Home Blog Page 259

Five Steps to Overcome Grief and Return to the Present Moment

Lauren
-
7
Five Steps to Overcome Grief and Return to the Present Moment

“I can’t be running back and forth forever between grief and high delight.” ~ J D Salinger

The painful process of grief can manifest itself a thousand times throughout our day, but is more often than not found in the big changes that weave their way into our lives; the death of a loved one, the loss of a relationship, or even the painful realization that a set idea of how our lives might go isn’t going to turn out in quite the way we would’ve liked. You would be lucky to find one person in your life who hasn’t found themselves stuck on one wrung of the grief process at some time or other.

Recognizing and understanding the grief process can help us begin to reflect on where we might need a little jolt in order to get us back on track and in the present where we belong. Those who often find themselves in this similar pattern; becoming sucked in to either the same part of the grief process, or the whole five steps (mentioned below) are also usually those who have low self-worth, take responsibility for other’s action and feelings, and those who let other’s abuse their trust time and time again.

Like the orphan archetype in their well of grief, the griever actually has a higher calling and opportunity for deep transformation, both through their capacity to experience the whole spectrum of human emotion, and to see it for what it is. An illusion.

Like a film we turn on, become immersed in, experience and radiate a huge range of emotions and reactions to, then turn off again, life is a story we are constantly writing, rewriting and trying to improve. Unfortunately, there is no option to go back and edit, only the willingness of the mind to dissolve past memories and lovingly send them on their way.

Grief can be an attachment, a fixture of the ego, something that won’t flush itself out of our systems until we confront that part of ourselves we are attaching so rigidly to. And so we come to the process itself, and all the opportunities for growth it presents:

Here are 5 steps to overcome grief and live in the present moment

Denial

steps to overcome grief

As it is with death, so it is with any kind of loss. We deny it has actually happened. Not recognizing and accepting our more ‘negative’ or uncomfortable emotions is alarmingly common in our masculine and pseudo-positive society and lifestyle choices. Pretending everything is OK when it’s not can only get us so far.

Faking it has its merits, but when it comes to grief it has no place at all. Denial will keep us stuck up to our necks; desperately imprisoned in denial we will unlikely move or advance much further than our own doorsteps if we stubbornly chose to admit to ourselves that something has even happened in the first place.

They continued on and left me behind, we weren’t right for each other, it didn’t work out how I wanted it to… it’s OK. Take a deep breath, embrace yourself, then let the sharp pain of loss consume you.

Anger

How could this happen to me? Why did the universe let it happen? What’s wrong with me? How dare they? The irrational flickers of anger rear their ugly heads when we get to the previous stage of accepting the loss. Anger is the next natural step. It may come in the form of quiet blame, or it may come in the form of soul-shaking outrage and violently dangerous actions. Whatever way it manifests itself, it is normal and again something to accept and embrace rather than fear and suppress.

The dangers of suppressed and swallowed anger massively outweigh the instant, more pure expressions of raw anger. Anger has some integrity when expressed with honesty. And if it is directed at yourself or the universe then it can be done with an awareness that ensures it never returns but is instantly cleared out of the system and gone without a trace.

Martyrdom

Striking bargains, expecting ridiculously high expectations of yourself or others, martyrdom comes in the form of the ego’s explanations for why this has happened. It’s probably one of the most difficult things in the world to just accept that it was one of those things, and the natural order of the world. Death is a part of life.

Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with te intent of throwing it at someone else you are the one who gets burned

Even the belief that ‘everything happens for a reason’ can go too far when attached to the ego’s rationale. If I succeed in this then it will make up for what happened, if I prove to this person I’m better than them, it’ll make the break-up more bearable, if I keep chasing this dead dream then at least I’ll keep face.

All rationalizations and martyrdoms are futile and will only make the suffering process harder in the long run. That said, we often have to run in circles for a while in order to see ourselves chasing our own tails. There is a perfect moment for everything and everything is occurring in perfect timing.

Grief can often give the griever feelings of over-importance as well as low self-worth. The truth of it is debatable. While everyone is special, grief can help us achieve in ways others do not, if only for the reason that we have more of a grip on reality and the impermanence of it. Then again to buy into such beliefs can breed narcissism and pride. It all depends on the individual… only we can truly know it for ourselves.

Depression

The essence of grief is the concave, moody blue lull of depression. It hurts, and unlike the intense and often immediate flexes of anger’s fist, depression can be an endurance test: wading through rivers that seem impossible to cross. Surrendering to this incredibly bitter tasting part of the process will be no fun, but again it is essential to give yourself time whilst not attaching to this specific part.

overcoming-grief-process

Depression can be a tricky one as it often surfaces when the other stages have been suppressed and can appear to be for no reason. The irony is that we then feel unworthy for feeling depressed all the time, whip up a new well-crafted front and grin and bear it. But the root must be sourced and dug up, and the deeper it’s buried the messier the metaphorical kitchen counter. It has to be done.

Often these ‘roots’ may even be our ‘loss of innocence’ that everyone has to some degree. The moment the child in us saw a true injustice in the world, stamped their foot and declared ‘that’s not fair!’ This can be a potent moment of grief and often needs some attention. What are the sources of discomfort for you?

The denials, the catalysts for anger? Depression will be the outcome and often puzzling to boot. Having uprooted those painful truths we will then need forgiveness and to mother ourselves.

If you are stuck in depression, you will need to enforce healthy habits after pulling out the thorn until the swelling goes down. Exercise and healthy eating are still up there with the best of cures.

Acceptance

The final stage, is acceptance. Acceptance rather than complete healing as, unlike a relationship or idea, the loss of a loved one often never entirely heals. Not struggling with our feelings any longer but being able to accept them and for the most part get on with our lives will be the biggest sign we have completed the grief process. Not only that, but that we have gained from it. As the Buddha said, there is suffering. It helps us grow, know ourselves better and become more resilient, compassionate living beings. Grief, above all things, can be a gift.

Image Source
Anger
Tears

The Zen of Fearlessness: Counting Coup on God

Gary Z McGee
-
5
The Zen of Fearlessness: Counting Coup on God

“To be human is necessarily to be a vulnerable risk-taker; to be a courageous human is to be good at it.” ~ Jonathan Lear

Imagine you were born into a culture that cultivates the fear of God, whatever that “God” may be. Imagine that this culture deems this fear as righteous, and even has you blindly believing that fearing God makes you a better person somehow. Capitalizing on this concept, this imaginary culture also convinces you to fear all authority: police, government, and parental.

warrior
“A warrior’s strike doesn’t have to lead to bloodshed.” ~ Little Sun

They convince you that such fear is necessary to keep things in “order.” They want you to be afraid because they are afraid, and it makes them feel better about their fear if everyone else is also afraid.

Like Bertrand Russell said, “Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.”

Fear begets fear. Fear also compounds fear, until entire systems are locked in a giant prison of fear from which it seems like there is no escape.

Now imagine: what would it take to get out from such fear conditioning and escape the prison? What kind of courageous act would it take to undermine this type of bone-deep fear? How do we become fearless?

Hug the hurricane

“Comfort is the enemy of achievement.” ~ Farrah Gray

hurricane-warning-sign-heavy-weathered-vector-eps-34628538 (1)First, it takes recognizing fear for what it is. It requires embracing fear itself, subsuming it, so that it can eventually be transformed into humor. But there can be no transformation without integration. The first act of courage is hugging the hurricane, tempting the tempest, staring into the abyss of fear itself.

Fearlessness isn’t the absence of fear, it’s being absolutely terrified but doing it anyway. It’s intimacy with fear. We realize that the fear was nothing more than the ignorant small-mindedness of our insecure animal-self, a petty fraction-less fraction of who we really are. It resides in that part of us where we have allowed culture to take advantage of us: the insecure, victim of an oppressive culture.

The next step is not to beat yourself up about it. It must be okay that you were once a victim in order for it to be okay that you are becoming a warrior. The longer you beat yourself up, the longer you will remain a victim. Obsessing over how you were duped is a waste of your energy. Focus more on acceptance. Acknowledge it for what it was, spiritual bamboozlement, and then let it go. Letting it go allows for a sacred space where courage can replace worry.

Transforming fear from an unskillful worry into a skillful courage is the essence of fearlessness. It is the foundation upon which all other layers of fearlessness will be built upon. We are not unchanging beings in a static universe; we are changing beings within a dynamic cosmos. The more we accept this, the further we distance ourselves from victimization and the closer we get to achieving authentic spirituality.

Count coup on Ego

eagle-flying
“Once one has said yes to the call to adventure, the ego is securely in the grip of the soul, and the soul serves notice that the ego will not emerge unchanged.” ~ Bill Plotkin

Now that the foundation is set, the next step is to get a little creative with our courage. One unique and powerful way of doing that is through the concept of counting coup. Counting coup is a Native American act of courage referring to the winning of prestige in battle.

A person wins prestige by uncommon acts of bravery in the face of fear. Danger and risk is required to count coup and it can be recorded by touching an enemy in battle and then escaping unharmed.

Counting coup can be done both literally and figuratively. It is a metaphor for dangerously and humorously shocking ourselves and our fellow man into wakefulness, a way of sneaking up on our fears and our certainties and giving them a little smack with our coup stick.

Governing the precept that all fear comes from the naive part of our insecure self, it stands to reason that we should first count coup on ourselves, and the best way to do that is to focus on the heart. Counting coup on the heart frees the heart to count coup on the universe.

Then we are suddenly free to count coup on anything: fear, our shadow, Death, and especially our pampered, inert, narcissistic and aggrandized egos. When we count coup on the ego we are counting coup on inertia, extremism and narcissism.

Counting coup on our ego turns the tables on the Soul-Ego struggle for power. By keeping our egos in check we allow for soul-centric energies (as opposed to egocentric energies) to emerge so that we can, like Thoreau said, “Live deliberately.”

Counting coup on Ego is counting coup on Super Ego; it jumpstarts both the individual and the collective soul. It makes us come alive. It gets us ever so closer to a more self-actualized state; a state where we even learn how to count coup on enlightenment itself.

Count Coup on God

193952632-DM-3“If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him.” ~ Linji Yixuan

There is perhaps no more powerful an act of counting coup than that of counting coup on God. God, in almost all human cultures, represents a powerful authority that should be feared.

Counting coup on authority is the essence of fearlessness. Even if your culture’s God is perceived as good, moral, and benevolent, the act of counting coup on such a force is a courageous act of questioning power itself.

Like Darnell Lamont Walker said, “Sometimes our walls exist just to see who has the strength to knock them down.”

Counting coup is the ultimate leveling mechanism precisely because it holds power accountable through mockery and high humor, which prevents power from corrupting, and prevents absolute power from ever becoming a thing that can corrupt absolutely.

Counting coup on God takes insurmountable courage, but it also requires an excellent sense of humor. Don’t fear God, laugh at God. It is tantamount to a Nietzschean bitch-slap. Imagine sneaking up on God asleep in his/her/its/their holy chambers, smacking him/her/it/them in the divine ass, and then escaping with nary a scratch on your ninja-like soul. Oh the blasphemous audacity. Oh the sheer unadulterated gall. Oh the sacrilegious insolence. Oh the unholy provocation of it all.

Who would dare such an irreverent act of utter impudence? The answer: A person who is genuinely and authentically fearless, a person who could give two blue shits whether or not they will “burn in Hell for an eternity” or “be cast from the eternal glory of Heaven” by a bitter, vengeful, imbecile bully filled with self-righteous wrath.

What is realized after such an act? That God was an illusion to begin with. That this so-called God we are supposed to fear was never a God at all. It was a divine façade. It was parochial smoke & mirrors. It was nothing more than a prop for our egos to fawn over. Once it is realized for what it truly is, and the mask slips away, and the curtain reveals the pathetic wizard of our ego is at the controls –then the true God of Infinity is discovered.
fear
A god that is everything and nothing, time and no time, mind and no-mind, universe and multiverse, micro and macro, you and me, all things interconnected in a sacred interdependent dance that truly takes your breath away.

Like Rumi said, “The ego is a veil between humans and God.”

And once the veil of the ego falls away, the true face of god is revealed, and that face is nothing more or less than Interdependent Infinity.

And here’s the beauty of it all: Even that God should have coup counted upon it, because at the end of the day, nothing is truly sacred. It should all be held accountable. It should all be questioned to the nth degree. It should all be susceptible to the sacrilegious, insouciant, undermining, blasphemous, audacious, but courageously humorous smack of the coup stick.

You want to be truly fearless? Then fear no man. Fear no God. Hold your coup stick high. Use it to keep the powers that be in check. Use it to poke holes in anything and everything that anybody else decides to blindly worship. If you would be truly fearless, a good sense of humor will be at the core of your courage.

Like Alan Watts said, “As they say in Zen, when you attain Satori, nothing is left for you in that moment than to have a good laugh.”

Laugh, and laugh hard, my fearless friends, especially in the face of the gods.

Image source:

Tribal art
Hurricane warning
Jillian Michaels quote
Tribal Mask
No Fear

The Day of Judgement: Will You Make the Jump?

Lauren
-
5
The Day of Judgement: Will You Make the Jump?

The Crumbling

“After there is great trouble among mankind, a greater one is prepared. The great mover of the universe will renew time, rain, blood, thirst, famine, steel weapons and disease.” ~ Nostradamus, Prophecies of Nostradamus

For millennia, every major religious text from the Old to the New Testament and everything in between has prophesied about our end of days with fearful relish. It has been the speculative fiction of many a film and sci-fi plot, keeping us drugged up and dunked in catastrophe soup for many lifetimes.

It has also been at the heart of mass suicides and become the core for many cults; spread mass panic on the subject of computer viruses and seen many a politician shudder in their beds in a brief evaluation of their autocratic tendencies and had them wondering if they aren’t simply vulnerable and helpless and just like the rest of us after all.

The tightening bolts of illusion is something we are witnessing on an ever-increasing scale; keeping fear in the water is proving to be increasingly difficult for the Powers That Be and, believe me, they’’re upping the dosage. The masses are pulsing with a plethora of new energies that have been introduced for some time now and will soon begin to spill over.

The crumbling has begun and is quickening with every step; every safety net put in place is fraying and our trust in them wavering; that means our jobs, property and monetary system, food and healthcare systems may soon give way… no-one can know how far off it is, but there may come a point when the rug is fully pulled out from underneath us. It’’ll be a frightening but exhilarating time. A time to transmute suffering into awakening, the highest form of alchemy.

nostradamus predictionsMany volunteers; those who have come to earth to attempt to help those clutched in the deep grooves of karmic patterns and heighten the energy of everyone they meet have probably had visions of the world in chaos.

People running around screaming, and them stepping into their higher selves and helping them. The more we learn (and we are always learning) the more we may be able to relate these visions to all the other things that have happened to us in this lifetime.

Every experience has most likely been in preparation for this event. As Doreen Virtue says, “You were made for this experience.” The World is waking up, and many of us have the potential to help during this great upheaval.

The Separation: Prophecies of Chaos

“There will be need for your stability and all of those who are here because people will be lost and confused and in much pain. Do you understand?” ~ The Three Waves of Volunteers, Dolores Cannon

Exactly what will happen when the shit hits the fan is entirely speculation, and the more we realize it will, in all certainty be a painful experience to have all our illusions shattered at once, the better.

Those of us who have been open to these increased energies for a while now, may have had inclinations for years and have been slowly expanding our minds, with no end of sources to draw from something is coming and it will require us to step up.

paradiseIn the face of adversity, people have been known to display superhuman strength, and play out superhuman acts of great compassion and depth of knowledge.

As Sogyal Rinpoche points out, it is only when we are in the raw and razor-like alertness of the present moment – a place of no-mind – that our true potentials burst forth, and near death experiences and situations that call on the best of us often wrench us happily (if not violently) from our shell in order to make miracles. All of us, volunteer or otherwise have this potential, this seed of the source within us and are travelling on the inevitable spiral towards this realization.

Such chaos on a grand, worldly scale however, will be the real test for many. The separation of the old world to the new will wrench us from our seat belts and shake us and our loved ones from our seats.

If we are to be a face of calm in the midst of panic, then it is this and not the words we may speak or knowledge that we hold but the healing energy we give off at the crucial moment. We will have the opportunity to help many others make the jump and increase their energies to move on.

The Pillars

“Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.” ~ Matthew 5:5

These Pillars, are supposedly the volunteers who have chosen their specific mission in this lifetime to be a higher calling of intense healing. Words, outward appearance and all else will be entirely superfluous. It will be an individual’s energy and that alone will attract others when the time comes.

Those who are currently highly sensitive and possibly experiencing extreme loneliness or feelings of isolation from the rest of the world, those who see through deception and those who radiate an intense revelation_bible-pageenergy that already lifts others into new perceptions and alternative ways of being are probably volunteers in action or waiting dormant. That said, it is still up to every one of us to realize this potential and the outcome lies in our own free will.

What lies on the other side is a mystery. Those who decide not to make the jump will in all likelihood continue to play out their old patterns, still with the opportunity to advance’ within the cycle of death and rebirth.

And those who move on – who knows? The new earth is said to be in exactly the same place as the current one, but as a snake sheds its skin it will cleanse itself as a living organism of its deep scars and those who are making them. And the new earth?

On the other side of a black hole? In another dimension? The imagination can probably only take us so far. But what we do know is that, unlike the biblical and more elitist prophecies we do all have the potential.

There are no chosen people, race or religion, but the ability to nurse and cultivate the seed within and let it bloom.

Image Source

Revelation
Nostradamus

How Your Thoughts Become Your Destiny

Gary Z McGee
-
7
How Your Thoughts Become Your Destiny

“Watch your thoughts, they become words. Watch your words, they become actions. Watch your actions, they become habits. Watch your habits, they become character. Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.” ~ Unknown

The preceding quote has been attributed to many people: the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, the transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Buddha, and even a supermarket magnate named Frank Outlaw, among others.

But who actually wrote the quote isn’t nearly as important as it having been written. In this article, we will break down this curious quote by tracing the seed of Thought to the flower of Destiny, and see how your thoughts become your destiny

Watch your thoughts, they become words

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” ~ George Orwell

Every single word originated from the fallibility of the human mind. Our skulls are like little cul-de-sacs of thought just waiting to spring into words. Our brains are tiny galaxies going through the motion of creating a multitude of thoughts through the firing of billions of synapses.

Thoughts Become Your Destiny

The only way we can share these thoughts with each other is through words. But first our thoughts need to be clear enough to become words.

This seems simple, but sometimes it’s the little things, the basics, that prevent us from being clear with each other. Sometimes getting the horse back in front of the cart is as simple as clearing our minds (the art of no-mind) so that our thoughts are clear enough to become words, while also being okay with the fact that we will never be completely clear on anything – quite the existential gamble.

“No philosophy,” William James asserted, “can ever be anything but a summary sketch, a picture of the world in abridgement, a foreshortened bird’s-eye view of the perspective of events.”

So it goes also with our thoughts. Our thoughts can only ever be rough drafts of what we’re perceiving, terse outlines of an unfathomably huge cosmos.

We must first be okay with being tiny cosmonauts in a giant cosmos, both literally and figuratively, so that we can eventually be okay with our words being fallible constructs springing from fallible thoughts.

Like Aldous Huxley said, “It is only by taking the fact of eternity into account that we can deliver thought from its slavery of life. And it is only by deliberately paying our attention and our primary allegiance to eternity that we can prevent time from turning our lives into a pointless or diabolical foolery.”

Watch your words, they become actions

“Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.” ~ Thoreau

Words are the flagship symbols of human perception. They are the invisible hat rack upon which we hang the infinite hats of our thoughts.

They are powerful beyond measure, and yet they are powerless unless we understand them. If they don’t make sense, then there can be no imagery.

And if there is no imagery, then there can be no action. Words are like hollow sentinels that form an army of imagery that dances across the reader’s/listener’s imagination; tying knots into thoughts, portmanteaus into bon mots, until there is a web of life living, ever-so-shortly, in the span of a few words which are nothing more than squiggly marks on a page.

And yet they are so much more than that somehow, for they compel us to move, to realign, to refocus and evolve.

The “whole function of thought,” Charles S. Pierce surmised, “is to produce habits of action.”

Indeed, and the links between the function of thought and the habits of action are the mighty words of our language. With them we can imagine new imaginings; we can capitalize upon them by rearranging them into novel constructs that create new worlds for new creating.

With them, we can topple governments, we can count coup on tyranny, we can create poetry that breaks the heart and makes the spirit soar. With them we manifest human flourishing. Indeed, our words become what we do.

Watch your actions, they become habits

“Everyone is gifted, but most people never open their gift.” ~ The Buddha

good-habits-bad-habits

When it comes down to it, our health is dependent upon our actions. When we act in healthy ways, we experience healthy results. It really is that simple. What’s not so simple is paying close enough attention to the dictation of natural law so that our actions are in order with the cosmos.

This is tricky because we all too often place the cart of our cultural conditioning in front of the horse of cosmic law.

The reason why our human cultures are unhealthy and unsustainable is precisely because the horse of cosmic law is stuck ramming his head into the back of our unreasonable, imbalanced and extremely overfilled carts.

As it stands, we need to unlearn what our culture has conditioned into us, and relearn what it takes to get back into a healthy and sustainable balance with nature. If we continue acting out our unsustainable programming, then unsustainability will continue to be a bad habit. If we continue the habits of an unhealthy culture, we will continue to be unhealthy people.

Living healthy is living simply, is living in moderation. Health and moderation are so intricately linked that a “language older than words” is literally screaming it from the mountaintops. We just need ears keen enough to hear it. Healthy actions become healthy habits. Just as what we eat is what we are, what we do is what we become.

Watch your habits, they become character

“Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?” ~ John Keats

This is where your character is formed: in the crucible of your habits. If your habits are healthy, your character will be robust and able to adapt and overcome. If your habits are unhealthy, your character will be weak and unable to adapt to the many unexpected changes that life has to offer. If the latter is the case, don’t fret. It’s not too late.

knowledge-will-give-you-power-but-character-respect-bruce-lee-mistake-quote

There is always the top-down method to attempt in order to get back to a place where you can implement the more effective ground-up method. But first, at the risk of sounding cliché, you have to seize the day. Seizing the day first requires seizing the moment.

Seize the moment by becoming painfully aware of your habits. Take note of your habits. Notice how they form and transform your day. Observe how they take you from one moment to the next. If your habits are healthy, then proceed to be healthy.

If they are unhealthy, then take a deep breath and get the horse back in front of the cart by reorienting yourself with the cosmos. Start the entire process over again.

Meditate on how your thoughts became words, how your words became actions, and how your actions became your unhealthy habits. Keep doing it. Meditate over and over again until you get to a place where you are brave enough to transform yourself (rebirth).

Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny

“The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases. Each of us carries our own life-plan, which cannot be superseded by any other.” ~ C.G. Jung

It’s arguable that if you do not first achieve a healthy character, then you will not be robust enough to experience destiny. Your destiny will merely be what society has molded you into being. The experience of destiny is an awakened state, a conscious awareness of existential thresholds, a third-eye wide open experience of one’s life path.

Like Carl Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.”

destiny-quote

It stands to reason that an unhealthy character is ruled by his/her unconscious. They are puppets of fate (puppets of culture, religion, politics, etc), and in their puppetry they have lost the primary experience of being free beings in an infinite cosmos.

As it stands, it seems as though the majority of us are not equipped to be creatures of destiny. A person of destiny is a person filled to bursting with bringing meaning to their life.

Like Robert Byrne said, “The purpose of life is a life of purpose.”

Their thoughts have become clear words, their clear words have become clever actions, their clever actions have become healthy habits, and their healthy habits have transformed them into characters robust enough to adapt and overcome the vicissitudes of a constantly changing, interconnected cosmos.

They are seared with freedom, radiating liberty and autonomy, even as they embrace the all-encompassing fact that they are interdependent and one with all things. They are massive characters, subsuming cosmos from their birds-eye view of self-as-world and world-as-self.

Most of all, they are reminders to us all (for they are us, and we are them): that the individuation of the ego and the self-actualization of the soul are real possibilities. We have only to begin with the fledgling seed of a clear thought, and with enough healthy words, actions, habits and character, it can become a mighty flower of human destiny.

Living in Awareness: The Art of Perfect Action

Nikki Sapp
-
0
Living in Awareness: The Art of Perfect Action

“Let whatever is happening happen… laugh, shout, scream, jump, shake-whatever you feel to do, do it!” ~ Osho

To the person living in and from their own awareness, all action is perfect. To some, the concept of perfect action sounds like a lofty goal. The image of a person completely at peace, quiet, humble, never raising their voice, never getting sad or frustrated may come to mind. After all, “perfect” must mean all things good right?

Good mood, good speech, good temperament, good deeds, this all sounds like what it means to take “perfect action”. Well, not exactly. If we replace the word perfect with the words “spontaneous” or “natural”, we see that when we behave in perfect action, it doesn’t necessarily have to mean good (or what our ego has deemed as ‘good’).

Spontaneous action suggests that all action that arises in any given moment is perfect action. For a person operating from their true self or inner awareness, there is no need for the mind to get involved in every single decision.

Without the inner critic aka our ego getting in the way, holding us to a certain code of conduct based on such things as manners, religious beliefs, ‘acceptable’ behavior, or past conditioning, all action that arises is completely natural and therefore perfect.

codeimage3

Which doesn’t necessarily suggest that an aware person never gets angry, sad, annoyed or any other emotion that our ego has deemed ‘bad’ or ‘unacceptable’. It only suggests that all action is completely authentic because it is always arising naturally out of the present moment, with no regard given to what one “should” or “shouldn’t” behave like.

“The minds appeal to the past deprives human beings of the ability to live authentically in the present causing them to repress genuine emotions and to shut themselves off from joyful experiences that arise naturally when embracing the present moment.” ~ Osho

To some a state of being that suggests that you abide by absolutely no rules, regulations, commandments or codes of conduct may seem a little scary.

“Wouldn’t that cause complete havoc and chaos in my life?” One might ask. “What if I go off on my boss and I get fired?” “What if I lose friendships and relationships because I’m just over here saying and doing whatever the hell I want, wouldn’t that be completely detrimental to my life?” When such questions arise, we must also ask, “Who is the ‘I’ or ‘me’ that is worried about such things?

Questions such as these are arising from a fearful place. Anytime we find ourselves coming up with ‘what if’ scenarios we can be sure that we are still operating from the mind. Consciousness doesn’t need to ask such questions because it resides in a place of complete trust and resonance with each present moment as it arises.

Consciousness trusts that whatever action is taken is the right one, therefore one need not worry or stress about what to do, what to say, or what to behave like in future scenarios.

In fact, to pre-plan future behavior goes against everything that consciousness stands for because it promotes inauthentic action. How are we to know what we will say in our conversation with a friend two days from now? How are we to know what we should say to our co-worker later today at work?

If we plan every single conversation we have with people or action we will take in the future down to the very last detail how can we be assured that we are taking the best and most effective actions? We can’t.

We can’t because the fact of the matter is, we have no clue how conversations or situations will go. We may have a general idea, but when we repress spontaneous reactions we may be repressing genuine and sincere emotions and feelings which can never veer us in the wrong direction. Even though it may be a little frightening at first, the more we resonate in our own awareness we will find that we start letting conversations and situations unfold naturally without giving any thought to them at all.

Once we see that this method actually proves to not only be completely effective and authentic but we stop over-thinking. We begin to trust that the process of life unfolds naturally for us through very little effort from our own minds. We begin to trust the present moment as it is presented.

A beautiful thing happens as we leave codes of conduct behind and start letting all of our behavior be completely spontaneous and natural. This way we respond better to situations as they codeimage4are happening because we are creating space between our awareness and our behavior.

This space creates a buffer that allows us to respond more effectively without necessarily reacting in a defensive manner. Even though there are times we may get angry or upset, when one acts from awareness these states are not judged as “wrong” per se.

They just are states that come and pass just as soon as they came. We also find that when we become completely authentic and natural in our speech and behavior, that other people in our lives begin to do the same.

Instead of people getting angry or getting defensive with us, which is what our ego would like for us to think is going to happen, we find that other people are completely refreshed and relieved to deal with someone who says what they mean and means what they say, unapologetically.

Life begins to get extremely simple, uncomplicated and carefree without constant worry about doing or having said the wrong thing. Forget about the “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts”.

Trust completely in your genuine reactions and emotions. You may be pleasantly surprised to find that your authenticity is not only the easiest path to take but also the most effective.

Image Source

Mind Power
Rules
Man at the river

1...258259260...348Page 259 of 348