power of now Archives - Adulting: Second- Half

Your Attention Please

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

(On an aside, I am struggling a little bit with writing today. This is an odd experience for me. As you all well know by now, I’m pretty prolific. I think this morning’s “writer’s block” mostly has to do with the fact that I got a new keyboard. My last ancient, dusty, “several times spilled on” keyboard was disgusting and no amount of spray action from a full can of compressed air was going to save it. It should have been trashed a long time ago. Still, this new keyboard feels foreign to me. Despite being a best seller on Amazon, it’s noisy and stiff and it feels clunky. My other keys were shiny from use. These keys feel matte and dull and too spread apart. Subtleties truly matter. I now understand why the “writers of old” held fast to their old, trusty typewriters. There is more to writing than just writing. The means matter. They truly do. Please, stay with me, as I let this new keyboard slowly become one with the pathways of my mind and my heart, so that I can best convey what I want to say. Like so much in life, I see that this is going to be an eventual process, and a lesson in patience.)

A big trend these days is an emphasis on “staying present”, staying in awareness, staying in the moment, but this usually only makes sense when we are reading about it, or being lead on a guided meditation in a yoga class, and even then, if we’ve had too much coffee, or we have too many things on our plates to deal with, the staying with our breath thing goes right out the window. (there’s a reason why our bodies breathe on their own, right? We’ve got other sh$t to deal with.) The times that we truly are staying completely present, we ironically, aren’t usually aware that we are doing it. These are the times in which we are completely and totally and mindfully and emotionally involved in whatever we are doing right at that very moment, and this is usually when we are engaged in something that we love to do. When we are involved in our passion projects, we are one with the passion and one with the project. Time stops. We are staying in the flow of life, moment by moment, and it feels so great. It feels so natural and the realest we ever feel. So why can’t we always stay in that state of pure, jubilant, in-the-now presence? We can, but like all things, it has to be our daily intention, desire and practice to do it.

I read some of Mary O’Malley’s writings lately about staying in awareness and her writings are the most helpful, practical “take” on awareness, which I have read in a long while. She has a blog and several books on the subject. O’Malley suggests that you take a look at all of the “story tellers” in your mind. If you are worried about the future, you are with a story teller. If you are ruminating about the past, you are with a story teller. If you are harshly judging yourself or others, you are with a storyteller. Your peaceful awareness part of yourself, the part of you that can notice your own breath, notice where pain and other sensations are in your body, the part of you that can notice your emotional response to happenings, doesn’t make a judgment. It just peacefully and unconditionally notices everything right in the very moment. Like it notices your physical pain, and your emotional trauma, it also notices your crazy train flow of thoughts.

Therefore, if you are feeling the need to find a pause in the storm of your thoughts or your emotions, or you need to find a pause in your reactions to your thoughts and to your emotions, check in with yourself. Take that deep breath and ask yourself, “Was I scared about the future? That has nothing to do with where I am right now. I was caught up in my “story telling”. Was I criminally flogging myself for something I can’t change in my past? That has nothing to do with where I am right now. I was caught up in my “story telling.” When you feel yourself getting emotionally roiled, check in with your thoughts. What kind of “story” is brewing in your mind? Call yourself out. “Storyteller!!” When you make this a practice, you can start calling yourself out on your own mind’s imaginary storytelling all of the time. This will help you to better intentionally respond to the circumstances happening in your life, versus having knee-jerk, overly-charged reactions. When we call out our Storyteller, we get back to noticing what is actually real, what is in the moment, what is actually happening now. When we stop with the “story telling”, we get back to what actually is. When we bring our attention back to “what is”, we are truly noticing and experiencing the peaceful flow of Life, without the distractions and made-up stories of our overactive and oftentimes preconditioned imaginations.

“Happiness arises from getting what you want, and this comes and goes in your life. Joy arises from being with what is – all of it!”
― Mary O’Malley

“With full attention, you become an instrument of healing on our planet, for all that you touch and every being you meet is then transformed by the power of your focused attention. Therein lies the possibility of Heaven on Earth.” – Mary O’Malley

“We live in a story in our heads that is always trying to get us to “do” life, dictating to us, telling us we need to make ourselves and our lives better or different from what they are. In our endless trying, we have forgotten how to be. We have forgotten how to open to the marvelous and magical adventure of life. We have forgotten how to trust ourselves, to trust our lives, and to live in joy.”
― Mary O’Malley

Peaceful Monday

“The total amount of energy and matter in the Universe remains constant, merely changing from one form to another. The First Law of Thermodynamics (Conservation) states that energy is always conserved, it cannot be created or destroyed.” – The Law of Thermodynamics

When you get really quiet and still, such as when you are involved in meditation or in a listening prayer state, or at a point where you choose to completely surrender to what is happening right in the moment to the degree that you lose all sense of time, you are connected to the part of you that will never, ever disappear. When you are in that detached, peaceful state of awareness, you come to understand what is eternal. This awareness doesn’t have thoughts, although it has all-knowingness. This awareness energy just notices thoughts, like it notices bodily sensations, without naming or judging anything. It just lovingly notices all that is going on right in the very moment. This deep, eternal part of you, is peace and love beyond understanding. It cannot be touched by fear, or by worry, or by desperation. It is untouchable, indestructible and everlasting. This awareness energy is always available to you. Today you can choose to stay with the realest, deepest, most undisturbed energy that lies within you, or you can stay mired in all of the scary news of the day. Use your feelings as a navigation system. What feels better – obsessively scrolling through the negative news feeds and trying to make intellectual sense of it all, or staying connected to the very, now moment, in which you are breathing, and in which you are completely okay? What state is your body in, when you are mired in fear and anger and distress? Is it tight muscles with cold extremities? What state is your body in when you are calm and connected to your inner peace? Is it warm and soft? We don’t want to believe that peace is a choice, but it is. As I have written recently, peace is a practice. But it is a worthwhile act. Peace is a practice of noticing what is always there, and always available to us, deep below the surface.

When you realize that you have this untouchable awareness inside of you, you come to realize that every other living thing has this same exact awareness inside of them, too. You come to realize that this awareness is what binds you to every other being for eternity. You come to realize that it is this very continual awareness that creates, and yet also experiences Creation. You come to realize that this peaceful, knowing awareness is what makes all of us One. So that if you think that you are hurting or attacking another, you may bruise their bodies, or their egos, but you can never destroy their Awareness, and nor can they destroy yours. And even more so, how silly it is to try to destroy that which is a very part of you, and that what is eternally indestructible.

I know that this is deep for my blog on a Monday. It is fun to start the week off on a joke, like I typically do on Monday-Fundays. But it is strength to start the week out on the right foot, by making peace a practice. When peace is your practice, you can laugh and you can cry, but at your core, you remain in tranquil bliss forevermore.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Balancing Act

I think that the internet was started by the little kids who ask, “Why?” all of the time. And not the little kids who asked, “Why?” just to be annoying, in order to get a rise out of the adults in their lives, or just to hear themselves chatter, but the kids who really wanted an answer. And good answers. I can’t be certain, but I think I was one of those “enquiring minds want to know” kids.

“What is vacation constipation?” and “What does dreaming about bald eagles mean?” are questions that I have already looked up this morning on the internet and I have looked up the answers, at more than one website.

“I don’t think we should have less information in the world. The information age has yielded great advances in medicine, agriculture, transportation and many other fields. But the problem is twofold. One, we are assaulted with more information than any one of us can handle. Two, beyond the overload, too much information often leads to bad decisions.” – Daniel Levitin

I read the above quote and I thought about it a bit. It is interesting to me that social movements often beget other social movements. We are having renovations done on our home, and inevitably the one project has now been the impetus for 3-4 more minor projects that all stemmed from the “open can of worms” of the first project. In the same way, the last line of the above quote about the information age suggests that information overload can lead to bad decisions. Hence, we have the “Being in the Now” movement, where meditation and self-awareness have become mainstream concepts. The trick is to balance the amount of information that we are assaulted with on a daily basis, with a healthy dose of relaxation and counting our breaths. . . . and not acting on everything we see and feel and hear and read, impulsively.

“Advances in technology can be empowering, progressive and enriching. History has shown this across civilizations and societies. But it has also shown, and the present and future will continue to show, that it is foolish, risky, flawed and folly without us raising our individual and collective consciousness and mindfulness to accompany it – to ensure we use it shrewdly, kindly and wisely.”
― Rasheed Ogunlaru

What Is

“Never let the memories of the way things were, blind you from the reality of the way things are.” – unknown

We all do the above statement, don’t we? We stay in relationships, friendships, jobs, neighborhoods, club affiliations, etc. sometimes way past their expiration dates, lost in the fond remembrance and loyalties, stemming from the past. When we do this, we avoid the fact that everything is always in a constant state of change, including us. Change is the only constant. It’s okay to outgrow a situation that is no longer healthy or right for us. Goldfish move from bowls to aquariums and then to ponds. Plants need to be replanted when they grow too big for their confining pots. The examples go on and on.

Right now, there are so many books and teachings on the importance of being aware and staying in the present moment. At a time in history when everything, especially technology, seems to be growing and changing at warp speed, it is even more important to take pause, take a breath and really assess what is going on in our lives, right in the present moment. Now. It is a hard concept to grasp, but the only thing that we really have is the present moment. Now is the only reality.

“The reason people find it hard to be happy is that they always see the past better than it was, the present worse than it is, and the future less resolved than it will be.” – u.fo Twitter