This is an email from the 8 week ‘Integrity of the Heart’ course:

I had a good coaching conversation with Sarah on Friday about ‘growing up.’ She was experiencing conflict and turmoil in herself, around the whole question of what it means to grow up and be responsible for your own life. When we looked a little more deeply at what was going on, Sarah was able to express quite clearly what growing up means for her right now: Being able to contribute in a genuine way to the lives of other people, and to be able to care for herself at the same time.

I thought this was a great description of human maturity.

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Dear friends:

This morning on our phone call for ‘ The Integrity of the Heart’ course, we were exploring the nature of radical responsibility--how it is to actually see or feel that we create our own experience, moment to moment. One of the participants spoke about a difficult situation she was engaged in at work, and how opening to the sense that she was creating her own experience, her own response, actually had an immediate impact on what evolved for her in this situation.

We looked at the distinction between reaction and response. When I react, even if I am not conscious of it, I am making myself a victim, thinking that life is unfair, too much, or that things should not be happening the way they are. When I respond, it does not mean that I will not feel pain, fear, or even anger, but my view of the world, and of life, is entirely different.

Nelson Mandela’s 26 years in prison and a forced labor camp are a great example of someone who did not behave like a victim. Instead, he related to his guards with genuine respect and loving kindness, day after day.  As a result, his guards became connected to him in such a way that they could not behave the way they were supposed to. They could not treat him as an object, as someone deserving punishment and brutality. The prison authorities had to keep replacing them with new guards.

One of the participants on the call spoke about how the understanding that we are responsible for our own experience created blame and self-judgment. We spoke about how this is just another extreme point of view. When we are resting in awareness, we can see so clearly that we create our own experience, and there is no blame or judgment attached to that seeing. Creating our own experience does not mean we create the events in our lives! And it does not mean that we can control the thoughts and feelings that arise in us. That is taking far too much responsibility--it’s a distorted view that leads to more suffering.

We spoke about the clarity that allows us to see that the voices in our head, and all the different points of view, are not our fault--these conditions are usually passed down to us through our whole genetic lineage. We have been trained to react in this way from a very young age. So these conditions, these ways of reacting, are not as personal as we think they are.

What a remarkable place to find myself:  a human being who is truly willing to see that I am the one who creates my own experience. I realize that I am not a victim, and I also see that I did not create the conditioning that arises when I fall into reactivity. Can I control my experience? No. This is the crucial point we return to again and again. Then what does it mean to say that I am responsible?

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Written in 2006.

A letter to a student on a different kind of spiritual practice—giving up our ideals and loving ourselves now-- before we improve

I wanted to share something with you about self-acceptance, and how much I have learned about this from Radiant Mind and Peter Fenner. Someone was speaking to him recently about how when they sit in meditation, they access an open, unconditioned place. But when they come back to ordinary life, they lose it. And feel bad, unworthy, frustrated, disappointed-pick the word that is appropriate for you.

Peter said, “Of course that happens. It happens to all of us. No matter how skillful we become at accessing this space of unconditioned awareness, we can lose it in a second. It’s nothing to feel bad about. It’s just the way things are, until you evolve to a whole different level of consciousness.” I realized in that moment that I had been feeling bad about that one thing for 30 years! That I had actually used my spiritual practice to torture myself about the fact that I couldn’t stay in the state I wanted to be in. Isn’t that amazing? And somewhat ridiculous?

My feeling is that self-acceptance and self-love are usually the focus of psychological work, and that this aspect of our ‘no-practice practice’ is often left out of spiritual work. We might talk about self-acceptance, but there is often a feeling of “Let’s get on with what really matters-realizing that I don’t exist, that I’m not separate. Why should I waste time on self-acceptance? This self is the one that has brought me all this suffering. I want to get beyond it.”

Now I’m understanding something profoundly simple: one of the foundations for this work, or any spiritual practice, is to build a field of complete tolerance and acceptance for the way we are in each moment. No matter what. Because we can’t change the way we are by fighting against it. This moment cannot be any different than the way it is. I cannot be different in this moment than the way I am; otherwise I would be.

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I want to clarify something that Sonja was asking me about in last night’s session of ‘Integrity of the Heart.’ We were speaking about the fact that we cannot control our inner experience in the way we have been taught to believe, and that all of our different attempts to control the mind create an endless and futile struggle within ourselves.

First of all we need to be clear that I am only talking about our relationship with what arises in the field of our inner experience. Coming to grips with ‘the illusion of control’ does not mean that we are going to start shouting at our children, or pushing people out of the way in the line-up at the store, or throwing things out of windows! Our authentic self, the being we discover when we rest in presence or awareness, has a tremendous capacity for acting in the world with both wisdom and compassion. So this inquiry into control is focused on our inner world, on the arising of thoughts, perceptions and emotions. Can we actually control a feeling? Can we stop something from arising within us? Many people believe that this is what spiritual practice or meditation is all about, and I am afraid that they will be very disappointed, as I was, with the results.

Real inquiry requires a profound willingness to see things as they are, not as we imagine them to be, or as we would like them to be. If we look clearly at the nature of our inner experience, we will see, again and again, that thoughts, perceptions and feelings come by themselves, and go by themselves, and there is nothing we can do about them. One of my teachers used to say this to me a lot, and I had tremendous resistance to hearing it. I wanted my meditation to take me to a ‘good state’ a blissful place, a better moment. I couldn’t understand what I would get by letting everything be as it is.

What Sonja asked me about was something else—she was inquiring into the choices we have over how we respond to our inner experience. And this is where our freedom lies. As we spoke about last night, our conditioned mind has some very basic responses to our moment- to-moment experience. It will push something away, reject it, deny it, or supress it. Or it will try to change one experience or thought to a ‘better’ one. Or it will indulge in the experience, give it energy and food by engaging in it, believing in it. Often we indulge in very negative experiences-- we intensify them, make our suffering more powerful, without being fully conscious that we are doing so.

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Instead of approaching the practice of inquiry as if it is something foreign and difficult, we can understand it as something totally natural, which every child knows how to do, until she/he is taught to stop wondering, to forsake the body and look for wisdom in the mind. 

This is an email from a participant in a recent workshop, engaging in the kind of inquiry we’ll be doing in “The Integrity of the Heart.”
“Re the inquiry…
Wow. Yeah, it was profound. Standing on top of the parking garage to get a better view of the town and truly feeling (in my body) how love radiates, and feeling how as we collectively learn to receive and share love - it will continue to grow and expand. “Love is infinite”. I realized that even though I had spoken those words before - my understanding of love was quite finite.
My understanding of love grew on Sunday, as I stood on the roof of the parking garage. Thank you for the simple instruction - to go for a walk and ask “what is love?”. This is my new hobby.”
Sonja Podstawskyj Feb. 11. 2010

This training starts Monday Feb. 22nd, 7-9pm

In the beginning of this training you learn to recognize your natural state—the openness and ease of your own being. Once this state is recognized, you learn to rest in it, to spend more and more time here. And then you begin to rely on this awareness. When you need clarity, strength and inspiration, you rely on this awareness, instead of your conditioned mind.

The more we relax and let go of struggle, the more we can rest in awareness without needing to figure everything out, the more the power of this awareness reveals itself to us. We discover capacities and gifts we never knew we had: radical acceptance, natural clarity, and unconditioned gratitude.

Awakening to this awareness allows us to become fully ourselves, free and uncompromising in living our own uniqueness. At the same time, we experience directly that we are not separate from anyone. 

As human beings, we have all kinds of desires, but to be completely comfortable being ourselves, and to know we are connected to everything, is all we really need and want.

For more information about this training, click here: http://www.barefootjourneys.net/index.php/events/event/the-integrity-of-the-heart/

Did you ever notice how certain themes run through your life, rising up and falling away, only to appear again sometime later?  For me, over the last while, the theme has been passionate living. As a teacher and coach, I have more and more people asking me about how to live a life that is fully alive and creative.

“ I want to contribute, to participate, to find something that I’m really passionate about,” they say. “How do I do that?”

“I feel something calling me, but I’m not sure what it is. How do I find out? I don’t even know where to start.”

When I allow my heart to open to these questions, I sense a deep longing that seems to be part of our collective consciousness right now. I realize that each one of us was born to discover this way of being, of fully participating in life.  I have helped many people open to this passionate way of living through a process of exploration and free expression. If we really allow ourselves to engage in this process of deep inquiry, we begin to experience directly that who we are is not a fixed and static thing, but a flow of energy that is changing, flowing, and dynamic. We discover how to live from a place I call our ‘creative edge.’

I think a great deal of confusion, doubt and despair happen when we equate this creative edge, this place of passion and aliveness, with skill or knowledge. They are not the same. Learning a skill and gathering information are the kinds of things we learn in school.  Passion and creativity do not work like this. To connect with this part of our being requires another kind of learning and practice. This is more like unlearning than learning:  how to open, to let go, to allow ourselves not to know, to be a complete beginner. The mystic poet Rumi was pointing to this when he said, “The more skill you have, the further you are from what your deepest love wants.”

“You know Rumi is right,” one of my clients said recently, “There are things I really love to do, that I feel called to do, that I’m not very good at. But that doesn’t matter. I can learn, bit by bit, and if the passion is here, then I really have something to sustain me, to keep me going.”

“Yes, “ I replied, “When we find out what we really care about, it’s a very powerful resource. We can move through the obstacles in our way, fall down and get back up again. Failure is just part of the process. It doesn’t defeat us. We just keep going. No-one else told us that we should be doing this. It’s a genuine impulse, connected to our authentic being.”

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To a potential participant in 'The Integrity of the Heart' : "I'm happy that you are ready to do this training. I want to find a way to support this long--term interest and longing that I experience in you. That's one reason I am offering this training--I want to bring it up a whole notch in terms of engagement and levels of available support--so that you all receive the benefits of this training in a very practical and immediate way. So I'm inviting all of the participants to commit to being there for every session, and some of them are realizing, all by themselves, that this is how they want to show up." love Shayla