You HAVE to Try THIS!

     Okay, you don't 'have to,' BUT I sincerely recommend you do, because this is a surprisingly simple but not easy "game changer."

    1) Become aware of your Mood or overall Attitude. 
    Unless you feel: Open & Curious to ANYTHING that might happen, Ready to Learn & Evolve, and Grateful to be Alive, then DROP YOUR BORING, DEADENING, SELF-DEFEATING MOOD. You've done shit mood & "ordinary unhappiness" (or worse) to death. It's time to LIVE!

     2) FRESH START EVERY MORNING!
    Anything, ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING can happen today! None of us have a clue how our day will go when we first open our eyes. YET, a pessimistic or anxious, or one of our other pet shit moods loves to rush in to pathologically distort our attitude for the whole day. This is our fear-based choice akin to people choosing to return to a familiar abusive home rather than 'risk' a new safe house. BE BRAVE! Admit you don't have a clue about the future, NOR can you micromanage the future. The best you can be is PRESENT: Not Knowing, Relaxed yet Alert & Energized, Ready to Learn & Evolve, and Grateful to be Alive. 

    3) PRESENCE
    This is relatively rare, YET simple, ordinary, AND feels joyful. Have you ever been somewhere with so many overwhelming noises that you can't think clearly? For most, the source of the overwhelming noises is our own "self-talk" - the ongoing dialogue from our small self. We, as individuals, "need" a "noisy ego" like we as a society, "need" a narcissistic dictator taking a wrecking ball to our world ie like we need a hole in the head. 95% of our self-talk is useless or harmful. We CAN ignore self-talk, and CAN direct our awareness ANYWHERE we choose. 
    CHOOSE Open Awareness! Open Awareness is a meditation practice that's also the ideal way to be 24/7. When we're not narrowly focused on a specific task such as cooking a meal, or driving, our awareness is wide open to & monitoring all of our sensory inputs, in the present moment. Unless we specifically choose to narrow our awareness down, we remain open, present. This is peaceful & joyful because it's so effortless & freeing - free from our infernal neurotic, fearful, anxious self-talk. TREAT yourself to this experience - even for a minute - to appreciate the miraculous peace. This peaceful 'liminal space' feels energized at the same time, a bit like a helicopter that has risen off the ground hovering, yet able to take off in any direction when it chooses to do so.

    This 'everyday miracle' is YOURS to enjoy, yours to LIVE. It's your birthright! You WILL kick yourself if you delay letting go of needlessly living in 'ordinary unhappiness' or worse.

    

small self vs Self

St. Michael Defeating Satan (c. 1633) by Guido Reni

     

Spaciousness and Contraction

    There is a back-and-forth rhythm or dance between (apparent) opposites to many aspects of life, as popularized by Pete Seeger's song, "Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season)."

         One of these 'dances' is our tendency to AT TIMES contract into our "small self," into self-concern: sadness, anxiety, basically a low mood or "ordinary unhappiness" AND AT OTHER TIMES, expand into our "true Self" or wisdom, "a peace that surpasseth all understanding," experiencing uncaused joy, awe, gratitude, awareness, concern for, and even Oneness with, all of creation!

    Expansion can occur spontaneously, because 'everything is perfect as it is' as experienced & understood by shamans, saints, prophets & mystics of all wisdom traditions throughout the ages. Expansion usually occurs when we're able to relax, self-reflect, and finally allow ourself to deeply listen to our inner wisdom's whisperings. 

    Today's mystics agree: 
    "... happiness is our default setting. That’s the way we come wired from the factory. It is our natural state. ... quieting of your mind allows that natural state to come back to the surface." Interview of Chip & Jan Chipman on The Three Principles and Relationships https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmqLI8_9pko
     “All we are is peace, love & wisdom, AND the power to create the illusion that we’re not.” Jack Pransky https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kni9VRMIuD4 . 

    Contraction can be very easily triggered & maintained by stress. BUT, the WEIRDEST CAUSE IMAGINABLE is that WE are used to thinking shitty thoughts, which invariably CAUSE our shitty moods - our "ordinary unhappiness." YES, WE habitually choose to continuously re-tell & thus continuously re-suffer the sad "story of me," the sad story of my tribe, and visualize in gory detail horrible future events, which, to paraphrase Mark Twain, "never happened!" The QUALITY of OUR MOODS are ENTIRELY OUR CHOICE! Though we habitually blame our moods on our external circumstances, they have almost nothing to do with it! 

    “The simple truth is this: We’re living in the feeling of our thinking, NOT the feeling of our circumstances.” Michael Neill 

    “The original, shimmering Self gets buried so deep that most of us end up hardly living out of it at all. 
    Instead, we live out of all the other selves, which we are constantly putting on & taking off like coats & hats against the world’s weather.” Frederick Buechner 

    “Stories are prisons we choose to live inside.” Bob Falconer  

    "How we experience life depends on our level of consciousness." Sydney Banks 

    “You can’t be in fear and curiosity at the same time.” John Clarke 

    WHEN you've had enough of being trapped in sad & anxious stories and wallowing in 'ordinary unhappiness' or depression, burnout or worse: 
1) realize self-talk's destructiveness,  
2) recognize self-defeating self-talk within seconds,
3) let it go,
4) immediately bring attention back to the present moment. 
5) cultivate the courage, perseverance & curiosity to remain, rest in, live in & savor the present moment. THIS is the HEART of Mindfulness Training & Practice! 

    You are cultivating PRESENCE - being fully awake, alive, free, engaged with whomever you're with, whatever you're doing - whether in motion or at rest. 
    While in presence, you will feel free, light, peaceful, relaxed, warm, loving, competent no matter what is going on, including a painful medical procedure!

    As soon as you start to feel down, anxious or otherwise troubled, DROP the shitty old thinking habits, go to #4 & 5 above.

    From Jack Pransky's excellent book: “Somebody Should Have Told Us!: Simple Truths for Living Well" 2011. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
    “I realized that if we deeply understood three spiritual facts or principles, how these facts work together and how our use of them gives us every experience we can possibly have in life, with this perspective we can move through life with peace of mind, well-being, mental health and psychological freedom. … The Three Principles point to ten little (but huge) points about life and relationships that would be extremely helpful for people to understand. … Each takes exploration and reflection. Thus a full chapter is devoted to each:

I. Our thinking is our life 
II. Wisdom is always available to guide us, if we know how to access it 
III. If someone’s thinking doesn’t change, they can’t change 
IV. When our mind clears our wisdom appears 
V. We don’t have to think our way out of our problems (or to happiness) 
VI. The feeling is what counts, and it’s foolproof 
VII. What we see is what we get 
VIII. In low levels of consciousness, it is unwise to believe, trust or follow our thinking 
IX. To deeply listen to others instead of to our own thinking gives us a richer experience 
X. We’re only as stuck as we think we are

    To deeply understand the meaning of these statements is to live in a different world, and inside-out world. You may never see yourself or the world in the same way again.

    Our innate Health and its natural intelligence is always hidden within us, just waiting to rise to the surface. All we have to do is allow what we think we know to drop away, or no longer take it seriously, and this wisdom will speak to us. It is so close to us that we have forgotten it is there – like the air we take for granted – yet it holds the key that unlocks the potential in everyone.” Jack Pransky

     Spiritual porosity refers to one of the qualities of Self: openness, connectedness, inter-relatedness or "interbeing," and ultimately Oneness with everyone & everything - nonduality. An old saying, "No man is an island." 

    “I’ve had the honor of being able to work with some of the Northern Plains indigenous peoples here - the Crow, and Sue, and the Northern Cheyenne. And I think they were much more comfortable with ‘porosity of mind.’ When they talked about the world around them, it was ‘all my relations.’ That’s a porous attitude toward the world. And I also think if we really could get back to that different attitude, we wouldn’t be able to treat the world around us so badly anymore.” Robert Falconer, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSa9hvEgWpk WONDERFUL INTERVIEW

     Simon & Garfunkel sing about the opposite of porosity, the "small self":

Peace is Within

    Our, 'How are you?' is often answered with, 'Not bad' or 'No use complaining.' Most of us generally feel EITHER "Normal! - Just our usual 'ordinary unhappiness,'" OR Bad! - Stressed, contracted & pessimistic. This is NOT caused by terrible external circumstances, BUT by our negative internal conversations (self-talk) continuously droning on in your heads. 

    Ongoing self-talk is a product of the brain's left hemisphere, activated by greed (neediness, sense of lack, not enough, not good enough - low self-esteem is very common even among mental-health professionals.) AND aversion (anxiety, fear, anger, hostility, disgust, etc). So self-talk is a constant, anxious motivator to escape the present moment. We hope that by escaping and / or acquiring something, we might be happier, if only briefly. This drive to escape the present to possess happiness later is so strong & pervasive that a 2014 study conducted by psychologists at the University of Virginia found that when left alone in a room with nothing to do for 15 minutes, 67% of men & 25% of women chose to administer mild electric shocks to themselves rather than sit quietly with their own thoughts. https://www.science.org/content/article/people-would-rather-be-electrically-shocked-left-alone-their-thoughts 

    YET OCCASIONALLY, BRIEFLY, we find ourselves wonderfully alive, energized & engaged, even awed & grateful by what the present moment holds! It can actually be even something we've come across & ignored many times before, BUT now remarkably, we perceive it as a dramatically spectacular, never-to-be-forgotten experience. Instead of our usual anxious chase for relief, we actually feel peaceful, pleasant, awed, timeless, spacious, wonderfully optimistic & ever so grateful. We might even remark how it seems to make no sense to feel this wonderful when nothing in our outer world has changed at all! "Everything changed, yet nothing changed," is a common statement.

    "To be enlightened is to be intimate with all things." Zen Master Dogen   

    "And as far as we know, this intuition that we’re part of something greater than ourselves is very ancient. All these cave paintings from 20, 30, 40 thousand years ago, the practice of burying the dead, dealing with the dead in a ritual way, and so on, all these things suggest that this has been part of human consciousness for a very, very long time. No doubt the forms have changed, and the development of the great religions has put a more unifying aspect on these insights, but it seems to me that it’s been foundational to human life throughout almost all human history, with the brief anomaly of Western Europe and parts of North America, in the last 150 years.” 
    "Dr Iain McGilchrist & Dr Rupert Sheldrake - Intersection of Consciousness and Matter."  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAvwy2LTLMM  

    This makes no sense at all to our left hemisphere, the narrow role of which is to quickly grab what we need to survive & to solve simple practical problems - basically, the materialist reductionist perspective. 
    However, when the right hemisphere is given the opportunity (ie some peace, quiet & relaxation) to balance the left hemisphere, we're allowed to appreciate the right hemisphere's far broader perspective which includes intimate connection with all that gives our life meaning & value: love, gratitude, music, humor, the arts, ritual, dreams, awe, mystery, the divine, mysticism, spirituality, mythology, religion, metaphor, paradox, symbolism, etc.
    "Why the West is Losing Meaning - Iain McGilchrist interview." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C85Vyq-yQtk

 

    “Although we all have a fundamentally pure nature, it is not easy to get in touch with it. The gross way our mind ordinarily functions drowns out this deeper more subtle vibration to such an extent that we generally remain unaware of its existence. If we truly want to connect with this subtle essence, we need to quiet all distractions and loosen the hold our ordinary appearances & conceptions have on us. In other words we need to create space, space in which our essentially pure nature can function uninterruptedly. Then. . . we will be bringing to the surface the inner, divine qualities that have always existed within the depths of our being.” Lama Thubten Yeshe

    So we might say & actually believe that our self-concepts & worldviews are mature & even spiritual. BUT if most of our self-talk is negative ("broken"), this will make us feel miserable, which in turn indicates that our actual self-concept & worldview are darker than we imagined. 
    A negative / dark / pessimistic self-concept & worldview, according to wisdom traditions, the experience of serious meditators, the opinions of all the current experts I respect, and my own lived experience, is sadly distorted! 

    Mindfulness practice is very much about acceptance of what is real, seeing clearly & engaging fully with whatever the present moment holds. 
    Research findings are encouraging: 
        • we feel authentic & truly happy only when we're fully present; 
        • it’s the quality of our presence, not external environment, that brings happiness. 
    Killingsworth MA, Gilbert DT. “A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind.” Science 2010; 330(6006): 932.

 
     “Your consciousness, your heart matters enormously, and in a way, it is the only thing you’re asked to look after. 
    You’re not asked to solve all the problems of the world. That of course would be overfacing. Nobody could ask you to do that. But there is something that you can easily neglect that you are asked to do, which is to take responsibility for yourself. 
    We don’t know what this gift of life is, but my view is that it is something that we can either waste or we can use for good. And what it is there for is for us to respond to the ground of being - another way of talking about the God that created all of this. That is why we exist. Life is improbably hard to imagine occurring as a random event for all sorts of reasons, some of which I’ve expressed in my writings, particularly in “The Matter with Things.’ (also in: Alan Lightman. “The Ordinary Miracle of Existing. Being alive at all is the most extraordinary stroke of good luck any of us will ever experience.” The Atlantic, June 2, 2026.)
    But that aside, life involves quite extraordinary expense of energy, in a way which doesn’t deny the second law of thermodynamics but acts, for a while, very steeply against its tendency. In other words, the tendency of the universe overall is we are told, although it may only apply to the bit of the universe that we know of after all, is for energy to deplete – increase in entropy. But life involves kicking that trend extraordinarily powerfully, and the carrying on of the development of more and more sophisticated life is extraordinary. How do you account for this? Because already with very simple early organisms – actinobacteria at the base of the ocean, some single examples are a million years old. If the purpose of this game of life is to increase your life expectancy, then we’ve gone in the wrong direction. Something has put an incredible amount of energy into developing sophisticated beings that are relatively short-lived. What does this mean? 
    Well, to me it means that the things that we are capable of responding to, which are the great values that I think form the purpose of the cosmos, the expression of goodness, beauty and truth, and I would say also the sacred. The expression of these values requires a kind of reciprocation. 
    So I see God - the ground of being - and his creation as being in an ongoing reciprocal process whereby that ground of being is discovering about itself what its potential can unfold, as what is infolded is unfolded all the time into myriad complex and beautiful entities. And we are the creatures that can respond, reverberate, resonate, be responsible in a relationship, the primary relationship of all relationships that we have with God who is described as love. And love is nothing if not relationship. 
    And that’s not unusual. I mean around the world there are ideas of a divine essence which has different names – Dao, Logos, Yahweh, - it doesn’t really matter, but these ideas are foundational in all cultures that there is something there that has produced this lifegiving creative universe, and we play an important part in what that is. And that is not self-aggrandisement. In fact there is something self-aggrandizing and rather ungrateful in the notion that we should diminish ourselves, and indeed the tendencies in our culture towards lacking self-respect for the human species. 
    I think it’s very good to appreciate the things that we have done wrong, and the havoc we have wrought in the world in the last few hundred years. But I think it’s very, very wrong to vilify & debase humanity. The fact that humanity can do bad things is the flip side of the fact that humanity is capable of the most extraordinary, beautiful and good, and to me holy acts of creation that reciprocate whatever it is that gave us life. 
    And it’s this dance, this back and forwards, this magnifying, this ever creative, ever growing process in which the good and the beautiful and the true can find expression that is the gamble that that creative source of being took on in creating life and creating complex life such as human life.”
    "Why the West is losing meaning - Iain McGilchrist interview." 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C85Vyq-yQtk

 

    “The real question is: Are you willing, whether your experience is tranquil, turbulent, ecstatic, tragic, opulent, or austere, to give yourself wholeheartedly to what is truly alive in you?”
    Amoda Maa. “Embodied Enlightenment. Living Your Awakening in Every Moment.” Reveal Press, 2017.

"Don't judge each day
by the harvest you reap
but by the seeds
that you plant."

Robert Louis Stevenson

 

Aimee Carty - "Painter"