is, being disturbed is in no way helpful to you.  Feeling disturbed doesn’t change situations.  Solutions arise when you feel free and spacious within, when your energy is high and can find like pathways to match its own positive frequency.  This doesn’t mean ignoring your feelings.  On the contrary, it means relaxing and allowing yourself to feel the negative energy fully, letting it pass through your awareness until it dissipates.  What are your thorns? This conversation between Michael Singer and Oprah is infinitely helpful in learning what to do about our thorns:

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consciousness

Can you go a day without judgement?

FlowersThis morning I listened to Deepak Chopra’s The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success as I was getting ready for work.  Chopra talks about accessing the field of potentiality, the space in which your highest dreams have the opportunity to manifest, and how to access this space.  One of the prescriptions he gives is to go the day without judgement.  Along with other tools, such as meditation, going without judgement creates space for the highest potential of any moment to arise.

I made the decision as if it was easy, “Sure I can go the day without judgement!”  Which within ten minutes turned into me becoming aware of how often I was judging the world around me.  I first noticed it standing at the bus stop.  I saw a guy park his car “way too far” from the curb, and as I was thinking this thought, I realized I was already judging!  In conversations with friends and coworkers, I began to notice how often I voiced my opinion.

I wasn’t just noticing negative judgement, I also noticed that I judged things all the time in a positive manner.  I would see a tree and think, “What a beautiful tree!”  I would look up at the sky and think, “Such interesting clouds today.”  Negative or positive, I found that I was constantly in judgement.

This experiment was anything but a failure, it truly helped me see how often I was judging the world around me instead of perceiving it as it really was.  Tomorrow I’m going to try again and see what happens.  I invite you to join me in going one day without judgement, just to see what it’s like!  Let me know how it goes, I’d love to hear your story!

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Inspiration

Personality or Prisonality

Is your personality a prison?  Do your likes and dislikes, wants and fears, opinions and attitudes interfere with your life? 

I’ve never been a morning person; I would rather stay up late and sleep late.  In my life there have been countless examples of that aspect of my personality keeping me from experiences I would have loved.  During the summer in which I “woke up,” experienced a new level of being present, I suddenly realized that I could be a morning person if I wanted to.  The only thing keeping me from engaging in countless early morning activities was the fear of the voice in my head that would be furious to be thinking at 7:00am, and would ceaselessly continue its complaints until I was back in bed.  Since I had stopped taking that voice so seriously, I realized that I could be a morning person if I so chose to be. I joined a choir that met at 8:30am on Sundays.  This might sound ridiculous to all those who wake up at 3am to get to work at 5am everyday, but for me 8:30am on a weekend was never even an option. 

Are you not a morning person?  Do you dislike waiting?  Can you not stand loud restaurants?  What are the parts of your personality that are keeping you from experiencing the fullness of life and your true authentic power?  In his book, The Seat Of The Soul, Gary Zukav defines authentic power as, “when the personality comes fully to serve the energy of the soul.”   In this video Gary and Oprah discuss where your authentic power comes from and how it can change your reality:

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You

A Personal Message From Humanity To You:

You Are Here!Congratulations, you made it!  Every small act, intention, and detail of the universe all worked together for your being here.  The cells that formed you came together specifically to manifest you.  Existence needed you to be here as yourself.  And you made it!  The entire world is a different place because you exist.  The way you experience the world changes all of our experiences of the world.  This is how much you matter.  You are important.  You are on purpose.  When you experience a victory, we all win.  When you are full of sorrow, we all weep.  When you express yourself as you truly are, you give each of us the gift you were meant to bring to our existence.  When you look on the world with love, acceptance, peace, and joy, you are providing the opportunity for everyone else to experience that world.  Everything worked together perfectly for your being here, and is working perfectly for your existence as yourself.  Congratulations and thank you for irreversibly impacting the whole of existence.

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Ego

The 6 Thoughts That Are Keeping You Unhappy

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“Whenever there is unhappiness in the background of your life (or even in the foreground), you can see which of these thoughts applies and fill in your own content according to your personal situation:

‘There is something that needs to happen in my life before I can be at peace (happy, fulfilled, etc.). And I resent that it hasn’t happened yet. Maybe my resentment will finally make it happen.’

‘Something happened in the past that should not have happened, and I resent that. If that hadn’t happened, I would be at peace now.’

‘Something is happening now that should not be happening, and it is preventing me from being at peace now.’

Often the unconscious beliefs are directed toward a person and so “happening” becomes “doing”:

‘You should do this or that so that I can be at peace. And I resent that you haven’t done it yet. Maybe my resentment will make you do it.’

‘Something you (or I) did, said, or failed to do in the past is preventing me from being at peace now.’

‘What you are doing or failing to do now is preventing me from being at peace.’” (Tolle 114)

Do any of these thoughts sound familiar?  Seeing them without content lays bare the structure of the egoic mind that does not recognize the present moment, living in the phantom past and future.  Shining the light of your own awareness on the voice of the ego is the beginning of its end.

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Inspiration

You Are Changing The World, Whether You Know It Or Not

Humans are promoters, givers, energy mathematicians.  We are always adding the energy behind our actions to a pool of like energy.  This can be recognized in negative emotions, which add their “low” energy to negative energy created by painful experiences from the past.  Has anyone ever tried to make you laugh when you were upset or angry?  In my experience, there is a part of the self in that situation that wants to stay upset.  It only wants to feel worse, to add to itself.

Your actions and intentions cast a vote in the energy and experience of the world around you.  The energy that creates war multiplies through more war.  To diminish the energy of separation and pain, we need to cultivate a higher frequency of energy that creates different outcomes.  It is inspiring to hear it so simply put, and well received, in this video that I couldn’t wait to share:

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consciousness

How do you know if you’re being yourself?

Me as a child with my older brother.

Me as a child with my older brother.

When I was a little kid I longed to know who I really was.  I remember wishing someone could just tell me.  I envied my friends from foreign countries who had a strong national identity.  I thought they really knew who they were.  I tried finding my identity in things, like being a writer, an actress, a musician.  But nothing ever stuck.

Now I am grateful for that.  I didn’t yet realize that the self attached to thoughts and things was the ego, the parasitic mind that can only survive through attachment to forms.  It wasn’t until the summer I turned 23 that I suddenly realized what a gift it was to experience the self without definitions and attachments.  It was then, when I realized what I was not, that I became open to finding out who my true self was, how it expressed itself, and how the true self was more expansive and inclusive than I could have ever thought up with my mind.

At first, not buying into your own thought created identity can feel like a black hole with no end in sight.  There is another side.  You will know it through inexplicable feelings of joy, love, and the state of peace.  For me, it still becomes obscured by the ego at various points throughout the day.  The good news is, that once you’ve experienced your true self it continues to grow in presence and power, no matter how the ego may try to reassert itself.  So who are you?  Try asking yourself without answering with words, and let your self show you.

I love this short video with Eckhart Tolle because it can give you an experience of your true nature as pure consciousness, as the watcher:

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Inspiration

“Don’t let a mad world tell you that success is anything other than a successful present moment.” – Eckhart Tolle

Rainbow RoomI recently talked about experiencing negative emotions and how to sit with them until they dissipate.  Sometimes a situation triggers a host of negative reactions that are disproportionate to the event itself.  For me, this tends to be how my pain body awakens. The pain body is the energy of past experiences of pain that haven’t been fully processed and continue to live on in the body.  When the pain body wakes up it brings with it the opportunity to dissolve the pain you’ve been unconsciously carrying around.  It also means you have to feel it, sit with it, and not allow yourself to get distracted.

This happened to me just the other day, and as I was comfortably lying there I found myself wanting to scroll around on my phone, or see what was on TV.  If I had allowed myself to get up and go about my day the pain body would have subsided, and I would have gone on having a fine time.  But the energy I was experiencing wouldn’t have been dissolved.  It would have come up again when the opportunity was right.  So I gave myself permission to feel both the uncomfortable negative energy, and the inertia pulling me to get up and do something else.  This is an endlessly worthwhile practice.  I plan on living for many years, and the benefits of practicing how to deal with negative emotions will be of great assistance on a journey that largely includes letting go.

It is also helpful to learn how to be with negative emotions, and a feeling of restlessness, because it can show you how to accept these energy forces in your friends and partners.  I intend for this practice to help me allow my loved ones to experience whatever it is they are going through.  It can be just as difficult, if not more, to bring acceptance to the suffering of a loved one.  First trying out surrender for yourself can tremendously aid you when you see someone you love going through the same thing.  If your loved one is suffering, and there isn’t any physical solution you can bring to them, you can surrender to their pain and be a peaceful presence in their time of need.

As a child growing up my mother would always sit at my bedside when I would cry into my pillow for whatever reason.  Even if it wasn’t visible at the time, just having her there helped me heal faster and more profoundly than I would have on my own.

Even further, you can bring surrender to the suffering of those you don’t know but witness day-to-day.  When I see homeless human beings on the street I don’t pity them.  I see them for the true radiant being that we both are, let go of any judgment of their situation, and smile with a genuine sense of connectedness.  If I have a dollar bill I offer it, but even then it is not the money that is healing.  The healing takes place in the moment that we are present with each other, without the judgment of the thinking mind, in the kind of communion that sees through the veil of form into our shared reality.  Every attempt to “just be” is different, whether it is with myself, a loved one, or someone I just met.  No matter how it goes, to let go of judgment and allow the experience to be as it is, is what I call success.

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