Without knowing you….just knowing how people are living and thinking in these times…this is my advice for whoever has the synchronistic fortune to come across my words
You’re probably too busy. Busy-ness a disease that prevents us from feeling the life in us. Busy-ness a drug we use to avoid facing the feelings of life.
We use our busy-ness to validate our lives. It’s somehow immoral to enjoy anything or anyone that hasn’t been purchased with busy-ness.
We’ve been domesticated by our culture to structure our human relatings around money changing opportunities so our communion time is replaced by rituals in our busy-ness.
But you can’t question the format of life that is ultimately unfulfilling if you’re too busy to take a look. So my first piece of advice is confront your busy-ness! Now it would be too easy to tell you ways to delegate, what not to worry about, and ways to otherwise carve desperately needed breathing space in a suffocating life. The problem is that we habitually fill in all the space we create with more distraction. Nothing in life resolves itself until we are finally determined to face ourselves. Make the intention that you are going to meet yourself and make peace. You have nothing to lose that’s worth holding on to.
Some busy people are on a mission they are truly passionate about, an expression of something within. I support your work, just do it from your heart and center.
But often, create this person who we think we are. We make up our identity in our minds and it becomes us. We then judge ourselves and are forever inadequate.
The essence of ourselves, our Soul nature, pure Being, ever fulfilled and the source of Love, is always experiencing life and witnessing every thought. Collections of thoughts and memories regarding our personal history take a life of their own and we assume they are “Us.” This False self image is always in danger of extinction because it’s not real. It will always play a game in our head that is ever unfulfilled, ever “not enough,” ever something lacking.
My advice: Take a step back from the image of who you thought you were and accept and learn to BE YOU. The beautiful expression of your Life and Love can only come from a “Real You.” Make the firm intention to reclaim yourself. Courageously face the adventure to take yourself back from a place where you can never win.
It will take courage because we have created a society based on a self-image disease that we’re all infected with. You have been trained to look at yourself and your worth in a socially conditioned way.
You can just as easily judge yourself inadequate for not having the organic, hemp-based clothing that your alternative community values as to judge yourself for not having the Mercedes. The always-lacking self image cannot be at peace in the world just like a deer cannot enjoy a nature walk among wolves. To reclaim yourself, you have to let go of the incessant voice telling you that you have to be something that you are not in order to be fulfilled.
As our parents and society teach the world to us, and suggest how we should act, we adopt an “idealized self” This is a picture of how we envision a “perfect us” would be. We then spend our lives suffering for not measuring up to our impossible ideal. The idealized self always has moving goal posts. There is never enough.
So wait! You started reading this thing about Baba’s advice and thought it would be all practical and help get your chaos and needless drama in order and suddenly you’re in a lecture on the nature of your Being and your conditioning?
Sorry about that. It’s just that my second piece of advice is to deeply consider the perspective I’ve shared above. If I give you list of ways to make life easy for your self-image floundering in the world, its just advice on how to die slower, die in less pain.
We do all kinds of dysfunctional things from the inadequate voice of our self-image. Practical advice has to contain a strategy for freeing the Spirit and Heart. It is my experience that each person’s essence is Love itself and an unimaginably beautiful conscious awareness. We express different flavors of it but we are inherently and forever full to the brim, resplendent in Love and lacking in nothing.
It’s just that we’ve wallpapered over this inner beauty with layers of habitual of thinking, thinking, thinking, comparing, competing, analyzing, and fearful self-doubting.
I don’t expect you to take my word for it, but I know, if you can only reclaim “Being Yourself” everything else will take care of itself. Find out for yourself by considering the cure.
Here is some advice to heal and help yourself back to your deepest Love and Power within yourself.
* Be Here Now*
Your essence is not an object, You are experiencing everything in the here and now. Every other time and place is just an idea in your head. You are not a “thought” but a “Being.” You can inhabit your Being more fully by not projecting your energy constantly into the past and future. Learn to “Be present” Listening, with your mind and feeling, to everything in your “Now.”
Keep returning to “Be Here Now” Breathe, relax. Don’t play word games, you can be present in the moment without forgetting to pick up the kids or deal with the other practical issues of life.
Paying attention is a muscle that is a strain at first but once it gets stronger, it brings you the real power of yourself. As long as your mental energy is scattered around a million thoughts and worries, there is no power of you for anything. Reclaim your power by collecting your attention to the here and now. Eventually, it won’t feel “right” if your presence is not collected at your center.
Once your mind learns to focus and slow down a bit, you’ll find great benefit in learning to meditate. It’s the next step in training your mind that it doesn’t need to run around in circles constantly but can rest in peace until needed.
Thinking, thinking, thinking is a tough habit to break for many so give yourself time and patience to learn this practice if you decide to do it.
Just as our sense of vision tends to dominate the senses, our rational thinking mind tends to dominate our experience. We lose track of listening to our feeling nature, to sensing and communing through presence. The thing is, thinking can’t make you feel anything if you’ve lost touch with your feeling.
So we have to retrain ourselves to tune into perceptions that are activated through presence and intuition rather than thinking. Tune into the feelings we have when just “being together” with a loved one, the feeling of communing with beauty in nature. All during our daily life we have intuitions~feelings~ that are inseparably mixed in with our impressions and thoughts about the life around us. A whole sense of how we perceive the world that we are feeling all the time is obscured by the louder voices in our minds.
Shift your “Be Here Now” awareness to listen to the field of your feelings, “the vibe” of things. Intend to feel the presence of someone and not how they feel to you. An amazing world of our deeper realities will unfold and a dimension within your self will awaken. This is empowered and made possible by you collecting your awareness in the here and now and learning to focus. Take that attention and witness all your feelings. When you touch someone, feel their energy and send some Love.
Next major advice: Don’t fear feelings.
Our world is at the brink of destruction because we have somehow managed to conceive of a million ways to kill each other without having the capacity to feel why that is madness.
There can be no deep satisfaction in life if you repress your feeling nature. Even if you are all about intellectual pursuits and ‘refined’ tastes, the quality of enjoying all that has to be reflected from your feeling nature. The mind and the heart comprise the divine marriage with your Being. When they are both open and in partnership, you are whole and feel and perceive the beauty of your life, however tough an adventure it might be.
The problem is that we all feel pain and develop numbing strategies to avoid challenging feelings.
Here is a crucial insight: Our resistance and fear of feeling pain comprises the vast majority of the pain that we feel. If we would just let ourselves feel it, the pain would come and go and we’d be back to being free. From fearing pain, we experience it unnecessarily when it’s not even present.
Just as bad, we are not really spared our denied, repressed and numbed pain. We create a dark room to hide our traumas in; a room that we create out of our own energy that becomes divided and locked up in that room. A part of us remains aware of the creatures in our dungeon though, and this colors our feelings and emotional reactions whenever a situation reminds us of what pained us before. The universe makes a point of making this happen regularly so we have an opportunity to work through the feelings we have locked up.
Make a resolution to make peace with feelings. Be brave and work through the pent up feelings you have stuck in you. (A good practice for this involves my “Shamanic Death and Rebirth” practice outlined on my website.) The more you become undivided and free of the past, the more your feelings and intuition will be your guide and friend, instead of the monkey on your back.
When that happens, and you face a decision, or you need to check in with yourself about what’s right for you, you’ll not only have the information from your mind, but you’ll be able to ask your Heart and get a feeling that often has insight beyond what the mind can offer.
Even better, you’ll be able to “feel” all the loved ones in your life and share Loving Presence. You’ll know that Love is within you, as you. When you know that, nobody can take your Love away and you can dare to give Love because it is always yours to give.
Once your Mind learns to be calm and focused, and try are centered as Being, and once your Heart is healed, and feels things openly as they are, and not in response to past hurts, then you won’t need any other advice because everything you need to know will automatically come to you. Everything falls in to place in the perfect poetry of your life unfolding.
We life in a magic world where nothing happens by accident. We live in a hall of mirrors where we continually experience the reflection of ourselves in every event.
Change yourself and everything changes around you. The whole of Life will conspire to guide and protect you if you call in the help of Spirit to take you on the road to Love and wholeness. “Ask and it will be given.”
The best one thing you can do is make a sincere prayer inviting the Spirit to guide you to healing, peace and Love. Otherwise the Spirit loves you anyway but won’t intrude on your subconscious determination to hold on to your present state, a discomforting place that you have somehow managed to tolerate and feel safe in. It’s not enough, allow yourself and Spirit to make your life an adventure of evolution, healing and wonder.
I ask Spirit to Bless you that you experience all the Love your Heart has to offer, all the Peace your mind can abide in, and a beautiful journey of Life Unfolding.
