Your thoughts, feelings, and beliefs create the landscape in your mind that you call “here.” The challenging element is that it’s not fixed. Even while you inhabit it, it is changing based on your perception. 

Your inner landscape reflects your feelings and the thoughts that are connected to them. 

Two people can encounter the same situation and have completely different reactions based on their own history and stories. For instance, one person sees a picture of the Eiffel Tower and feels excitement and romance because it’s where their partner proposed. Another sees the same picture and feels sick to their stomach because it reminds them of the trip to France that led to a romantic breakup. Same photo, two very different responses rooted in their own individual experiences. 

The ground beneath you, the atmosphere around you, and the energy within you can all shift in an instant as you react to what you perceive as happening in your life. 

Past or Present? It’s Hard to Tell…

The capacity to witness what is happening inside us with a non-judging attention allows us to respond to life from our full intelligence and heart. This talk looks at the role of witnessing in spiritual practice, and how we can cultivate this superpower in a way that reveals the light or spirit that lives through all beings.

“Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled—
to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking

into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing—
that the light is everything—that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and falling. And I do.”

Mary Oliver

Most of you that are healers think that you need to use a modality until you remember that you are the magic. Once you understand that you are the magic, you’re free and you don’t need the wand anymore, or to twitch your nose, or blink your eyes. You don’t have to repeat any phrases or mantras, you just show up in your spectacular self and you bring your own magic to the party. 

Life becomes so much simpler when you know who you are. At some point you have to acknowledge the magic in you and you have to realize that that five year old inside of you is the magic.  When you resolve your inner conflict with your inner-child, and your inner-child feels safe, and you’re back to being child-like again, you’re free. 

Being child-like is returning to your pre-programmed, pre-conditioned self. It’s getting back to raw curiosity, pure joy, and enthusiasm. The more you realize that you are not defined by anything that is happening, the more you realize that you have the capacity to tap into your beautiful inner-child. When you connect from the beautiful being that you have in you, you’re free because that is where the magic is. 

Great lakes, ponds, and streams freeze over; the earth grows hard and unreceptive. Tree sap stops flowing; even the air becomes dense, slow to move, and heat stealing. Yet, not everything is as it appears to be! 

The pervasive stillness and deep silence of winter are powers every bit as great as are the explosive forces of spring and summer, only different. After all, what is a glacier but a vast frozen river crawling its way through time? Both are forms of water whose unstoppable might can carve their way through solid rock! So, how can we channel this power of winter, and use it to let go of whatever stands between us and the higher life we desire? 

Winter is the time of the year when the forces of nature assume their most passive form. But we are discovering here that passive does not mean powerless!

The better we understand this unique power of being “passive”– and how it serves as the secret consort of all things active – the more we grow in the faith we need to be wisely passive toward whatever fears remain in us about letting go of our false self. This is why, during the dark days of winter, we should take time each day - - as often as possible - - to quietly return to the living Light that dwells in the center of ourselves.

By gathering our attention in this way, and bringing the whole of ourselves into the heart of this interior stillness, we not only collect our own forces, as nature herself is doing, but much more: in this deliberate act of gathering ourselves – and for the conscious sense of quiet contentment we find within it – we are also being released from the false idea that the source of our strength and security can be found somewhere outside us.

Once we start to see, to know in our innermost heart, that Life itself is already complete, we can let go of whatever – or whoever – would have us believe otherwise. 

I am so thankful that my life did not work out the way I wanted it to, the way I had envisioned it, the way I had prayed for it, the way I had intended. Thank God that my life didn’t bend to meet me in my limited lens of perception. 

Mark Twain said famously: 

"The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why." 

The day I figured out why I was born, interestingly enough, was New Year’s Eve 2002/2003.  On that day, I had a direct experience with the Divine. I experienced God, The Divine, The Beloved, as an infinite ocean of love. No judgement, no criticism, no forgiveness - just love in its purest form.  Since that day, I have been no longer able to deny why I am here. I was shown very clearly that we are all connected to this love, every single one of us.  

I have learned through personal experience a long time ago, that surrender, and I mean complete and total surrender, is actually the only way to fly. I’ve traveled all over the world and have met people from all walks of life, and have experienced things that are just beyond the mind that I never could have imagined. All in all, my life has been a journey that has been unfolding with this perfection and synchronicity, even in this moment.  

Letting go is how you access freedom. Letting go of your version of life allows you to experience life in its totality. I used to want things, I used to pray for things, I used to believe that things were going to make me happy, and that having things was an answer to something that was feeling inside of me that I didn’t want to feel, until one day, I realized I was praying for all the wrong things.

We spend all of our time intending, praying and envisioning for ourselves, for things we think are going to make a difference in our lives, only to discover that once we get them, they don’t make a difference at all. 

If our heart longs to see a shooting star, that day will come when we’ll see one blaze across the heavens. If we keep looking for physical gold, by panning a stream or breaking through rock, chances are our search will be rewarded, but when we seek the more valuable gold of real self-knowledge, we are guaranteed to find it. It is there in abundance just waiting to be uncovered. 
 

Opportunities for self-study — and the changes these discoveries yield — present themselves endlessly, with new ones arriving with each new moment. The key point here is that if we don’t undergo the changes within ourselves that we say we desire, it’s because we are not awake to these unfolding opportunities. In other words, our attention is on something else. It’s easy to have our attention sidetracked in this way. The truth is that even though we may feel a strong pull in the direction of self-study, and long for the special freedom it alone can grant us, there also exists quite often an even stronger pull away from it.