Aim High in Steering

 At a certain point life has no more secrets to reveal. You live as if there is one reality,  and in return it repays you richly. When you reach this stage of freedom, life starts over again.

Deepak Choppra

     When I was 15 years old my brother brought me out one day, to teach me how to drive. I was anxious and it seemed so difficult to keep the car in between the lines on the road. My nervous muscles jerked and twitched and the car obediently followed, back and forth down the road. And the harder I focused, the worse it got. After observing me for a moment he asked me "Are you looking directly in front of the car?" I just nodded yes, not wanting to take my eyes from the road for a moment.
     "When you're driving a car", he chuckled, "you cannot look directly in front of the vehicle to steer. "Aim high in steering" he said, pointing forward  to draw my distracted eyes back to the task at hand. "Aim for the horizon and the car will drive itself there." I immediately relaxed and the car began to flow forward in its natural manner. This is advise helped me then and  I still use it to this day. When people ask me how to set goals, strive to become more, while still accepting that life is a process and being ok where they are today. I tell them "Aim high in steering!"
    Spirit posed the question to me one day, "How do you create while being still?". I had practiced stillness but I didn't really KNOW it as a way of life. I was always doing. I defined myself, and let others define me, by my ability to do. But the doing never got done. I found myself hurrying through one task, thinking about the next task, all day long.  I made the shift to present-moment thinking and my life immediately became more still.  Then I realized that the tasks got done, not as a result of the doing, but as a result of the thought about doing. THOUGHT IS WHAT MAKES THINGS HAPPEN OR NOT HAPPEN.
    Don't worry about the hows of life! The Universe KNOWS and it will drive Itself there! Focus on where you want to go and just show up!  To navigate life we simply have to be present, watch out for pedestrians and brake, don't swerve for squirrels!

The Wisdom of The Tortoise

"I know God is talking when the answer is simple."                           Albert Einstein

     There's a story about Confucius sitting by the stream one day when he was approached by the Imperial Guard. The men tried to persuade him to come to the palace and become a advisor to the emperor. Confucius said nothing, at first, then asked the guards about a rare tortoise, very old, which was rumored to live there. "Yes!", the men replied, "You can see it if you come with us." Confucius said nothing.

     When they asked Confusious for his answer he told them "The tortoise will tell you my answer". "How will we know?", the guards cried. "Ask him.", Confuscious replied calmly. "Ask him what?", the men proclaimed. To this the wise man responded " Ask him if he'd rather be there with you in the placace or here, on the riverbank, with me."
     The ego has such a way of complicating things. Be who you were born to be.

Space is Relationship

"By grasping the Tao that was of old, you can master the present era"                   Lao Tzu

One of the profane mysteries is "Space is Relationship". What does that mean? The ancients understood the importance of relationship in that we are relative to all things in this universe. We see, in what physics tells us about space, that a point is defined by its relationship with other objects. It is known in relation to or, as they say, relative to the things around it. The old ones said everything, everyone, was a reflection of us. Science supports this concept as well explaining that reality is a creation of consciousness and the world we see is relative to our perspective.
     The two schools of thought come together again in a Big Bang. Ancient teachings said everything came from one Source, one speck of timeless energy. They also taught that Relationship was one of  the first things born. It created a before and after, an in here and an out there. It also created Illusion. The most powerful deception, still working in our world today, is the of the illusion of a One and a not one.

     I think what our ancestors were trying to teach us that we have a very limited view of relationship. The relationship to this world, to God, to our selves and others, to the earth and the sky is Oneness. Webster's definition of relationship is "to be related or connected to". How we perceive this relationship, how we choose to engage in it, is up to us. Our relationship to the universe is ours  to create. Our lives are Ours to create, this world is OURS to create. Who wants to play?!

The Known

     At the moment I accept the illusion, it no longer holds me.

     When I ask clients why they think they have failed to make the changes they know they need to make to be happy many of them say that they are afraid of the unknown. Sometimes the familiar, even though uncomfortable, sometimes even painful, is more comforting than the thought of what life may be like of it were different. Somehow, we feel we are in control of our lives just because it seems familiar. But we know life changes in a moment.  We know that when we get that promotion or lose a job, when a child is born or a loved one takes their last breath, it all happens in one moment. How do we convince ourselves that we are standing in the known?
     Add to that the fact that we only see 2000 bits of information per second out of 400 trillion and one must conclude that we are standing, smack dab in the middle of, the unknown. We have no idea what the next moment of life may hold and yet we cling to the illusion of "the known", of control, and why? Because we fear. We fear what the next moment of life may hold so we pretend its not there, the unknown. Or, at least, we hope it doesn't come knocking on our door. But we don't realize that by doing so, we close ourselves off to all the wonder that life can be. It could be opportunity knocking but we're to afraid to answer!Without knowing it, we choose to be content to sit in our illusion of the safe, and seemingly comfortable, known.
    But there is a moment we can choose not to fear and this is the exact moment that we can truly revel in the boundless possibility of all there is. I am only free when I have the clarity to see what is,what's best for me and the evolution of my soul. At the moment I accept the illusion, it no longer hold me.

Streams of Emotion

The mind is everything. What we think, we become.       Buddha

     I was sitting in the park one day, not too long ago, watching the stream go by. It was spring and the water was very high. It reminded me of my own emotions which were running high that day too. I was hoping that, as it had been in the past, Nature would provide me with the answer. And She did.
        I noticed the pattern of the flow in the water and made note of the riverbed that channeled it. Emotion is like the water in that way. I understood that the emotions that were flowing through me we channeled through my thoughts and my perceptions, my beliefs and my fears, and it was that which held them in the stream that I was experiencing. But that was my choice and I could choose to change it. I immediately felt better but I was left with so many questions.
     How do we experience life without these perceptions from the past that make up the riverbed of our emotion? My mind wandered for a moment and my eyes came to rest on a whirlpool in the stream. There was the place to start. The biggest source of pain for me was the whirlpools of emotion, vortexes of thought, in which I got stuck.I knew that the whirlpools were a result of my underlying beliefs, but the riverbed changes slowly and I wanted an answer now.
     After several hours of contemplation, and many wonderful revelations, I realized the river just flows. In all the time I sat there, the river was the same but, at the same time, always different. The whirlpools came and went and the water ran before me ever-changing. I knew that to hold on to my fear or my anger or my pain was just unnatural and the answer was simply "Let it go".
     To avoid negative emotion is impossible but we can allow it as opposed to resist it. We can understand it, learn from it and let it go when the time is right.  All things in this universe change and flow, always moving forward in an endless stream of energy. The emotion we experience is just energy. We judge it, good or bad, try to avoid it, seek to control it but life marches forward on its own, with or without our help! When we can learn to flow with life we get a sense of peace, knowing and security that nothing else can provide. And that is because it is our natural way of being.