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":

Four Paths of Meditation Practice

    It can be almost impossible to have any sense of where we come from, who / what we really are. Usually we only get brief, vague, glimpses, intuitions, insights. But these nudges are recurrent, and our openness, readiness, preparedness to receive them fluctuates. At some point, some of us are drawn to open up & assent to this whispering call, to at long last say, 'Yes!' 

    There have always been those among us - shamans, wisdom keepers, prophets, mystics, saints, and countless ordinary folk - who remember their True Nature more clearly than most, and live as closely as they can to align with that insight: http://www.johnlovas.com/search?q=perennial+philosophy

 
    Hearing / reading about our True Nature, especially for those with minimal direct experience of it, can be challenging. Language itself is dualistic - it comes from & reinforces a perspective that each of us is a separate entity in a harshly competitive relationship to people, animals, Nature, life itself.

    Those who've had profound direct experiences of ultimate reality, have powerfully experienced how everyone & everything is one, profoundly interconnected, expression of timeless, intelligent Love. 

 

    One of these awakened folks is the Zen teacher & poet, Henry Shukman. A few words he says about his latest book, "Original Love: The Four Inns on the Path of Awakening" 2025:

     “What I’ve come to feel in the world of meditation, and what my book is really about, is that there are different paths. They’re all closely related, but they have slightly different purposes. They’re not all one and the same.

    So there’s a whole world of practice around mindfulness, which is basically therapeutic, healing. It’s about taming our anxieties, de-stressing, and getting our nervous systems in better shape, more balanced, more subtle, responsive and well-toned, rather than jammed into an accelerated position all the time, stressed-out. So that’s great.

    There’s a whole world also of discovering deeper connectedness, and discovering that underneath our surface life of name & gain and trying to get things, or what Wordsworth called, ‘Getting & Spending,’ beneath that surface life that we’re all so engaged in, there’s a kind of deeper life where we contact something some call the soul, like a deeper level of our personalities, a sort of truer, somehow more authentic self, that has very different concerns. It’s much more concerned with beauty, with spiritual things, and with deeper connection with others. Sometimes it feels connected to forces in Nature, and Nature itself. So to uncover that more connected part of ourselves is a whole other kind of practice. Mindfulness and meditation can help with it, but it’s a slightly different target zone from foundational mindfulness.

    And then there’s the whole world of flow states and absorption practices and what we call Samadhi in Buddhism. This deep absorption, beautiful states of mind that we can cultivate in our mediation, which are wonderful. That’s another world of practice.

    And then the fourth one, I say is Awakening, which is also not like any of the others. Yes, closely related, but it’s a sudden, dramatic shift from one way of seeing, where I am me, which basically I am in those first three kinds of practice. I remain me. I don’t have to suddenly discover I’ve never been here the way I thought. I can work with who I feel I am in mindfulness. Likewise in the deeper connectedness, I’m still a person. There’s no doubt about it. But I am feeling myself in a very different way, but it’s still kind of me. And likewise in cultivation of flow, my sense of self may get quieter, but I haven’t radically discovered that I’ve never been a self the way I thought. 
    In Awakening, we do discover that. Suddenly, we see that what we have taken ourselves to be, has just been a figment of our imagination. And somehow, what’s really been going on is something – well we can get it on different levels really, different depths. There’s no time, there’s no space, there’s no separation. It’s just one unfolding happening now. Just like this. And that’s what we are.” 
    Henry Shukman https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJ6uKrhAc_s

 

         “There are only two ways to live your life.
         One is as though nothing is a miracle.
         The other is as though
         everything is a miracle.” Albert Einstein

 Now is the Time

Now is the time to know 
That all that you do is sacred.

Now, why not consider 
A lasting truce with yourself and God.

Now is the time to understand 
That all your ideas of right and wrong 
Were just a child’s training wheels 
To be laid aside 
When you can finally live 
With veracity 
And love. . .

My dear, please tell me, 
Why do you still 
Throw sticks at your heart 
And God?

What is it in that sweet voice inside 
That incites you to fear?

Now is the time for the world to know 
That every thought and action is sacred.

This is the time 
For you to compute the impossibility 
That there is anything 
But Grace.

Now is the season to know 
That everything you do 
Is sacred."

Hafiz 'The Gift' translated & interpreted by Daniel Ladinsky

 

Insight Meditation Society (IMS), Barre, MA

 

     

Hope, Courage, Patience, Perseverance

    "I believe that there’s an intelligence, a spiritual power that I don’t understand. I call it God because I don’t know what else to call this great spiritual power. It gives me strength. 
    I’ve also had amazing times alone in nature when for a moment you forget you’re human. Your humanness goes away, and you’re part of that natural world. It’s the most amazing and wonderful and beautiful feeling .....
    Traditional faith will have you believe in a loving God, and when I look at what’s happening on the planet, I think if there is a God like that, is he playing with us? Are we living in some great experiment? How can you believe in a loving God when you see the horrors that are perpetrated against nature, against animals, against each other? I sometimes think it is like an experiment which has culminated in this strange, confused creature that is human beings, and we seem to be lost. Who are we? What are we? Why are we here? I don’t know what the meaning of life is. 
    The meaning of my life is to give people hope because without hope you give up."  
    Jane Goodall PhD 1934-2025 

    There's a lot to unpack in Jane Goodall's heart-felt words. So what does she mean by "amazing times alone in nature when for a moment you forget you’re human"? 
    I understand that momentarily forgetting you're human refers to going beyond or deeper than your surface identity of name, address, history, likes / dislikes, virtues / neuroses etc, and opening up to / remembering our primal intimate Oneness & Source.      

    Goodall clearly contrasts what many of us see as human civilization blindly rushing towards self-destruction, with her sense that there is still hope, because human beings are also capable of experiencing, nurturing & sharing awe, wonder, & beauty. 

    Iain McGilchrist has been clearly explaining how human society's current tendency is "left-hemisphere-dominant" - seeing the world in a very pragmatic, abstract, detached, transactional manner: seeing only lumber when looking at a great forest, seeing only mining opportunities when looking at a majestic mountain, seeing only harvesting of fish, oil & natural gas when looking at the great oceans - focused only on what they can quickly grab for short-term gain for themselves. Some, much like the tobacco industry a few decades ago, flatly deny that this way of seeing is "perpetrating horrors against nature, against animals, against each other." Many CEOs, populist politicians / dictators, billionaires, etc CAN BE clever, AND YET display no evidence at all of wisdom. 

    From a neuroscience perspective, McGilchrist would say that we are able to see things in balanced way when the left-hemisphere's exclusive emphasis on grabbing, controlling & surviving is not running the whole show. One way to facilitate a balanced, healthy, holistic perspective is being alone (and at peace) in nature. Then we more easily appreciate the right-hemisphere's way of seeing the world: appreciating our intimate inter-connectedness with everyone & everything, love, beauty, truth, the arts, mystery, spirituality, meaning, metaphor, humor, paradox, etc - AS WELL AS - using the practical, limited role of the left-hemisphere. 
    To have a clearer understanding of these two, ideally complementary ways of seeing and being in the world, I highly recommend one of McGilchrist's many excellent interviews, eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuqz0MO9mX0

    To paraphrase Einstein, our (left-hemisphere dominant) way of seeing / level consciousness that got us into this dire mess CANNOT possibly lift us out of it, into a better future. Our exclusive left-hemisphere ways: estranged, adversarial relationship with our own hearts, each other & Nature is what's so painfully unnatural & unsustainable. 
    Chronic fear, anxiety & anger has for too long, been drowning out our patience, wisdom & kindness. We desperately need to cultivate a FAR wiser balance.

    So can we gain some freedom from chronic fear & anxiety - when "being well-adjusted to a toxic situation is no measure of health"? 
    Well, we know that our executive function is easily shut down when we're stressed - ie stress tends to impair good judgment. 
    We also know that many are able to operate under high-stress life-or-death situations with amazing calm & competence: fire-fighters, police officers, paramedics, surgeons, psychiatrists, air traffic controllers, pilots, military personnel, martial artists, etc. 

    Common knowledge would incorrectly tell us that our level of stress is directly proportional to the degree to which we lack total control of our present situation. 
    Actually, our level of stress is mostly based on catastrophizing ie anxiously, vividly imagining the worst possible future outcome, which very rarely if ever materializes and / or being stuck re-living the past.
    The secret of the "grace under pressure" exemplified by fire-fighters etc is staying in the reality of the present moment and responding appropriately. Clearly, knowledge, training & practice in knowing what to do in challenging present situations is a basic necessity ALONG WITH knowing how to remain present, focused & grounded ie Mindful.

    Mindfulness training IS PRACTICING staying in the reality of the present moment and responding appropriately. It's best started under stress-free conditions eg being peacefully alone in nature, or in your own home away from distractions. Start by sitting, standing or lying down and remaining still, for a set period of time eg just 5 minutes at first, with eyes closed, and just quietly observe what goes on, mainly inside of you. 

    "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."  Blaise Pascal, French philosopher

     With patience, a bit of courage, and a lot of perseverance, a sustained regular practice will result in you being able to remain surprisingly calm, grounded & wisely responsive (rather than impulsively reactive in a way that everyone will later regret) to even the most serious challenges. You will also learn humility & empathy for yourself & others, because you will remain perfectly imperfect. Interestingly & a bit annoyingly, after decades of practice, you too might find major challenges surprisingly easy to accept, yet small, meaningless events might still briefly provoke you. 

    So this is a life-long practice, with continual growth in wisdom, and less & less sabotaging interference by neuroses & traumas. Your quality of life, and the quality of life of those around you, will definitely progressively improve well beyond your current understanding.

“We are not isolated individuals. 

We are cells in the body of humanity, and what we do to one another we do to ourselves. 

The new story is one of interdependence, shared purpose, and sacred relationship with all Life.” 
Nancy B. Roof PhD 1929-2025

 

Another World is Possible www.kosmosjournal.org

All Paths to One Mountain Top

    Basic meditation instructions usually guide us to de-armor mentally, emotionally & physically, to allow us to open up to ultimate reality. We do this by: Relaxing (letting go of efforting); Simply "being" (letting go of "doing mode" - trying to control everything) - allowing the belly to soften, allowing the heart area to soften, allowing the mind to open (transcending habitual thought loops, must haves & must avoids). Part of us (our heart / right hemisphere) clearly wants to open up to ultimate reality.
    But another part of us (ego mind / left hemisphere) resists because we fear losing control & being overwhelmed by our shadow. This resistance is the main obstacle to peace & joy. Asking us to let go of our fearful avoidances, defensiveness & distractions is like asking a drowning person to let go of the scraps of wood they're hanging onto for dear life. We resist letting go as if our life depended on it. Our shadows are the scary-looking gargoyles "guarding" the entrance to holy places of transformation. Our usual "ordinary unhappiness" level of life does indeed depend on maintaining protective armoring; while our awakened life waits for us beyond this.
    One way or another, awakening out of universal human suffering involves learning to approach (rather than avoid), accept (rather than reject), and actually befriend & become intimate with our own personal "darkness" or shadow. And the result is transformational.

    “The process of unlocking your higher purpose is one of turning the authority of your mind over to your heart. This alone will transform your life.”
    Richard Rudd “The Gene Keys. Embracing Your Higher Purpose.” Watkins, 2009.

    Below, Richard Rudd's brief summary of his Gene Keys path towards Awakening :

    "Through the Gene Keys ... I’ve looked at DNA through a poet’s eyes, because I’m essentially a poet (which) means I attempt to live a poetic life and I see things poetically. And to see things poetically is to see beauty basically, in as many places as you can, especially in ugly places.
    And so we have to start by looking at the ugly places inside us, which in Gene Keys we call the shadow state. Everyone kind of knows these places. If you just close your eyes for a moment and think, ‘Where is the ugliest place inside me right now? Where’s the big challenge? What is it?’ And you know what it is, where it is, instantly. Somewhere something that you’re grappling with that is a grain in the oyster - that shadow pattern, which you are attempting to resolve, or trying to distract yourself from. 

    IF you give it space inside your being, IF you give it time, IF you allow it some compassion, IF you treat yourself gently, IF you watch it, IF you bring mindfulness & awareness to it, you will see it begin to transform. That’s the case with any shadow pattern, any victim pattern that we are playing out, going round-and-round in circles in the samsara loop.
    You have to recognize that this is the point of meditation, the point of contemplation. Contemplation is the word / technique I use, because it doesn’t necessarily involve closing our eyes – you can create the contemplative state, while doing absolutely anything in your daily life, and so through the art of contemplation, I teach how to bring that state, that interior awareness, into everything in your life, beginning by taking little pauses throughout your day so that you can begin to create that space. Lots of little pauses, interconnected, starts to create quite a lot of space, and it also creates more time throughout your day, which is an irony really, because you’re pausing, so you might think that you’re losing time, but actually you’re pumping time into your day. It’s a strange paradox, because you’re stopping, pausing. When I say pause, you can still be in motion. You’re pausing in your mind loops, in your struggles, your old patterns, so that you can see them clearly. And you’re creating space, compassion & gentleness around them.

    That begins to create this ... kind of flower which begins to open out of the shadow, out of the very thing that you’ve been avoiding, ends up being this great gift. 

    So in the Gene Keys are all 3 levels: the seed is the shadow; the flower is the gift that’s hidden in the seed & the shadow – every shadow, every difficulty in life is really asking us to do some alchemy. There’s something powerful in that. The most difficult thing in your life has the most potential if you have the courage to give it some space, and really look at it. You have to be authentic, so honest with yourself. That’s a process, and you might need support as well.
    And then the final aspect is the siddhi – a Sanskrit word, you could say Divine Essence, Divine Treasure. It’s the genetic enlightened expression of a specific part of your nature. So everyone, when they become fully awake, has a completely different expression. So when you look at the Gene Keys, there are 64 of them, and you look down the line of the language for the siddhis, you see all these words for compassion, rapture, ecstasy, perfection, beauty, humility … they’re all describing the same state, but through a slightly different lens. So understanding that every shadow contains one of those siddhis inside it, it’s hidden in there, it’s the fruit, in the seed. And you might think it's a long way away – the seed is tiny, and it’s going to grow into a tree, and it’s going to have to go through all this, and then you get this beautiful fruit, and the fruit of course contains another seed, which is a beautiful metaphor in itself. But that is in there, and that metaphor is life. 

    All you have to do, is create that contemplative space inside you, those pauses, so you can begin to look at these difficult patterns. That’s all the ancients actually ever taught. Now we can go off into quantum realities and describe it all ((as Robert Grant does in the earlier part of this interview)), but actually, it comes down to just that, just that mindfulness, just that spaciousness, so that the pattern has space to transform, and then it can transform really quickly as well. You can go from a seed to a tree really fast because awareness is the water, the nutrition & the nourishment that allows that whole process to happen, and then you’re left with this fruit, the juicy ecstasy of biting into this mango, or whatever your favourite fruit is.
    And it was there all along, that golden thread, that golden awareness, that awakening. It was there all along. It was in the numbers, it was just hidden in the thread, in the stream, and we just had to unlock it. And that’s what the Gene Keys are. And that’s what the Keys of Enoch were. And that’s what all these ancient teachings are about – the I Ching, Shakras, and the Vedic systems, the Kerala system, all the systems. You get to see the same golden thread in every single one, but just in a totally different way. Look at the Sufis in the Middle-Eastern deserts, they had more words for love than any other tradition. Like the Eskimos have different words for snow, the Sufis had different words for love – just layers and layers of different words to describe different aspects of love, because that’s all they wanted to see was love. There’s love that’s full of angst, desire & misery, but it’s still love. And then there’s love that’s at the highest level of divine annihilation and oneness with the cosmos – that’s also love. So it’s all about love ultimately. It begins with self-love.
    So creating space in your life through a contemplative practice, and I would say ultimately learning to be gentle with yourself is the greatest secret I’ve ever learned.
    And I learned one day ... what awakening is ... It’s a series of softenings. That went into me so deep. Wow. You just have to go on softening your heart, and then the mind opens, and everything begins to just kind of transform. And then those higher states are just there, are revealed, they’re underneath.” Richard Rudd
    “A Meeting of Brilliant Minds - Richard Rudd & Robert Grant on a Collective Awakening” - DejaBlu Ep109 https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/a-meeting-of-brilliant-minds-richard-rudd-robert/id1480169551?i=1000617036026

    An excellent free app to help practice the Gene Keys is: "Tripple Flame"

Fear and Confusion turn Peaceful

    At times we become weary from the heaviness of life, and need to get away, if only for an hour or so. Pleasant, healthy getaways include playing with little children or puppies, walking or jogging outdoors, gardening, listening to or playing music, joking or watching comedy, reading a book just for fun, playing games with family and friends, etc. Most of us don't 'play' like this nearly enough. 

    At the same time, almost all of us have an understandable, visceral fear of death. We're so afraid of the dreaded "D" word, that we expend a lot of energy avoiding / ignoring / neglecting / delaying even things we associate with it: proper nutrition, proper health-care, exercise, meaningful discussions about sickness & death, meditation, meaningful spirituality, wills & estate planning. Many of us mistakenly assume that opening our minds & hearts to the deepest, most meaningful aspects of life will somehow "make us soft," threatening our ability to earn a living or even to survive. Fear of death confines many of us to the shallows of life's profoundly vast & deep ocean.

    “We look like (we're) rich from the outside, but mentally we have problems. (We're) all about 'face.' We don’t know how to talk (sincerely - from our true Self). We can’t ask for help. So many people are alone with their problems, and stuck, and their hearts aren’t touching. … It’s not that people lack friends. Facebook, Instagram— scroll around and you find (people) bursting with mugging, partying companionship. It just isn’t real, that’s all. There’s a real me and a masked me (and a) lonely gap in between ...” https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-incredibly-true-story-of-renting-a-friend-in-tokyo?utm_source=pocket-newtab

 

     “Our hearts do not need logic. They can love and forgive and accept that which our minds cannot comprehend. Hearts understand in ways minds cannot.” Lois Wilson “When Love Is Not Enough: The Lois Wilson Story” 2010 TV Movie – Prime Video

    "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." Blaise Pascal, French philosopher

    “the only thing really needed is to descend alone ... down into the silent depths of yourself to listen, and wait, and learn.” Peter Kingsley “A Book of Life.” Catafalque Press, 2021.

    "I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity." Albert Einstein

    “It is perhaps the ultimate paradox: At the heart of our loneliness, at the core of our longing for life, we find an exquisite aloneness, a Oneness with all creation, our true salvation.
    We find God in the forsaken pit of the psyche; we find the Divine in the abyss.
    We find astonishing light in the darkness of ourselves.
    This is the true enlightenment. To be alone and to be found, to be lost and to be saved, all before the moment even begins.” Jeff Foster

“In the beginning, mind is like a torrent rushing down a gorge.
In the middle, it flows gently like the river Ganges.
In the end, it’s like a stream returning to the sea.”
    Tilopa, 10th century Indian sage, on the progress of meditation over the stages of its practice

“If you look for the truth outside yourself,
it gets farther and farther away.
Today, walking alone,
I meet her/him everywhere I step.
S/he is the same as me, yet I am not her.
Only if you understand it in this way
will you merge with the way things are.” Tung Shan 

 

    Amoda Maa's pointers to help you find your true Self:

    “True healing is what happens when consciousness recognizes its own wholeness amid what appears to be broken or wounded.”

    “Moving from the stillness & silence of being gives you the freedom to start wherever you are, without having to change, fix, or improve anything. … simply but utterly present in what you do, work becomes spiritual practice.”

    “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?”

    “If you truly want to enter the ‘kingdom of heaven’ and be free of suffering, you must put down the burden of all acquisitions and be fully here, in this moment, without a story. This freedom is available to you here and now if you are willing to die, in this moment, as empty awareness.”

    “When the dream of separation becomes unbearable, and you have the courage to honestly say you have had enough of suffering, then awareness has the possibility to turn back in on itself and recognize the deeper dimension of formlessness that exists prior to all forms.”

    “All forms are transient, even the most spiritual ones, and without an anchor in the deepest dimension of beingness that does not come and go, the vicissitudes of the world will threaten to wipe out the satisfaction, joy, and fulfillment derived from external manifestations.
    Your true purpose and fulfillment have nothing to do with what you imagine yourself to be, but everything to do with what you do with who you are beneath and beyond all forms. The invitation is to stop asking, ‘How can I manifest my dream of a better life?’ or ‘How can I do something special / important / unique / spiritual in the world?’ and to turn your attention to the primary purpose of your life: awakening out of the dream of separation. Your true purpose is an inner, not an outer one. Without staying true to this, you will keep on chasing dreams.
    If you are on a path of spiritual inquiry, your commitment to realizing your inner purpose prior to finding your outer purpose is likely, over time, to unravel all agendas and expectations of what you should be doing, what you will be doing, and even of what you want to be doing. This unravelling allows the revelation and release of an essential quality of beingness that wants to express itself through you as you. Not as a future dream, but as a present moment reality. This quality of beingness exists prior to conditioning, and is experienced as a subtle felt-sense (such as clarity, playfulness, devotion, or harmony) when you are still and silent inside.”
    Amoda Maa. “Embodied Enlightenment. Living Your Awakening in Every Moment.” Reveal Press, 2017. HIGHLY-RECOMMENDED WISE, VALUABLE BOOK

Amoda Maa "Falling Open in a World Falling Apart"