You’re so much more than all of the labels that have been spoken over you. Every label that you identify with inherently comes with its own set of limitations. Identification is the root cause of why we suffer. We take that label of being a ‘good spouse’, being a ‘good parent’, being a ‘good business owner’ and because we are identifying with this piece of programming or conditioning around it and what that means, we’re forever falling short.
At some point we remember on our journey of waking up, loving and accepting ourselves, that we are just pure consciousness. That we’re literally an infinite presence, here for a limited time, expressing and experiencing uniquely.
I had to laugh when I saw a cartoon some months ago. (If you haven’t seen it, I shared it on my Facebook page: It showed three booths at a Spiritual Fair. One of the booths offered “Past-Life Reading” and another touted “Future Telling.” Both booths had crowds of people in line clamoring to get their turn.
The middle booth, however, had no customers whatsoever. The sign above it read: “Meditation” and the lonely person manning this booth kept desperately trying to wave people over, saying “Present Moment anyone?”
How true is this? We yearn to discover more about how our past has shaped us and we can’t wait to find out what’s in store for our future. But for right now, we’re more inclined to shake our heads and say: “Uh-uh. No thanks. I’ll pass.”
If there was one thing that I could have shared with myself when I was 16 to 18 years old, I would have let myself know that it was okay to be peaceful. I feel like, in a world where individuals are constantly chasing things outside of themselves, bringing them moments of happiness, peace is actually where it’s at. And, it is fascinating because peace is actually our natural state of being.
The majority of the world today is going through this pandemic, this unprecedented moment in human history, and lacking the awareness that peace is even an option for them.
How blessed are we that at least we have the awareness that we can be peaceful in our lives. And it’s not that things are necessarily going to change in our lives, or we’re all of a sudden going to become some other version of ourselves than we are at this moment, it’s just that we are going to fundamentally chill out.
" When your mind and heart are truly open abundance will flow to you effortlessly and easily.
Although the marvels of the brain as an organ have been wondered at for decades, there’s a risk that science will make us feel like brain puppets. Neuroscience runs this risk by assuming, without any proof, that our brains think, feel, perceive the world, and make choices. In reality the brain is an instrument at the service of the mind. We cannot live without it, just as we cannot live without a heart, but by promoting the brain into a thinking machine (an M.I.T. professor who championed Artificial Intelligence dubbed the brain “a computer made of meat”), we demote ourselves.
You are much more in charge of your biology than you think. Your experiences constantly change your brain. Much of the time we fail to pay attention to how we relate to the brain, but no relationship is more important. One thing the human brain does, in fact, share with computers: It is programmable. We primarily use this fact the wrong way around. Instead of programming our brains to be open, creative, alert, and quiet, we program it to carry out a hundred short cuts.
Have you ever wondered why you’re here? Have you ever questioned the nature of existence and what the purpose of all this really is? I have. And here’s what I have discovered; I chose to be here to have an experience. And, I didn’t just choose to be here to have a particular, singular experience, I chose to be here to have the entire experience to be a human being.
The more I remember this truth, the more I am able to breathe, relax and withdraw my energy, attention, and focus away from the world. I am recognizing that who I am, as I am, doesn’t need to be fixed. Who I am, as I am, doesn’t need to be improved. Who I am, as I am, doesn’t need to be healed. Who I am, as I am, is just a form, or function, or an activity.
In stressful times many more people feel fear than in normal times. What this means is that an ability to be fearless becomes more essential than in normal times. How is that accomplished? Being fearful is a skill you can master. It doesn’t require any of the things society falls back on. You don’t have to be tougher, stronger, more of a man (if you happen to be a male) or call upon a strong man for help (if you happen to be female).
In reality you only have to be present, because in the present there is no fear. At first this sounds wrong, because when you experience worry and anxiety, the most common types of fear, they hit you here and now. But here and now isn’t the same as the Present. Here and now describes clock time. If you are waiting for a bus and it is five minutes late, once it arrives, it is here now. The present moment, however, has nothing to do with clock time. The present is a state of mind, and in fact is the most natural state of mind, the state your mind wants to be in.
One of the key concepts in my new book, Total Meditation, is that the mind will return to the present effortlessly if given a chance. Even though “living in the present” has become a popular phrase, most people still approach it as a kind of spiritual challenge that requires them to intensely focus to make sure they stay mindful and present. This is the mental equivalent of balancing a penny on the end of your finger. The penny naturally wants to topple over unless you exert an effort to keep it balanced.
The active mind can feel like that. When fear and anxiety are roaming the mind. Balance seems difficult. In reality it’s not. Fear, despite its unique power, is just another mental distraction. Distractions can also be pleasant, as we all know watching a movie, and the active mind finds them very useful, because when you are distracted, you get a vacation from the endless stream of thoughts and feelings that the active mind must deal with.
You are so powerful. You have so much potential inside of you and it’s important that you begin to transform your relationship with your life in order to uncover and reveal the light, the love, and the power that has always lived at your core.
We’re at the beginning of a 10 year window of time that’s going to disturb every survival-based energy in humanity. It’s important that we recognize that the upset, the overwhelm, and the stress that we are experiencing, isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. As empaths, and people who are sensitive, it’s important that we are empowered now to ride these waves of experience so that we are not reverting to distractions that are undermining our health, well-being, or peace of mind.
There are some days when you wake up and you begin to wonder what on earth is going on. That someday has been the last 200 plus days. If you have not at some point over the past six months woken up and consciously asked yourself what is going on, then you have been fundamentally checked out completely for one of the most unprecedented times in human history.
We are at a tipping point. We have to begin to unwind from every survival based energy we are holding on to. As long as humanity continues to be burdened by fear, guilt, shame or grief, we’re going to continue to need to have experiences in our lives that are based in survival. Our holding on to the energies of survival creates scenarios and situations that we have to survive through. At some point we have to get the interconnected, intertwined, interdependent nature of reality and we also have to be accountable and responsible for what we feel inside of ourselves.
When the Matrix movies first gained immense popularity in 1999, the notion of an imaginary world in which everyone was enslaved seemed just that, imaginary. Pop culture didn’t look deep enough to reveal that ancient tradition of Maya, the Sanskrit term for an all-enveloping illusion that, for real, envelops all of us. When Maya was discussed, it belonged to an exotic worldview that no modern person in the West gave much credence to.
But that’s how illusion keeps us entranced, by making it seem, as in the brilliant movies, that the matrix constitutes real life. Clearly a better explanation is needed in order to convince the average person, not so much that we all live in a dream/spell/illusion, but that it can be escaped. I discuss what it means to escape the illusion in my new book, Total Meditation. Here I’d like to give a capsule preview of why the real-life matrix matters to everyone.
I believe that we are at this point in our lives, having to have gone through everything we have gone through, everything we have experienced, so that we can meet what is unfolding at this moment peacefully. This is why you have done everything in your life as you have done. As we are, and as we are unfolding and moving forward, expanding into who the person we have come here to be, it is important to remember we have gone through the necessary preparation required, in order to access the love, the light, the presence that lives within us.
So often, we feel like something is missing. We invalidate our journey, and we feel like we are not ready or equipped to meet life. What I want you to know is that you were born ready and equipped to meet life. This is your time. Everything that you have gone through, and everything that you have experienced has been in preparation for this very moment. Life isn’t always going to go the way you expect it to go, or the way you think it will go. As Spiritual Beings, acceptance is the fastest path back to peace.
When the great American mythologist Joseph Campbell first used the phrase, “Follow your bliss,” he inspired many people. He held out a vision that was radically different from the notion that hard work, persistence, and keeping your shoulder to the wheel was the key to success. But actually, achieving this new vision didn’t prove to be easy.
Campbell’s underlying intention had mythical and spiritual roots. This is clear when you read a bit more about his advice. “If you do follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you.” This is where people get confused and frustrated, however. They have something they love to do, but the invisible track doesn’t show up. Or what they love to do might have absolutely no financial aspect. What then?
Did you know that unconscious thoughts trigger chemical messengers in your brain, which in turn trigger your cells to take action?
Let’s break it down...
You may be familiar with the “fight-or-flight” response.
This response is something we all have. On an evolutionary scale, it was intended to be triggered when we are faced with a predator, one that may kill or eat us.
In this situation, we have two choices: to fight the predator or to RUN.
Our bodies are flooded with adrenaline that gives it the ability to do one or the other.
That same response is triggered in humans every single day.
We are not running from tigers any longer but…
Holistic health, diet, and medicine have made the term “holistic” more familiar today. The era when anything “holistic” was considered fringe is long past. But the central concept of wholeness remains misunderstood. You cannot aim to be whole, learn to be whole, or make yourself whole. You are already whole as far as your body is concerned. There is constant unified coordination between trillions of cells that organize thousands of organic processes into a working whole.
Understanding organic wholeness in complete detail is beyond anyone’s current intellectual grasp, and is likely to remain that way. The only working model of a neuron, it has been said, would be a neuron. The brain resists any simple reduction, in other words. But the wholeness of mind and spirit is even more baffling, as I address in a new book, Total Meditation. I based the title on practical consideration, to distinguish how meditation can be holistic rather than occasional.
Countless people start meditating only to quickly drop it or else to return to it when their day is particularly stressful. I think this high dropout rate can be turned around simply by offering simpler techniques that encourage the mind to do what it naturally wants to do, which is to stay in balance all the time, regardless of daily pressure, stress, worries, and overwhelm. These challenging times make the need even more urgent.
Although meditation has become widely popular, higher consciousness baffles and intimidates people. It seems like a faraway exotic attainment, and perhaps more myth that reality. But higher consciousness is just a convenient catch-all for expanded awareness. Reaching any higher state depends on a simple, very basic axiom: You cannot change what you are not aware of. Grasping this statement takes only a minute, but the point is critically important.
To be aware is also called being mindful. It is very desirable to be mindful. It keeps you in the present moment. It involves being alert and open to new experiences. Mindfulness is detached: you are open to the present moment but are not attached to any outcome that you either desire or fear.
Yet mindfulness has a built-in catch. How do you remind yourself to be mindful when you have drifted away from the present moment? Mindfulness is the very state you are not in. Telling someone to be mindful is like saying “Don’t forget to remember.” Fortunately, you can get past the catch. It involves the simple act of noticing. Your mind is designed to notice things all the time and sending the signal to you.
When you notice a friend in the crowd or something appetizing on a restaurant menu or an attractive stranger, what actually happens? You flick a switch and start to pay attention. The thing you notice is selected from lots of other things you are not noticing. When you see a friend in the crowd, you ignore the other people all around.
Hilary wrote:
I am eating very clean and working out five days a week. I try to meditate every day. Despite this, I feel disconnected and unloved by my Higher Power. I know this is just how I FEEL and not reality. I tell my little girl it’s not true…but I can’t seem to change this belief. I know connection will help me. I need some guidance from you to hear my Guidance!
It’s wonderful that Hilary is eating well, exercising and meditating. But taking loving care of herself involves much more than that. The fact that she feels disconnected from and unloved by her higher power indicates that she is disconnected from her feelings and not loving herself – that she is operating from her wounded self.
Telling her inner child that something isn’t true is not at all the same thing as living from the truth. If she is abandoning herself by ignoring her feelings – staying in her head rather than in her heart – by judging herself, by turning to various addictions (even meditation can be an addiction if the intent is to bliss out and avoid her feelings, or to control God), or by making others responsible for her feelings, then she is operating from a closed heart. There is no way to connect with her guidance when her heart is closed.
Meditation has a built-in problem that needs solving, the problem of noncompliance. Countless people have taken up the practice, motivated by the benefits of meditation supported by literally thousands of studies. The first few sessions go well, which is encouraging, but it is only a matter of time before meditation becomes one more thing we don’t have time for.
Letting your meditation drop away seems to affect every kind of practice, no matter how simple, including mindfulness, mantra meditation, Buddhist Vipassana, and so on. Even sitting for 10 minutes following your breath, which is the simplest meditation of all, doesn’t manage to stick. The result is that the vast majority of people stop meditating and never go back, while a much smaller number meditate “when I feel I need it.”
Are you breathing?
The Practice:
One breath at a time.
Why?
[If for you the breath is associated with trauma and discomfort, you probably shouldn’t try this practice in its form below. But you might adapt it to something that is more nurturing for you, such as a saying or image.]
Breathing brings you home. Body and mind twine together in the breath. As soon as you become aware of breathing, you’re in your body. Speed up the breath and there’s new energy. Slow it down and you calm. Inhale and oxygen surges into your brain while the arousing sympathetic nervous system activates and accelerates the heartbeat. Exhale and activate the soothing peaceful parasympathetic nervous system, so the heart beats more slowly. In the breath you are home in this moment, this Now.
You are a magnificent being. You have a light inside of you that is both dynamic and powerful. It’s time to finally have the courage to liberate this potential for all of the world to see and feel.
Many of you have been wondering during this time of coronavirus how to best utilize every gift and blessing that you have for the betterment of the world. The greater evolution or ascension happens through the radical and profound acceptance of yourself.
The more you end your resistance to your humanity, the more you realize that all of these things that you’re trying to bring about in your life naturally exist within you. We do this though relaxing into the parts of us that already is.
The allure of living in the present moment is popular but also endangered. The pandemic lockdown has forced millions of people into cramped living conditions that disrupts normal life, puts strain on relationships, adds stress to families, and introduces depression and anxiety. Escaping the present moment is likely to be everyone’s dream.
But the situation will eventually change, and phrases like “the power of now” are embedded in people’s aspirations. The present moment has wound up being a problem and a solution at a same time. The most basic question needs answering, then. Why live in the present moment and how is it achieved?
Sometimes the present moment brings experiences of love, kindness, creativity, beauty, and insight. In those moments no one needs to ask why it’s good to live in the now. (The body’s trillions of cells, including brain cells, don’t ask the question, because they are designed to only live in the present, occupied with thousands of chemical reactions and electrical signaling every second. Even when you recall a past event, your brain is strictly confined to the now in order to retrieve the memory.)
The first thing to notice when you are overtaken by the now is that you didn’t have to work for it. The present moment is always present. The real question is why we aren’t in the present moment. Countless people ae working hard on themselves to stay in the now. But if it takes no work to get a glimpse of the beauty, love, and fulfillment that dawns in the present moment, can we expect that working to get back there is really necessary, or even effective?
“We have within us a miraculous power, and if we live our daily lives in mindfulness, if we take steps mindfully, with love and care, we can produce the miracle and transform our world into a miraculous place to live.” — Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnamese Thiền Buddhist monk, peace activist, and founder of the Plum Village Tradition
Mindfulness. Presence. Omniscient Wisdom.
These are always right at our fingertips—right here, right now—if only we decide to claim our rightful inheritance as Divine Co-creators with God.
Many have. And many more are with each passing moment because we are in the time of the Great Awakening. Can you feel it?
We here at Humanity’s Team live and breathe this conscious awareness every day as we come together in collaboration to communicate and share the message of Love, Connection, and Oneness with the world.
We’ve accepted the invitation to live this way, to bridge any previous gaps between workday and home life, and to share with others, who are receptive to the message, the inevitable grace and ease that come with conscious awareness.
What does this feel like?