This post is plain and simple – ask me whatever you want in the comments: from the personal, to the silly, to the philosophical, to whatever. In fact, the sillier and fun-ner the better

The only thing I request – please do not ask anything related to mental disorders. I tend to get quite a lot of such questions, and the answer is always the same – stuff like this cannot be fixed on the internet in general. There is no shame in finding professional help.

A quick disclaimer: I’m just a normal guy. I’m not the Truth, I’m not an expert, enlightened, or whatever – and everything that I say is just the opinion of a guy with a blog (Which anybody can start, by the way. Just because someone runs a blog doesn’t always mean he or she is suddenly an authority of any kind.) This might defeat the purpose of having a “ask me” post, but hey who cares And if I don’t know, I will simply say I don’t know.

Also, if any questions are too big to be answered in the comments, they will be saved and made into blog posts in the future.

Link Love

For some excellent reading this week, head over to Joyful Days by Daphne. The tagline for the blog is – Think deeply. Speak gently. Love much. Laugh a lot. Be kind. (and more). Isn’t that enough? A recent post: No more crappy days

And a big hello to a blogger I met a long time ago – Patrick Meninga from Spiritual River. An amazing resource for non-traditional recovery from addiction. A recent post you might like: 101 tips for recovery

Most people will have a good idea of just how much our parents, and our upbringing, affect us as adults. But there is a strange twist to what we have come to expect. Below is a basic description, with all the content taken out of it, leaving behind only the structure:

• My parents said I was a bad boy/girl.
• I want to be good.
• To be good, I cannot contradict my parents. It is wrong to make them wrong.
• Therefore, to be good, I have to be bad.

Of course, this “bad” can be anything – stupid, worthless, ugly, fat, a liar, angry, the list is endless. But the idea is the same: even if we haven’t seen our parents in decades, in many ways we are still children, living under their influence. We are still seeking their approval or disapproval in ways that don’t always make sense to our logical mind.

This might sound stupid, but please think about it a little. When I first discovered this strange line of reasoning in myself, many months ago, it made no sense, and I thought I was mistaken. I didn’t do anything with what I found, so this limitation remained inside me for far too long. But I was recently reading Honoring the Self, by Nathaniel Branden, and he described this exact same paradox – and stated that it was one of the most common things he has seen in therapy, if you know what to look for.

When we can see this in ourselves, things begin to change, and we slowly become our own person. Please take a moment now to think about this, to see how it applies in your own life. There is a tendency to get locked into examples, so it is a good idea to investigate before we discuss any further.

An Example

Let’s describe this with an example, with details changed to protect privacy. Samuel was recently promoted to a job with higher pay and responsibilities. This was something he had longed for, and he was feeling fantastic about it – for about a day. Then, he began feeling uncertainty. The closer he got to his goal, the more this uncertainty turned into fear, and he began to sabotage himself. These acts of self-sabotage were minor at first, not enough for him to lose his promotion, but eventually he began acting out in bigger and bigger ways. In the end, he not only lost his promotion, but endangered his entire job. This was a pattern he had followed for most of his adult life.

Strangely, this made him feel safe; he was back in his comfort zone. It actually felt wrong for him to have a secure job. Even though it was scary, being in financial danger felt right to him.

While there were many reasons for this, his parents were one of the strongest factors. They had always hinted to him that he was worthless, useless, and he will never do well in anything he tried to do. Now, we’ve all heard of someone who became very driven to achieve because their parents told them they were useless; they want to prove their parents wrong. But this was different – Sam realised one day that he unconsciously wanted to prove them right by always having to live in financial fear. To be a good son, he could not contradict his parents; he could not prove them wrong.

The Opposite

Interestingly, the opposite is often true. Just as we do things – consciously and unconsciously – to get the approval of a childhood authority, we might live our entire lives in a certain way, just to spite them!

I was discussing this issue with a psychoanalyst, who described the tendency perfectly in the expression “cutting off the nose to spite the face.” This tendency refers to an act of revenge where we hurt ourselves even more than we hurt the other person. For instance, Sam might unconsciously choose to get fired out of spite – “If you think I am worthless, well I WILL just be COMPLETELY worthless, then!”

If this sounds irrational, keep in mind that most of these are impulses and tendencies from our childhood. We have never grown out of them. They lie just below our awareness, silently influencing us even as adults.

Searching For This Paradox

Can you see why it is a good idea to do some thinking before we continue? Because of this example, the mind might start searching in the area of work, and ignore other possibilities. But these can be seen in every area of life. So, take a moment now to do some searching.

If you can’t think of anything, here are some tips. But again, these lines of inquiry might lock you in, so only use them if you are stuck.

• Try looking for something you are afraid of.
• Try looking for something you are procrastinating on.
• Try looking at something you don’t want to do, and you don’t know why.
• Look at something you have been feeling guilty about.

Further, it doesn’t have to be your parents. For many, other authority figures play a bigger role – an elder brother or sister, a teacher in middle school, perhaps.

If we really look, we can see that the variations are countless. Here’s another common example – what if Sam’s parents had always struggled financially, and Sam feels like he is somehow betraying them if he became happier, or did well in his job?

However this shows up, the end is result is the same. As Branden puts it, we end up pursuing the good by accepting the bad.

Breaking Free

What can we do about this? Branden suggests that this is, for the most part, a long process. We learn to honour ourselves, trusting our own judgements and changing the sources of approval and esteem from the external to inside ourselves. If we are struggling with a large or particularly painful issue, the care of a mental health professional is a good idea.

There are other things that we can do on our own, however. Firstly, just the mere recognition of these hidden motivations is enough for change to begin. Below are some things I’ve found to be very useful.

1. Awareness and Mindfulness. Being aware of it – and remaining aware of it the next time it arises – is often enough. When we know that the feelings and thoughts pushing us around aren’t ours, but a reaction to another person, we slowly begin to develop awareness. That is when we can make our own choices. We can simply say – that isn’t me, this is me.

2. The Desire for Approval. In some ancient teachings, such as Buddhism, it is taught that our desires are the root cause of our suffering. They also teach basic techniques to let go of these desires directly. It is a simple method, without needing conversion to any traditions or beliefs or anything like that.

This is described in the Core Practice of Welcoming and Releasing Emotions. Simply identify the desire (in this case, for our parent’s approval), and let go of wanting it. Some variations you can release are: wanting to make them right; wanting to make them wrong; wanting their disapproval; wanting to spite them. It might be a good idea to experiment to see which brings up the most “emotional charge” for you.

Otherwise, apply your favourite tool to this. If you prefer using The Work, for example, try undoing beliefs such as: I need their approval; doing _____ will make them approve of me; they know better than I do.

3. The Consequences. The last way I’ve used is more direct and confronting, which is why I recommend it only if you feel strong enough, or if you have professional support. The idea is to mentally (not in real life) bring up the emotional consequences of being bad, of not having their approval – and then releasing that.

Use the inquiries below, or your own variations, to see what you can find:

What would happen if I did/didn’t _____? How would that make me feel?
In the worst case scenario, I am afraid that if I did/didn’t do this, _____ will happen, and that will make me feel _____.

For example, Sam is worried that his parents will resent him if he became happier than they ever were. What would that make him feel? Guilty, ashamed, afraid. Therefore, he experiences those feelings fully, and then releases them with the Core Practice. He has lived his adult life to avoid feeling this way, but the moment he is no longer afraid of them, they begin to dissipate. Now he has nothing to avoid. Now he has regained his freedom to choose for himself with a rational, adult, mind; rather than an child-like fear and shame.

As Nathaniel Branden says – we do not transcend our limitations by denying or repressing our feelings, but rather by accepting them, experiencing them, and then stepping beyond them. In doing so, we learn to think for ourselves, and to honour our own being.

A gentle reminder that this is strictly an internal process; please continue to act with common sense and respect for all involved, including yourself.

(If anyone wonders about the unrelated picture for this post, it’s because I couldn’t find a good one. I was going to use a picture of someone dangling from some puppet strings, but I’m not sure everyone shares the same twisted sense of humour, hehehe.)

Link Love

One of my favourite blogs is Beyond Growth, by Duff McDuffee and Eric Shiller. They’re certainly not afraid to speak their mind, and indeed their goals are to critique, expand and explore the field of personal development. This keeps all the gurus and teachers responsible for what they say and do. A recent post: Synthesization of Money and Mind

Another good blog to visit is TonyTeegarden.com. Human SEO is a big focus of his blog – Self Exploration Optimization! That’s enough for me. A recent post you might like: 3 Steps to Pulverize Procrastination

This might seem like a basic idea to understand, but the real difficulty comes in facing up to it – there is often a good reason we are covering them up in the first place. But there comes a time, when we are strong enough, to remove these defences and see what is underneath. What really needs to be healed?

A Personal Example

This might be better explained with an example. I’ve written many times of a man who took up a lot of my mental space. He once persuaded me into doing a free draft for him in my design business, and then verbally abused me on the phone for ten minutes – while I sat there in shock – when he didn’t like what I had spent hours doing for free. I hated this man for years, constantly reliving what he said, fantasising about revenge. And yet it made no sense. Others had done far worse, and all I felt was some annoyance.

Why did I remain stuck in my hatred? All the emotional work I’ve done over the past few years has removed a large portion of it, but some of the remaining hatred refused to dissolve. The answer was simple. My remaining hatred was inauthentic – the real hatred I had felt for him had been healed a long time ago; what remained was a cover for the authentic feelings underneath.

What I really had to feel, to heal, was a feeling of worthlessness. These thoughts had actually come into my head many times, but they were so painful that I pushed them away.

He is an asshole, he is abusive, it is all his fault, I was the nice guy. Painful as these thoughts might be, they were a lot safer to me than I deserve it, I am worthless and I don’t deserve fair treatment and respect from anybody.

And yet, in the end, these were the feelings and thoughts I had to look at in order to heal. Ken Wilber once suggested that my inauthentic hatred will never go away, for these authentic feelings were underneath them, forever creating more. Even more important, Michael Ryce has stated that emotional pain take its toll, even if we are not conscious of them. Not only was I stuck in my inauthentic hatred, but the feelings underneath were hurting me too!

(By the way, facing these thoughts was simply to heal them – it didn’t mean that they were true and I was worthless. This is important to realise, for these hesitations were what caused me to be stuck in the first place.)

The Process

Now, on to the actual process. This is a booster technique, to be used in conjunction with the Core Practice of Welcoming and Releasing our Emotions. If you haven’t read or tried that technique yet, please do so.

It is important not to get caught up in the example I gave above. It was only to illustrate the point – what is underneath your particular feeling could be anything. Allow yourself to be surprised. It’s not always guilt that lies underneath fear, or love that lies underneath hatred, or whatever. Be open to your own experience, and see for yourself – don’t go in there with any preconceptions.

Think of an issue or emotion that you have been struggling with. Now, feel it fully. Emotions often come with sensations, pictures and sounds. Where is it in your body? What does it feel like? Just let it be there, intensify it.

Then ask yourself some of these questions:

• If I couldn’t feel this way, what would I feel?
• What am I trying to hide with this feeling?
• What is underneath this feeling?
• What is at the core of this feeling?

Don’t try to think about it or analyse it in your head. Feel it. It might take some time for a new feeling to come through. That’s fine; this might take some getting used to. However, please keep in mind that not all emotions are inauthentic, sometimes there just isn’t anything hiding underneath.

And whatever arises, heal that with the Core Practice. It can also be an eye-opener to ask what is underneath even that new emotion, too. Credits to a local practitioner of NLP, Reiki, and The Journey for inspiring some of those questions.

Different Aspects of the Same Issue

It is helpful to do this process several times, especially for issues that are very strong or have been around for a long time. Often, there are several hidden emotions/beliefs that gather around the heavier topics.

For instance, another strong set of authentic emotions around my client was fear and guilt. In the depths of my depression and anger, many years ago, I had acted out in the same way he did. I even used the same growling tone of voice he used. In Jungian terms, he embodied my shadow. I had flashes of a realisation – Oh my god, I am just like him! But I could not consciously admit this until recently; I was hiding behind my lifelong “nice guy” image. Getting in touch with my authentic states would mean destroying a self-image I had held on to for most of my life. But I had to, or I could not heal.

And on this goes. Sometimes even positive emotions can be hidden, if we somehow feel them unacceptable. In other explorations, I found – illogical as it might seem – that fear and dislike can hide and cover up feelings of rejection. And what is underneath that rejection? That’s right. Affection, sometimes even love.

Conclusion

I hope that helped. While this is a pretty safe technique – the worst I’ve experienced doing it is lots of nausea – I am aware that there is often a good reason we are covering something up in the first place. I have been doing stuff like this for a while now and am very lucky to be friends with professional psychotherapists who can be my 24-hour support, so I feel safe exploring some of this more painful material.

However, let me be paranoid here and draw your attention to the usual disclaimer. Please consult a qualified mental health professional before trying it, especially if you have a history of traumatic experiences or mental illnesses. This article is for informational purposes only, and you alone are responsible for what you do with it. The author cannot take responsibility for any harm that arises. Always be safe, and stop if anything gets too uncomfortable.

(If you haven’t discovered your passion yet, you might want to read Finding a Purpose and Passion in Life first.)

Whenever my friends or my coachees talk to me about the topic of passion, they would often resign that their passions can only remain as a hobby. When I probe into the reason why, some of the most common comments I hear are “My passion can’t earn (much) money”, “It’s not feasible in this world” or “There are no avenues for me to pursue my passion”.

When I hear that, an internal alarm in me will go off. As someone who has walked the conventional path of corporate employment for years and subsequently branched off to successfully pursue my real passion in helping others live their best life, I have come to realize those obstacles are just a result of self-limiting beliefs.

What do I mean? A year ago, I was still in my corporate job, but was looking out for avenues where I could pursue my passion. I was checking out job directories for jobs in social corporate enterprises or organizations supporting humanitarian causes. At this time, I was already all prepared to make certain trade offs in the new job, such as relocating myself to United States or Europe (I live in Singapore), getting a 50% pay cut, starting from an entry position and so on. Despite that, I was still unable to find any job which matched my extremely loosened up criteria. It was very disheartening.

I began to relook into my passion and rethink into how I could bring it into life. At that point, I realized what the problem was – I was restricting my passion to a certain form of expression and a certain medium. I realized that pursuing my passion didn’t have to be done in just that way and there were other ways of doing it.

For the rest of the article, I will share the five simple, yet powerful and timeless steps I used which enabled me to successfully create a feasible career for my passion.

1) Identify the essence of your passion

With everything that we do, there is an essence we are trying to deliver and there is the medium we are delivering it through. For example, if you are passionate about dancing, the essence of your passion may be excellence, elegance and freedom and the medium you express them is through dancing.

The first step is to identify the essence of your passion. Identify what it is you are passionate about doing. Then, identify the essence of this passion. What is it you are trying to seek/achieve? Do you want to inspire people? Help people? Entertain people? Express your creativity? To achieve excellence? This is actually the most important step out of the 5 steps, because this is where you look beyond a certain fixed way of pursuing your passion and start looking at the underlying message you are trying to achieve.

When I looked into the essence of my passion beyond working in a social corporate enterprise, a non-governmental organization or company, or a humanitarian cause, it was really to raise the consciousness of others. Everything else were just the mediums I could express them in.

2) Identify your preferred form of expression

In the second step, nail down the ways you will like to express your passion. Some examples can be: singing, drawing, dancing, sports, writing, educating, designing, constructing, cooking, speaking, acting, producing, and so on. Some people may have preferences towards certain manners of expression, such as singing or drawing, while some people may have no specific inclinations at all. Perhaps you like to pick out forms of expression where you already have strengths in, which is fine too. The most important thing is it has to be an expression you feel passionate about.

In my case, I didn’t have any specific preference towards a particular way. However, I was (and still am) a very efficiency-driven person, so I selected the forms of expressions which I felt I could best use to reach out to people. These were (a) writing (b) in-person coaching and (c) speaking.

3) Brainstorm on the mediums

Based on your passion and your preferred forms of expressions, start brainstorming on all the different mediums you can use to pursue your passion. Mediums refer to the channels which lets you reach out to others. This is where you get really creative and start listing everything possible. If you picked singing in step-2, different mediums include: a stage performer, a wedding singer, a backup singer, a lounge/pub singer, forming a band, being a solo artist, releasing an album, sharing your songs through the internet (your site/YouTube/Itunes, just to name a few), and so on.

Keep listing all types of different mediums and don’t stop until you have listed everything. One way to get new ideas is to look at the people who are already achieving success in the area you want to move in and study the different mediums they use to express themselves. The most important thing is not to limit the pursuit of your passion to certain fixed mediums. Expand to everything possible and imaginable.

Some of the mediums I listed included being a blogger, an author (book), a school teacher, a coach, a speaker, a trainer, a lecturer, a broadcaster, among others.

4) Pick the mediums you are most passionate about

Based on the whole list of mediums, circle the mediums which you are most passionate about. There is no need to limit it to just one medium – you can have more than one. These would be the mediums you want to bring your passion to life.

The mediums I selected were being (a) a blogger (b) a coach (c) a speaker. While I was open to the other mediums too, I wanted to use those 3 mediums as the core channels to reach out to others.

5) Create your plan to bring your passion to life

Now that you have clarity on the mediums to pursue your passion, create your plan to bring your passion to life! Crystallize your long-term vision, break them down into short-term goals, design your strategy and create your action plan. (You may want to check out my 7-part goal achievement series on how to achieve goals successfully.)

Side note: As you work on your plan, it is important to build in a transition phase where you work simultaneously on your passion while inside your day job. When you feel you are ready, you can make the leap toward your passion.

For me, after realizing I could pursue my passion via other mediums, it became clear that it was extremely possible to embark on my dreams immediately. With that, I started building proper plans (with the new mediums in mind) toward my passion. In 2008 last year, I left my corporate job and started working full force on helping others.

Today, I help many achieve personal excellence through my blog, coaching and speeches and it feels totally amazing! Life has never been better and I’ve never looked back at corporate life since. This is just the beginning too – I have other plans (such as publishing my book and setting up my personal excellence school) which are already in the works and I can’t wait to bring them to life.

How about you? What’s the essence of your passion, and what are the mediums you can bring it to life via? Try out the steps for yourself and start to create the career of your dreams. I’d love to hear how they work out for you

About The Author

Celestine Chua is a personal excellence coach who writes at her popular The Personal Excellence Blog to help others like you achieve excellence. She has been featured frequently in the press and is a highly sought-after coach.

The mind is empty only when thought is not. Thought cannot come to an end save through passive watchfulness of every thought. In this awareness there is no watcher and no censor; without the censor, there is only experiencing. In experiencing there is neither the experiencer nor the experienced. The experienced is the thought, which gives birth to the thinker. Only when the mind is experiencing is there stillness, the silence which is not made up, put together; and only in that tranquility can the real come into being. Reality is not of time and is not measurable.
~ J. Krishnamurti

I write books and run a www.beyond-karma.com on awakening for two reasons.

One, there is a simple and easy way to release depression, anxiety, the unease of being—it is releasing all the conditioned gunk we build up in our minds with the bumps and grinds of life.

And, two, because awakening is simple.

And what is awakening? Awakening is awakening out of the world of fear and sadness. Leonard Jacobson says very simply, “To awaken simply means to awaken out of the world of the thinking mind into the world of the present moment.” Buddha said awakening is the end of suffering.

Some people take exception to using the word “simple” to describe the awakening process. For most people who are trying to awaken, the process has not been easy. I recognize this. The reason I use “simple” to characterize awakening is not to insult the many who have and are struggling with it. But just because it has been difficult for many does not mean it has to continue to be difficult.

I say simple because if you look around at the resources available for awakening, you might get the idea that awakening is very difficult, or you have to meditate for decades, or you need specialized spiritual knowledge, or you need to understand theories of existence, and bliss and oneness, or you have to sign up with a tradition and ‘advance’ your way through the hierarchy or you need to understand the various “stages” of consciousness or solve zen koans, and so forth. You don’t have to do any of this, and from what I have seen, these are actually the very obstacles to awakening for many.

Awakening is simple. It is not simple only when we put in the effort to complicate it.

Here’s what you do:

One: find a release technique that resonates with you. Try the Release technique I describe in beyond-karma.com, or the Sedona Method, or EFT. Releasing helps free us of depression, anxiety, the past, and it’s an effective salve for awakening symptoms—some call these Kundalini or Kundalini Rising symptoms.

Two: find an awareness technique that resonates with you. Awakening is relaxing into awareness.

If you sit quietly and consider, the only things you can be absolutely certain of are: that there is Awareness; and all experience is always in the Now. Awakening is simply moving attention from thinking to the present moment, from mind to awareness. There are many techniques that can help you with this. Start with the one that is easiest.

One, Release and Two, Awareness. This is the two-step dance of awakening.

Awareness

Have you ever tried to meditate? Do you meditate? If you meditate or have tried to, you probably found it very difficult, especially in the beginning. Many people talk about meditating, and want to meditate but they can never start or give up very quickly.

My first meditation experience was about seven years ago at a Vipassana Meditation retreat. It is a rigorous ten days, of complete silence, two simple meals a day, and three to five one-hour meditation sessions each day, and a 90 minute discourse. I was about two minutes into the very first meditation session at 4 am the very first morning when my mind started screaming! This is boring, I have stuff to do, if I feel this way in a minute how can I get through ten day so of this…well, somehow I did manage to get through.

Meditation doesn’t have to be difficult at all, in fact when we are truly meditating, it is the most effortless we can be.

And this is why it’s important to start with techniques that are easy. It is only after practicing for a while that we understand the nature of effort, and we understand what it means to “relax” into awareness. Effort and discipline belong in the mind and are counter-productive to getting into the flow of awakening.

All awareness techniques lead to effortless meditation. You may know this by other names: zazen, zen, formless meditation, mindfulness and so on. It is not a meditation at all; it is not a technique; it is just being, here and now. Krishnamurti said it well: it is a passive and alert watchfulness.

Two Techniques

Observing Thought is a wonderful technique, easy to incorporate into daily living, and of “medium” difficulty. If you observe thought for a while, you will find that it is much easier to meditate, or to do some of the other techniques.

However, I’ve worked with people who are not quite able to understand what it means to observe thought. If you find it difficult to observe thought, don’t worry, there is nothing wrong with you. Start with Inner Stop.

Inner Stop

Sometimes we find it hard to rest in Awareness Now, or release, or to observe thought or meditate. Here is a technique that is easy and effortless. When the mind is resistant, you can simply decide to be momentarily aware—just for a second or two. Then you are free to slip into auto-pilot mode. Whatever you are doing, driving, working, talking, listening, thinking, longing, wondering, or daydreaming about how grand life will be when you are finally enlightened—whatever it is, just use your inner stop to stop and look and momentarily slip into a witness mode, and watch yourself, passively, just for a second or two. Watch thought. Watch the inner body for sensations or emotions. It’s a quick wake up. And then allow yourself to go about whatever it is you were doing.

As you do this, you will do it more and more frequently and it will become easier to be a witness to what’s going on inside you.

Observing Thought

How do I quiet thoughts?

Can you simply end, right here and right now, your fascination with thoughts? Can you stop believing them? Whether the thought is good, bad, spiritual, evil, of him, of her, of me, recurring, obsessive—can you simply end the fascination? Can you see thoughts are not yours? Thoughts arise out of conditioning and memory; literally out of the stale past. You do not choose your thoughts. So how can they be yours?

How do I end the fascination?

If there were a 12-step plan, that would simply be another thought. If we can’t end the fascination or belief in thought, Observing Thought is a good technique to take the wind out of its sails.

To get a taste of what it is like to be in observation, wait for you next thought. Wait with alertness, like a cat watches a mouse hole, ready to pounce with all your might on the next thought that rises.

You may find that it’s a while before a thought rises. The quiet, alert waiting, without the pent-up energy to pounce, is what it is like to observe thought.

Do we control our thoughts? For the most part, we do not decide what our next thought is. Can we just say to thoughts: yes, come in and play. And leave when you want to.

Observing thought is moving attention from the content of thought to Awareness. Then, it can be seen that thought is just one of many objects that pop up in Awareness, and that there is no perceptual difference between a thought and seeing a coffee table.

Your attention can either be inside of the thought or it can be outside of thought. When it is inside, you are participating in the thought-story; when it is outside you are observing thought without interpreting or reacting or participating in it. When it is outside of the thought, it is in awareness.

Right now you are embroiled in thinkingness. This is blocking awareness. Awareness is light simplicity. Thought is heavy complexity that arises within awareness. Thought cannot see Awareness; Thought can only see its own narrow content. Awareness can see thought and everything else that rises in Awareness.

For now, set aside the need to understand.

Witness thought. This is a soft, intention-less observing; this is not the effort of concentration or analysis. Do not analyze the content. Do not judge. Do not interfere. Do not block any thought or emotion. Simply observe. Watch. Witness.

When thoughts rise, allow them to. When they subside, allow them to. They’ll come and go. In the beginning it may be hard to keep out of the river of thought. You’ll get involved. Without blocking the thought, without changing it, try to step out of it and watch it.

Watch without judging or analyzing or labeling or interpreting. If you feel good, that’s good. If you feel bad, that’s good. Don’t reject negativity. Just observe it. Only thought can judge. Awareness does not judge. So when thoughts are judged as good, bad, negative, irritating or whatever, it is one thought judging another. Don’t judge. Don’t judge yourself on how well you are observing. That too is just another thought.

Don’t think about how well you’re doing or whether you’re doing this right. That too, is just a thought.

The first thing you will notice is that observing thought is hard!

The second thing you notice is that with continued attempts at observing, it gets easier quickly. Don’t get frustrated. Decide to enjoy the process. Decide to see humor in the monkiness of the mind. With a smile, bring attention back to observing whenever you remember. The mind has always been thus.

Observe thought and experience its structure. See that it flows in a single stream. Thought does not have volume, it has speed and disjointedness, and it has the uncanny ability to gobble up all your attention. Thoughts come one after another, in rapidity, one melting into another, but thoughts are not simultaneous. Observe that as you observe, thoughts begin to become distinct, with some space in between them. Observe that there is a transition, from being immersed in thought to observing the thought, and from observing to being immersed. You can observe when observing, and you can observe the two transitions, but you cannot observe in the immersed state. When immersed in thought, you are swept away, and therefore not watching. When you become conscious of being immersed you transition out. It feels like a release, a falling, a relaxation.

As you continue to watch, you will find that the momentum of thought diminishes. As thoughts diminish, you will find gaps between thoughts. This is Stillness. Allow the gaps. Don’t force them; don’t wish for them. You may be tempted to clutch at the gaps, or to cling to them. Don’t. This will not work. The gaps are the Stillness, the Silence. You don’t arrive at the gaps, the gaps are just being right here, right now.

The gaps will expand.

You’ll soon realize that these gaps—this space—is the constant background Stillness in which thoughts rise. Thoughts come and go. The Stillness is constant.

Gaps expand, and stillness abides—this is presence.

If you’re having trouble observing thought there is a nice trick you can use temporarily. It’s called echo-talk, and it is exactly what you think it means. It works well with obsessive, recurring thought-stories. When you become aware that you have had a thought, repeat it. Repeat it in an impersonal, slow voice. See what happens.

Are you not able to observe thought? Is it hard? Do you not understand what watching thought means? Can you see that these too are just thoughts? Trying to observe is observing. Keep at it. Or go to Inner Stop.

Close

What does awakening mean to you? Perhaps nothing; perhaps everything. Have you had the experience that you thought of awakening and enlightenment as some sort of super-natural, ultra-spiritual achievement for celibate monks, or you thought it was all mumbo-jumbo, and then, for some reason, when you were ready, it all made complete sense, but not in a way that you can explain? What is your experience with awakening? Meditation? Healing? Why are you interested in self-improvement or awakening?

About Beyond Karma

Are you ready to awaken out of the world of fear and sadness? Are you ready to jump off the self-improvement treadmill? Do you want to rise above your stuck patterns? Are you ready to…declog, unclench, unstick, release, and open up to a life of joyous and limitless possibilities?

Visit Beyond Karma!

Today I’m mostly bedridden – in my sixteenth year of a rare, incurable disease. On 9/11, although seriously disabled, I was still employed as a school counselor at an elementary school just up Columbia Pike from the Pentagon. The day began as follows.

Explosion

In Arlington, Virginia, just outside Washington DC, the morning of September 11, 2001, was one in a string of clear, mild days that almost felt like the return of spring. As usual, I clicked off the news on my radio shortly before 8:30 AM and headed for Patrick Henry Elementary School, which stood almost directly across the street from my apartment.

I’d been scheduled to speak to a class first thing that morning and had just returned to my office when our principal made a quick detour to step inside my door. With a roomful of second graders at her back, Cintia spoke quietly. “Have you heard the news?” she asked.

“I was listening to the news before heading out this morning…” I didn’t know what she was referring to.

Cintia started to tell me something about a plane crash in New York when she paused in mid-sentence: “Did you hear that?” she asked, looking at me intently. I played it back… I had — a low rumbling sound that had lasted two or three seconds. We would soon learn that a plane had just struck the Pentagon a couple miles away.

The rest of the day was a blur. And in the days, weeks, and months that would follow, my longstanding feelings of anger and indignation around my personal situation, as well as those that initially flared up in reaction to the terrorist attacks, were blown into oblivion – and many things fell into place. Things I’d had intimations of for years and, at one level or another, all my life.

Forms of Asymmetry

During the months prior to 9/11, my condition had been deteriorating more rapidly than ever. I had been doing everything in my power to resist the gathering darkness – but there it was.

Four fiery crashes – and there it was again. Reality. Reality that featured immense and undeniable darkness. The darkness of witnessing explosions shatter a beautiful morning. The darkness of the terrorist mind and the social injustices that helped shape it. The darkness of the deaths of victims and of their families and friends facing lifetimes of loss. The darkness of senselessness, with its outraged and unanswerable, “Why?”

It was as if the fireballs that had instantaneously affected so many other lives as they glittered across a planet’s television screens had publicly proclaimed the undeniable existence of a darkness that I had been experiencing in private for so long. Yet the nation’s life would go forward. And so would mine.

Not many things are black and white, but this is one:
Own the darkness when it comes
Or see the light extinguished.

Own the darkness of your unfair share, for there is one world that is strewn and streaked with darkness and light. Great pain brings us to see that we are no exception. What happens happens. The spinning world is streaked and dappled. A single shifting shaft or shadow can make our little lives appear specially blessed or specially cursed. Neither is true, and each of us should be prepared for change; for the streaks and patterns move and morph like clouds over a weather map, bringing both calm and chaos.

Allness

Accept the darkness and accept the light – and lean toward the light. Lean toward what you feel but cannot see, like a plant under the sun.

There is only One whole world, and it is dark, it is light, and it is leaning slightly and always toward the light. It is All inexplicable.

There is deep darkness – terrible, painful, haunting shadow. It can even overshadow our greatest dreams, and yet faith tells us that the World’s dream is so much greater: like a far-off dawn just now touching the tips of our tallest trees, illuminating little, but just enough for us to run toward light.

Lean, look forward, and run. The shadows may even swallow your last chance on earth for what you call success or happiness, and which may indeed have been a good thing. But there is such a thing as darkness, and none are exempt from either its certain eventualities or worst possibilities.

Indignation and resentment do nothing except make us lose our forward poise and balance, that asymmetry which is the measure of our humanity. They only rob us of the good things that are left, the helpful inclinations that may otherwise have been possible for us, including possibilities that we may not foresee. Our outrage only slams the door on God. Our violent protests only shut out the Allness of our owness.

In desperation and love, through the fearful sense of falling backward and losing ourselves, and the loving desire to find our balance in the wider and more truthful World, we seek union with the asymmetrical, forward, lightful bent of life’s dark soul in us.

Accept the fullness of what you cannot understand. Allow the Allness of your owness to settle over your shoulders.

Being Here

What is, is. Let me be a piece of that,
Amid the horror, explosions, shatteredness,
The strands of sense and beauty, the irresolvable whole.
WHAT IS is, and I shall be myself.
Contradictions are not resolved, yet I begin to resolve
The contradictions. I do not feel the tension any more.
The Whole is doing what it does, and I
Am wholly doing what I do.
In the crosshairs now, I see WHAT IS.
I cannot miss!
Desiring nothing for my splintered self,
I am being every inch something.
I care, but do not care.
I let go of my stake in all former aspirations;
Aspiring to nothing, I am occupied, every inch, with being something.
The worst cannot undo the act of what I am doing, and the best
Cannot change it. I am here. I am desperate, wise, strong
And live now beyond the land of my own dreams.
None of this is on my time. I resent nothing and no one.
I share in the whole world by laying claim to none of it,
Tasting what is sweet and bitter even in my own life
Like a sample off a plate in someone else’s home.
I am not here to stay and know it, and I no longer have a care
Because I wish to stay sane enough to keep caring.
Care like you died and kept on caring.
Care without a care, almost in just the way so many other events
Happen with no reflection or without meaning to,
But only because you mean it so much
That you are willing to be as heedless as it takes.
Become as ignorant of the parts and the frictions between them
As you were once so conscious of them in relation to yourself.
Be aware of being who you are in the arms or in the teeth of what is.
Forget all that might have been or might not be and there you are.

Where Do You Stand?

Once, long ago, I knew a way of great and growing joy. For many years now, I have known a way of great and increasing pain.

Suffering, we become empty. Joyous, we find more space. Either way, a new identity surges into the void that opens us up far beyond the borders of what we once called self.

On the way, there is an ego to outgrow and, eventually, a life to give up for a greater.

Where do you stand?

About the author

Paul Maurice Martin is author of Original Faith: What Your Life Is Trying to Tell You and blogs at www.originalfaith.com. He holds an M.A. in Religious Studies from the University of Chicago Divinity School and an M.Ed. in Counseling from the University of New Hampshire.