​I think of mouse view as what you see and how it feels when you’re down in the nitty-gritty details, and eagle view as what you see and how that feels when you rise up to get the bigger picture or the greater perspective.

There’s more space up there, and you get more spacious in your assessments.

There’s more room for everything, and more points of entry for new characters and resources to come in.

There’s room for surprise.

Let me relate this to something I’ve talked about plenty and some of you know outside of my work—because you, too, listen to Abraham-Hicks to be inspired and to get reminders about how to live as a happy creator of your reality. Remember GO GENERAL? (Skip down to below the eagle pic if you don’t want the review.)

The idea is that stress comes in when we get into the details—how, when, who? Where will the money come from? What about the parts I don’t know how to do? Is there enough time for this? In other words, stress happens in MOUSE VIEW. Look up the totem or symbolic meaning of mouse and you’ll see the word fear all over the place! (Oh, little trembly mouse.)

The teaching, then, is to GO GENERAL when you find yourself in stress. In other words, TAKE EAGLE VIEW. Remind yourself in general terms what you’re doing, what you’re after, what’s likely to work out over time, how you’re doing okay, how it’s all unfolding just fine. Give yourself general, nonspecific reminders of what you can believe that makes you feel better, soothed, and eventually empowered to go back in. (Ah, powerful eagle, soaring above it all.)

And go back in you will! No one’s inviting you to ignore details. I’m very much inviting you to get out of that realm when you’re stressed (at the first whiff of stress!), and go general to get realigned, to gather up courage and hope, to trust life and whatever process you’re in. THEN, go back to the details. Until you get stressed again (and maybe try to catch that first whiff and RESPOND) …
Some things eagle view can do for you:

Shift your perspective of time from all the cutural not-enough message to way more spaciousness to play in.

Remind your body that contraction feels bad and opening, relaxing, breathing good air feels GOOD.

Remind you of the greater journey you’re on and have been on. Bring in that comparative of how you were doing before or how you used to handle this, and WOW-LOOK-HOW-MUCH-BETTER-YOU’RE-DOING-NOW. Just look how far you’ve come.

Remind you of a larger vision that the current task is in service of—and what you CARE ABOUT, perhaps are passionate about, all of which is way larger than any frustrations related to this moment or this task. There’s a reason you’re doing this thing. It’s NOT to plow through it or check it off a list. This task is actually a worthwhile stepping stone toward somewhere you really want to go, something you really want to create.

Call you back to your place in this picture, and even the fact that ultimately, yes you are replaceable. Maybe there’s stuff you can let go, delegate, stop micromanaging or controlling at all, leave alone entirely. Resign from a few jobs you’ve taken on. Let go of micromanaging even yourself according to some pre-chosen standard that doesn’t fit this now-moment. And maybe you can drop back into your right place, your right role, and let it all be easier and more manageable. (LET it be easier & more manageable.)

Bring in a sense of peace and well-being that always exists beyond any tiny or overly precise realm of focus. Beyond what they’re presenting in the news, beyond the thing that’s not working right now, beyond how others in your field are currently showing up, beyond what you have or haven’t figured out up to now, etc, etc.

Remind you that YOU DON’T NEED TO FIGURE IT OUT RIGHT NOW. Or probably ever. Pan out, look away. At the risk of mixing metaphors: Something wants to come in through the back door when you’re looking out the front.

Get you back to LOVE when you’re all focused on what bothers you about someone, what they’re doing wrong, how you’re not getting what you want from them. Beyond this moment’s frustration or fear or resurgence of distress over all you can’t control—there’s nothing but love.

Come back to There’s no problem. It really is all okay. Take satellite view. Take galactic view. It’s really all okay.

Love & blessings, Jaya

​You can set up your life (or this hour, this day, this week, this era) so that it’s more and more and more frustrating.

Or you can set it up so that it’s more and more and more easy and flowy and fine.

Basically, what follows is a simple story to illustrate.

I just had a typical bout of grand frustration while doing taxes. (Not tax time you say? Um, some of us file for an extension when you’re getting yours done on time, so our due date is coming right up.) (Are you starting to get my relationship with taxes?)

So it all started with some thorny stuff. I got frustrated fast, because I came in with the idea that I really wasn’t into this. (Ah, the power of opting in 100 percent.) I was also soothing the frustration as I went, not just letting it rip. I was doing fine. But I wasn’t all joy and sunshine. Let’s say that soft, expansive belly breaths maybe weren’t predominant. Or maybe not in the vicinity.

And then, things got thornier. And I got more frustrated trying to get help from customer service or even trying to get to a human being. Even the chat was intercepted by a mean-girl kind of robot. And I permitted myself a bit of railing to my mother, whose house I’m living in for the purpose of being helpful and uplifting, so … mission not accomplished.

And then a bunch of data got purged from Quickbooks. It all seemed very random, like someone flushed a toilet in a parallel Universe and my data went down the invisible pipes.

I have standards and quite refuse to literally slam my forehead repeatedly into the wall, so I did not do that. I did get up and move away from the task.

If you’re getting anxious, let me tell you this would all end well. I would later be involved in an interesting hours-long process getting data transferred back in. I would learn some stuff. When I solved the puzzle (and I would solve the puzzle), it would be an almost funny and cute matter of two little bunny-eared quotation marks that had hopped away to a distant field, probably very sweetly, maybe in that same parallel universe where that mysterious toilet was, when they were very much needed for the purposes of proper coding within a bunch of crammed-together words and numbers in a tiny font that cryptically contained both my data and a secret code. This code, properly presented, would then allow Quickbooks to open the door to let in the data that I wanted there. I would manage to understand the pattern and see where it was disrupted and …  I would fix it. No bunnies would be hurt in the righting of this data. I wouldn’t even be rough on the computer keys or even my own system. I would breathe lovely, soft belly breaths, while sitting and working in positions that would require no chiropractic adjustments down the line. All would work out.

Fucking Eureka. And bonus, it’s really kind of fun and wondrous to crack a code, right?

Honestly, most of the time I affirm that everything’s always working out for me. I lost track of it for a minute there.

Okay but let me backtrack. How did I get there? Note that I was already witnessing myself FROM THE BEGINNING because my policy and preference is not to live with frustration. I don’t judge it when it comes. However, I witness it coming in and feel the effects and then I usher it out.

(This takes practice, folks, and just noticing when the judgments come in and dropping them again. Keep dropping your self-judgments. They serve nothing except to keep you in modes that better match frustration than flow. They’re not fun, they’re not kind, they don’t make you a better person. They literally serve nothing you’re after.)

Speaking again from my policy and preference (to be clear, not what I was doing with this round of tax work), I do whatever it takes to release any grip on an outcome, a timing, a way the process must go. As quickly as I notice such interference, I let it go and align with reality. I soothe myself with presence in body and breath. I look away from the thorny task and get my alignment back, then I come back again—even if that means no more than a 5-minute break to look up at the sky and breathe and watch the breeze move some leaves around or drink some water or do some stretches or wash a few dishes or whatever.

Back to presence, back to body and breath, back to alignment THEN back to work.

So I wasn’t exactly doing this with tax work. I was watching the frustration (self-witnessing is good and helpful) and I was not entirely believing the messages the mind was forming about what was supposed to go differently or feel better (seeing thoughts as thoughts, not reality, and not believing them is good and helpful), but I also did not properly and fully INTERRUPT it.

So more frustration accrued.

By the time I sat down to spend some comfortable hours cracking the code, a true interruption had taken place. I had stopped. Surrendered. Let go of alllll the things I wanted that I wasn’t getting in this scenario.

I happened to be slated that day to do some EFT/tapping with a group of people on zoom and when we had some minutes left at the end, I brought in this topic. It yielded this 10-min EFT session you might try when you have some frustration about techno-trouble, or about current customer-service realities, or about anything that you believe should be less fraught with trickiness, thus making you more frustrated in the face of reality.

I felt so much better after the tapping.

And then I didn’t go back to frustration. I went back to work already breathing well, and I just settled in, staying conscious of the breath, for whatever was ahead. Which turned out to be some hours. And I got into the puzzle of it in that way that puzzles are actually fun, even when you’re kind of frowning at them going, Well, NOW what?

Because Now what? is in fact a very good question and typically invites the next one thing to try. Especially if you’re in your body, and your breath is flowing.

Also, I played soothing music on YouTube while I worked. Whenever I happened to stop in and see who was swimming by in the ocean footage that went with the music, I kind of wanted to cry, but not the way cruel techno-trouble games in the multiverse make you cry. Just the way dolphins swishing through blue love with little half-smiles on their relaxed and earnest faces makes you cry. Don’t even get me started with the giant turtles. (Though the soothing-music video does start with a giant turtle.)

I didn’t even finish in that sitting. I went to bed early when I felt the first whiff of frustration coming back in. I got up and started fresh and full of hope. I found those two missing quotation marks very quickly, gently grabbed two new ones by the ears, plunked them in, and carried on with a flowy version of finishing my taxes.

Seriously, folks. There’s no problem if we get super frustrated by life’s potentially frustrating things. And we don’t need to fault ourselves for that. Most others wouldn’t fault us.

But we also don’t need to rev up the frustration, and feel justified in it, and rail (and keep railing, and rail to a bunch of people) (and keep railing inside our own minds), and keep creating more of that. Because that will and must keep creating more of that.

As soon as you can interrupt it, INTERRUPT IT. And do whatever you know to do to get your alignment back. And then, if you’ve revved up a bunch of frustration, you may need to take a while in the unraveling, so drop in for whatever it takes. Breathe. Listen to soothing music. Let some part of you weep quietly with achy joy because, in the meantime, there are sea creatures somewhere being too wondrous for words and truly embodying the flow.

We can live in peace and flow. Or we can live in frustration. And that’s true with hard things and things that go wrong and things that are just wrong on this planet and in our current setups at our current level of evolution. And it’s also true when things are relatively wrinkle-free and flowing along.

The more we flow peacefully, present, opting in, the more things flow in general. The more we create frustration and amplify that, the more things bump along uncomfortably or screech to a halt.

So don’t expect yourself to flow nonstop. Do interrupt yourself when you’re out of the flow. And gently soothe yourself back into alignment. Create more and more and more alignment and more and more flow.

Love & blessings, Jaya

Here’s what I’m not saying. I’m not saying BE more and DO less.

That’s an old construct that was nice to talk about when we first thought to bring the concept of being front and center. (That is so way yesterday!) And maybe no one had dared think in terms of doing less as something sane and good because we were just all about efficiency and cramming in more.

It’s truer to say that being & doing go together. Be vs. Do is an example of a binary, which is always ultimately a false construct. In fact, if you’re doing, you’re being, and if you’re being, you’re doing. They are inextricable one from the other.

So don’t be versus do. Be fully. Be in the fullness of all that you are. Do fully. Do with all your caring and creative verve, and opt in fully wherever you opt in. Be present in body, mind, and heart to what you’re doing. (That is, make it your doing to come back to being.)

Do nothing just to get through it. Do everything because this is your beautiful life and this is the thing to do right now in support of your beautiful life, and all its beautiful parts.

• Do the dishes that way
• Do conversations that way, even with customer service
• Do lovemaking and even hugs that way
• Do walking that way, whether moving away from or moving toward
• Do creative brainstorming that way
• Do work tasks that way
• Do dancing that way
• Do connecting to nature that way
• Do all connecting and dropping in with another and bouncing energies back and forth that way

If you’re being while doing, you’re inhabiting this moment and opting in fully to what you’re doing. You’re here, in presence. You’re inhabiting the body. You’re connected to breath. (Or, again, just coming back. Keep coming back.)

So why did I title this DO LESS?

When you’re doing without being, you’re doing unconsciously.  You’ve literally withdrawn your consciousness from the doing. You’re in autopilot. You’re just doing the thing to do it and check it off the list. You might actually do less (or do more things one at a time, with a more one-pointed focus) in order to marry doing & being together in the most beautiful way.

So here are some things you might consider playing with, more or less:

• Multitask less.
• Put your phone down more.
• Ruminate way less.
• Come back to the breath way more.
• Do less while talking and listening.
• Go outside more.
• Do less figuring.
• Tell yourself way more often you don’t have to figure it out right now.
• Do less staying with thoughts & feelings that feel bad.
• Do more interrupting of what feels off, early & often.
• Do less because you think you have to do it or someone will be disappointed or this is the way you always do it or [fill in your own old bullshit concept that still gets you]
• Do more because it feels good, it makes you laugh, it’s kind, it brings you to this precious moment here & no
• Watch squirrels more, run with the chickens more, look up at the sky more

THESE TWO PARAGRAPHS ARE FOR MILDLY-BUT-TENACIOUSLY ADDICTED ADDICTS. (Oh, yeah. That’s everybody.)

Do the things you feel divided about in a single focus and opt in fully. (Eating, smoking, drinking, playing the game, watching whatever …) What do you keep telling yourself you should quit or do less of or do differently? Start by giving it your full permission and full opt-in and full presence as you do it.

Example: go sit outside and smoke, and do nothing else. Experience it, because you’re not NOT smoking, so SMOKE. Don’t be divided. If you’re not ready to quit, drop in for real. Do it while being, while being present to alllllllll that comes in for you as you do it, including pleasure, self-disapproval, old voices, your own guidance system. Witness it all. Get present to it. Your experience will shift.

The best (and EASIEST) way to marry together doing and being is to come back to presence, often, in anything you’re doing. Inhabit your body (drop in consciously and feel it, ground it). Inhabit the breath (take MANY moments to feel what breathing feels like right now). (Stay with that for at least a full breath cycle.)

Let every moment and your whole being and life be fuller and more conscious. Do less. Do more while being. Appreciate this beautiful life and the fullness of all that you are.

Love & blessings, Jaya

Oh, dear ones, how normal is it for big feelings to sometimes hit hard as we navigate Corona times? Stomach-dropping fear anyone? Roiling, buzzing anxiety? Chest-gripping grief? I invite you to judge nothing—by which I always mean NOTICE that you're judging it and seek to release judgment: welcome yourself to the human race; meet whatever you're experiencing now knowing you can be feeling it only if millions of others feel it too.

I offer you 2 resources here:

1. a profound and deeply calming 20-minute meditation on dropping deeper into love
2. a practical piece of writing on dropping in when you're overloaded with hard-hitting emotion—drop into the feeling & drop into love (it's not that hard)

1. The HEART MEDITATION is deeply calming and connecting. You can do it either in the actual moment of meeting a strong emotion or when you simply choose to settle into the heart realm and find what's there. The meditation invites you to keep dropping in where perhaps you haven't yet—or never as you are right now in this fresh, all-things-new-all-things-possible moment.

2. The written part follows.

STEP-BY-STEP TACTICS TO GET OUT OF YOUR OWN WAY when strong emotions hit and you feel disconnected from love.

1. NOTICE AND MEET RESISTANCE.
This really means notice it and let it be there. You will resist. So get okay with that. But know that if you run with the resistance (otherwise stated, ignore it and let it dictate what you do or don't give attention to), you can't sort of reach around it to stroke and soothe what you're feeling. Resistance will take many forms, and may look like:

• powering through other tasks and pre-set goals as you feel worse and worse
• attacking yourself with words or literal physical harm (Watch for subtler versions and stop being okay with them—like just walking around vaguely feeling wrong and bad and like you're not managing this right or should be beyond this!)
• attacking someone else (outwardly or internally) and blaming them for what feels bad
• ruminating or obsessing about the story of the moment that correlates with the strong feeling—which keeps you at the mercy of the feelings while you harbor the illusion you're addressing some issue by "thinking about it"
• arguing for some limitation, especially by telling yourself you're stuck with these feelings, you won't be okay, you can't get your needs met, your future can only be bleak
• warding off the present moment (the only place in time where you can meet what you're feeling) by steeping in past stories or future predictions related to the story affecting you now; call yourself back to now and proceed to #2)

 
2. LOCATE YOUR WILLINGNESS TO MEET WHAT YOU'RE FEELING.
You don't have to make resistance go away! Once you notice it, accept that it's here; accept that we all resist. Then you can pause with it, breathe into it, and find your willingness to meet the strong emotion itself. Beyond your resistance is the thing that will set you free. Here, that means that beyond resistance is the emotion for you to meet directly by dropping in with it and feeling it fully.

You might simply tell yourself: Something feels awful here. Because something that feels awful is here, I'm willing to meet it. I'm willing to feel it. I can't just will it away, so I'll drop in to see what it has for me. I'm willing to feel bad, for now. I'm willing to feel whatever any human being might feel. I'm willing not to abandon myself here and now.

3. FEEL WHAT YOU'RE FEELING AS YOU INTEND CONNECTING TO LOVE.
Every emotion carries with it a call to love. Wow.
​

No matter how painful a feeling, no matter how close to the fear or hate end of the spectrum it may register, it only wants to call you back to yourself, back to self-acceptance, back to love.

It's actually amazingly easy to feel what you're feeling—as opposed to analyzing it, thinking about or mulling over the related story and all its gory details, or letting it engulf you in a toxic way.

You know what I mean by that toxic engulfment? You're there if you feel wretched with it; if you're despairing (even to the point of questioning your life's worth or declaring yourself hopeless for living it well); if you're steeping in your worst beliefs about yourself, others, your prospects, life itself. You're there if you feel all alone.

So how do you feel a feeling? This post will take you there (This is what X feels like), even as it connects you to all the other beings who feel it too, so you don't get lost in being alone or in feeling singular in or singled out by what you're feeling. Chapter 3 of Scooch! offers a lot on that topic in the Mind the Pain Body section (ch. 3 covers Mind the Pain Body, Tend the Mind).

More than anything, you drop in. You give yourself to locating IN THE BODY the specifics of what you feel:

• where is it?
• what are its parameters (how deep in & how far out does it go—perhaps even beyond the confines of the body)?
• what's the intensity level?
• what's the density?
• could you give it a color?

​Be a scientist collecting data on the body. See if you can do that without a lot of words or naming (or work up to that as you experiment with this method). Ultimately, all you're trying to do is FULLY feel whatever you're feeling, and feel it where it is—in the body.

Call on the breath as you do this. FEEL the movement of the breath as it already registers in your body. Then gently direct your breath to the place of pain.

That's all the pain body wants: awareness and breath. So drop in. Fully. Drop into the pain as you would something that feels great, relaxed, letting it have you: think of easing down into a jacuzzi and letting go, releasing all resistance.

4. SEEK TO LOVE WHAT YOU'RE FEELING—AND LOVE YOURSELF FEELING IT (HINT: neutrality is a great support).
This heart meditation (mentioned & linked above) will walk you through. Read on for some words to explain it.

Start with simply intending love. Remember that love doesn't need ANYTHING put on or forced. It doesn't need you to try to locate some approximation of feeling love. Love doesn't necessarily come with any particular feeling attached. You don't need to rev up inner flavors of sweet or kind or whatever loving means to you—or rather, to your disconnected self. Just let love be a powerful, neutral force that doesn't need you to cough up anything in order to show up and make itself known. It's already who you are in your essence. It already drenches the entire Universe. So simply intend connecting to that.

Since you're already dropping into the feeling and breathing it (if you've followed instructions in #3), now bring your awareness to your heart center and invite love. Relax muscles you don't need on the out-breath so you stay out of effort, and simply breathe in the intention, the invitation, the truth of love's inherent location everywhere—accessible from this specific area of the body (aka, the heart chakra).

You've JUST been exploring a feeling. See if you can head from that feeling/sensation to some neutral acceptance, even expectation, of love. Love as ever-present, inherently yours, beyond any need to earn it. Scooch that way and don't worry about getting there.

But let me stress the idea of NEUTRAL. It's powerful to just let love be, call it in, let it come as it will as you sit here as you are: you need ask nothing specific of love; it asks nothing of you except the letting go, the allowing. 

You'll love yourself better if you cultivate some connection to neutrality inside yourself, especially in painful or self-disapproving moments. It's neutral, in fact—because these are normal human things—to feel strong emotions, to feel out of control, to be confused and in the dark, to have a bad taste in your mouth, to have a wildly beating heart, to fear you won't be okay, to disconnect from your best self, to lose track of all hope, to not know what to do next. It gets easier to drop self-judgment if you can hold a neutrality toward anything you've habitually disapproved of (in yourself or others).

So I'll leave you there. This is a practice. Make it an experiment (perhaps a grand experiment while you're at it). Let it take you wherever it will. Come back and seek to meet yourself, your emotions, the heart space again and again and again. Especially during intense, hard times of collective fear, grief, and letting go, as we find ourselves living in now in the time of Corona.
 Love & blessings, Jaya
​

 Have you ever shown someone a startling blossom or alien bug and been disappointed by the way they say, Amazing, and then carry on? Like it was nothing? Like—what kind of amazement has no power to jolt them out of sleepwalking, even for a moment? Don’t do this to yourself. Drop a notch deeper into presence.
 
Once you think you’ve seen something, look again.
 
Try any of these tactics to drop down a notch, drop deeper into presence. What we’re after here is meeting the dynamic reality of this moment—not your concepts about it or all the prior decisions you’ve made, the stories you’ve rehearsed, the names and descriptors you’ve got down. (Red cardinal. Jenna when she’s moody. This much half-and-half.) These simple measures could literally take one more second—or whatever you like better in the moment.

• See and feel into its newness to you here and now
• See the colors in a more specific, more nuanced way (Every sky I’ve done this with has more colors in the mix than I first registered)
• Activate another sense beyond the default one (Don’t just smell the coffee; don’t just see the leaf)
• Take in its feeling essence, or what it makes you feel
• Take a consciously felt breath as you take it in, as if you’re letting it in more fully, while more connected to yourself (You’ll be doing just that)
• Even for a moment, be consciousness meeting consciousness (yes, with inanimate objects too—the building, the car, the stuck drawer)

 
Especially if you’ve had a thought about the being or thing perceived (and thus turned it into a concept of itself), look again as if for the first time. Apply this to the most familiar face (even in its most predictable presentation), the flower you walk by (yes—even if it did already spike appreciation), the cup steaming with the known hot beverage.

Now and now and now, just for now: just one notch deeper into presence.

Love & blessings, Jaya