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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. 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. 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 … 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 Did you notice this post has an audio version? See button just under the title.
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Where do you stand toward where you stand right now? This is a bad idea: Focus on current conditions that are not to your liking—that need fixing, that bother you, that make your life feel like a grind, that stir up dread, that make you review history for what’s been wrong forever or what was lost, that pop you to a future with more of the same, etc, etc. (Follow that link if you want more on that.) This is a very good idea: Find what you already like about where you stand now, what your life is like right now, what feeds you and supports you and lights you up right now. These are bad and good ideas respectively not just in terms of determining how happy you are and how much you love or even appreciate your one wild and precious life. They also affect how and how quickly you get to where you’d prefer to be than where you find yourself right now. Feeling bad as a misguided motivator We don’t need to pathologize wanting change, wanting more, wanting things to be better. In fact, evolution and movement toward greater well-being are the way of this world, this Universe. That’s how it works. That will always be operative. We love taking things to the next level and improving on what we got to before. But in some weird, wobbly moment in time, human beings got it in their heads (and taught that idea to younger ones, and wrote it into books and scripts and songs, so that we all started to treat it as fact) that when we focus on what’s wrong, what’s missing, what needs to be fixed and improved, things will go better. Actually, when we focus on what feels bad to us, we feel bad. We cultivate dissatisfaction. We feel stuck and doubt our capacity to change things, or we notice factors that make change seem hard or complicated or unlikely. We lose track of what’s going well. We talk to others from that perspective and create vibes of complaining or criticism. It’s not pretty. That focus on WRONG actually doesn’t motivate us to move forward and create more of what we want. We do keep trying to make this warped tactic work, though. If you’re noticing now that you feel pretty married to that idea, or you’re pretty sure it’s a focus you’d better hang on to (I mean, it’s been really well-rehearsed and -reinforced), you might simply ask yourself whether there might be other and better motivators for creating the change you want and bettering things that aren’t as you want them to be. You don’t even need to locate and name the new motivators right away. Just open to the idea that kinder and more effective ones might actually exist, and they might serve you better. Here’s what I know will serve you better
Appreciate where you stand right now This is now. This is here. This is where you are. Notice what you like about this place. Notice how it serves you. Notice how much your needs are met. Notice that there’s laughter and beauty and functionality in every corner of the Universe, this one you’re in now included. Or as Abraham-Hicks says, there’s wanted and unwanted in every particle of the Universe—and they (A-H) constantly invite us to point toward or focus on the wanted. From feeling good about where you are, you can feel better still. From there, you can see what else is possible. You’ll be open to the inspired idea coming in, and you’ll have the wherewithal to follow the mental spark with physical action. From there, you’ve got enough of a good mood going and good energy stirring that you can notice one next simple thing to do to feel better better better, to like your life (job, relationship, home, kids, location, avocation) even more, to make this work a bit more smoothly, to help the dynamic ease with this person or that machine or this place. … I am not asking you to do anything I’m not doing myself. I live in the midwest right now, caring for my mom in the last phase of her life. I’m here until that’s no longer needed (unless I get different operating instructions as I go). I’ve believed I hate this part of the country, it’s landlocked and I love ocean, it’s conservative politically, it’s not the easiest place to be queer (Ithaca was that!), the topography is flat (boring). I could go on. But I don’t. Every day I love the birds I see. I gaze at the sky and remember that I’ve seen similar skies over the ocean, and think about how the ocean could be RIGHT THERE. I find dogs who want to greet me like a best friend. I visit nearby parks that feel great to me, and where I see not only dogs but blue and green herons, where I saw my first indigo bunting and first bright red summer tanager (and I’ve seen them more than once), where big ole turtles hang out on logs and cool snakes sometimes slither across the path. I’ve found some lovely and queer-friendly coffee shops with adorable baristas who remind me of my kids. I have fun making my mom laugh every day and getting involved with her in the convivial drama of The Great British Baking Show. I do my work by zoom and love it every day, every individual and group session. I play with art supplies daily. I listen to things that feel enlivening and elucidating, often in Spanish. Every day, I love my life. And every day, I believe it’s getting better. And one day, as I’ve done before, I’ll be writing you from somewhere I actually prefer, somewhere tropical, maybe, where English isn’t the first language. I’m on my way, I’m in my becoming, and where I am now is just fine. You’re on your way. You’re in your becoming. Where you are now is absolutely just fine. Love it, and love following any small thing you think of that would make things feel even better. That will INEVITABLY take you to larger such things. (The earlier Mary Oliver quote was … your one wild and precious life. It’s from The Summer Day. Did you get gold stars?) Love & blessings, Jaya JUNE 22 WAS MY BIRTHDAY—my favorite day of the year. I stepped outside early in the morning then fetched a broom to sweep the messy walkway. I took my time so I could linger in one of the most delicious breezes I’ve ever felt on my skin. It was a strong one, too, and I knew I was doing thankless work that’s instantly nullified by the next mess. But … I wasn’t in it for the thanks, or even for the task. WHICH IS THE MAIN EVENT? Have you ever had the experience of going outside to work in the garden or do some fix-it project or wash your car—really because you just wanted to be outside? And bonus, a chore gets done while you’re out there. Or have you ever gone out into the world rationally believing that what you’re up to is shopping or picking something up from your work place, and as you go about your business, you take in some beautiful or interesting sights and lovely sensations, or you hear a near-forgotten song you love on the radio, or you run into someone wonderful (and maybe something recent made you think about them, so now the magic has kicked in as well)? Which was in fact the main event—the errand or the joy-producing, soul-nourishing stuff along the way? Or have you ever gone somewhere with a particular idea of what would unfold or a particular goal in mind, or entered a conversation thinking you were moving with this person in a certain direction, and then you discovered that something entirely different was underway? Whether you expected a proposal and got a break-up instead, or you expected a routine catch-up and instead got a tempting business proposal—truly, the good or the bad of it doesn’t matter. You could say it’s all good, and you might notice it all comes with challenges. More important, it’s all the stuff of life! WAKING UP TO REALITY So what’s more aligned with reality? The stuff we check off lists, or the stuff that grabs us and generates awe and other stirring emotion? The stuff that feels good because we’re properly adulting or the stuff that reminds us of what we’ve known since earliest childhood, that life is fun and fascinating and delicious and hilarious and profound? The stuff we sleep-walk through or the stuff that wakes us up? Well, actually, in presence, we can be awake through both kinds of events. And, of course, both are reality. And both are happening concurrently ALL THE TIME. OUR REALITY ON PLANET EARTH IS OUR DANCE WITH CONSCIOUSNESS. The spiritual stuff that delivers goosebumps or quiet smiles or hard laughter is in no way opposed to or separate from the stuff that keeps us financially solvent or takes care of the physical well-being of our bodies or homes. I have a friend spending this day cleaning up flooding in her basement. I learned this in a WhatsApp exchange in which I did NOT write that I’m so sorry she has to do this pain-in-the-bum stuff. I wrote, Wishing you any bit, glimpse, or, um, flood of sparkle and joy as you set your basement straight. She will not be offended that I didn’t treat her like some god-awful thing had gone wrong, because she’s right with me. She lives in a gorgeous flow with whatever life delivers and walks herself through it brilliantly & kindly and keeps learning and loving as she goes. She’s also hilarious and I love being around her. LET LIFE SHOW YOU Let life show you what you’re doing as a human being in a material world, and let life show you what is constantly shimmering under the surface. Let life show you whether the next event is to your liking or not, but go in no matter which you think it is, curious about what cool next experience or what gorgeous new understanding or what kind of fun you’ll get this time. Go swimming without knowing whether you’ll be in the shallows or the depths this time, and just LOVE the swim. As I keep celebrating my 63rd birthday, as I savor this amazing life I’m in, I invite you to the following. Keep having fun and keep being curious and keep showing up IN CHOICE, as if you’re doing it all for you. Because ultimately, you are. This is YOUR DANCE WITH CONSCIOUSNESS, however you choose it, whether you hold a consciousness of choice or not. If you choose according to other people’s expectations, you’ll end up in resentment or deep dissatisfaction or at some level of disconnection from your authentic self. FORGETTING & REMEMBERING Later, if you find yourself telling someone (in your head or out loud) (we can be even more shrill in our heads, can’t we?) (I have a head, I know all about this) (I digress) … If you find yourself declaring how hard you worked or how much you sacrificed or alllllllllllll that you did (that they’re failing to appreciate), you’ll be inaccurate or at least beside the point in your take on the matter. What’s truer is that you forgot why you’re really here. What’s truer is, you forgot to have fun and love every moment of the journey—or at least appreciate its value and stay open to the capacity for anything lovely, interesting, wondrous—for anything life- or love-infused)—to show itself at any time; to enter into your lived visceral sensory experience of the dynamic now in the dynamic now, NO MATTER THE CONTENT OF THE MOMENT. Don’t accept being in autopilot. It’s fine to catch yourself there (yay, you caught it!). Course-correct back to presence. Don’t do things to check them off lists. Don’t miss the journey. And don’t suffer to be good or do a good job or have others think you’re a good person. Nothing will be accomplished by that except more suffering for you to live through and walk yourself out of. Live your beautiful life. The beauty is astonishing. THIS, TOO, IS ABOUT MANIFESTATION I’ve been sharing manifestation nuggets. I didn’t call this one that, but it really is. When you’re living in the mindset described here and the feeling state that goes with it, you’re much open, you’re in a state of allowing, and you generate the creative ideas & energy to move toward what you want with concrete actions in this physical world. Again, the spiritual and the earthly all married together, not separate, not at odds with each other. Love & blessings, Jaya Two more posts that touch on your dance with consciousness: 1. Follow the whispers & impulses that call you to feel alive 2. Trees & Coral put to proper use (or, Are you a Clown fish or a Mockingbird?) third (hu)manifestation nuggetThis 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. FIRST (hu)manifestation nuggetThis writing contains one manifestation principle plus: 1) some thoughts to support your deeper understanding; 2) some ways to play with it, as no concept will do you any good unless you know how to put it into practice. Practice, by the way, is a great word. Keep playing with anything that seems promising to you until you get better and better at using it effectively and with ease.
I want to begin with a pair of principles that really go hand-in-hand and work together as one. THE FEELING IS THE FIRST MANIFESTATION. A FEELING IS THE EASIEST THING TO MANIFEST. WHAT THIS MEANS Well, if you’ve ever fallen in love, you remember that before you ever know the details of what you and this other beautiful human being are going to do together; and before you know the details of all you later came to know about them (a body of knowledge you may still be adding to)--first of all, you felt all kinds of feelings. You felt feelings you wanted more of. You felt a pull, a curiosity, something that wouldn’t let you go. In short, you felt the love. Um, you may have experienced this with non-human sentient ones (wonders!) as well—the animal we take one look at while visiting the shelter, and we’re done for. I’m not going home without you. From another angle, think specifically of when you got an idea to look for a certain kind of job or explore a certain course of study or learn how to become an X [fill it in and get specific here, so that you’re learning from your own lived experience]. You might remember the first jolt of Whoa, what about this? Or the curiosity that stirred and kept growing as you looked into different possibilities. Or the excitement that grew as you talked about it with others or read things written about it. (Side note: You know that some kinds of talking to certain people dashes the dream while it’s unformed, so take care with that!) You know when you started wondering about buying a car or a house or a taking a trip, and as you looked into things and dreamed into different possibilities, you felt a momentum build to carry you in that direction. That momentum came from feelings. You could feel what it might feel like to live there or drive that or vacation there, and perhaps as this grew inside you, it seemed more and more DOABLE until perhaps it felt inevitable. The feeling comes before the manifestation. The feeling is in fact the first manifestation. Once you get the feeling going related to the thing you want, that fuels the going after it, the grabbing of ideas and opportunities that come to you to explore it. You know they come and you miss them, or ignore them, or talk yourself out of them; OR, they come and you go with them and grow the thing. The feeling make the difference. It allows you to take a risk when a part of you (or someone in your world) objects. The feeling is the magnet that brings it in. And the feeling is easier to get in place than the lover or the car or the advanced-degree program or whatever. Way easier. But most of us don’t give a lot of attention to cultivating that feeling—except when we’re falling in love, which is why I began there. The love buzz is so compelling that we let the feeling take us and we go with it. It’s possible to do that (in different ways, at different levels) with other things in life, with anything in life, as well. It’s not only possible--it’s a necessary component of manifestation. The feeling will fuel the journey from wanting to having, from dreaming to creating. HOW TO WORK WITH THIS CONCEPT You may trip yourself up (many people do) by mentally jumping too soon to the finish line. You don’t need to know now what it (whatever you’re after) will look like or how you’ll go about getting the right information or making the choices involved or how you’ll finance it or how long it’ll take you to get it nailed down. Don’t jump ahead. Stay out of not only the outcome but also the details of the journey. Do show up for the journey as it unfolds, now and now and now, with each thought, each bit of research, each conversation, each little or large trip to explore the site, etc, etc, etc. Most important: ENJOY THE JOURNEY. FEEL GOOD WHILE YOU’RE ON IT. HAVE FUN DOING IT. START FEELING NOW HOW YOU WANT TO FEEL WHEN YOU GET THERE. CULTIVATE NOW THE FEELING that goes with whatever you’re after. The easiest way to work with this is by going very general with the feeling you’re after. At the least-specific level, you want this thing because it will feel good to have it. You’ll feel better in some way. It will improve your life, your sense of purpose and fulfillment, the amount of fun you’re having, the joy of having an experience, developing a talent, offering a service, relating with a certain someone or population in a certain way. All of that feels good. Feels like you being you. Feels like life is good and worth living. So … the work is first and foremost to feel good now. Feel good in any realm of life. Feel good getting up, feel good first thing in the day, feel good going to work or wherever you’re going. Feel good with people, feel good with tasks, feel good in the world, feel good noticing what you notice, feel good moving in your body. Feel good, now, living where you live, doing what you do, relating with whoever’s around you, moving in your body as it looks and feels now, experiencing the nature in your vicinity. Notice that these things aren’t necessarily related to the thing you want or even in the same realm of life--you may even think you’re off-course or at least off-topic giving this your PRIMARY attention, but you’re not. (I’ve written before about how the universe doesn’t care about categories, and your feeling good here and now will spill into the good feeling of what you want to bring in.) As you carry on and live life and go about your business, yes, you’ll need to move toward the thing you want by exploring a possibility here and another there, taking one simple next step at a time to flesh out the dream, learn more about the various forms it could take, check out what seems most promising. But don’t just take steps to check steps off a list. Take steps to keep cultivating and growing the feeling. Take steps while paying attention to how you feel! Last way to apply this: In your process of exploration, when it feels good to explore, and you feel it as expansive (fun, interesting, exciting), KEEP GOING. When it feels bad (stressful, confusing, overwhelming, deflating, frustrating), MOVE AWAY FROM THE TOPIC. You’ll kill it for no good reason by staying fixated on the how when where and getting preoccupied and confused by what you don’t yet see. The not-yet-visible is probably something you couldn’t possibly see right now and won’t ever bring into view by keeping your blurry, squinty gaze on it as you feel worse and worse. Whatever you’re after, get the feeling in place first, and feel good in whatever step you take in that direction. Feel the feeling grow. Consciously expand it. Feel good in general all the time in all that you do (or in resting, playing, NOT doing). Manifest the feeling first. That’s the easiest way, and it really is a manifestation in itself. Love & blessings, Jaya Read here about finding the feeling place related to what you want in order to move toward manifestation. Consider the importance in the manifestation game of simply reaching for feeling better when you feel off. Find second (hu)manifestation nugget here. Find third (hu)manifestation nugget here. |
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