Monthly Archives: January 2008
Go To Your Dreams: Allowing As A Lifestyle (Repost)
I continue to sit in the middle of questions lately about, for lack of a less over-used term, manifestation. Like most people I talk to about spiritual matters, I seem to be as fixated as the next guru on how to give form to my dreams, how to make them real—that is, how to get the stuff I want.
Clearly I’d never make it as a Buddhist. So as I sit here stewing once again in my impatient wondering about how to get from here to there and how to walk the talk . . . I talked again to The Shower Team about how to live my dream rather than just living with it . . .
What most of you do the moment that you return to conscious awareness every morning is to begin to throw your attention at the things that you remember from the day before that did not please you or to aim your attention at the things you anticipate in the day ahead that will not please you or to scatter your attention among the many things going on in your experience that do not please you . . . . And as a result you immediately begin to pinch off or to disallow the well being that is available to you for that day—even before your feet hit the floor.
Allowing or alignment is not a band-aid you slap on over a cut or scrape. It is not a pill you pop or an ointment you apply or a shot you take in the hopes that your life will immediately or soon thereafter snap back into shape. Allowing is not a step or two (or twelve) that you can follow for a while and then forget about. It is not a process that you can play with for a few days or weeks and then be done with. Allowing and alignment with your desires is a lifestyle—and for most of you, a lifestyle change. It is the difference between a crash diet before a vacation and fundamentally altering the way you approach food for the rest of your physical lifetime. It is a way of being and it is the way that we so want you to choose to be because as you ‘be’ that way, then all the well ‘Be’ing thatabounds can flow so freely to you . . . and all that you desire—that is part of that ever-flowing stream of well ‘Be’ing can flow to you . . . or more specifically, you can flow toward it as you continue to make the choice that “well” is how you are going to be on all fronts.
We really want you to get a sense of the way that your life is a perceptual field of possibilities always competing for your attention. At any given moment there are multiple, countless options available to you in terms of where you beam your focus, what you throw your attention at and therefore, countless options available to you in terms of how you can feel about your life at any given moment. If you understand that how you are perceiving . . . what you are choosing to look at and how you are choosing to respond to the object of your attention is always—ALWAYS—determining how you are feeling—and that what you are thinking and how you are feeling are always a match to what you are experiencing . . . then you begin to understand the critical importance of choosing your focus consciously and deliberately with your sole aim being to feel as good as you possibly can about whatever you are focused upon.
We hear you pooh pooh much of this sort of talk as pollyannaish or as fluffy positive thinking drivel and we hear you offer instead what sounds to us like the real drivel when you go on about the value or importance of being “realistic” or being “practical” or facing what is. And we continue to offer to you the idea that “what is” only is because that’s what you or others have given your attention to and so “it is” because you keep noticing it. As soon as you withdraw your attention from what is, it no longer “is” in the sense that you are no longer noticing or observing or caring or being particularly affected by it.
What we would so much like to see you do is to come to an understanding of the abundance, the wellness, the prosperity, the love, the passion, the satisfaction, the fulfillment, the success—the boundless and infinite joy and possibility that is ALWAYS in front of you if you will just allow yourself to notice it. It is a decision you can make anytime under any conditions—to give your attention to what feels better.
We would love for you to just try—just try—waking up in the morning and instead of letting your thoughts meander toward the least pleasant or most difficult or most worrisome thoughts available to you . . . for you to decide—to make a conscious choice—to flow your thoughts in the direction of anything you can think of that pleases you. We would encourage you, as soon as your eyes flutter open in your bed, to begin to consciously decide the direction of your thoughts.
Consciously throw your attention in the direction of an idea that provokes eagerness or anticipation or joy . . . Begin to wonder what wondrous and satisfying and surprising things might come your way that day. Begin to ponder the fun you could have, the satisfaction you might experience, the pleasure that could be available to you at work or play. Begin to imagine your day going beautifully. Begin to imagine yourself being joyful and content and engaged and satisfied . . . Literally decide as you lay there in your bed, fresh from your dreams, that it WILL be a good day.
You’ve practiced not doing this for most of your physical lifetime and we would, somewhat respectively, ask “How’s that working for you?” And then we would, also somewhat respectively, suggest that you not knock this alternative we are offering until you have tried it. Go to your dreams as frequently and fervently as you’ve gone elsewhere. . . give it a shot. All you’ve really got to lose is your lack of progress toward those dreams, in our admittedly not so humble opinion.
Well somebody thinks pretty highly of Themselves. Is it just me or am I getting wonderfully varied renderings of the same answer to my question? I wonder how many rounds I/We could go and keep getting yet another response that is basically telling me to do what I already know to do but keep hoping I can somehow get a shortcut around.
Somehow the idea to “Go to my dreams” . . . has just a fresh enough feel to it to intrigue me. I don’t have to get hit over the head (much) to get the point. So I will give it a shot and let you know how it goes. Just having that much of a plan feels enough like progress to keep me in the game for another round, and to let me feel, for the moment, playfully complete.
Save the Saving, Love the Living
A good friend of mine told me some time ago that he had, for most of his life, been laboring under the assumption that he was here on Earth to somehow make it a better place. That is, he had assumed that it was/is his life purpose to improve life on this planet or in some way to fix some broken aspect of it. But then a teacher of his argued that life on this planet and the planet itself and all the presumably miserable masses were in fact doing quite well and in no need of saving.
My friend said that it was a crushing blow. If he wasn’t here to save someone or something, what possible reason could there be for his existence?
On the flip side of that question seems to be the never-ending worries, stresses, concerns, frustrations, causes, and crusades that we are continually giving our attention to and the ways that we are so often twisting ourselves into knots to try to fix or solve or correct or conserve or save ourselves or our neighbors or our planet. We’re always worried about something.
So I wondered if my friend’s teacher was speaking some truth—are we really fussing and fretting about the condition of our community or our nation or our race or our planet needlessly? I asked The Shower Team, if we’re not here to save ourselves or each other . . . to right some wrong or solve some problem or mend some mistake . . . then what ‘are’ we supposed to be concerned about? The fact of the matter is that most of the things you think are so important in your life experience really don’t matter all that much—and in fact, this is one of the things that becomes so immediately and perfectly—and even amusingly—clear when you transition back to nonphysical. You recognize then how very little most of the things you worried about really mattered and what a big messy deal you made out of so many things that ultimately had very little to do with your happiness. We will from time to time try to suggest this to you with the intention being to get you to ease up some on the punishment you so persistently inflict upon yourselves in your efforts to make things better or to make things the way you think they should be or to make yourself somehow better than you think you are. But we also realize how profoundly you have absorbed the message that it is your actions that determine the value of your experience, no matter how many times we suggest that it is, rather, your alignment with who you really are that is the source of your joy in this or any other lifetime. We would love for you to gain even a little bit of understanding that your actions really only serve you when they are inspired by the lining up of your energy with your desires . . . but the voices telling you otherwise have been loud and legion. So rather than try to change your minds about how to go about living truly joy-filled lives or to reverse the effects of all the training you have received that has convinced you that you must somehow improve yourselves or your world in order to justify your existence . . . . we more often opt for those opportunities where we can simply help you to soothe some of that stress . . . and offer you a gentler approach to the obtaining of the happiness that you all acknowledge as your ultimate objective. We would love to see you work less, play more, laugh louder, love more freely, trust more easily . . . and on and on . . . We would love to see you come to a fuller understanding and perception of yourselves as perfect the way you are and of your world as perfectly fine and in no need of your help to survive or thrive. . . Most of all, we would love for you to see the power that you have to make your life go the way that you want it go . . . to choose the nature and degree and direction of your joy . . . and to systematically follow your bliss toward any dream that you dream. We would also love for you to see that no matter where you are, or what you’ve done or what you’re fearing or fretting about or what you’re wishing or longing for or what you’re worrying or stressing about . . . that you are part of a stream of wondrous well being that so prevails and so dominates your Universe that no matter how ‘wrong’ you think things have gone or how ominous you think the outlook may be . . that nothing you or anyone else does can ever truly wreck or ruin or even seriously damage the well being that flows.
And that even if you spend your life, inexplicably struggling to make your experience as difficult or painful as possible . . . you, like everyone else will soon enough withdraw your attention from that struggle and find yourself right back in the blessed thick of bliss . . . amused by your forgetfulness and your attempts to control what never really mattered much to begin with . . . amazed at the perfection of the stream that flows and your place in it and the expansion that has followed from even what you would have considered the worst of your experience.
We would love for you to know what we know that you already know even when you are not letting yourselves know it . . . that all is truly well . . that you are loved beyond measure . . that you are powerfully creative and masterfully loving and eternal beings whose adventures get better and better and brighter and brighter and that from that broader perspective, you are in the midst of the most perfect and precious experience that you could ever have . . . and from that broader perspective, no matter how it looks on the surface, you are loving every minute of it.
So . . . one might surmise then that the admonition “don’t sweat the small stuff” applies as much to our little planet as to the little worries that orbit our daily lives. Another expression about climbing down from the cross so we can make better use of the wood also comes to mind.
I confess that the notion that no one or nothing needs saving is pretty jarring to little ole’ Pisces me. Whatever will I do with my martyr self if I decide that life on the planet is proceeding quite nicely without my help, thank you.
It’s a curious notion. No wonder The Team offers it sparingly. Imagine the potential hit to the salvation industries. It’s on oddly compelling idea that makes me wonder if just maybe, I might be way more complete than I imagined.
