Crossing the edge

The art of hitting your edge, and eventually crossing it, is through awareness, curiosity and courage.

When something in life hits us, or we hit it and feel stress, annoyance, anger, sadness, disappointment, loneliness or any other charged and uncomfortable emotion, we must first to able catch ourselves in the mist of that disturbance- that my friends is awareness.

Once we catch ourselves rather than being mindlessly consumed by the emotion, we can get curious about it. Curiosity can be expressed in a number of ways. We might wonder, “Where in my body do I feel this emotion? What does loneliness/anger/sadness… feel like?”. We might ask ourselves, “what is going on with me that I feel so disappointed?”; “What is hiding underneath this emotion?”. We might also pay attention to what thoughts accompany each particular emotion and whether these thoughts make us feel better or add fuel to the fire? If the thoughts are part of the problem rather than the solution, we might explore how it feels to be out of control, out of our mind with grief.

Curiosity helps us connect to our Self and our emotions, it keeps us from shutting down, numbing down or from loosing it. Curiosity keeps us from judgment, judging ourselves, others or the situation that brought on the emotion. There is no place for judgment in curiosity. Judgment by definition closes, curiosity opens. Curiosity keeps the focus on us, rather than blaming or looking outside of ourselves for answers. This is important since the only control we ever have in life is over our own self. Curiosity keeps the awareness process going. The paradox is that the moment we become aware and curious, we regain mastery over our self, even in the mist of losing it.

As we explore the nature of our mind and our emotions we come to see that emotions are constantly changing, shifting and evolving. We come to realize that they have no real or solid essence in and of themselves, they are nothing more than a passing cloud or storm, key word being ‘passing’. In fact, emotions are not real, we make them real by buying into them and acting them out. As we get curious we learn that the mind makes everything it buys into real and if it conceives of something as real than it works very hard at maintaining it. I can have a friendly five minutes conversation with an attractive man and literally ‘think’ myself into having a crush on him, and suddenly out of that five minute conversation my mind will create longing, craving, disappointment that he didn’t ask for my number and then deep loneliness. But what happened, I wasn’t lonely eight minutes ago, actually I wasn’t lonely three minutes ago as I was talking to him. The fact is I am not lonely, it is a mirage, a creation from the mind based on an illusory crush. The moment I recognize that I don’t have to buy into it, any of it, that it is not real, I can move on and start another conversation. Or I can buy into it, dwell on it, feel sorry for myself and ruin my entire evening. The choice is mine. Awareness and curiosity help keep things in perspective.

Lastly, it takes courage to stay put. Sometimes we might want to just shut down, numb out, find a distraction, have a fit, anything not to feel, not to have to stay with it and go through it. But the longer we stay connected and curious to what is going on inside and outside of us, good or bad; the less they have a grasp on us and the more we transform and transcend our self, loosening the bars of our self imposed prison, becoming free.

Live fully, live joyfully, live kindly,

-ivc-

Pick Love!

The bonds we share with people and the music we play with them, for a lifetime or a minute, are our playground in which we can manifest whatever we choose to. If you feel loving, people will show up and help build the stage on which you can manifest love. If you feel angry, people will show up and help you build the stage on which to manifest anger. We are magnets. We are the author, players and audience of our own plays. It is all a play. It’s all play!

If the stage is built, but you change your mind, then you can always do another performance; nothing is fixed, nothing is predetermined, nothing is frozen, and nothing is ever permanent. And thus, anger can be performed on the stage of love, and love can be played out on the stage of anger. Hopefully you will pick the latter.

Live fully, live joyfully, live kindly,

-ivc-

A puzzle worth solving. . .

All Spiritual seekers have wondered “who am I?”. Paradoxically the answer to this question cannot be found by focusing on you and who you believe yourself to be. It can only be found by expanding and broadening our awareness. You have a better chance of finding yourself in the wind, the sun, the birds, a tree and the distant sound of traffic than you have in dissecting your life story, your thoughts, and emotions. Those are nothing more than a fixated pattern that needs to be unraveled. Mickey Singer says it beautifully, “you will never find yourself in what you have built to define yourself”.

This is why all the sages have said something along the lines of: You are not this body, you are not your thoughts, you are not your emotions, you are not your beliefs, you are not your actions. Take all of that away and You are what remains.

You are not awareness of a particular thing however amazing or traumatic that particular thing is, you are awareness itself. There is an entire puzzle made up of millions of pieces and when you buy into yourself, your moods, your story… you are choosing to live, make decisions from, relate to others and to experience life in one single piece. You are attaching yourself to that piece, believing that it will give you a point of reference, a stability and steadiness in this changing and constantly moving world, but all it accomplishes is to imprison you. This kind of security is false and in the end, it is as freeing and stable as a bad marriage.

Everything you define yourself by falls short of who you are. Your political and religious views, your gender, your age, your roles, your job, your looks, your childhood…are only very small pieces of a very large puzzle. My guess is that in many ways you are all of these things, their exact opposite and everything in between.

Enjoy putting the pieces back together because as a very dear friend of mine said we are all puzzles worth solving.

Live fully, live joyfully, live kindly,
-ivc-

Let go and expand….

Nothing is real or true until we make it so. It might be real for a moment, an instant but the moment we let it go, it is not real any longer.

Our sense of self, our personality, our beliefs, all those things that fuel the choices we make and direct the course of our life, are often, nothing more than our failure to free ourselves from the sticky web of our narrow and pointed focus. We are what we focus on, our life becomes what we focus on.

The more we focus on a thought, an emotion, a longing, a disappointment, a success or any experience, the more solid and real it becomes. Michael Singer tells that because some objects remain in our awareness while others pass through, our consciousness relates more to them. We actually end up relating so strongly to this inner structure that we end up building our entire sense of self around it. So out of what should have been (had we not clung to it) a passing thought, emotion, experience, or desire, we create a solid and very narrow view of who we think we are.

This was one of my most freeing life lesson thus far; I don’t have to believe everything I think or feel, I don’t have to get all wrapped up in it. I can acknowledge it, be curious about it while realizing that it has no real solidity in itself and that if I don’t cling to it, soon enough it will change into something else and be gone. If we don’t focus on things for too long and expand our awareness when we catch ourselves buying into our stuff, than within a minute, an hour, a day, or even a week it shifts and disappears, leaving space for something new to arise. This is how you keep yourself and life free and fresh, just don’t get caught up and buy into it the passing bits and pieces, just keep letting go and expanding your awareness. Let go and expand, let go and expand, let go and expand….

Live fully, live joyfully, live kindly,

-ivc-

Meeting the Wiitness...

You are what you eat? Who came up with that? You are definitely not what you eat, but you are what you focus on.

-Who are you, really?
-Who am I?
-We are this thing I call the witness.
-But what is the witness? You might ask.
-A very good question indeed.

The witness is awareness itself. More specifically, it is a field of consciousness that is aware of itself and of everything within and outside of you. It is aware without judgment, preferences, or any particular notions one way or the other, just pure unequivocal awareness.

It does not reside in a particular in a particular space or time, it can be narrow or wide. Consciousness can be like a laser point and become aware of the most minute flutter of emotion, sensation or random thought. Or it can be a field, a wave of awareness that simultaneously comes into contact and becomes alert to everything going on inside and outside of us. I can be ultra aware of an itch on my finger or a moment of deep frustration, and put all my focus there becoming closed to everything else. But I can also be aware of the breathe coming and going in and out of my body, of emotions, thoughts and sensations passing by and through, of the sun shining on my face, the wind rustling the leaves above, of dogs barking at a distance and the birds singing; all at the same time, taking it all in.

When consciousness becomes too narrowly focused and keeps focusing on the same emotion, thought or experience over and over, we lose our self into it, we forget how broad and expanded we really are and how wide life is. Just like watching a movie and getting so immersed in it that we forget that it is nothing more that a movie. Fortunately, at the movies, at some point, the lights comes back on. Not so in life, we have to be our own light and remind ourselves that there is so much more to ‘me’ and to life than this, whatever this is. As the Buddha said “be a light unto yourself”. We have to realize that the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, about others and about life are nothing more than a very narrow, fixed, tunnel vision view of reality. In the end they are nothing more than stories.

Live Fully, live joyfully, live kindly.

-ivc-

It's a box of chocolate, dive in!

Experience is experience. Stay with that for a minute. You might say, “duh, yeah, so what?” But there is something fundamental about this statement. Experience is experience, not good experiences are good and not bad experiences are bad. They just are different experiences.

I was looking at my life this morning as I drank the first cup of tea of the day and I caught myself wishing for something else, something more. Why? Why do so many of us do that, waste the experiences we actually have by longing, day dreaming or chasing a different one. The mother who wonders what it would be like to have the freedom that motherhood does not provide and the childless woman who wonders if by not having children life has passed her by. The single person who wishes he wasn’t and the married one who wishes he was. The financially successful man who stresses and would love to have less responsibility and the struggling one who wishes she could have the choices and freedom she thinks money affords. Each season offers its particular gift, enjoy winter while winter is and stop dreaming of summer. There is greatness and wonder and lessons in just about every aspects we’ve been dealt and in every turn our life takes. We waste them, wishing our life to be different.

How can you live YOUR life, the one you have and get as much out of it as you can, don’t rush through it, trying to accumulate different experiences just so you feel your life has had meaning, that it has mattered, that you’ve lived well. Living well is not in how many experiences, relationships, or possessions we have, living well is about how awake we are during the few experiences we do have. Most people live life like a bad vacation through Europe, as many places in as short a time as possible, four countries in 10 days. That kind of mentality affords plenty of pictures and plenty of stress, but very few meaningful and deeply experienced moments.

Stop chasing, stop fighting, stop running. If it is meant to be, it will be. Life will unfolds as it needs to, to provide an experience, not good, not bad, just an experience. Our job is not to judge it, dissect it, grasp it or fight it. Our job is to trust that this experience in some way makes sense, whether you see it or not is of no importance. Dive and the net will appear. Just allow yourself to experience, to be there for it, fully and to learn from it, and then move on to the next one when the time comes. Our job is to trust that this universe is nothing less than perfect, wise, loving and intelligent consciousness and it makes no mistake, not in you and not in life. In many ways our lives are nothing more than a succession of blessed accidents. Life truly is like a box of chocolate, you never know what you are going to get inside. One thing I do know for sure, no matter what‘s inside, it’s still chocolate. So enjoy the one you’ve got, before tasting the next one.

Live fully, live joyfully, live kindly.

-ivc-

"This is a beautiful path. Be happy"

“The highest spiritual path is life itself…You have to realize that you really only have one choice in this life, and it’s not about your career, whom you want to marry, or whether you want to seek God. People tend to burden themselves with so many choices. But in the end, you can throw it all away and just make one basic , underlying decision: Do you want to be happy, or do you not want to be happy? It is really that simple”
-Michael A. Singer-

Why didn’t anybody teach me that in school? I think it would have been much more useful than long divisions!

You might read this and say, “that’s easy for some people to say, look at my life, how can I be happy when I work a nine to five I dislike?“, “how can I be happy when I am struggling everyday to give my kids the best?” , “how can I be happy when I am still single at 40?”, “how can I be happy when I can’t have children?”, “how can I be happy when I have cancer?”, “how can I be happy when my husband just died?”. Mickey Singer would probably say: So what, how can you not be happy?

The problem with happiness is that we’ve been filled with lies that to be happy we must have what we want and life must go our way. The more we buy into this notion the farther away happiness seems to be. And so we continue on this rat race for the next car, the bigger house, the raise, the yoga retreat, the perfect mate, the perfect body, the next vacation, retirement… and in the end noting satisfies, nothing does it, happiness is always just slightly out of reach, like a word on the tip of the tongue. Similarly to the word on the tip of our tongue, it is only when we let it go, stop chasing that we finally connect and remember. We remember that happiness has been there all along just under the surface.

To be happy we have to drop all the conditions we have built around it. Do you want to be happy, regardless of what goes down? This is not a yes but answer, simply yes or no, no buts, no as long as, no what ifs. You will have bad days, bad weeks, even maybe bad months and in the end you and everyone you know and love will die, that’s a fact, that’s life. The question is do you want to be happy despite all of that? If you do, than drop the preferences, drop the conditions, stop restricting it, life in all its splendor and all its misery will happen and underneath, beyond it all, you can still be happy. That’s the ongoing choice we have to make, the vow we take.

By the way, the moment you take that vow, it will seem that all the forces of the universe conspire against you, to test your resolve. Literally two or three days after making the promise to be unconditionally happy, I received a letter from my mortgage company letting me know that my taxes and insurance had gone up which would raise my monthly payment by $300. (I physically jumped out of my chair reading the letter) I did get lost in it for a while (honesty is key) and then I remembered, “I took a vow to be happy no matter what” …. God that’s a tough promise to abide by sometimes! Being unhappy, stressed out, depressed will not make the $300 disappear, so what’s the use? As of today I am still talking to my mortgage company about it. Sometimes all you can do is be happy, no matter what, and actively look for a solution while having unwavering faith that in the end everything will wok out as it should.

Whenever life happens and we start to get lost in it, we have to remember that happiness is ours to have, regardless. We have to remember that we made a promise to be happy. We made a promise to our self, to our kids, to our planet, to all the generations that will follow, to all who have come and gone before us and to God. We promise to drop the conditions and no matter what, to stay open, to honor life and be happy. In the end we gain nothing by being bothered by the events and circumstances of life, most cannot be changed and none can be undone. Nothing is worth breaking our promise over. Because unreserved, unrestricted and unconditional happiness is The Way. It is the way to transcendence, to Spirit. “This is a beautiful path. Be happy.” -Michael Singer-.

Live fully, live joyfully, live kindly.
-ivc-

Surfing the self

We, the “I”, the self, is like a note in a symphony, a ray of sun, or a wave in the ocean, part of a much bigger whole, not quite our own independent piece of a much larger puzzle. The problem is we want to hang on to our note, our ray, our wave, our piece, rather than allowing our self to be the symphony, the ray, the ocean and the entire puzzle. Each note is perfect and important to the entire symphony, but means little on its own, it only exists in reference to other notes and all notes only exist in reference to music. The whole is always greater than the sum of its parts.

We long for something real, steady and constant that we can hang on to. We long to be real and enduring, but everything including us comes and goes, changes, flows in and out of existence.

Even in this lifetime, this “I” seems to have different personalities, ideas, beliefs and convictions from one year to the next, hell, sometimes from one moment to the next (hormones and intense emotions can do that to you). This self also changes physically over time. We have a bran new cellular body every seven years. The bottom line is that if “we”, our “I”, was steady, real and enduring, we would be the same at 4 than at 15 than at 40. Our personalities, beliefs, and physical body would remain the same, that is just not the case. The you at 15 is a completely different person, in every way, than the you at 4. The you at 40 is also a completely different person than the you at 15, and that’s good! It gives us the ability to evolve, change our mind, reinvent ourselves as we wish. Who we are today we will not quite be tomorrow. That is the pain of it as well as the beauty of it.

So instead of hanging on to the note, we’ve got to allow ourselves to make and be the music. Rather than hanging on the wave and wanting it to be separated, unique and solid, we have to be willing to surf it and allow it to crash because in the end we are the wave and the shore it crashes onto. We are also the surfer, the board and the ocean.

We are nothing and everything .

So surf up,

Live fully, live joyfully, live kindly.
-ivc-

From Nietzsche to Buddha

A couple weeks ago we journeyed in Robert Anton Wilson (RAW)’s theory of the mind. I essentially agree with RAW’s mind theory that the mind is divided into the Thinker and the Prover, but keep in mind that there is much more to RAW and his theories than what I discussed in here, he is quite an interesting man.

That being said, here is what the Zen Buddhist in me would add. I believe (potentially another program with no fundamental Truth) that the mind is actually divided in three rather than two parts; the Thinker, the Prover and the Witness. The witness is the part of the mind that is always uninvolved, in the background and just watches what is going on, like a spectator watching a play while being aware that it is not real, nothing more than a play. Unfortunately, the Witness is often forgotten and put aside. Its function is to bring us back to our self, rather than getting caught up in our own trip and in the bullshit flying around us. The witness is the part of our mind that can actually playfully question our beliefs, our choices, our sanity.

Here is an interesting exercise I often give clients:
-For 60 seconds relax, breathing in and out slowly, try to make you mind blank and then put your focus on counting how many different thoughts you have in those 60 seconds. The substance and theme of the thought is not important, notice it, add it to the count and let it go. Some have a few longer thoughts, some have many fleeting thoughts.
-Go ahead and do it, in 60 seconds, how many thoughts do you have? keep count!
-Now comes the real question, I actually don’t care how many thoughts you had or what you thought about, I am sure you had a minimum of one or two thoughts and that in the grand scheme of things, the thoughts were unimportant. This is the important question of this exercise, Who was thinking and who was counting?

One of the main function of prayer and meditation is to come into contact with the Witness. The Witness has a snowball effect, the more you come into contact with it, the more it becomes available to you. As human beings evolve, the Witness becomes paramount, overriding the Thinker and Prover, loosening our self inflicted chains and freeing us from our conditioning. The witness sees us going crazy as we go crazy; never losing itself, slowly it moves us back to sanity. It is our core wisdom. It is awareness itself. It is freedom of thought, dogma and delusion. It is being awake.

I Go back to Nietzsche’s quote, “What is a man? A bridge between the ape and the Superman- a bridge over an abyss.” Now consider the following story in relations to the above quote by Nietzsche.

-"My friend, what are you? Are you a celestial being or a god?"
-"No,"
-"Well, then, are you some kind of magician or wizard?"
-Again he answered, "No."
-"Are you a man?"
-"No."
-"Well, my friend, then what are you?"

-"I am awake.", replied The Buddha.

Live fully, live joyfully, live kindly.

-ivc-

From Nietzsche to prometheus rising...

“What is a man? A bridge between the ape and the Superman- a bridge over an abyss.”
-Nietzsche-

Robert Anton Wilson (RAW), in his book Prometheus Rising, talks about the mind. His basic philosophy is that the mind is divided in two, the Thinker and the Prover. The thinker is basically made up of all the beliefs that have been passed down to us by society, mostly to control us and make us better citizens. Our mind is basically a computer, the mind is the hardware and the all our beliefs that create our reality are the software. In some ways, until we wake up to our conditioning, and question our programming (beliefs), we are nothing more than robots.

The Thinker can think and believe anything and everything. As we have seen over the course of history, the Thinker can believe that the earth is the center of the universe, that women who use herbs are witches, that the world is a friendly place or a horrible one, that people of different color are inferior, that we are decedents of UFOs or decedents of apes and so on… The more passionate a person is about their belief, whether it is rational or not makes no difference, the harder it is to change their mind or change the program.

Usually the Thinker will organize its beliefs in into models or map through which it views, makes sense of and interacts with the world. The problem is, as the famous saying goes, “the map is not the territory”. What we think about reality, how we view reality and how we interact with it, has very little to do with actual reality.

Take a person suffering from Schizophrenia, like the genius John Nash in the movie a “Beautiful Mind”, it takes years of therapy and medication to help them question and possibly let go of their distorted reality. Similarly, I have a horrible memory of an evening in which I tried to calm a friend down and bring him back during a bad LSD trip, nothing I said seemed to convince him that he was okay and this would not last for ever. Whether the Thinker is correct or not makes no difference, since most of us don’t have access to Truth with a capital T, What the thinker believes becomes his reality, his truth.

The Prover supports the Thinker in its delusion. As RAW says, “whatever the thinker thinks, the Prover proves”. The job of the Prover is to act as a filter and magnet so that your reality is in accord with your beliefs. If you believe you are an Alien, the Prover’s job is to make that true in some way. The Prover will then notice weird things about you and your environment, will come into contact with people who believe the same. If the Thinker believes he or she has a weird illness, the Prover will create a fake illness (psychosomatic) or actually change the body’s chemistry and create an illness in a previously healthy body. Whatever the thinker thinks/believes, the Prover will find evidence of it and discard and ignore anything that contradicts it.

This is the conundrum, the Prover reinforces our beliefs, our map of the world, regardless of Truth. Whether our beliefs are enhancing or dysfunctional to one’s life and the world makes no difference. Hence the Prover imprisons us inside our faulty programs. As Christopher Hyatt says, we are both the jail, the prisoner and the guard. As we buy into our programs/ beliefs and identify with them, we become trapped in them.

So how do we break free from our patterns? More on that next week. Until then enjoy being a robot…

Live fully, live joyfully, live kindly.
-ivc-

Winds of change: The great oscillation

The pain and the beauty of life...

The pain: the fluidity of life makes it so that everything changes. Because everything changes, what we hate can never be kept at bay for very long, it always comes back around. Because everything changes, what we love, we cannot keep, it eludes us, slips right out of our finger.

The beauty: The fluidity of life makes it so that everything changes. Because everything changes, what we hate never lasts for very long “this too shall pass”. Because everything changes, what we love, always comes back around.

So relax and go fly a kite, will ya?

Live fully, live joyfully, live kindly.

-ivc-

The joy of keeping it simple...

Simplicity...

One of the great discoveries in life is that we don’t actually need quite as much as we think we do. Also, what we think we need is rarely what we need. There are only a few things in life that we absolutely need: air, water, food, shelter are the main ones. Most other needs are based on fear.

Life should never be lived based of fear. You think you need a relationship, ask yourself, do you really? If you think you do, then there is a good chance that what you actually need to find yourself and evolve is the exact opposite. Only when you will be comfortable with being alone will you choose the best mate for you. Your choice will be made out of freedom rather than fear.
You think you need to be rich? Do you? Are you sure that you absolutely need to, or would it simply be nice? Maybe being broke and seeing that you are still okay with little might be good. That way, when you make it big you will actually be able to enjoy it and ease into it rather than live in fear of loosing it. Everything in life is that way.

You don’t have to satisfy yourself with less than you should, but there is something to be said with being comfortable with unease and getting by with little. Only then can you truly be free rather than being ruled by your desires and your fears. When we are able to be still with unease, loosen our attachments to things, be at peace with the universe and embrace simplicity, then we can finally stop living our life on the run.

I will leave you with the words of Mickey Singer, “When you have tasted the ecstasy of the inner flow, you can walk in this world and the world will never touch you. That’s how you become a free being - you transcend.”

Live fully, live joyfully, live kindly.

-ivc-

More on we win some and we lear some...

One of the great lesson of life is being able to stand still in the face of discomfort. If we are unable to welcome our uneasiness, then we have no other choice but to fix it, mask it or run away from it. Suddenly we find than our entire life is built around protecting us from pain. Our fears run our life. We begin to make choices based on what will lead to less discomfort. We walk around with a protective wall around our soul. We modify our life and avoid certain experiences, careers, mates, friendships, activities, emotions and situations that might stir up any kind of distress . And so we play it safe, never fully opening to life. And again this is a perfect example of the solution becoming more destructive than the original problem.

Here is a scenario, This wonderful person feels very lonely and is afraid of being and staying alone, so he/ she gets married to the first person who will have them and keep them company. They are no longer lonely, but out of fear and need they married a person that in the end was not a match for them. Soon they have a whole other set of problems, they exchanged being lonely for being miserable. That doesn’t sound much like a deal to me.

The problem with temporary fixes is that they are temporary. So of course the minute you find something or someone that covers up your fears or fills a need or void, then you are ultimately faced with another, more complicated problem which is, how to keep that situation or person in place. At this point the fear of loss comes up. People who are afraid of being broke, of not having enough, who have a deep need for safety, don’t feel any safer and freer once they become rich. They usually never have enough and whatever they do have, they cannot enjoy because they worry about keeping it safe and not losing it or having it taken away from them. In the end, any choice or action that is based on fear can only lead back to fear.

By not staying still with our fears and our struggles and opening our self to the lessons they bring, we are only able to put temporary bandages on them. If on the other hand we can ease into them and not jump into action and cover up mode, we can then get to the root of them and find the freedom that comes from putting down our heavy baggage.

How do we free our self, you ask? By having the courage and patience to stay with whatever comes up. Something or someone rubs you the wrong way, brings up some kind of unease and suddenly you find that can’t wait to get rid of it or run away; that’s great news, that person, situation and emotion is a catalyst for growth and change, a door towards freedom. Stay with it, do nothing. Of course if your hand is on a hot stove by all mean remove it, use good judgment here.

The trick to staying connected and open to turmoil and getting to the root of our discomfort is breathing. Breathe into it and through it as you observe the feelings, sensations and thought flowing through you. That is essentially why we sigh, the body knows instinctively that the breath is a bridge to freedom and the best available tool we have for releasing whatever negative energies comes up.

Breathe up…

Live fully, live joyfully, live kindly.

-ivc-

The year of expansion and transcendence

*****

Years ago, I was probably in my late teens or early twenties, I spent a New year’s eve alone. I was supposed to go out with a friend of mine. I got all dressed up and waited for her phone call. She was supposed to call me at the end of dinner around 10:30pm or so. Eleven came and went and I sat there all dressed by the phone. The new year came and went as well and still I sat there by the phone. This was the first time in my life that I had spent new years by myself. Back then I was devastated, it was the height of low. I was staring so much at the phone that I actually missed the new year. It never crossed my mine that I was enough, I could celebrate and wish myself a happy new year.

******

I had never been alone since, It was a compulsion, finding something to do for New year’s eve, surrounded by people. Whether I liked them or not made no difference, as long as they were flesh and bones, breathing and talking beings that would wish me happy new year at the end of the count down was all that mattered.

*****

2008 has been a major turning point in my life. I got my heart broken and carefully glued it back together; I started on this spiritual and creative journey of fearlessness, joy and boldness; I quit my long term job and went into business for myself, and finally I started meditating and writing again. 2008 has been a year of me coming back, face to face with myself, all of me, beauty and muck, fears and hopes.

*****

This new year I purposefully turned down a number of invites and decided to face one of my main demons, being alone on new year’s eve. I wanted to spend the new year in a way that would be a symbol for 2009; fearlessly, comfortable with myself, in communion with life and nature, my heart open.. This new year I stayed home, had a burning bowl ceremony in my back yard and crossed the threshold into 2009 in metta (loving kindness) meditation.

*****

Metta meditation (my adaptation):
-In breath: May all beings be healthy and free.
-Out breath: May they all be happy, safe and peaceful
-In breath: May they all be filled with loving kindness, compassion and courage
-Out breath: In this life, just as it is.
Repeat 108 times (the use of a mala helps to stay on track without having to count)

*****

In a few months I will turn 30, quite a turning point. In my mind, 30 marks the shift from girlhood to womanhood. Everything in 2008, it seems, has been in preparation of that. A cleansing and opening of myself to create space so that I may expand and transcend into the woman I aspire to become; authentic, loving, passionate, creative, free and courageous. 2009 will be a year of change and discoveries. I can feel the rumbling of change building, deep within myself, slowly expanding out from my core. I can feel change come as easily as I can smell rain approach or see the storm building in the clouds.

*****

Can you feel the rumbling of change deep inside of you? What changes will 2009 bring? What contribution will you offer the world in 2009?

*****

I wish you a very happy new year,
May you be healthy and free.
May you be happy, safe and peaceful.
May you be filled with loving kindness, compassion and courage
In this new year, as it enfolds.

Live fully, live joyfully, live kindly.
-ivc-

We win some and we learn some

How great would it be if we could simply turn things around in our head and see all problems and all hurts as nothing else but growing opportunities. I did this with red lights years ago, rather than getting frustrated when I hit a red light, I would take it as an opportunity to relax and repeat a few mantras while breathing deeply. I got so good at this that at some point I looked forward to red lights, I know, I am nuts. But you have to admit, my entire experience of and relationship to red lights changed without reality having to change. In the end nothing was really different, the red lights were still there, the only difference was my perception. As Wayne Dyer says, when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.

As stated in a previous posts, us human beings do most of our growing and learning in bad times, to grow we seem to need the pain that comes along with it. If it is too easy and too pleasant, we don’t seem to value it. Go figure, maybe we are all weird.

Life is really not about getting rid of problems, it’s about changing our perception of them and our relationship to them. If your focus is on getting rid of problems, than that is all you will ever do in life. Your life will be a constant juggling of problems, when one is solved another will appear to replace it, at some point the balls need to drop. We need to let them drop rather than trying to keep things going, neat and ordered. In many ways, the nature of life is to be a constant succession of problems. Spirituality, true transformation resides in our ability to see problems and disturbances as opportunities. When we can change our perception and see the thorns of life as agents of growth, we can then begin to embrace them and release them, thus finding true freedom. As Reed Lindbergh said, there is a great freedom that comes from choosing to remain open to life itself, whatever it may bring: joys, sorrows, triumphs, failures, suffering, comfort, and certainly, always, change.

Happy juggling...

Live fully, live joyfully, live kindly,
-ivc-

The paradox of spirituality

Yogic as well as Buddhist philosophy is centered around letting things go and flow as they will, not grasping them or wishing them to be different. On the other hand we are also bombarded, in books like, The Secret, by the idea that through the power of our mind, we can create the life we wish. We are told that through right thinking and positive emotions we have the power to change our circumstances. We are stuck in a paradox, or so it seems.

On one hand we are told that suffering is created by not wanting to live life on life’s term. That to find joy we must learn to surf the waves of life and not swim against the currents. At the same time, we are also told to change our thinking, to make vision boards, write down affirmations and recite them throughout the day, to keep our emotions positive, to visualize our goals as if accomplished and to have absolute trust and faith that the universe will manifest our desires. So which is it? Should we accept life as it is, with it’s up and its down or should we actively work at creating the life we think we want?

As a Buddhist, I very much believe that our suffering and stress comes from wanting things to be different than they are and from trying to change things we have no or little control over. I also believe that everything is energy and that to a degree, we can create own reality. There are things in life that are in our power to change and others that are not. The sun will rise and set, the seasons will pass, people will become sick, people will die, you will have good days and bad ones, those are absolutes. Certain things, however much you visualize them and wish them to be different will always be.

Magical Arts teaches that once the spell is cast, the magician must release and let go of it, allowing the powers that be to work in the fastest and most practical way possible. Grasping gets in the way of manifestation. Any kind of attachment creates fear and anxiety which block and limit our ability to create and change our life. Fear is the opposite of faith. To have faith and trust in something we must be able and willing to relax and let go. We see that acceptance and manifestation are not as opposite as we first believed them to be. In the end, they are complementary rather than contradictory.

The more fear you generate, trying to keep things the same or make them different, the more you grasp. Acceptance is the opposite of grasping. With acceptance there is nothing but ease and freedom. From the point of view of the law of attraction, whatever you fear and put your attention on, you actually draw to you. Meanwhile you are wasting precious life energy worrying and stressing. If you were to accept that this ‘negative’ situation, whatever it may be, is a part of life and thus a possibility, you would instantaneously relax and feel energized. This would allow you to look at the circumstances of your life, without fear and worry and decide calmly and with equanimity which are in your power to change and how you might proceed. It is that simple, no drama, no dread, only peace. Free to be at peace with yourself and at peace with life.

Being filled with stillness and faith, you would then be able to heal yourself, change your financial situation or find a more satisfying place to live. If you are diagnosed with cancer, how can you fight the cancer and concentrate on being healthy when at your deepest self you are angry and ragged with fears of dying? You can’t! Now if you were to first make peace with death and accept that it is a possibility, you could shed the fear that depletes you and be fully awake and open to healing.

Accepting death as a possibility does not mean that you lay down and give up, it is not a death sentence, but simply a way to force open death’s grasp on you and give you the freedom to get past it. We can accept that the world is not always fair or kind or peaceful and still fight for and live our life in fairness, kindness and peace. Acceptance doesn’t mean that we develop a helpless or indifferent attitude towards life. Acceptance simply allows us to stop being angry and afraid, it liberates us from bondage and disappointments and gives us the space, energy and freedom to create and bring about true change. Only then can we build a life filled with joy, peace and contentment.

Live fully, live joyfully, live kindly.

-ivc-

A thought that got started with ganga

I have a lot of marijuana supporters in my groups, they ask me all the time if I am pro Marijuana. I always answer, “I am neither for or against it”. They don’t understand that, in their mind, I am the confused one. The way they look at it, my mind has to lean one way or the other, maybe even just a little. Of course they want me to be on their side, so we can have a wonderfully pointless bitch session about the unfairness and senselessness of things. But that is the truth, I am neither for or against it. As I tell them “I am pro freedom and against anything that binds you”. Marijuana can be freeing and it can be binding, it simply depends on the person and on the situation. Personally it does not influence or affect me one way or the other. Nothing is ever all good and all bad. In the end, it didn’t work out too well for my clients since they ended up behind bars, both the self inflicted ones as well as the one built by the court system. We still live in a society that has rules and laws, however pointless we find them.

Many feel that defying rules and laws to do what they want is individuality, originality, freedom. So you are not ruled by other’s laws and rules, you follow your own rules. You defy others’ rules only to be ruled by your own desires and egocentrism, either way you are still being ruled, still a puppet and in the end you suffer. Fighting against a rule is being imprisoned by it, fighting for something, in a way, is also being imprisoned by it. Anytime you fight and struggle for or against something you grasp it tightly, your mind leans in one direction over another, you have preference, you create duality and thus you suffer. Through grasping and fighting rather than easing and seeing, we fail to wake up to the idea that it is all a play anyway and in the grand scheme of things it is really not all that serious. Life is not about right an wrong it is about being, experiencing. The enlightened mind, true freedom, has no preference, nothing is a big deal. Only then are you truly free from rules, laws and whims, yours and those of others. Of course this is easier said than done.

I can hear some of you saying “what? Are you saying that we shouldn’t fight for what we believe is right or fair?”. No that is not quite right. If people had not fought for what they believed was right, I would not have been allowed to vote this election and we would not have an African American president. I am glad people fought for everyone’s right to vote, for equality, for the end of slavery, against terrorism and to put an end to crimes against humanity such as the Holocaust. Fight all you want for what is right, but make sure that you are absolutely sure about what is actually right. Morality is a tricky thing. The most horrible crimes have been committed under the guise of righteousness. We can get wrapped up in our concept of fair or right and miss the whole picture and fail to see the situation from all vantage points. True morality unites all people and it does not create suffering. Once you are absolutely certain, without any doubt, that what you are fighting for is actually ‘right‘, then take great care at not getting swallowed up in the fight. You do what you can, with equanimity and grace and then let it go, accepting and being at peace with the outcome. The more attached you are to the end result, the more suffering you will create for yourself and others. What is the point of fighting for what is right, for fairness and for peace, if the solution, in the end, winds up creating more suffering than the original problem.

So remember…

Live fully, live joyfully, live Kindly.
-ivc-

Taking on what is off...

There is something off about human perception, let's see if we can take it on.

We tend to see things in opposites, black and white, up and down, beautiful and ugly, pleasure and pain, dumb and intelligent, right and wrong, hot and cold, good and bad… You get my drift. But what if there was no such thing as opposite in the sense of the word. Remember how I said that sitting and standing still were the necessary opposite of wise action, so if an opposite is necessary, maybe it is not an opposite after all. We tend to think linearly, while most of life really can be better understood as a circle or a loop. Take two points on a line, one at each opposite end, they are as far as they can be from each other, if there was an invisible line in the center they would be at opposite ends. Now take that line and curve it into a circle, suddenly point A and point B are actually right next to each other, as close to each other as they could possibly get without becoming one. In any loop, the father two things appear to be from each other, the closer they actually are. We see the word opposite and we think of opposite camp, enemy, against, but maybe our opposites are nothing more than allies.

A wolf goes after a deer, we feel for the deer, we want to warn it, shield it and so we get rid of the wolf to protect the deer, thinking we've done something good, thinking it is compassion and wise action. But soon the deer are doing it like bunnies and trying to take over the world. They eat everything, destroying the very system they need for their own survival and soon they too begin to starve and die. Can you say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And so can it be that in this sometime crazy and seemingly senseless world, the deer and the wolf are actually allies, that there is not such thing as a prey and predator and that in spite of their outwardly opposite nature they actually depend on each other for survival?

Ask a group of people to give you the greatest life lesson they have ever learned based on personal experience and I guarantee you that most people will name some kind of tragedy or painful situation. That's us, we can relate to pain, experience it, use it to push our self and find meaning in our existence, while connecting us to each other. On the other hand we consume pleasure mindlessly. It is taken in and gobbled down, like we haven't eaten in days, and then digested out. Just the way most of us eat our food; hardly chewing it, tasting it and enjoying it. And so could it be that our roughest times are actually our best?

There is such a concept as karmic friends. This is a game I play with myself. Is it possible that, before we came down here, you and I have made a pact with the people who truly get in our face and shake us to our core? Is it possible that the people who are your greatest nemesis down here are in fact your greatest friends in an alternate universe. Maybe over a game of cards (in this alternate universe, call it heaven or whatever), we come to talking and I say to him, "hey, maybe you can do 'this' to me in this life and maybe as I am raging against you, I will snap me out of it and realize that this is just a big illusion. If not, then at least it will be a good lesson on acceptance, resilience and forgiveness, then I'll do the same for you on our next trip, what do you say?"

I suppose that does not fix the conundrum of this life, but it does put things in perspective. Things are never as they seem and as we see them. And maybe the way to get our karmic friends to share a cup of tea with us in this life rather than a couple of fists is to have no need for them to teach us lessons anymore. If only we could get as much from the 'good' as we do from the 'bad', then we might only need good or maybe we just would perceive everything as good. As our perception of things changes so does our experience of them.

experience of them.

We want everything to be clear and simple but that is not life. We do not have the wisdom to see that up is really in many cases down and that what I consider small you think is big. We try to put things in nice little packages, put things in boxes and category and the moment we try to name, define and categorize things, experiences and people, we not only diminish them, but we also diminish our self.

How can this play be permanent, clearly defined and set when its writers, actors and audience are ever changing, moving and flowing. So…

Row, row, row your boat,
Gently down the stream.
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream.

Live fully, live joyfully, live kindly.
ivc

Traveling light...

Travel only with thy equals or thy betters; if there are none, travel alone.
-The Dhammapada-

I sent this saying to a friend because of his misadventure while traveling with wrongly chosen mates, but I got to thinking that maybe the Dhammapada was talking about more than a trip to Europe, Asia or Latin America. Maybe The Dhammapada was referring to the Ultimate travel. And I got to thinking, how many time I have journeyed through life with inappropriate traveling partners rather than trekking alone, weighing myself down and adding baggage. I suppose there is such a thing as traveling light. They say show me your friends and I’ll tell you who you are, umm, who was I? Something else interesting to ponder.

I am not a fan of words like better, as it presupposes, class, distinction and judgment on worth. Nobody is better or less than anybody else, this, I truly believe. That being said, I do believe that some people are better aligned with who we are and who we aspire to become, and others head in a slightly different direction. Not a better or less than direction, just a different one. Traveling alongside people who are on a different journey can only lead to one of two things, or both. The first is that you will be swayed off course and the second is that the journey will be much more difficult and painful than it was ever meant to be, kind of like hiking the mountains of California wearing flip flops, been there done that, not my most enlightened decision or the most pleasant way to experience the beauty of nature.

Today, my traveling companions can be counted on the fingers of one or two hands. There are many out there who are my equal and more, I have simply yet to meet them. And so equals and betters I hope our path cross someday so that we may travel together at least part of the way. Until then…

This brings me back to you, who have you been traveling with and are they equal to or better than your best self? If not or when in doubt, don’t forget, that keeping it light, at least for part of the way, is always an option.
Happy journey,
Live fully, live kindly,
IVC

Impermanence....

Lately I have thought deeply about the concept of impermanence and the cycles that are natural to life. As Dawna Markova states, “There is no part of creation that does not go through a cycle of growth, falling away, disappearing and reemerging” She offers up the idea that throughout a lifetime we go through many different incarnations, living up one dream, one idea, one role, only to let it fall away as another evolves out of us. And so we are adventurers, writers, spiritual seekers, entrepreneurs, teachers, students, money makers, pleasure chasers, artists, parents, mates, stoners, cool, lame, into shit and out of it.

Like nature, we have seasons, the budding and emergence of spring, the bloom of summer, the shedding of autumn and the dying and stagnation of winter as we prepare to be born again. And so just like the seasons we allow bits and pieces of ourselves to emerge, blossom, wither and die only to be transformed into something else.

Nothing stays the same, from one minute to the next we are completely different beings. From one year to the next we are different people, in different places, with different thoughts and visions, different needs, wants and worries. I suppose the only thing that remains is this timeless, never ending dance between love and fear, fear and love. In the end everything is an extension of those two things.

So I wonder which season am I in? Quite possibly the late stage of winter, I feel things slowly sprouting, right under the surface, getting ready to push through and slowly grow through, from and out of me. Humm that sounds kind of gross, oh well, even the best things in life can be kind of grimy, messy and sticky. And so out of all that, a new life emerges, a new cycle begins. The last two years have been a necessary time of putting myself and my life into question, of shedding, and stagnation, making the dirt of my life fertile, ready to welcome what comes next.

For all you who fear being in a rut, don’t forget that stagnating, standing still is the necessary opposite of wise action, just like a field needs to be left alone for a while to replenish itself before it can be planted again. So for all those of you out there who are in a rut, do yourself and your life a favor, don’t just do something, sit there! Sit and ask deep questions, sit and contemplate, sit and wonder at the wonder that is life, sit and count your blessings, sit in trust and faith, sit and make space in you head and your life and then listen. Listen deeply, courageously and patiently to the inner longing and stirring of your soul. At first like the purr of a kitten, the first spasm of an orgasm, it cannot be rushed, wait for it, wait for it! Have the strength, the audacity, and the patience to wait for it. Stop the busy making and have the faith to wait for the longing of your soul to come alive and grow from, through and out of you. After all it is your life, quite possibly the only one you’ve got (the jury is still out on that one, maybe a question to ponder during one of your ruts).

And so I wonder, what season are you in? What questions will you ponder?

Cheers,
ivc

My way back

I have found my way back to this blog and incidentally, for the last couple weeks I have also found my way back to Buddhism. Why did I ever stray away? I don’t know, it’s been a year and a half or so since I have had a regular mediation practice. I suppose life works in cycles of coming and going, in and out, present and lost.

So I have been out there, looking out there to be filled and fulfilled, asking questions to which there are no answers, getting in relationships with no depths and future and getting out of them to find myself faced with myself once again and faced with God in solitude and silence.

I know Buddhism doesn’t really talk about a God, but one thing has been true for me, through my ins and outs, coming and going and my lost and present times, God/Something (call it whatever you wish, the name/word will never capture it anyways) has been here for me, with me, walking along side me. It whispers words of comfort in my hear during times of darkness, it reminds me that the sun is always behind the clouds, I can always find this great holly something in silence and in nature, and in everyone if I look closely and deeply enough. In the end it is all about connecting, right? Connecting with nature, connecting with oneself, connecting to each other and connecting to God. The Closer I am to you, the closer I am to God, the closer you are to me the closer you are to God and the Closer we are to God, the closer we are to all beings, and so it goes.

So here I am, I am back....

As an aside, I have been reading Jason Mraz blog http://freshnessfactorfivethousand.blogspot.com/ and I find it humorous that a “rock star” is keeping me real, honest and grateful.

What about you, what have you stayed away from, that deep inside you know you need to get back to? What keeps you real, honest and grateful? How do you connect to your God? Can you see the face of God, the spark of the Goddess, in everyone and everything?
Namaste....

The art of living: Rekindling the flame

I often ask myself those hard questions like, What is life about? The four words that come to mind are passion, purpose, meaning and essence. You see I don’t believe life is about living longer and how much time we’ve got left, because unfortunately we never seem to stop and ask ourself this until our days are counted. Life is about living deeper and wider, wide open, wide awake. That is the essential labor of one’s life. How do you and I find and create passion, purpose, meaning and essence in our life, even if some of us have a 9 to 5 job we don’t especially like, or a few months to live, or if we are stuck in a wheel chair, or are overwhelmed and busy and exhausted? How do you and I create the space in our life to rekindle the flame of passion, purpose, meaning and essence?

I have a couple thoughts on that:
Lesson in Happiness:
-First let go of the idea that for something to bring passion, purpose, essence and meaning to your life it must be big. That’s a fallacy and it keeps you stuck since most of us are not privileged enough to have the time, energy or money for something big. Yesterday I took a walk with the dog, for once it was not so hot and muggy in Miami. We were walking on our way home when I noticed the breeze in a tree nearby. The leaves of the tree were huge, in a shape of a heart with this perfect shade of light to dark green (depending on how new the leaf was) and the tree had those beautiful purple flowers. It was like a perfect picture. I stopped and looked at the shape of the leaf and the lines on it. the leaf, even though it was big, must have been relatively new because it was almost translucent, and for a moment I found passion and essence and meaning right there in my street with my dog on a cool cloudy day. Proust said “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes” and Victor Frankl believed that our sanity and strength depends on finding and creating meaning out of any situation. He believed that one way to create meaning is to look for beauty where you might not have looked for it before, that all thing and people at their core, in essence have beauty.

-Second understand that all things devoid of essence are draining. To have more time and energy and feel less overwhelmed and scattered you have to look for the essence and beauty that is at the core of all thing, create some kind of meaning out of the situation. If you are just busy making, you will always feel drained. You don’t wait to be less tired to find passion, purpose, meaning and essence, you find and create passion, purpose, meaning and essence to be less tired. When you find yourself, drained, frustrated, sad, confused, look for meaning and beauty in the person or situation you are struggling with, the silver lining. This is a lifelong practice, an exercise on perception. Remember we create our lives based on our perceptions, what is outside of you is a printout of what is inside.

-Third, The Dalai Lama said it best: “The purpose of our life is happiness. From that perspective, our task becomes one of discarding the things that lead to suffering and accumulating the things that lead to happiness. When faced with a feeling of stagnation and confusion, it may be helpful to take an hour, an afternoon, or even several days to simply reflect on what it is that will truly bring us happiness, and then reset our priorities on the basis of that”. How simple… and yet so hard.

-Fourth: Remember that to find passion, purpose, meaning and essence in one’s life we have to be willing to honestly and fearlessly ask and answer certain questions that scratch bellow this hollow, busy and empty surface that is our life. And then have the courage to reshuffle and live our life based on those answers, one choice and one change at a time. This is a life long process and it comes in cycles, as all things. A cycle of stagnation, a cycle of growth, a cycle of stagnation, a cycle of growth, a cycle of stagnation, a cycle of growth, a cycle…. One cycle is not better than the other, they come together, they are the two sides of the same coin. Here are some of the tough questions of the day.

Questions for you: What has created or brought passion purpose, meaning and essence in your life in the past? What small thing could you do today or tomorrow to recreate that? What thing could you start looking at with different eyes ( pick something easy at first and move up, find beauty and positive in difficult areas of your life)? What and who in your life drains you? What and who in your life regenerates and energizes you? What makes you happy, gives you pleasure? How do you start reshuffling things around so that you might add more of those things that regenerate and make you happy and less of those things that drain and create suffering? How do you create the space in our life to rekindle the flame of passion, purpose, meaning and essence?

Cheers…

The art of being fully alive and living on purpose: Death

Part of this blog is about not playing it safe any longer, I’ve been better with that for a little while, trying different things even thought I don’t think I might be very good at them, like going canoeing or taking salsa classes, saying what’s on my mind, dating more openly without really getting involved too quickly, I have even been considering training for a triathlon, now I realize you don’t know me, but let’s just say I got a note from my mom to get out of PE. Now all of that is good and I intend to keep doing it, but lately I have come to realize that doing all of this, as great as it is for my confidence, isn’t really dealing with the underlying fear behind why I have been plying it safe. What do I want my life to be truly about? How do I want to be remembered?

This blog is also about not having any regrets, I don’t want to have any regrets! I don’t want to be old and think, “I was wrong to be so cautious, I should have taken more risks, opened my heart more, had more sex…”, “I was wrong to work so much, I should have had more fun”, “I was wrong to settle, I should have waited for real crazy love”, “ I was wrong to hang on to my judgments and my concepts of right and wrong, because they changed as I got older, I should have lived wildly instead”, “I was wrong to waste my precious time, because it goes by so fast“, “I was wrong to be afraid of being vulnerable, of being hurt and of failure, because in the end it is not all that serious”.

I am afraid. I am afraid of running out of time ( what a crazy fear I am only 29). I am afraid of not fully loving and being loved back. I am afraid of fully loving and opening my heart without protection or holding back to have it stomped on and destroyed by another. I am afraid nobody will ever read this and I am afraid that someone will. I am afraid that I will die alone without kids and real friends by my side. I am afraid the people I love will die and that a part of me will die with them. I am afraid that I wont have enough. I am afraid that I wont live wildly and passionately enough. I am afraid I wont leave something behind with enough substance to be remembered…. I am afraid. But yet I am happy, how strange that I can have so much fear in there and yet be happy. Maybe I am happy because I can look and connect to my fears. God, I wonder if I was able to drop the fears, how much happier would I be? I can’t even conceive of such happiness, maybe it might be this thing called bliss or joy. Then again possibly those fears are just another aspect of the human condition. What about you what are you afraid of?

I read that in Buddhism they study death because you can never fully learn to live or be alive until you know how to die. How do I want to die? I want to die happy, at peace, free, trusting, fearless, so full of love and life experiences I am ready to explode, with many people around me smiling and a legacy to leave behind. I want my life to have meant something to myself and others. So the question is, how do I live my life today, tomorrow and for the rest of my days, so that I can die this way!

Author Dawna Markova wrote this about living and dying: “ There is something highly passionate about living in conscious relationship to fear. When I die, I want my heart and soul fully seeded with rich stories and experiences. I want to be moving forward, falling upward, leaving my body well worn. I want to know presence, staying with what is hard until it softens, staying with what is narrow until it expands. I want to be so well practiced in crossing thresholds that dying is merely another step in the dance.”

Lesson in Happiness: The secondary title of this blog is being seriously happy, kind of a paradox I suppose, because I believe that one of the tricks of happiness is to not take our self, our life, our beliefs too seriously, in the end it is simply about living the best most open, most loving and passionate life we can through of all the fear and doubt.

Questions for you: What are you afraid of? How do you connect, deal with the fears? Do you get busy, do you run away from them, have a drink, make a joke, meditate, talk to someone, write them down...? How might you make peace with your fears? How do you want to die? Who do you want to be when you die? How do you want to be remembered? How do you need to live your life to die that way?

Cheers...

Our perceived reality: What lies winthin us...

Anais Nin once said, "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are", not only is that true but I believe that, "things are not as they are, they are as we are".

My background as therapist is in post modern therapy, our philosophical ideation is that there is no TRUE reality, just a never ending stream of individual realities, who are never completely the truth and never completely false either. So we create our world, bear with me here, I am not trying to get all new agey on you, but as a professional, that statement is absolutely true.

How do we create our world and our experiences of this world? Well it is actually rather simple we are a certain way; we have beliefs about our self, others, the world we live in, about what we can achieve, what should happen, what we think will happen, what we expect, what makes sense to us and so on and we create our life through those lenses. As human beings, our egos are so big that we don't like to be proven wrong so we notice events, people, situations that confirm our views. We create situations, invite people in our life and take or not opportunities that will sustain our views. This is a proven scientific fact by the way, we only notice and pay attention to what makes sense to us, if not, it is unconsciously discarded or stored somewhere in our mind. We also enjoy people and activities that fit and reinforce our views, giving us very limited and narrow view and experiences in life. For example when I ask my substance abusing clients, as a group, what percent of the population they believe do illegal drugs regularly, most of them give me a crazy number, like 95% of the population gets high. They believe that, probably most if not all of the people they know and situations they surround themselves with involve drugs. It is a very narrow view of the world that they have, it is their reality which they keep recreating and reinforcing over time.

Now, this is not essentially a bad thing, as long as at the core of your being you truly believe that you are a wonderful person, that you can achieve anything, that people are good and peace is the way...You get my drift, none of us are that way. We are riddled with fears, doubts, insecurities, resentments towards others, limiting beliefs bout life that were passed down to us as kids, most of us are a mess and we are trying to hold our self and our life together as best we can, some more successfully than others.

It has been said that the outer manifestation of our life is really a print out of who we are and what is going on inside of us. We are the root of our experiences and circumstances, and that if we want to change our life, we first have to look at our self, if not, sooner or later we will sabotage whatever successful change we have accomplished and get back to our mediocre unconscious status quo. Einstein once said something along the lines of 'we can not find solutions to a problem with the same level of thinking that created the problem'. Red that statement again, doesn't it make complete sense? Most of us do just that though, we fail to look at ourselves and what about us created whatever we are unhappy with, and we simply work very hard to find a very limited and often temporary fix. We have to elevate our self and our thinking before we look for solutions. As a society we are very impatient, we want everything yesterday, we want results right away, but unfortunately life doesn't work that way, as a friend of mine said, masterpieces are not created in one day. So do you want your life to be a masterpiece or a stick figure?

Lesson in happiness: Learn to be patient, everything of worth takes time. Learn to look at yourself and what is going on inside of you. As Ralf Waldo Emerson said, "What lies beyond us and what lies before us are tiny matters when compared to what lies within us." We are not victims of circumstances, we have unconsciously created most of our life. We have the power to start consciously creating our life as off today. Life doesn't happen to me, I create it. I am in control, I have power. It's worked for me so far, take it or leave it, it's up to you.

Question for you: What area of your life are not working or are you dissatisfied with? Rather than looking at how you can change them or fix them, look at what belief, early experiences or lessons, fears or attitudes, could be at the root of it? What thinking created this and how do you elevate your thinking, before you start looking for a solution.

cheers...

My first post: How this blog came about

Last week I turned 29 and realized that as much as I push clients to take risk, to not live lives of quiet desperation, to step out of the box and to actively create their lives rather than be victims of circumstances; it's been a while since I have stepped out of my own box and taken a risk. This blog came out of frustration and an inner feeling of not wanting to play it safe any longer. Maybe all of this came about because I find myself being a year older and closer to thirty. It is time to make time.

It has been said that when asked what they regretted, most people hardly ever say they regret something they did. What most people regret is usually something they didn't do. I don't want to look back and wish I hadn't been so busy or afraid to live, I mean really live and experience life. So in a way this blog is about having no regrets! Again it is time to make time!

I love to write. I write in a journal, I put curriculums together for clients, I am even writing a book, but a blog never occurred to me. I was on my second date with a nice guy last week and he mentioned that I should write a blog. When he mentioned it, time stopped for second and it made sense. I know it sounds hockey and like bullshit, but hey it's my experience, so deal with it. ;) So who knows if I'll go out with him again, maybe this blog suggestion was the reason we met (the universe works in mysterious ways sometimes), but I hope not because he is cute. Keep your fingers crossed for me will you. Dating in Miami is a killer!

Let me tell you quickly what I expect this post to be about. I expected it to be a journey with different topics and experiences(mine and others) about success, happiness, living fearlessly, mastering yourself and your life, growth, balance, creating your life one choice at a time, resilience, action and no regrets. I don't expect much of this blog to be an original thought, after all nothing is new under the sun. I expect to end each blog with a one liner lesson and one question to guide you and me on our road to recovering our authentic self. Don't confuse the map with the territory, answering the questions is a good step, the map, but action is the territory. I'll try to post a couple times a week.
We'll see if this blog evolves as expected, this lead us to our first lesson.

First lesson in happiness: Have few expectations as everything changes and nothing hardly ever happens the way we were expecting. Simple? yes! Have you heard it before? I am sure you have! Do you live by it? Doubtful! In what way would life and your relationship to life be different if you did?

Question for you: In your life the way it is at the moment, what are you excited about? Now you guys Playboy is not an appropriate answer (just kidding), I am talking about passion here, the thing that makes you look forward to the day, week, month and year ahead.

Cheers....