 Photo of dog not even thinking about letting go from Barnabas Davoti on Unsplash. Pic is linked to a blog post on finding an easy way into alignment. Bottom line up front: If you’re surrendering from a place of alignment, it will not feel bad. It will not feel like giving up. Not on yourself, not on your dreams, not on your becoming—which means your evolution, your greater expression of all that you are, your getting more of what you want. It will not feel like defeat—and you will not feel like a loser or a failure. It will not feel like a wet blanket, a rained-on parade, a burst bubble. It won’t even feel like losing your agency. The right kind of surrender, in fact, feels GOOD. It feels like RELIEF, like relaxation. Like contracted muscles softening, opening, dropping down. It feels like the blessed end of unnecessary striving—most often, letting go of what you can’t possibly control, what was never yours to control in the first place. It feels like a welcome-home, like coming back to yourself, back to your business. Back to what’s actually yours to manage, to control, to choose.  Photo of person floating in natural waters from Lia Bekyan on Unsplash. Linked to the blog post FEEL BETTER. That’s why SURRENDER—the good kind—cannot be all-or-nothing. Be careful with questions like, Should I hold on (to this WHOLE THING) or surrender (this WHOLE THING)? In that great ball of wax, there are disparate bits to sort through: weighty bits that you could put down and lighter bits with your name on them that you could hold onto firmly with (at least some semblance of) competence and ease. In the aligned surrender, you still get to have choices. In fact, you’ll have some decisions to make. The decision-making gets way, way easier once you’re deciding from a place of sanity, not trying to manage the unmanageable. When you’re not arguing with reality (as Byron Katie puts it), not pushing against anything (as Abraham-Hicks repeatedly reminds us NOT to do to have the best life and greatest ease and fullest power to create), then you can stand solid, relaxed and aligned, on a firm foundation of seeing and accepting reality as it is. From that foundation, you’re free to manage what’s yours to manage, and you simply keep letting go of the rest. I chose the phrase keep letting go very intentionally. It’s important, even crucial.  Photo of horse’s neck and head with bridle from Tim Schmidbauer on Unsplash. Pic is linked to a blog post on Byron Katie’s 3 kinds of business. I so often see super-smart human beings thinking in terms of pulling some plug to be done with something once and for all. Usually, their language betrays that they thought that would (or should) happen, as they speak especially in terms of still—as in, I’m still trying to convince the doctors to listen to me. I typically have my coaching clients reframe that in a heartbeat in session. Just BRING IT TO NOW. Just be with your impulse to grab the reins of someone else’s horse again, and get really good at putting them back down as quickly as you catch yourself. Correct it in the moment, not in the whole of how you operate. Hey, you do get to have a plug pulled sometimes, maybe from a powerful healing process or ritual; maybe through an epiphany or stroke of insight; maybe from a peak experience or some hellacious unwanted event that floors you and rocks your world, leaving you forever altered. But most of the time, the undoing, the reprogramming, the unraveling and rewiring—all involves what you notice now, pause with now, accept right now because it’s here right now. In that conscious pause, you can find where to surrender and where to assert or simply choose. In the now-moment, you make your best choice within your control toward what you want and who you want to be, now and now and now. and now and now and …  Photo of person wearing CHOOSE LIFE tee-shirt from Steve Harris on Unsplash. Pic is linked to a blog post on EASY DECISIONS made from your best self & all 3 centers (body, heart, head). So love, please don’t surrender out of a sense that you’re screwed and have lost all capacity to choose. In every situation or relationship or moment, there are areas of letting go and areas of holding fast. Let yourself feel the RELIEF of what you appropriately stop trying to control and the POWER and SATISFACTION of making all kinds of choices where they’re yours to make. In fact, don’t abdicate the choices that are yours to make. In a moment when you come close to where you do have agency, tune in: What’s important to you here? What do you want? (Not, what do others around you want or even want for you?) This is your life. What you can’t control in it is not your business, so do surrender that. But that surrender will not be absolute; most absolute surrenders involve giving up and failing to locate your right agency. Locate your business here and now and find your power to choose, to act, to stay true to yourself. My dear one, be(come) someone who knows when and how to surrender and be(come) the one who chooses your life. Love & blessings, Jaya Like it when someone reads to you? CLICK HERE FOR THE AUDIO VERSION OF THE GOOD KIND OF SURRENDER (6:20).
0 Comments
THEN DO AND GET MORE OF WHAT YOU LOVE  Photo from below of kids looking down together with awe & wonder from Getty Images on Unsplash. I was wondering what I wanted to do next in the group work I’ve been loving so much. It’s so deeply fulfilling to me on so many levels. So I sat down with pen & paper to find what Abraham-Hicks calls the feeling place. That’s it. That’s all I was seeking to locate. What does this thing I love feel like? (Below, I’ll flag for you what I did NOT begin with—things we typically begin with that keep us stuck.) As with everything I offer you, focus on what this calls up for you about you, even though I’m offering an illustration about me! I invite you to let it remind you of similar or even different things that stir for you when you know you’re right in there doing what you love in the most satisfying way. FEELS LIKE … Feels like I’m in great company—people opted in, dropped in, present, open, engaged Feels like all present are curious, fascinated, excited, eager Feels like recognition & connection Feels like fun, like being in the sandbox, like playing in the magic together Feels like being in love, happy to see every face and all the shifting expressions Feels like wonder, wow, delight Feels like goosebumps, no way, truth better than fiction Feels like I’m learning and teaching at the same time, evolving with my clients Feels like growth, expansion, evolution—mine, theirs, shared Feels like coaching in the dynamic now, responding in the moment to what arises in the moment Feels like being in my zone of genius, at ease, in flow Feels like surety, like knowing what to do or say next Feels like absorption, like there’s nowhere else I’d rather be Feels like wonderful storytelling from different voices Feels real, feels authentic, feels like come-as-you-are Feels like Abraham’s phrase tuned in, tapped in, turned on After I wrote all that out, I was fully connected to those feelings, that feeling place, and ready for the one next thing to do toward what I want to create. Next, I’ll put this process to finding or even appreciating your person for those focused in the dating & relationship sector.  Photo of two cats snuggling on couch from Sigmund on Unsplash. CLICK ON PIC FOR DATING RESOURCES. You know when it feels really right and just works with someone? Even for a while, at times, in the beginning, or the closest you’ve gotten to yet? Or can you imagine what you’re pretty sure it would feel like based on what you’ve learned about what is NOT IT, what you know you don’t want? Feels easy, feels natural, feels unforced Feels spontaneous, unrehearsed, experienced fresh in the moment Feels like recognition, feels like knowing & being known Feels like acceptance, feels spacious, feels welcoming Feels relaxed, feels calm, feels like comfort Feels like letting down, letting go, letting be Feels fun, feels like easy laughter, like hard laughter, like shared secret smiles Feels exciting, animating, activating Feels sparky, feels mutual, feels like a volley of good energy, banter, inspired ideas Feels chosen, feels wanted, feels right Feels like adoring, appreciating, cherishing Feels like being adored, appreciated, cherished Feels like good attention, good mirroring, being seen, being appreciated Feels like mutual admiration Feels like learning, growing, opting in to forays out of the comfort zone Feels like adventure, feels like delight, wonder, awe Feels simple, easy, intuitive, organic, obvious Feels satisfying, feels good, feels like OF COURSE Are you getting it? It’s so wonderfully easy and more helpful than you might think to get you moving in the direction you’d like to go—especially when a lot feels unclear and unformed. If you took in the above feeling statements at all, you probably started to touch into or even really got hold of the feeling place.  Photo of squirrel peaking around tree trunk from Hasse Lossius on Unsplash. This is not where most human beings are taught to begin, so it’s not where we habitually begin—or even get to at all. In fact, we can get stuck early on and shut down possibilities because we begin in all the wrong places:
Also, beware of old labels that represent things you make identity of (conditions, diagnoses, history, tendencies) that in no way represent WHO YOU ARE:
About that last one, do fill in your own Enneagram type, if you’re aware of that construct, and notice how you chalk certain behaviors and mindsets up to that (or any other construct you relate with). Instead, use what you know about your tendencies to recognize and pivot from that autopilot way of seeing & approaching things—which is not WHO YOU ARE and in no way limits what you’re capable of or what you get to experience next. Let’s give a quick nod to WHO DO I THINK I AM? Pointless question whose job is just self-attack. Either answer the question to actually locate who you think you are to alleviate a sense that you have wrong ideas about your journey, wants, preferences, skills, talents; or move away from that question entirely. It’s ridiculously unkind. Notice that nothing in the above bulleted list is an actual concrete, inexorable, intractable aspect of anyone’s identity or even reality, however much they accurately know about themselves, their experiences, or their current conditions. Anything you notice that’s in your way is something to respond to consciously: you can question it (as with The Work of Byron Katie or my short inquiry process); use it to pivot from unwanted to wanted; or respond to with some process to bring forth other and stronger truths that actually align with what you want and support you to head that way (and believe you can do it and you get to have it!). (See the marble game or a focus wheel, both from Abraham-Hicks.) Or book a session with Jaya! One truly effective and crazy-simple process is to FIND THE FEELING PLACE. And do it in witing. It’s more effective that way. Second-best is saying it out loud. Love & blessings, Jaya Or Rather, Feeling and THEN Doing  Image of back of human being facing gentle ocean with arms open wide. From Imdadul Hussain on Unsplash. WHY I’M STILL TALKING ABOUT HOW TO FEEL INSTEAD OF WHAT TO DO First, you’ll find good preludes to this new idea in these 3 topics I’ve already covered:
DO NOT BE DISMAYED: I do know my focus hasn’t been on what we can do and even must do—appropriate & necessary action steps needed to create the change we want, to get to where we’d like to be. I’m absolutely not denying that there are such actions to take. I even agree that they’re important. But DON’T START THERE. Don’t keep teaching yourself that it all hinges on what you do. (This is based on doership, a lovely illusion to dispel.) THE OLD WAY YOU WERE TAUGHT & THE NEW WAY I’M PROPOSING You were taught to focus there, weren’t you? They put on their most serious, even scolding faces, and said: Start in the realm of ACTION, and stay there, buckle down there, bite the bullet there, prioritize being there, finish what you start there, work very hard there, collect & demonstrate evidence of all you’re doing & all you’ve done ... I invite you to open to the possibility that ACTION is actually not your best point of departure. I learned this from Abraham-Hicks (and from practicing their teachings). Action FIRST is not best for the most ease, most efficiency, most flow, most satisfaction, most fun & well-being along the way, most success, or most anything else that you may want. It’s really only best for proving YOU ARE ON IT to those looking on (and maybe giving you money or taking you on guilt trips for what they gave you before or telling you what’s what because they always have known and still do know better than you). They strongly believe that your doing is the key. Leave them to it, and consider another way even for a moment. What if it’s truer that the key to your best life and the ideal point of departure is in minding your feeling state? In cultivating good feelings? Then when action comes out of that habitual way of being, it’s inspired action, it’s wanted action, it’s doable action, it’s satisfying action. (I’ll be writing more on that down the line.) GETTING SPECIFIC WITH THE FEELINGS YOU GENERATE Beyond the idea of feeling good in general as a way of being (see link #3 above for some goods on that), you can also cultivate super-specific feelings that match what you’re after by finding where you have them in your reality now and putting focus there. I know some of you have played with the Easy Existing Matches process I’ve written up from the teachings of Abraham-Hicks. This is truly a fabulous DAILY & super-simple process for keeping in view and living into this principle of finding where what you want, and especially how you want to feel, is available to you before you figure out how to create—or rather, LET IN, respond to, flow into—the change you want. So … what makes you feel loved that’s already in your world?  Photo of person with arms around two German Shepherds from Piermario Eva on Unsplash. Focus first on that—not on the ways the love you want is missing, and not on what to DO to go after the love you want! What makes you feel that abundant sense of finding treasures now, before your purchasing power changes?  Photo of someone rummaging through a vinyl records bin from Kevin Turcios on Unsplash. Focus on that, and play at finding within-reach treasures here & now before you focus on going after the wealth that eludes you. What makes you feel attractive that’s within easy reach already?  Photo of beautifully manicured nails from Bryony Elena on Unsplash. Yes, focus there. Let new actions come later, with ease, once you’ve got that feeling nicely established. You won’t truly embody it if you keep focusing on what’s missing and work hard to nail it in place with dense or frenetic energy. That will not put the swagger in your walk! What makes you feel at peace that’s accessible to you now?  Silhouetted photo of someone walking in woods with a small dog from Michael Kucharski on Unsplash. That’s where the real peace is, right here, already in place. You can only get now-peace now—not future peace. Note that your peace is certainly not in the stuff of your current reality that disrupts your sense of harmony & well-being [justice, goodness, unity, etc]. So don’t put your focus there! (Maybe less news-watching for some of you?) The peace disrupters are easy enough to find, aren’t they? Don’t even add something like in the current era or in the current political climate. In truth, it’s always been easy to find what’s not wanted in the current reality; it’s the easiest thing to focus on what’s missing. (You’ve experienced this to different degrees, and at different scales, but you’ve experienced it all your life!) And you will always find the unwanted when you’re focused on it. For a very long time, it’s probably been your default to TAKE ACTION to shape things up—or even to feel bad about yourself and accuse yourself of laziness, procrastination, or failure if you’re not motivated to act. Well … how about this instead? Get your feeling state lined up. Feel good way more often. Interrupt what feels bad to head for feeling good again. Live this way. Make it a grand experiment. (The biggest fool this can make of you is to turn you into the fool who feels good more often.) Once feeling good becomes a normal way of life, inspired action will too. (That’s the way of it. You can’t NOT act when you feel great and ideas are flowing in.) Much love & many blessings, Jaya third (hu)manifestation nugget Photo of two bees on a yellow flower from Mario Beducci on Unsplash. This writing contains one manifestation principle plus: 1) some thoughts to support your deeper understanding; 2) some ways to play with it and practice. Here’s nugget #3. TREAT & USE APPRECIATION AS YOUR GREATEST ALLY IN MANIFESTATION. WHAT THIS MEANS When you’re …
… YOU’RE OUT OF ALIGNMENT WITH YOUR INNER BEING. Other ways to say that: You’re out of alignment with …
Hey, you can even just call it being out of alignment, period, and drop any name for the pure-essence-can-do-creative-energy you’re out of alignment with! Is it already clear & obvious to you that you’re not going to step into your life at your most powerful level when you feel like it’s such a struggle and things are kind of stacked against you or you’re doing it all wrong or missing some crucial piece? Is it equally clear & obvious that when you’re out of alignment, you’re not at ease or feeling your power to generate more of what you want? What’s the quickest way to come into alignment? We’ve already looked at feeling good and loving your life on an ongoing basis, or prioritizing feeling better when you can’t feel good. That will keep you aligned and coming back to alignment as you simply care about and manage or take care of how you feel. Really make a project of it. The P-word again: Prioritize it. But is it also clear & obvious to you that APPRECIATION is the easiest access point to feeling good? To establishing an ongoing feel-good place inside you that you can keep coming back to as an easy touchstone or point of reference? Let’s look at the practice, or the practical application of APPRECIATION AS YOUR PORTAL TO ALIGNMENT. HOW TO WORK WITH THIS CONCEPT Cultivate appreciating anything you can feel good about having and benefiting from in your world, life, home, relationship, work, family, location, etc, etc, all day every day. Appreciate what you like about your bed and bedroom or sleeping space when you wake up. Appreciate your access to drinking water and the supplies and utensils to make or buy the hot beverage of your choice. Appreciate the weather, the yard, the street, the signs of nature all around, the breezes, the temperature, the green, the gray. Appreciate the clothes you have to wear. Appreciate each small thing your amazing body allows you to do. Appreciate good sensations and flavors and smells and movement. Appreciate your five senses, or however many you have access to at whatever level! Appreciate the food you’re eating. Choose it, take time to prepare it consciously, chew it, taste it, savor it. Appreciate the faces around you. Appreciate the energies around you. Appreciate the silence, appreciate the sounds. Appreciate your agency, all the minute and huge ways you have choice, your capacity to choose. Appreciate how you show up. Appreciate how others show up. Appreciate time and how it supports you and quit saying there’s not enough of it; quit treating it like it’s working against you. Appreciate your capacity to NOTICE that you’re functioning right now in a stressful, anxious, irritated, fretting [whatever] way, and your ability to reach for soothing tactics, movement, breathing, pausing, reframing, opting in, redirecting, delegating, asking for help … Appreciate how you grow, how you’ve grown, how you’re teachable, how amazing teachers, guides, wisdom has come to you. Appreciate that you do enough, you’ve done enough, this is all enough, for now. You are enough, always. Is it clear and obvious that I could keep going and so could you? All that we can appreciate in a life, an era, a season, a day, a moment, one single task, the one that’s ours to do right now—truly, it’s endless. Living in a bottomless pit—okay, maybe a well—okay, fountain, ocean … or how about infinite space of APPRECIATION! Living in ongoing boundless appreciation is not only possible but extremely advisable for feeling good and living in alignment. Bring that to your moment-to-moment everyday life! It can help to write it down, as in the Easy Existing Matches exercise. The more you appreciate everything as it is here and now ... Wait, there are many ways to say that
AN IMPORTANT WORD ON ENJOYING THE JOURNEY That enjoy-the-journey bit is important, because each arrival, each manifestation, has a whole journey that goes with it and came before. Some are quick, some are long, some are harrowing, some involve lots of fun and adventure … in any case, there’s a journey. Enjoy the journey. Don't miss the journey. (That could be a whole nugget in itself, but we’ll let it piggy-back here onto APPRECIATION AS KEY.) For those wondering why I’m not talking about GRATITUDE, it’s very deliberate. I was already not a fan when I learned from Abraham-Hicks the greater power of APPRECIATION over gratitude. If gratitude feels amazing to you, keep it! But for many of us, it has a tinge (sometimes unconscious) of you’d better be grateful, or you deserve nothing if you’re not grateful, or it’s all going to be snatched away from you if you’re not grateful. None of that is empowered or aligned. I’ve written about appreciation vs. gratitude in this post with a recipe for the gratitude-intolerant. I’ve written here about appreciation as an underappreciated tool for creating your life. ENJOY CULTIVATING APPRECIATION. It naturally feels good, it easily brings you into and supports you to spend more time in alignment. It gives you easy access to coming back to alignment when you’ve slipped away (and slip we will). It’s truly your best ally in the manifestation game—and the game of life. Love & blessings, Jaya Find the second (hu)manifestation nugget here. Find the first (hu)manifestation nuggets here. PROCESS #4 of 5 for quick & easy FOCUS & ALIGNMENT Photo of cloudy sky with dark clouds in color variations. From Osarugue Igbinoba on Unsplash. (Have you ever noticed you can follow the bold print in each post to get the gist of it for a quick read and to find where you may want to go in more deeply? Yup.) Today’s piece-of-cake process requires no paper or pen, just the capacity to move through a threshold from indoors to outdoors. If that’s difficult or you can’t leave the premises in the moment you have the impulse to reach for this process (and do follow those impulses!), do you have access to a window? Just look out. Better still if you can open the window for even a moment, in any weather, and breathe a bit of fresh air. STEP OUTSIDE I step outside early in the day, sometimes just for a minute or two, sometimes to hang out for a few. I do this in the midst of my other focusing processes because, seriously, going outside (or your variation of that) fully counts as an alignment process. I’ve met some birds, squirrels, cottontails, and raccoons that way. The bird song is remarkably present in all weathers (even if scant), and the crescendo of music in the springtime is downright life-giving. It’s nice to learn the temperature by encountering it, experiencing it, not reading about it. If you don’t like how it feels, see if you can appreciate the contrast between inside and out; enjoy both the variety and your preference. Gauging the movement in the air as it plays all around you allows a specific kind of connection to consciousness. Air can feel still (almost silent!), flowy, breezy, windy. Watching current air movements register in the rippling branches of trees is a presence practice in itself, calling forth your own ongoing dance with consciousness. And, oh, the sky. The great, ever-present sky, I have learned, provides constant solace.MAKE A GAME OF FINDING COLORS IN THE SKY Spending time in Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic, right by the ocean, I was struck by the insane number of beautiful colors in the sky. I developed a habit of being on the beach, usually practicing Qigong, for the hour leading up to and lingering just past sunset. As the sun sets or rises, the shifts are so quick you can almost decipher them (even see them quite clearly) with the naked eye. Watch for this anywhere on the planet. (I once wrote about a little life lesson or reminder from the swiftly changing Caribbean sky.) I’m in Kansas now, landlocked, living in a townhouse in a little cul-de-sac. When I step outside, I see other houses that look almost exactly like my mom’s. My old self would have made this cause for ongoing disdain and possibly depression. Now, I look up. Instead of telling myself that this is not the sky of the tropics (I used to focus relentlessly on what was missing, what I didn’t have), I search for colors in the Midwestern sky. At some point, I started playing a game of finding five colors in any sky. I almost always can. I very often find more. I told this to a color-blind person recently, who was instantly sparked by the idea and declared they would look for textures. (Brilliant! Now I’m noticing textures a lot more.) Even a simple blue sky isn’t monochromatic. There’s a lighter blue near the horizon line, and you may find a deeper shade as the eyes scan upward, and the deepest blue looking right up. White clouds aren’t just white. They’ve got edgy bits of shadow, with notes of violet, mauve, gray. (Get subtle and snobby, as if describing a fine wine.) Closer to the sun, a yellow-gold may gleam through. Even in a gray sky, shades of gray abound, and some of that gray turns out to be mauve or almost dark blue. I could go on. I cannot tell you how fun and fulfilling I find this absurd little game. I can barely express the benefits of looking into the sky. I know them viscerally, not semantically. Russ Hudson, my favorite Enneagram teacher (who gives huge emphasis to presence), sometimes uses the phrase Let it make its impressions on you. I love this phrase. And I love letting the sky make its impressions on me.  Photo of a blue sky with dramatic clouds. Some are dark,and others appear to glow with light. From Jake Weirick on Unsplash. WANT A BRIEF, RELATED AUDIO FROM THE HORSE’S MOUTH? Remember that these five quick & easy alignment and focus processes come from Abraham-Hicks. Here is a lovely 10.5-minute video/audio to give you more ideas directly from Abraham about what it does for you to step outside and what you might do, experience, remember, feel, and allow out there. (If you bump into some of their jargon you don’t know, just ignore it and focus on what you instantly get and what appeals to you. There’s something in this for you if you’re drawn in. I find this to be a little gem of a talk.) WANT A LITTLE EXPERIMENT WITH LAW OF ATTRACTION? Of course, it’s nice to be out for the best skies at sunrise and sunset. Here’s a fun experiment to run: if you make a point of stepping outside or gazing out the window more than once in the day, and you’re cultivating a mindset of finding colors, you may notice you start receive tugs or impulses (and follow the impulses!) to look or head out when there’s more going on, when prime-time skies hit. That’s an easy to show yourself that what you give your attention to really does start echoing back to you. This way, you can play with LOA for free and at the risk of catching more amazing skies.  Photo of a pale sky with clouds lit yellow and purple from sunrise or sunset. From Jei Lee on Unsplash. NURTURE & REVEL IN YOUR LOVE FOR THE EARTH For those concerned about the environment, whether as a matter of course or more acutely in the current era, go love it up. Don’t just hate things happening that seem wrong and counterintuitive to you. Do spend time in nature. Remind yourself that beautiful places exist and that birds are flying around and animals are playing, grazing, gathering. The Earth, like your own amazing physical body, is constantly and actively self-repairing and bringing anything that’s off-kilter back into balance. Concern yourself less with what’s wrong (even if you’re right that it’s wrong) and more with healing and thriving mechanisms in progress. And take in and love and experience the beauty, the magic, the ongoing perfection. As Rachel Carson taught, cultivate a sense of wonder and teach and model that to younger human beings (who are almost always predisposed to meet you in the awe). People learn to give a damn better from a sense of what they love and cherish than what they fear and feel as spinning out of control. The Earth is still spinning properly in the perfect orbit. Give her your love. QUICK NOTE ABOUT THE SEDENTARY LIFE As with all of these processes for focus & alignment, stepping outside is great to do several times a day, as needed. You know your body wants to move. Your blood wants some support to circulate. Your screen-weary eyes want to stretch their gaze and take in something that isn’t digital. At the risk of repeating myself, follow every impulse to take even a super-quick pause to look out and up. Your whole body, nervous system, and breathing flow will recalibrate in a lovely way every time you do this. (Drink water while you’re at it!) You can find Abraham-Hicks process #1, Easy Existing Matches, right here. Find Abraham-Hicks process #2, Segment intending, right here. Find Abraham-Hicks process #3, Zoom in, zoom out, right here. Find Abraham-Hicks process $5, Prime the Pump, right here. Process #5 coming soon! And yes, I still love feedback. Love & blessings, Jaya |
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed