And the amazing MARBLE GAME to use on this topic or any other Want a quicker read? Scroll down for a numbered list of 12 ways to think about time that feel better. If there’s any detrimental belief that A LOT of people from all walks of life share, at least in American culture and I daresay in most places around the globe, it’s that there’s not enough time. We have more to do that we have time to do it in. Does that even sound right? Is that even possible? And yet people walk around believing it. Please take a moment to notice the toll this takes on you. It’s going to do something that’s counter to total well-being. Any of this sound familiar?
And more. Any awareness hitting right about now about how absurd it is to give yourself this ongoing experience that’s based on an illusion? IT’S NOT REAL. But the effects of believing it are very real, and they impede so much:
And more. Abraham-Hicks has a clarifying and focusing process they call the marble game. It’s really simple and it’s really worth trying. Marbles are your thoughts and beliefs. All the thoughts and beliefs you’ve ever had. We have a lot of those, so in the marble game, you determine which ones you want ACTIVE in this situation. Which beliefs do you want to run the show? For example, you may have three marbles that say
You may have three other marbles that say
Which marbles would you like to have active as you look for a job or start the process of buying a house? Notice you’re likely to feel bad about yourself and ill-equipped for what’s next if you have the first three active; you’ll feel torn and vacillate between mindsets and the matching emotional states if you have all six active; you’ll feel empowered and curious about what’s possible with the last three active. So anytime in life that you notice you’re leading with a bad marble or you have a seriously active marble that’s not where you want to stand—like, There’s not enough time for all I need to get done—then play the marble game to consciously choose 12 marbles you want active. I did that on that very topic one morning recently. (See my activated, chosen marbles #1-12 below the illustration.) Hand drawing in a sketchbook. On the right quarter of the page is text that reads: State the problem here. Not too much! Don't rev up all the gory details. The main drawing on the rest of the page is a circle of marbles. In the center of that circle, are two smaller circles. The first circle contains the succinct version of the problem. The second circle contains the succinct version of your new mindset. Use the right margin to lay out the problem.
Draw a circle of 12 marbles (same positions as for numbers on the clock). In the middle of those, draw 2 circles. The first inner circle will contain the succinct version of the problem already written out in the margin: Not enough time for all tasks. Go ahead and put that in before you fill in beliefs next to each marble. Here, you could also just write a one-word statement of how you’re feeling about that margin problem (discouraged, depleted, angry). Write your 12 statements of more positive, empowering, helpful beliefs you already have (or ones you don’t have to reach too far to get to), the ones you do want to stand in and create from. These go next to the marbles where my squiggly lines are in the illustration. The second inner circle, you’ll fill in at the very end, when the writing out of 12 marbles you want activated brings you to a new mindset: Tasks & time coexist perfectly. (If you chose to write a single feeling word here as described above, then your new words might be brave, energized, accepting.) Here are the 12 marbles (things I actually believe, or that aren’t too far out of reach, and that I want to have as my ACTIVE beliefs) that got me from "Not enough time for all tasks" to "Tasks & time coexist perfectly."
I invite you to play with Abraham’s marble game to consciously activate the beliefs you want to live out of—or carry into just one situation that’s coming up. Love & blessings, Jaya P.S. Monday-night group-coaching drop-in sessions are FOR EVERYONE, and new and repeat people come all the time. Let me repeat that they happen on Monday nights whether there’s a mailing that week or not! Come talk to me and/or listen in about any topic and participate in body, heart, and head processes for release, clarity, alignment. Let’s clear out unnecessary suffering and live in joy from the fullness of all that we are.
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An easy way to make this concept concrete, applicable to self & others Consider first what unconditional love could look like directed toward the self. Below, I offer a list that contains two components followed down the line. We begin with a) a possible thing that makes you feel good about yourself and automatically creates a sense of self-love, followed each time by b) the flip side of that, which you generally don’t want and feel bad about—the stuff that stirs up self-disapproval and that sense of being wrong, unworthy, not good enough. Which can lead to all manner of what is not self-love, from walking around feeling subtly off and not quite up to par (without even verbalizing it, but it still feels bad, and it’s unfair to yourself) all the way to pure self-loathing and vicious self-talk (which feels rotten). What if you FULLY, equally, loved yourself in both the wanted & the unwanted aspects of your behavior? Of how you feel? Of how others see you? That’s unconditional self-love. Make it about others, and you’ve got unconditional love as directed to others. Want to love unconditionally? Notice the conditions that get the inner or outer critic in motion. INTERRUPT THE CRITIC. Drop into love for what’s here right now, the good, the bad, the ugly. Consider whether you might at least try saying (writing!) that you love yourself on each end of any spectrum, and all the way across. I love myself when I feel great & strong in my body. I love myself when something hurts or feels tender, off, painful, fragile. I love myself when I’m strong & stable. I love myself when I’m wobbly. I love myself when I’m kind to [my mom] & soothe irritation that arises without expressing it. I love myself when I notice I’m being critical, unkind, mentioning what doesn’t need to be mentioned. I love myself when I’m inappropriately instructing & suggesting. I love myself when I feel the love & joy flowing effortlessly. I love myself when I’m not in the vicinity. I love myself when I show up to do processes (like inquiry, focus wheels, EFT), getting out ahead of old negative thought patterns before they can build momentum or wreak havoc. I love myself when I reach for those processes after I’ve reacted or thrown myself off in some way or even after I’ve gone wayyyy down the rabbit hole and must walk myself through the whole climb back to ground zero. I love myself when I’m happy & appreciating others & all of life.
I love myself when I’m sad & full of discontent. I love myself when people hold up beautiful mirrors telling me I’m great, brilliant, talented, loving. I love myself when someone looks at me funny or declares everything they think is wrong with me. I love myself when I pause and choose a kind, calm, clear response. I love myself when I’m reactive or triggered and don’t even know I’m puking on someone till the mess has already dropped. I love myself when I [do qigong] and grow the practice. I love myself when I skip it. I love myself when I’m [do qigong] in presence, consciously growing my relationship to presence. I love myself when I phone it in, just do it to get it done, call it good enough. I love myself when I just simply and easily say what’s true for me. I love myself when words get stuck in my throat or I tiptoe around the issue. Hey, to be clear, the idea isn’t to condone or excuse what feels off to you. It’s to love what’s actually there, reject no part of yourself. In fact, when you’re loving yourself in any current condition, you’ll be much more able to swiftly course-correct. You’ll feel what’s off and head toward alignment fast. Getting out judgments and filling the space with love makes thing clear and more spacious. There’s room to shift. Maybe you can see that better with others, and it’s just as true for yourself. I invite you to make your own list. You could approach it from either direction: instead of what I did above, you could start with a statement of loving the least-preferred part (especially if it’s present here & now) and go from there to the stuff that easily feels good). You could also sit down on a day you notice you’re carrying around a critical play-by-play narration of yourself or another or your day, job, whatever, and write out both parts. Get yourself squarely situated in the acceptance that you’re not your idealized self, and you don’t need to be. Love yourself (or another) in writing, and you’ll be able to love yourself (or another) in talk, in actions, in the day-to-day now-now-now of it. It’s always helpful to write your thoughts down on paper so you can see what they’re up to and write out what you prefer to think to support really taking it in. Writing helps with focusing. Focus yourself into unconditional love. Love & blessings, Jaya P.S. Monday-night group-coaching drop-in sessions are FOR EVERYONE, and new and repeat people come all the time. Let me repeat that they happen on Monday nights whether there’s a mailing that week or not! Come talk to me and/or listen in about any topic and participate in body, heart, and head processes for release, clarity, alignment. Let’s clear out unnecessary suffering and live in joy from the fullness of all that we are. would you like to get behind that, for real? Start with believing you’re worthy of thriving. Your worthiness is not earned. You’re here, so you’re worthy to be here. Human beings can thrive, so as a human being, you’re worthy of thriving. You have this one brief life in this form, so what if you kept testing your worthiness to thrive, instead of collecting evidence you haven’t thrived, you’re not thriving, and you probably won’t thrive. Please interrupt that useless waste of your time and energy. Let go completely of whether others are thriving or not. If part of your mission is to support other individuals or groups to thrive, you will do that, you can’t NOT do that, and you will do it best when you’re thriving. Abraham-Hicks points out that you can’t get sick enough to help others be well, you can’t get poor enough to help others have more wealth. So how 'bout you thrive as much as you can and from there … the best of what you’ve got (which, BONUS, will keep evolving as you keep thriving) can bolster others to thrive. Interrupt all comparisons to others. They’re neither here nor there—just a royal distraction that keeps you from walking yourself toward what you want to be, do, and have. All comparisons among human beings are apple-and-orange comparisons. Seriously, what does it matter what or how anyone else is or isn’t doing? What matters is what you’ve got, what wants to come through you, what you’re passionate about, where you trip yourself up, what you’d like to try next, what you can do right now to meet yourself kindly and walk yourself toward thriving. Go ahead and make this all about you—because ultimately, you’re in charge of your own journey and your own thriving on that journey, and this has nothing to do with anyone else. Catch any whiff of punitive mentality toward yourself and keep releasing it. If you’ve done something that feels off to you or that makes you disapprove of yourself or feel shame or go into self-castigation—pause with that. Be still with that. Breathe it. Let the part of you that still thinks it deserves to be punished come forth. Be with that one. Love them as they are. Love your own humanity. Love that you’re on a journey. Appreciate anything that makes you let go of idealized self-image, self-righteousness, or foolish thoughts that you should be beyond this. I sat with someone recently who was being very hard on themself for something they’d done that violated their own ethic and shattered their sense of well-being and worthiness. I heard myself say, Well, unless you want to walk yourself now to some special little corner in hell that’s been rightfully reserved just for you, you could consider this too—and literally everything that unfolds in your life (even your missteps)--as your next opportunity to heal and evolve. Your best and worst moments, and everything in between (especially if you’re not making identity of them) can all be part of the natural evolutionary thrust toward thriving. I believe that life wants to support you to thrive, constantly. Would you like to play with believing that? You do already? Cool, now what if you found the topic or realm of life that you keep excluding from that concept—because you tell yourself that here, in this special case, you really don’t deserve …? Releasing identity will support you to thrive. Who are you anyway? What if you’re not the one who fucked up? Just like you’re not the one who’s right or who shouldn’t be talked to this way or the one who created that brilliant art or said those wise words or anything else. Practice being nobody more often. (Hint: play with presence outside of thought. What is revealed to you right now by your five senses, and the grounded sense of being in a body, and the felt sense of your own breathing in this moment? Not much room in there to tell a lot of story and craft much image or make much identity. And not much room to keep yourself from thriving, either.) I recently got thrown off by something that passed between me and another human beings. After a number of clarifying and clearing processes, it’s dissolving and releasing. It was one of those episodes that hit with a wallop, so every once in a while the ego-mind will grab it again and start to present a case for how mad I should be and what they violated and blah-blah-blah. It would go on ad nauseam, but I interrupt it. Lately I’ve been able to just look at it and say, This isn’t even real! And this has nothing to do with who I (really) am and who they (really) are. This doesn’t need my attention. And giving it my attention does not promote my thriving. (To be clear, I gave it the attention of processes when that was needed, and will again as and if the need arises.) We think we’d thrive better if they didn’t do this or hadn’t done that, or if they did do XYZ. Nope, it’s all in our own hands—how we choose to make our interpretations, what we hold on to and release, what we choose to give our focus to. Want to give more focus to what makes you thrive, and to thriving itself? Have more fun. Feel good more often. Laugh more. Focus on what’s fun, what’s easy, what feels good, what you’re proud of, what makes you laugh, what brings pleasure. Cultivate all of this. Make it a project. Oh wait—was the whole start of this paragraph in a recent mailing (on being your own best ally), exactly in those words? Um, yeah. Because that, my friend, is how we believe we’re thriving, want to thrive, practice thriving, get used to thriving, and call forth more thriving.
Love & blessings, Jaya P.S. Monday-night group-coaching drop-in sessions are FOR EVERYONE, and new and repeat people come all the time. Come talk to me and/or listen in about any topic and participate in body, heart, and head processes for release, clarity, alignment. Let’s clear out unnecessary suffering and live in joy from the fullness of all that we are. This post is a redo of a writing from 2017 that never made its way to this blog. I was inspired to bring it back because I needed an alignment meditation, then a client needed one, then ... THEY'RE BACK. Alignment meditations reset us when we lose alignment with someone we love or something we believe. Out of the blue, I'm into Alignment Meditations. They take less than 5 minutes—because it's not that hard to align. In fact, alignment is all about ease—the antithesis of straining, striving, forcing, contorting--so it can only be easy to get into alignment. Sound too easy? The caveat is: you have to let go. Let go of all you want to control that isn't actually in your realm of control. The meditation eases you into the water, then your job is to give yourself to the flow, let it take you downstream. If you're in resistance, you'll paddle against the current shouting, No, that way, that way, my way! (You'll make an awful internal ruckus—your inner seagullwill be shrieking Mine! Mine! Mine!) (My first Finding Nemo reference ever.) You know when you're out of aligment. If you're out of whack with a person, everything between you gets needlessly complicated. Out of whack with a place—just feels wrong to be there. Out of whack with a role you play--you feel miscast, even fraudulent. You can be out of alignment with your own body, ay, and that's hard to reconcile—like the discord originates with you while it's also externally imposed. In any case, you know you're out when you're out. The misalignment may not be your doing, so doing isn't likely to make it right. (Kind of radical, really.) You can't require another person to show up the way you want them to (to see you the way you want them to, to treat you ...). You cannot force your way into some society or require it (with its many faces) to look upon you with unconditional welcome. You can't bend time or sway the timing of other minds or machines or the healing mechanisms of the body. You can't require what hasn't yet arrived to come forth NOW. So how do you align with a lot of moving parts that you (rightfully, appropriately, even mercifully) cannot control? You stop trying to control anything external AND you align internally (thoughts, feelings, the vision you keep in view) with what you want. This is why a meditation is a great way to quit pounding on the door that won't yield to you: meditations aren't about DOING. Meditation allows you to slip into where you want to be--but you slip in the back way, with slow, steady breathing to support you. Alignment requires nonresistance. Start there. Nonresistance is simply letting it all be exactly as it is, like it or not. (But only for now—it can and will all change!) Alignment goes well with surrender—the good kind. Let go. Let go of outcome. Let go of what the other person does or doesn't do, what others think, what they think of you. Let go of the future; definitely let go of predicting the future. Let go of how you thought it should go, what you thought you should feel, what level of evolution you thought you should have attained here. Whatever's happening is fine—really. The meditation: alignment first happens internally, energetically, as a powerful precursor to external change. Here comes the white-ligh part. Stay with me? To meditate into alignment, sit in a column of light, aligned with that light. Watch your breathing as you sit there. Now imagine that the situation (person, group) you seek to align with is equally aligned with this column. This light represents and holds the alignment. It's a beam of light—the most effortless, uncrowded thing you might imagine. Now find where you're already aligned. Find your essential oneness with the other or the situation. Don't think it, but feel into it. Find the essential love that unites you. Open to shared philosophies, mission, history. (Invite the mind to play movies of such things.) Focus on the passion for a topic, ethic, or aesthetic that all those involved connect to, even where details of your visions don't match. You may see lots of overlap and feel instant relief—and instant movement toward alignment. You may need to drop down to the lowest common denominator: we're both/all children of the universe, inherently worthy. Or get scientific, if you will: we're made of the same stuff, exchanging the same oxygen and carbon dioxide. Anything that's real to you works. My simple meditation invites you to cast a beam of alignment and sit in it. Feel and breathe into what connects you with the thing, situation, concept, person, or group you're out of alignment with, and let go of where you're stymied by differences, disconnections, disillusionment. Sit in the truth of essential oneness. We're never separate, even when we feel separation. Oneness or unity is truly the way of it, so sit in that, the essential truth of that—never mind where anything in real life makes it hard to feel. Find the easy way to feel it in this meditation. Alignment may require ongoing tweaks and adjustments. The tightrope walker steadies themself with the pole, weaving in and out of balance. Still, they walk the line, however tricky or dangerous it looks. Don't expect yourself to meditate into alignment then hold the alignment. Sit imagining and feeling into alignment for the love of alignment, not to indulge some magical thinking that you get to have your way if you use a spiritual tactic to have it. Align without expecting anything else to happen on the physical plane, in actuality. (This doesn't mean it can't or won't.) Align mentally just to have a private experience of alignment, whether you get it publicly or not, whether you get to share it with another or not. With a touchstone of internal alignment now available, you can keep coming back to alignment as you take action and as events unfold without your orchestration. Keep coming back to alignment, just because alignment feels better. While this doesn't guarantee any certain outcome, it does make feeling better super likely; it makes course-correcting toward alignment much easier; it makes the actions and tasks you step into from that alignment much more effortless. It opens you to guidance for unexpected solutions, inspired actions. If you experiment with this at all, you simply cannot simultaneously white-knuckle it the whole way. Just play with it as you might try a yoga pose, testing the wobbly line between pushing and releasing. Endless applications. I've sat with a teacher, realigning her with the students she's not certain she's serving; a post-grad student, aligning her with a professor she thinks is disappointed in her; an artist, aligning him with the unknown galleries that want to represent him. You can align with the employer who will hire you, the lover you haven't met, the baby on the way. You can align with the maddening political scene, the uncertain marketing thrust, the slippery social event. I do this often for myself, always briefly, always lighter and easier in the aftermath. It's a great thing to do at bedtime: fall asleep from a place of alignment. You just might wake up feeling aligned. Try your own meditation. There's really no formula. Even the column of white light is dispensable if it bothers you. Just sit with your breath, intending alignment with a task, concept, person, group. Sit breathing into the possibility of alignment; open to where it already exists. Let go of striving and experiment with believing that the way is clearer, simpler, more accessible than you currently believe. It's easy to align. Love & blessings, Jaya I've come to understand that the answer for anyone is, Only if you make it that way. Only if you believe it to be. If you interpret things as punishment, if you respond to things with punishment. Focus on punishment as a thing, and it's a thing. Make it a Big Thing, and it can define your whole reality. (This is true of anything. I like to say that whatever you put under a microscope fills your whole field of vision.) I think it's profound and powerful for most anyone, raised in most any way, colored by any religious tradition or belief system, to ask yourself if you live in a punitive Universe. I'm serious: Pause. And ask. And watch for what arises. If you get any whiff of yes, breathe into that. Feel that energy of punishment and castigation in your body, and breathe into that. (This is the pain-body work.) Ask yourself if it's true. (This is the tend-the-mind work.) Ask yourself if you'd like to experiment with the possibility that it's not true. Ask yourself if you'd like to take responsibility for creating a reality that isn't informed by punishment and the whole mess that goes with it (unworthiness, hypervigilance, perfectionism, defensiveness, needing to earn things that are your natural birthright—like love). (Living into that responsibility will be the choose-your-focus work.) I did a lot of work around this later in life, long after I had consciously declared myself not to be a Christian or to subscribe to the beliefs of the brand of Christianity I was raised with (fundamentalist, or specifically, Southern-Baptist flavored). I started considering the possibility that I still (unconsciously) saw the Universe as punitive when I noticed something important and simple and super-recognizable by a lot of human beings. I realized that I felt myself being punished when things went badly (or not to my liking). I paused, breathed it, asked again (I did this again, and again, and again, each time it arised): Do I live in a punitive Universe? For me it was the last undoing (with many repetitions) of the long-ago teachings instilled in me (and then presented as Truth, so my attachment to them ran deep even after I no longer consciously intellectually saw them as true). While fundamentalists in the Christian tradition (and probably others) give a lot of lip service to grace, there's a ton of emphasis on concepts that counter grace (and its twin, unconditional love): being inherently sinful, needing to constantly watch for the workings of the ego and somehow eradicate that aspect of ourselves (actually not possible or desirable), etc. There's also the disingenuous (a nice word for BS) "love the sinner, not the sin" thing, which is almost never actually applied with anything that feels or looks like love. If you have no experience with this yourself, ask anyone who's queer who's also been on the receiving end of this so-called spiritual concept. I took total responsibility to uncover my punitive Universe AS IT LIVED IN ME. I found:
Honestly, as with EVERYTHING else, I've found the undoing is less hard than we think it will be. The undoing takes wayyyyyy less time than it took to originally instill these wrong concepts in our minds and hearts and sometimes the cells of our being. The undoing is set up through strong, clear intention (I'm going to notice where I live in a punitive Universe, take responsibility for that, and engage in the undoing), followed by choices now and now and now that align with that intention. (Back to the process described above—catch any whiff of it and pause, so that you can work it on both the body/breath and the thought levels; a few simple questions, just sitting with it till it seems absurd—that's enough to undo one hook right now, in this one moment.) Nonjudgmental awareness is your best ally in the process: you get to simply notice your own punitive mentality (the punitive Universe you live in) that will always look like typical human stuff—which you therefore don't need to take personally: I'm punishing my partner right now for not connecting with me the way I want connection. I'm wishing horrible things for our so-called president. I'm making my kids feel bad about something instead of having an open conversation in which I invite them to tell me their experience, including what feels off to them. (Thus you could teach them to honor their own guidance system, not follow your beliefs that you keep reinforcing through punitive means.) Thus, the undoing happens one moment at a time, each moment that the issue presents itself, not by a single unplugging. But people miss the extent to which this is a great process to be in. It's easy precisely because you know exactly when to go in with it (when it presents itself). You basically open the door and look it in the face when it comes knocking. The rest of the time, you're as free of it as you need to be. Ah, the power of NOW. (Thanks, ET.) I invite you out of any model of a punitive Universe. If you choose a love-based, expansive, forgiving Universe, you get to live there. That too, requires living into your vision, now and now and now. Please look below where I've given you a clip of writing describing my dear friend & colleague Kelli Younglove's indoctrination into a punitive Universe. I share it because our work together was part of the undoing for both of us. I share it because she may be your right coach. (If you're an Enneagram Two or need support with boundaries, standing strong, or speaking up, she may very well be your gal. She's also gifted with supporting cisgendered men to do their best personal-growth work. And ... she's a powerful, gentle healer.) love & blessings, Jaya p.s. An addendum featuring Kelli's writing follows. If you'd like another one from me on releasing guilt to get out of a punitive Universe and back to present time, follow this link. ADDENDUM FROM KELLI: Specifically, this is from Kelli Younglove's blog post on a healing she set up using a surrogate listener (when the one she wanted to say things to, in this case a parent, could not hear what she had to say). The part copied below describes her own indoctrination into a punitive Universe: In 1971, my parents moved to a Bible Institute on the isolated prairies of Alberta, taking me and my sister with them. Back then, it was the largest Missionary Training Centre in Canada. Imagine an army barracks with its own school system (everything from pre-kindergarten all the way up to Bible College) and you'll catch a glimpse of my childhood. The Institute was based on an authoritarian system with a top-down hierarchy that put children on the bottom rung. And what I experienced and witnessed there (and after) went directly against the church's message of love and forgiveness. Corporal punishment was used to to break children's spirits and force them to submit to the will of the parents. Signs of independence were commonly met with force. The loss of self was devastating. See the entire post here. I love the healing event it describes that could serve any human being who can't get the listening they want from a specific human being—while staying open to getting exactly what they need in another form. You may also want to look around on her blog: there's such good content there. |
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