The Transformation of Consciousness

There is a prayer in the nondual Christian tradition, about that simplest of all things: learning to be where you are. Here is the first part of it:

Focus and Sink In
As soon as you notice any kind of emotional disturbance or upheaval, feel it as sensation in your body. If you are angry, where is that happening in your body? If fear is present, what is the sensation of fear? How are you breathing? How does your stomach feel? Your jaw?
Don’t try to change anything. Just stay present. Do not try to analyze, understand, judge or justify your experience. Just stay with it. Practice allowing all of the judgments, fears, ideas and images in your mind to float on by. Keep opening to the feeling in the body, and breathing as deeply as you need to in order to give this feeling space to be.

It reminds me of Rumi’s beautiful poem, ‘The Guest House.’

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!

From every direction we hear the same thing, and it could not be more simple. Our own true nature, the nature of awareness, does not reject, does not resist anything. How could it? How could awareness, which is not even a thing, push anything away?

So these writings, these poems, these songs from all over the world, are not really asking us to be this way, because human beings resist. That’s what we do. They are simply pointing to a spaciousness at the core of our being, and asking us to recognize this welcoming presence, now.

The prayer continues:
Welcome

Now, begin to say gently, “Welcome anger, welcome pain, welcome fear..” (or whatever it is)

By embracing this thing you have defended yourself against, or avoided, you are actually disarming it, removing its power to hurt you or chase you back into your smaller self. You are only welcoming your actual experience in each moment, not a general situation, or someone else’s behavior. This is not about passively accepting situations that are intolerable. Once you open to your inner experience, without indulging or feeding what is happening inside you, your response to the outer world will be much clearer and more decisive. You will be responding from a state of awareness, instead of reacting from negativity.

Sometimes I dream of a place where children are taught how to welcome, right at the beginning of their education. Where they lay down the inner sword, and come to rest, in the innocence of presence.

Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Can you imagine living like this? No preferences, no judgments, just an openness. An openness that is so effortless, so vast, that it never needs protecting.

The prayer carries us into a willingness without conditions:

Allowing it to be as it is
When you are ready to be with your experience for a few minutes, you can repeat these words, and feel into what they are actually pointing you towards, a place where you no longer need to understand and struggle with what is going on.

I am willing to let go of my desire for security
I am willing to let go of my desire for approval
I am willing to let go of my desire for control
I am willing to let go of my desire to change my experience

See what happens as you release what I sometimes call your ‘survival conditioning’ in this way, just by opening to the willingness. This kind of letting go is very gentle. It is not a pushing away, or a rejection, but something that happens naturally when we are no longer struggling to control, change, or manipulate our experience.

And Rumi takes us to the same place:
Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Let’s help each other to see that it’s really not so difficult. This is our true nature, nothing foreign. We just have to see that the struggle isn’t working, it’s a war we will never win. Then we can be here, just like this, just like this.

with love
Shayla

Some friends and I were doing a ceremony this summer, as a way of coming to completion with our past, in the best way we could.  We were intending to open a clearing, an unconditioned space in which a compassionate and generative response to our future could emerge.

Part of our ceremony was devoted to examining, with discriminating wisdom, the spiritual practice we had all been engaged in for many years. It was a practice that no longer served us, and what became clear and vivid in our time together was this: despite long years of meditation and inquiry, we had never really learned how to live in relationship, with ourselves, with life, and with each other. This dilemma is not limited to one teaching or one particular practice. Many of the spiritual practices that emphasize the absolute or transcendent aspect of life treat all relationships as illusory, since the idea of an ‘other’ is a construction of the mind.

It struck us during this ceremony that excluding the whole field of relationship from our practice creates an incredibly huge gap in the teachings, since our life on earth, our life in a human body, is nothing but relationship. These kind of practices and teachings do not give us any support at all in learning what it is to be fully human.

The indigenous teachings, on the other hand, are deeply grounded in a view of life as a vast interconnected web of relations. They call us into the living experience of who we are when we are open and accountable for an unending relationship with the whole field of life. Some of these practices are solitary, but many are done in the context of community, in a spirit of deep intimacy, where we learn to be fully present and engaged, without our habitual barriers and defenses.

There are challenges that arise when we work in this way, coming from a culture that is based on very different values—being a separate individual, making it on your own, being strong and independent. I was also strongly conditioned in this way, and am still learning to open to a different way of being. I have received so much from reaching out, connecting, and discovering, step by step that there are radical new ways we can learn to be with each other.

When we are together, so much is available to us that is simply not there when we function in isolation. A depth of wisdom, love, and creativity emerge from these collective conversations, contemplations and dialogues. We come back into our lives and realize that new possibilities are everywhere, that by connecting in this way we have nourished and been nourished, we have empowered and been empowered. A fulfillment comes with this that is not temporary, not dependent on the conditions of our lives. We realize that we have, in each other, an unending source of support, courage, and grace.

In ‘A Sacred Gathering’ on Sept. 19, and ‘The Gift of Presence’ course that starts on Sept. 21, we will be exploring all of this together.

For more info about ‘A Sacred Gathering’, click here: http://www.barefootjourneys.net/index.php/events/event/a-sacred-gathering/

For more info about ‘The Gift of Presence 8 week course,’ click here: http://www.barefootjourneys.net/index.php/events/event/the-gift-of-presence1/

One of the participants at my ‘Effortless Being’ retreat asked me to write this down for him. Since it’s about all of us, about our human condition, here it is.

One evening at the retreat they were showing a video of ‘Le Cirque de Soleil’ on a full size screen. This particular video had many long shots of the audience, so you could really get a feeling for what was going on with them. The first ninety minutes were the acrobats-probably some of the best acrobats in the world--tumbling, whirling, jumping and swooping around, like fantastic birds in flight. Their costumes were stunning, the music was amazing, and their performances were impeccable. It was beyond impeccable, it seemed almost superhuman. The audience sat, with heads craned and mouths open, oohing and aahing in wonder.

And then out came the clowns-each clown, in his or her own way, trying to duplicate the feats we had already witnessed. Their costumes were ridiculous, and their antics were absurd. They tripped over each other, pushed each other out of the way and down trap doors in the floor, and pranced around together like a bunch of complete lunatics.

What really got to me was the audience. They were all laughing ecstatically-laughing until they cried. The clowns were very good, and they just went on and on, new ones appearing out of a hole in the floor every few minutes. In the audience, total strangers were passing kleenex around, slapping themselves on the legs, and children were throwing themselves in their parents’ laps with total abandon and glee.

It became apparent to me that our laughter, this overflowing joy and freedom, was a spontaneous recognition of the human condition, even if that recognition was not conscious. Who can identify with the acrobats? Impossible, they are the perfect ones, the ones who never fall, who never make mistakes. But the clowns are us, stumbling around, falling flat on our faces, wondering what happened, and why we can’t be those perfect acrobats.

What a great relief it would be if we knew, from the beginning, that to be human is to be a kind of clown. How seriously we take ourselves, how hard we try to get everything right. Who taught us that we are so important, that every thought we think is so important? Why have we never learned to laugh at ourselves? To release our grip on our terrible self-preoccupation?

I remember when I was first learning how to speak in public, many years ago. It was in India, and the audiences I was speaking to were sometimes quite large. One day I asked my teacher for help. “What should I do?” I asked him, “when I first walk out in front of that huge sea of faces? It can be pretty scary.”

“It’s simple,” he told me, “All you have to do is remind yourself that you are no more significant than a spider.” You might regard this as a strange kind of comfort, but it was one of best things anyone ever said to me. It released me from my self-importance, and allowed me to be myself up there, without any fixed ideas of how I was supposed to be. Sometimes I would walk out in front of the audience, and just repeat that to myself, “I am no more significant than a spider.” I would feel my whole being expand, and relax into the ‘unbearable lightness of being.’ The lightness of being that knows that the harder I try to impress you, the less authentic will be our connection.

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One of the Radiant Mind students from Germany asked me a wonderful question today, on the phone. We were talking about the practice of ‘just sitting’ and allowing everything to be as it is, which is one of the foundations of most nondual work, or the training in awakening to unconditioned awareness.

Just sitting is not the same as meditation. Meditation usually has some kind of focus, like the breath, or a mantra, and a goal as well, some kind of state we are trying to reach. Just sitting begins with the end, it begins with the recognition that there is nowhere to go, nothing to achieve, and nobody to achieve it. Our natural state, the openness of awareness itself, is not an object, not something I can find, grasp, or get any closer to than I already am.

The woman I was working with told me that the Radiant Mind course has ‘ruined her meditation practice.’ She was laughing as she said this. Then she asked me something, which I experienced as a kind of spontaneous koan, a question that arose from within her that cannot be answered by the mind. This was her question: If I am not even watching, not trying to witness, then what is the difference between just sitting and hanging around?”

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Often, when my students or clients are struggling with deep places of contraction and isolation, they will tell me they feel like a worm. This seems to be some kind of collective image for a place where we feel small, helpless and cut off from the nourishment bubbling up from inside.  Rumi refers to it here:

There is a worm addicted to eating grape leaves.
Suddenly, he wakes up,
call it Grace, whatever,
something wakes him, and he is no longer a worm.
He is the entire vineyard, and the orchard too,
the fruit, the trunks,
a growing wisdom and joy
that does not need to devour.

Rumi

This is what I am offering you, if you come to ‘The Yoga of Effortless Being’ 5 day retreat-- a chance to discover for yourself what this deep wellspring within is--how to connect with it, and how to receive this nourishment in your body, in your heart, and in your mind.

For more information about this reatreat, or to register, click here: http://tinyurl.com/343b7zk

with love
Shayla

Dear friends:

I encourage you to consider this possibility:  spending 5 days in a beautiful place, where you can look with clarity, courage, and compassion at yourself, your life, and what you really want.

In my work work with people all over the world, I am seeing that we have entered a time of great movement, a time when structures of thought, belief, and perception are breaking down. This is a time of great possibility, and it is also a time when we need support, a strong container to hold us as we learn to inquire, to express ourselves without defence or blame, and to discover what it means to be fully human.

Our bodies are not separate from the land, from the water, from the trees. When we spend time in a place where the silence is deep and the beauty profound, something opens up inside our cells. We breathe differently, we move more slowly, and we have a real chance to become truly intimate with ourselves. We will be exploring what it is to be fully present--to open to the living stream of our body, our feelings and our authentic being. We’ll learn how to move through the instincts for control and security to another way of being that is undefended, tender and deeply alive.

This is not an experience that will feel good for five days and then be gone. It is a genuine opportunity to take responsibility for yourself and your life, to find out what it means to come out of isolation and live a life of integrity and love.

Please call me or email if you have questions about this retreat.  For more information about registration and the retreat, click here:  http://tinyurl.com/343b7zk

with love
Shayla

Contrary to what many people assume, there is actually a big difference between the practice of learning to recognize and rest in awareness, and the practice of mindfulness. People often assume they are the same, and they are not. In mindfulness practice, we are focusing on the content of our moment to moment experience. In awareness, we are not really concerned with the contents--not focusing on them, and not trying to block them out either. Just letting them be as they are. Our focus is the open space, the boundless field of awareness, in which everything is happening. And of course we can’t really focus on this awareness in the way we focus on an object, like our breath, or our feelings.

So awareness practice is much more about letting go of the impulse to grasp, to understand, to fixate on anything, and just relaxing into the openness of our own being, which is always here, as soon as we are willing to let go.

love
Shayla

We are in the middle of a very powerful time, as we approach the Solstice.  I’m noticing that something potent and challenging is happening with a great many people right now. We are being pushed to our edge, right up against our deepest patterns and core conditioning. The abundance of light on an outer level corresponds to an abundance of awareness that is awakening on an inner level. So we have an opportunity to see many things about our patterns and the way we live, that we may never have seen before, or even wanted to!

How to respond to such an opportunity? It’s crucial that we align with a deep willingness to take full responsibility for our lives, our conditioning, and for the power of awareness to illuminate and dissolve what is obstructing and limiting us.

There are 2 key questions that we can use for self-inquiry, very simple questions that we can take with us into our daily lives.

1)Am I willing to give up the right to be a victim to both outer and inner circumstances? Am I willing to give up the right to be a victim to the moods and thoughts that arise in the field of my awareness?
2)Am I willing to give up the right to not take care of myself? Or to put it another way: Am I willing to do what I need to do to create a good environment for myself, one that really nourishes and sustains me?

If we are really willing to work with these questions, we can tap into the fluidity of this time, the power that all this light has to liberate us from outmoded structures of thought, belief, and behaviour.

May we all find ways to support ourselves and each other in healing, transforming and awakening.

love
Shayla