Before enlightenment chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment chop wood, carry water.
Zen saying
In the east there is an old story about the appearance of mastery and humility. It is of an old caretaker in the monastery, contentedly serving all by doing the lowly tasks of sweeping and cleaning. The young arrogant monks suspect nothing but an ignorant peasant, but the abbot and older monks know that in their midst lives the greatest Teacher in the land.
The young monks treat the old man with distain and disrespect, the old sage in turn does not care what anyone thinks of him. The story goes that one monk makes friends with the old man and learns much about appearances, ambition, and his own judgements.
I love this story because everyone wants to be someone. Very rare are those that want to be themselves. People want to be famous, to be recognised. With noble intention we want to make a difference, especially if the difference is noticed far and wide.
We also believe that we should be doing something else. That our lives are not noble as they are. That who we are and what we do is not good enough. Many spiritual people fall into this trap. That if we were truly spiritual we would look and act and be a certain way, most definitely different from what we are right now. That we would ‘arrive’ and make an impact on the world through best-selling books and interviews with Oprah. In that vision there is always an assumption that those who aren’t doing that are compromising, that they aren’t complete.
Again in the east, water is used often as a metaphor for humility and service as it flows to the lowest point, serving and supporting all life, able to be transformed to whatever is needed. It has no ambitions beyond to fulfil its purpose in life.
What is our purpose in life? For me it is to dissolve without trace of limitation into the Ascendant. To know absolute love and joy and peace. To follow the will of God in every moment. Perhaps that means chatting with celebrities about inner peace, perhaps it means sweeping the courtyard. It could simply be looking after the people around me, making sure they have what they need and know they are loved. Whatever it is, it is doing it with presence and connection, service and contentment.
Friday, 5 March 2010
Thursday, 19 November 2009
6 tips on living life fully and without negativity
1. Learn to meditate
Meditation allows you to see what your mind is telling you and gives you the power to choose what you want to focus on. It builds a relationship with who you really are, beyond all the habits and beliefs of the mind. Sometimes we are able to fall gracefully into a state of complete focus, but many times we cannot. Basically this is because most of our life is lived in a scattered way. Our minds are constantly thinking, mostly about things that we have no control over. We are not present with what we are doing. So it is no surprise that when we want or need to focus our attention it is not always easy. Practicing what happens in our conscious awareness is necessary. Greek philosopher Aristotle said ‘We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act, but a habit.’ This habit comes quick through meditation.
There are three things that help with meditation. Firstly, it involves absolutely no force of any kind. Interestingly, so many people try to clear their minds of thought when they meditate. The truth is that this is impossible. You have thoughts flowing through your mind because you are alive. The key to meditation is regaining control of your attention and changing your relationship with your thoughts and feelings, not suppressing the natural tendency of your mind! It becomes so much easier when you appreciate this.
Secondly, a teacher or coach is invaluable. Like learning any skill, a personal trainer helps smooth the way, making progression much faster. They stop you from reinventing the wheel and can answer all the questions you have, helping dispel doubts and keep you on track.
Thirdly, regular practice is necessary because your mind is very much like a muscle. Getting your focus in shape requires gentle persistence and application over time. But as the results are immediate and clear it’s a very motivating thing to practice. Every part of your life starts to benefit when you are there participating in it.
2. Be present and aware
Meditation helps with this, but start noticing when your mind wanders to another time and place. Through habit we are rarely in the same place as our bodies are, with our minds in other places and situations, constantly trying to change the past and control the future. Neither are possible, and we miss out on our lives that are right in front of us right now as well. Buddha said ‘Life can take place only in the present moment. If we lose the present moment, we lose life.’ Even people like businessman Donald Trump agree: ‘I try to learn from the past, but I plan for the future by focusing exclusively on the present. That's were the fun is.’
3. Choose to appreciate
We have the ability to choose to appreciate or condemn (at least something) about every situation or every person we come into contact with. Its like the old choice between seeing the glass as half empty or half full. You can make the choice to be optimistic, and your body and awareness respond in kind. What you put your attention on grows, and what’s more, its our choice. The more you see the good in your life, the more it grows. Be active with your appreciation. Find things to appreciate about the people around you - your family, your friends, your colleagues, and strangers - shop keepers, taxi drivers, people on the street.
4. Be thankful
Related to the above is the power of gratitude. Quite simply you can’t complain and be thankful at the same time. To cultivate the power of gratitude, make a list of the 10 things that you are grateful for in your life. Review the list regularly and realise how much there is in your life. Don’t take anything for granted, especially the people closest to you. Remember to take a moment to see how much people do for you and you’ll never ignore how much goodness is in your life already. Say “thank you”. A call or a card is everything to those that receive it. 14th century German churchman Meister Eckhart once said “If the only prayer you said in your whole life was "Thank You", that would suffice.”
5. Watch complaining carefully
Complaining is the opposite of appreciation. Sometimes its necessary to blow off a little steam about something, but we always do this for far too long. Eckhart Tolle wrote that complaining “invariably carries an unconscious negative charge. When you complain, you make yourself a victim… Wherever you are, be there totally. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally.” “All else is madness”. And as Jesus said too, ‘Judge not…’
6. Give
Giving is the most powerful way to change your state of being. Many large companies and business people already do this in terms of giving money and time to projects of their choosing. You will find that giving is the best way to get what you want. It works with everything. If you want more hugs, give hugs. If you want more understanding, be understanding. If you want more money, give money. If you want more knowledge, give knowledge.
Find the time and energy to give to others and you’ll find it revolutionary, especially if you are stuck in a rut. There is nothing like giving to take the attention off your problems and give you a wider, more complete perspective on life.
Meditation allows you to see what your mind is telling you and gives you the power to choose what you want to focus on. It builds a relationship with who you really are, beyond all the habits and beliefs of the mind. Sometimes we are able to fall gracefully into a state of complete focus, but many times we cannot. Basically this is because most of our life is lived in a scattered way. Our minds are constantly thinking, mostly about things that we have no control over. We are not present with what we are doing. So it is no surprise that when we want or need to focus our attention it is not always easy. Practicing what happens in our conscious awareness is necessary. Greek philosopher Aristotle said ‘We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act, but a habit.’ This habit comes quick through meditation.
There are three things that help with meditation. Firstly, it involves absolutely no force of any kind. Interestingly, so many people try to clear their minds of thought when they meditate. The truth is that this is impossible. You have thoughts flowing through your mind because you are alive. The key to meditation is regaining control of your attention and changing your relationship with your thoughts and feelings, not suppressing the natural tendency of your mind! It becomes so much easier when you appreciate this.
Secondly, a teacher or coach is invaluable. Like learning any skill, a personal trainer helps smooth the way, making progression much faster. They stop you from reinventing the wheel and can answer all the questions you have, helping dispel doubts and keep you on track.
Thirdly, regular practice is necessary because your mind is very much like a muscle. Getting your focus in shape requires gentle persistence and application over time. But as the results are immediate and clear it’s a very motivating thing to practice. Every part of your life starts to benefit when you are there participating in it.
2. Be present and aware
Meditation helps with this, but start noticing when your mind wanders to another time and place. Through habit we are rarely in the same place as our bodies are, with our minds in other places and situations, constantly trying to change the past and control the future. Neither are possible, and we miss out on our lives that are right in front of us right now as well. Buddha said ‘Life can take place only in the present moment. If we lose the present moment, we lose life.’ Even people like businessman Donald Trump agree: ‘I try to learn from the past, but I plan for the future by focusing exclusively on the present. That's were the fun is.’
3. Choose to appreciate
We have the ability to choose to appreciate or condemn (at least something) about every situation or every person we come into contact with. Its like the old choice between seeing the glass as half empty or half full. You can make the choice to be optimistic, and your body and awareness respond in kind. What you put your attention on grows, and what’s more, its our choice. The more you see the good in your life, the more it grows. Be active with your appreciation. Find things to appreciate about the people around you - your family, your friends, your colleagues, and strangers - shop keepers, taxi drivers, people on the street.
4. Be thankful
Related to the above is the power of gratitude. Quite simply you can’t complain and be thankful at the same time. To cultivate the power of gratitude, make a list of the 10 things that you are grateful for in your life. Review the list regularly and realise how much there is in your life. Don’t take anything for granted, especially the people closest to you. Remember to take a moment to see how much people do for you and you’ll never ignore how much goodness is in your life already. Say “thank you”. A call or a card is everything to those that receive it. 14th century German churchman Meister Eckhart once said “If the only prayer you said in your whole life was "Thank You", that would suffice.”
5. Watch complaining carefully
Complaining is the opposite of appreciation. Sometimes its necessary to blow off a little steam about something, but we always do this for far too long. Eckhart Tolle wrote that complaining “invariably carries an unconscious negative charge. When you complain, you make yourself a victim… Wherever you are, be there totally. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally.” “All else is madness”. And as Jesus said too, ‘Judge not…’
6. Give
Giving is the most powerful way to change your state of being. Many large companies and business people already do this in terms of giving money and time to projects of their choosing. You will find that giving is the best way to get what you want. It works with everything. If you want more hugs, give hugs. If you want more understanding, be understanding. If you want more money, give money. If you want more knowledge, give knowledge.
Find the time and energy to give to others and you’ll find it revolutionary, especially if you are stuck in a rut. There is nothing like giving to take the attention off your problems and give you a wider, more complete perspective on life.
Monday, 18 May 2009
A Love Story
There are times in one’s life when it all makes sense, when everything becomes clear. Perhaps you remember a time like this for you, at the time of the birth of your children, when you fully committed to your partner, when a loved one dies, or perhaps you were simply with friends or alone, enjoying the company and the moment. In these times the priorities of your life become so apparent that sometimes you cannot fathom why you made anything else more important, why you chose to live any other way. Without a doubt you know that love is the most important thing: Your love for the moment, for people, for the place, but most of all, for yourself. It is so clear that love is all, that this love is a love that needs nothing else, that needs no one else, that is content and perfect in itself. These are the great moments of our lives, the times when we fully rest in the lap of God.
It’s something everyone wants. In one form or another, creatively or destructively, consciously or unconsciously, we all seek to fill our lives with this experience of completeness. Everything anyone does is for the greatest love, even when it looks like a mad grasp for security or self esteem by attempting to take from others. The whole world spins around a version of love, whether a memory or an actual experience, it doesn’t matter, love is the only thing that motivates life. Obviously, how we experience love makes the crucial difference to our experience of life, yet the realisation that everyone around you is motivated by the same thing - however it looks - is of huge significance. There becomes an experience, not of greater and lesser, but of different choices, of compassion for all that exists.
You also start to experience love as the core of creation. You see love as the cause of everything. It becomes harder and harder to see anything else, even in challenging events. You truly live life as it was meant to be lived, resting in the deeper experience, never moving from full enjoyment of every moment, this full enjoyment motivating greater and greater love and silence to flow into your awareness, an endless cycle of love and joy blossoming at simply being able to experience presence and life in this moment. Nothing better.
As the whole world revolves around love, bringing the fullest version of love to the world is a simple thing. It comes by you personally filling this moment up with attention rooted in silence. The more you do this the more you come into love. The more you are love, the more love comes to the world. It’s so simple and so enjoyable. You begin a love affair with the still presence in your being and the more you give yourself to the relationship, the more you fulfil your purpose of being alive.
Now here is the best part. Once again, as it has been said and experienced from the dawn of time: You don’t have to believe this to be true. You move towards experiencing this and the results are self motivating - you prove it to be true to yourself. If love in its many forms is important to you, perhaps a suspicion of the variety that “if it works for some it may just work for all” would help motivate you too to live the fullest possible experience of being here on this planet. But really, even the desire for only a little more in your life will bring you more love than you can handle. As someone once said, even a small amount of faith that there is more to life, only the size of say, a mustard seed, will bring great things to you.
But you have to actually do it. Fortunately, there is nothing simpler in starting to walk towards more. You rest in this moment, say an Ascension Attitude, and gently and innocently watch, notice, observe, stay aware. Notice that the only thing that creates anything else but silence is your mind, the only thing that stops love is you believing the judgments of your mind are right. You allow your awareness to relax beyond the confines of the mind and there you are, resting in the lap of God once again, fulfilling the reason for this moment in time, fulfilling the reason why you have a choice. As you do this you’ll find love is the only thing that lasts, the only thing that is the salve to all your troubles, and the only thing that is the underlying source of all your desires. Love truly is all.
It’s something everyone wants. In one form or another, creatively or destructively, consciously or unconsciously, we all seek to fill our lives with this experience of completeness. Everything anyone does is for the greatest love, even when it looks like a mad grasp for security or self esteem by attempting to take from others. The whole world spins around a version of love, whether a memory or an actual experience, it doesn’t matter, love is the only thing that motivates life. Obviously, how we experience love makes the crucial difference to our experience of life, yet the realisation that everyone around you is motivated by the same thing - however it looks - is of huge significance. There becomes an experience, not of greater and lesser, but of different choices, of compassion for all that exists.
You also start to experience love as the core of creation. You see love as the cause of everything. It becomes harder and harder to see anything else, even in challenging events. You truly live life as it was meant to be lived, resting in the deeper experience, never moving from full enjoyment of every moment, this full enjoyment motivating greater and greater love and silence to flow into your awareness, an endless cycle of love and joy blossoming at simply being able to experience presence and life in this moment. Nothing better.
As the whole world revolves around love, bringing the fullest version of love to the world is a simple thing. It comes by you personally filling this moment up with attention rooted in silence. The more you do this the more you come into love. The more you are love, the more love comes to the world. It’s so simple and so enjoyable. You begin a love affair with the still presence in your being and the more you give yourself to the relationship, the more you fulfil your purpose of being alive.
Now here is the best part. Once again, as it has been said and experienced from the dawn of time: You don’t have to believe this to be true. You move towards experiencing this and the results are self motivating - you prove it to be true to yourself. If love in its many forms is important to you, perhaps a suspicion of the variety that “if it works for some it may just work for all” would help motivate you too to live the fullest possible experience of being here on this planet. But really, even the desire for only a little more in your life will bring you more love than you can handle. As someone once said, even a small amount of faith that there is more to life, only the size of say, a mustard seed, will bring great things to you.
But you have to actually do it. Fortunately, there is nothing simpler in starting to walk towards more. You rest in this moment, say an Ascension Attitude, and gently and innocently watch, notice, observe, stay aware. Notice that the only thing that creates anything else but silence is your mind, the only thing that stops love is you believing the judgments of your mind are right. You allow your awareness to relax beyond the confines of the mind and there you are, resting in the lap of God once again, fulfilling the reason for this moment in time, fulfilling the reason why you have a choice. As you do this you’ll find love is the only thing that lasts, the only thing that is the salve to all your troubles, and the only thing that is the underlying source of all your desires. Love truly is all.
Thursday, 11 September 2008
When friends go without saying goodbye
I only met Wendy on a couple of occasions. Both times I was amazed by her lightness and her absolute goodness. Teaching meditation means that sometimes people's personal stress comes up for them. Wendy was incredible to have around whenever this happened in a class because clearly here was a lady who had so much more on her plate than most people could even imagine and yet she came through shining. But she always listened with perfect compassion. She was incredible like that.
The saddest thing about most of humanity is that only others can truly see how magnificent we are. We are the last to appreciate our own being for the beauty that it contains. It reminds me to make sure that my loved ones know what a difference they make to my life. I wish in particular that Wendy could have known how deeply she touched my heart and inspired me.
If Wendy has taught me anything it is that we can choose to fill life with goodness and hope and magic and love. The only thing that stops us is ourselves. We are the only ones that see ourselves as not worthy, we are the only ones that see our lives as insignificant. We can make another choice though: we can choose to see ourselves as others see us, we can choose to see ourselves as God sees us.
With perfect love Wendy, fly free.
The saddest thing about most of humanity is that only others can truly see how magnificent we are. We are the last to appreciate our own being for the beauty that it contains. It reminds me to make sure that my loved ones know what a difference they make to my life. I wish in particular that Wendy could have known how deeply she touched my heart and inspired me.
If Wendy has taught me anything it is that we can choose to fill life with goodness and hope and magic and love. The only thing that stops us is ourselves. We are the only ones that see ourselves as not worthy, we are the only ones that see our lives as insignificant. We can make another choice though: we can choose to see ourselves as others see us, we can choose to see ourselves as God sees us.
With perfect love Wendy, fly free.
Monday, 16 June 2008
Just for this moment...
I got inspired to write something after reading a passage from someone complaining that in the 40 years of their meditation practice they hadn’t experienced so much as a peak experience, let alone lasting peace or enlightenment. It made me laugh, really in sadness mixed with amazement because for a long time they have completely missed the point of their practice. They haven’t been meditating. Essentially they’ve been going through the motions because they lost the first principle of meditation: Be innocent in this moment. In doing so, they missed the lasting peace and the enlightenment. See, the searching, the looking, the expecting – all of it hides peace from you. Any kind of searching, wanting or trying puts a big cover over God, even when the searching is noble, even when the trying is for a spiritual result. These things and freedom are mutually exclusive; they cannot exist together. Rather innocence, presence, and contentment are the signposts of God.
All true spiritual practice is the practice of letting go all the habits that take us away from our Self. As we do that in awareness, we are in the presence of Truth. It is the being aware of deep awareness exactly as it is, right now. The peace, the freedom, the joy - all the rewards of meditation come from stopping and getting off the mind train that only knows the future and the past and judgement and comparison. The beauty of a spiritual practice comes from the ever expanding realisation that you can afford to stop, you can let go of everything you have been chasing. You find that there is nothing else right now, no one to impress, no such thing as fame or fortune, no reputation or image or possession or future to secure, no past to defend, no argument to win, nothing but stillness to rest in. The relief is amazing. It’s just like I used to feel in the school holidays, I’d wake up in the morning and feel this contraction: “Oh no- I have to go to school” followed quickly by this release and joy as I realised I didn’t have to go anywhere, that there was nothing to be done right now.
By the way, this resting and contentment and allowing has nothing to do with holidays – it is completely internal. It has nothing to do with the circumstances of life. You still have things to do, decisions to make, responsibilities, commitments, you still have to wake up on a Monday morning and go to work, if that’s what you choose to do. But you are living life from a completely different place, one of joy, lightness and clarity. Those of you who practice everyday know what I’m talking about. The day is the same, except you are not. In this experience of internal rest you are active in that you feel inspired to do things, you have desires and you carry out your plans, but in this state of true non-attachment you simply are not concerned by the ups and downs or as to the outcome, because you are so present.
This moment is full of potential. Being completely full of presence is not abandoning hope and your dreams, it does not mean that you stop living, that you stop caring, that you stop feeling. It is being completely real, completely authentic to yourself without the madness that has taken over most of the world. It is stopping being what you think you should be, what you think is appropriate, it is stopping guessing what the other person wants to hear and instead it is accepting You, exactly as you are right now, saying and doing and being You. In this way the potential of you is limitless, released from the very box you put yourself in.
So if peace or happiness or freedom from limitation is important to you then rest in this moment. Pretend that this moment is the only moment there is. Allow yourself this moment, be attentive to your own presence and attend only to the needs of this moment. When you use your meditation techniques, be aware and be content, allow the experience to unfold as it will. Practice meditation not to get anything, but to lose your fixation on judgement, on the past and the future, on the shoulds. The experience you are having is the only one possible to you right now. You don’t have to lose yourself in it the experience, but you don’t have to deny it either. Instead go beyond it. Go beyond the chaos of the pushing and pulling and rest in the Self, free of expectation, free of neediness, free of loss, free of heartache, free to be whoever you are right now.
Saturday, 24 May 2008
Surrender - part 2
A bunch of meditation teachers made a recording recently of what their experience of surrendering everything - every thought, feeling and action - to the Stillness was like. For me it was amazing. It reminded me on so many different levels of playing with surrender myself.
I hadn't realised it, but there was a subtle effort to secure an experience I thought I wanted. I know the silence well, but there was a lack of contentment in that experience. There was expectation that somehow, sometime (hopefully soon!), my experience was going to change, get bigger, get more profound. This was frustrating because the experience I was having in any given moment rarely met with expectation.
Instead, it's amazing the difference in allowing the silence to be exactly as it is right now. To simply rest in whatever is there. Instantly my experience of stillness and of life became so soft and embracing. There is an immediate quiet joy and gratitude for my experience and for my life. I love it.
It's also so much more obvious to me now how surrender is one big game of seeing how innocently I can approach every moment. To see the mind setting up expectations and play with simply ignoring them.
I feel so grateful for the ease of this. As opposed to rigidly trying to be still, relaxing and allowing the stillness to be is so much easier and graceful. So much better than forcing and controlling.
I love it!
I hadn't realised it, but there was a subtle effort to secure an experience I thought I wanted. I know the silence well, but there was a lack of contentment in that experience. There was expectation that somehow, sometime (hopefully soon!), my experience was going to change, get bigger, get more profound. This was frustrating because the experience I was having in any given moment rarely met with expectation.
Instead, it's amazing the difference in allowing the silence to be exactly as it is right now. To simply rest in whatever is there. Instantly my experience of stillness and of life became so soft and embracing. There is an immediate quiet joy and gratitude for my experience and for my life. I love it.
It's also so much more obvious to me now how surrender is one big game of seeing how innocently I can approach every moment. To see the mind setting up expectations and play with simply ignoring them.
I feel so grateful for the ease of this. As opposed to rigidly trying to be still, relaxing and allowing the stillness to be is so much easier and graceful. So much better than forcing and controlling.
I love it!
Wednesday, 7 November 2007
Inspired
Have you ever heard a thing and only later understood it, realised it?
I don't know how many times someone has said to me something like:
"Don't do anything, just rest in the silence now. Be completely present and aware of what this moment has for you now. Remain content in your experience as it is, without judgement, without wanting to change or it to be anything else than it is, right now."
The amount of times something similar has gone through my eyes or ears and always running was this idea that even to rest I had to do something. I couldn't sit back in the comfy sofa of awareness because there was something more. It was this Noble Thought - I want everything, and what I am experiencing right now is only a taster so I'll try a little harder, be a little more one pointed, be a better student.
It's so funny because its the littlest thing that kept me from resting, from experiencing what there is in this moment, from being free to be all that presence.
So there is just the experience of stillness. Everything still comes and goes but there is this central core, untouched by any of it. I love the saying "like paint being thrown through air". Just like that. It's just what I choose to make it.
Wonderful, simple, so simple and such fun, captivating...
I don't know how many times someone has said to me something like:
"Don't do anything, just rest in the silence now. Be completely present and aware of what this moment has for you now. Remain content in your experience as it is, without judgement, without wanting to change or it to be anything else than it is, right now."
The amount of times something similar has gone through my eyes or ears and always running was this idea that even to rest I had to do something. I couldn't sit back in the comfy sofa of awareness because there was something more. It was this Noble Thought - I want everything, and what I am experiencing right now is only a taster so I'll try a little harder, be a little more one pointed, be a better student.
It's so funny because its the littlest thing that kept me from resting, from experiencing what there is in this moment, from being free to be all that presence.
So there is just the experience of stillness. Everything still comes and goes but there is this central core, untouched by any of it. I love the saying "like paint being thrown through air". Just like that. It's just what I choose to make it.
Wonderful, simple, so simple and such fun, captivating...
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