Going Deeper

Dialing Up Life in the Now

 

Think for a few moments about your heart. How it never stops beating; how its intelligence keeps you alive. Think about this most important muscle in your body, and everything you ever learned about it. Spend 30 seconds recalling any amazing facts that this supercomputer between your ears has stored for you on this, its most important partner the life of your body.

Now, at the end of this paragraph, look up from your device and open your focus. Keep your eyes open, unfocused and relaxed. Put your attention on your breath, and feel it gently moving in and out, expanding your lungs close to that precious heart. Keep your eyes unfocused, your attention on your breath, and feel  for your heart. Be aware of it, and your gratitude for it’s work.

If you did indeed take a few seconds and did that, did it feel any different? Did your breath and the stillness of an open gaze offer you a bit more than the information your mind kindly served up? Did it dial up the warmth of love you feel for, and perhaps from, your heart? Was the embrace of gratitude any more complete?

 

For me it always is. I deeply appreciate the wealth of information my mind can offer me from a past Now moment. It often serves as a welcome reminder of the things and ideas to put my awareness on. My mind can also often show me a whole lot of unreleased resistance to a past Now moment in the form of fear in my current one. Which without a quick decision to surrender can easily pull me right out of that Now and into a whole lot of mental analysis of how to change it. Today was one of those days.

I returned home yesterday after an amazing trip to the Midwest for some time with my mom, some big and beautiful horses,  (the ones in this pic are only yearlings) and some friends old and new for a workshop on what this blog has been about.

How rapidly the pain in my body all but left was remarkable. Was it the heat and humidity? The time away from a job that no longer serves me? Time with a different focus and purpose? What I ate differently? These were the questions I was left with this morning when I woke up and it was like I had never left. Pain and more pain.

But we drink from a deeper well when we live without resistance to the present moment. Awareness is the amplifier to the sweet sound of morning birdsong,  the taste of a ripe mango and the almost magical sight of a rainbow. And when I resist what I am aware of in my Now, that fear pulls the plug on the Wonder Channel and tunes me into the Frustration Network, where I get to analyze the story of struggle instead of gracefully allowing for new possibility.

Information through the past and predictable future of the mind comes in as if on a dial-up connection, while our awareness rooted in the present moment brings it in on fiber optics. Deeper, broader and far more visceral, life in our Now moment carries the energy of limitless possibility into every part of who we are.

Somehow both peaceful and emergent, the magic of an unresisted present moment holds us and heals us. Even in anger, weakness or fatigue, we are fully alive when we surrender into our eternal Now moment. It balances, it soothes, and it inspires.

Allowed enough of our attention,  that Now moment reveals what no longer serves, and offers the possibility of what does. It washes away the old and quickens the spirit with the new. It offers us the often unexpected yet always perfect.

I wrote a lot of this last night, after a lovely time walking barefoot on some cool evening grass. I was exhausted, and went to bed without posting it. Today offered the opportunity to weave some of the rough and chafing fabric of fear into this, a written expression of the evolving tapestry that is my life.

So off I go, to surrender the fight, and find what I know awaits in a connection to my body, my breath and my heart in this, a challenging Now moment. It’s always hard when it seems we’ve gone backwards. Good thing love is there, in any direction.

Your breath will take you there. Take it for a ride. Hold on long enough, and it can always take you Home.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Present Moment Has Your Back

Balance and Grace

I am always amazed and softened by the grace of the present moment when I remain long enough. It reveals the perfection in my imperfection.

Radical Forgiveness

My life changed profoundly several years ago after an emotional clearing session called Radical Forgiveness. It reframed my past, and shifted my awareness. Love flowed into the space left open when my heart cleaned out all the closets 🙂

In the video I left out a very important aspect of the whole experience. I hope you’ll read the couple sentences below after watching it.

 

Ok, a couple things.

One, the most important person I put in the chair was myself. Nothing holds us captive more discreetly than self judgement. So much of what I describe feeling the next day was a wholeness, a self love and appreciation I had never felt to that extent before.

There are many RF facilitators our there. If this is something that has resonated with you, the link below offers a state by state listing of folks offering this type of session.

http://www.radicalforgiveness.com/coach-type/radical-living-coaches/

Have a wonderful weekend!!

 

Letting Go of Judgement exercise

I’m happy to share a short meditation here. Watch it seated comfortably and with 15 minutes of time so you can integrate it for a few minutes before you have to do something else. The video is only 11 minutes. Enjoy!

 

I Wanna Go To McDonalds

The Toughest Freedom to Grant

Unrelenting pain, be it physical or emotional, can be hard to see beyond. Resistance to it in any given moment changes hard to impossible when it comes to to seeing beyond it.

I’ve talked a lot on this blog about the idea of a free heart. I’ve shared my thoughts on how life goes from mundane to sublime when we live it from a place of presence in the present moment instead of from the narrative of the mind.

Even pain can be sublime when we lose our resistance to it, and everything it can create in us. Pain can be the greatest path to complete self love and wholeness as we surrender our grip on control and into the waiting arms of grace. Suddenly we find freedom instead of fault within ourselves and others.

The challenge is our resistance to some of the now moments pain can bring us to. It is easy to judge our negative emotions, suppress them, and hold them hostage in the name of “being better than that“. If we don’t grant our humanity in a now moment the freedom to be, it will bang at the door of the cage we have just created.

If we can find the love to let go of our resistance to our desires and feelings, no matter how we may have labelled them in the past, love’s freeing nature will work it’s magic. This alchemy of the heart brings healing , and a vision beyond whatever pain created what we have been resisting within ourselves.

In the video below, I share my thoughts and my own experience with perhaps the toughest freedom to grant ourselves and others: the freedom to want to leave this life behind.

I understand how deeply wounded many feel by the thought alone of someone they love wanting to leave. I hope this helps with that, even just a bit. Just like being that space for an angry friend to vent and move on, finding the love to allow for even the desire to leave to be honored is often the grace that heart needs.

 

Attachments Big and Small

I had an aha moment yesterday morning around my mistrust of certain governing entities in this and other countries. I felt a shift into more love and freedom,, and that’s always something I want to share.

 

 

Close The Windows

Finally closing the windows last night felt rather symbolic this morning on a variety of levels. Just a few Saturday morning thoughts…