The whole pleasure/pain response, that instinctual mechanism, is embedded in the body. We resist pain, and we hold onto what feels good. What could be more natural? And yet what could be more mechanical, conditioned and reactive? We cannot ask the deep survival patterns of our body/mind to disappear. They are very powerful, and quite essential on a certain level of our being. But if we allow this kind of conditioning to dominate us, then we cannot discover our deeper nature, which is presence-- completely open to everything as it is.

We can work with our conditioning in a much gentler way when we are already resting in presence, in an open space of non-judging awareness. This awareness is our foundation. It is simple, open, unstructured, innocent, natural, and right here.  With this kind of awareness we can begin to become intimate with our own experience, with the totality of our experience. Not separating parts out and saying, “This is me, and this is not,” but opening our arms and accepting it all.

Accepting my body just as it is in this moment, listening, breathing, moving, and letting go. When I allow my breath to mirror the openness of my awareness, then the nature of my experience begins to change. I can approach the feeling of discomfort without pulling away or resisting. I can allow myself to open to this feeling, listen to it, respect it, work with it. Not looking to a book or a CD or a teacher, but opening to the wisdom that comes through the body, from moment to moment, that emerges and then disappears. Heart beating by itself, lungs moving by themselves, resting in the simple feeling of being alive.

Some kinds of yoga emphasize the willful, effort-full aspect of the practice, as if, by trying harder, we are going to gain some control over our body. I want to look a little deeper here, because this lies at the heart of everything we are doing. 

In Soma Yoga we begin in a place of deep receptivity, with a willingness to listen to the intelligence that lives in every cell of our body, to listen and respond. Sometimes we are strengthening our core muscles, sometimes we are working with our flexibility, sometimes we are grounding our energy, sometimes we are working with the energy meridians, sometimes we are working with our brain patterns.  But we are not trying to control the life force in the body. We are opening, creating a much wider container so that the life force can flow freely, spontaneously.

How does that happen? It happens when I come back, in a very simple, easy way, to the simplicity of the moment when I am just feeling my body. Just breathing, opening to this moment, this experience, allowing my breath to hold it all, and the next moment, and the next.  A flow, an aliveness, that emerges out of stillness and comes back to it, again and again.

I can allow the energy that is usually entangled with the thoughts in my head to stream down into the body. I can feel the openness inside my head when I let the energy descend, down into heart, into belly, into earth.  I can feel the difference between the direct experience of this moment and what my thoughts are telling me about this moment.  I realize that the body is not what I think it is. I am not who I think I am. How fully alive am I actually willing to be?

The first thing I want to say about creativity is that is belongs to all of us. We are deeply embedded in a relentlessly creative universe. The most natural way we can be is intensely creative. That’s our authentic nature. But we started to believe something else: creativity is for the gifted, for the special, for the other person, not for me.

Have you ever had thought like this? Have you turned away from the creative side of yourself? From the openness inside you that just wants to flow, to express itself fully. I’ve heard so many people speak to me about this longing they have carried, for so long, to somehow open to this field of creative energy they sense inside themselves, and let it flow. They speak to me, and I listen, not as someone separate, not as an expert. I listen from the place that sees how easy it is to fall back, again and again into what is comfortable, known and secure.

In order to follow another part of myself, I have to learn to value that part, listen to it, learn about it, follow where it is calling me.

My conditioned mind knows so many things. It has a vast supply of information about almost every area of my life. But in this area, my mind cannot really help me. It doesn’t know anything about the nature of this creativity. It is wild; it is free; it is profoundly authentic. Creativity cannot be domesticated. If I connect with this force of creativity, I do not know what is going to happen in my life. I can no longer cling to the illusion that I am in control of my life, that things happen according to my plan.

If I am willing to let go of my own agenda, creativity begins to bubble up, like those bright flowers that push right up through the rock. Did that ever happen to you—that you finally gave up trying and something emerged, all by itself? Have you noticed how rarely that happens through will and struggle? How it’s not really about techniques either? For me, it’s about a deep willingness to turn toward that which is mysterious, unknown, and alive within me, right now.

Now that spring is finally here, even in snowy Canada, I’d like to share an exercise that is a great one to do in the spring.

In the Sufi tradition, students work on cultivating and nourishing what are sometimes called ‘soul qualities.’ These qualities come from our core, from presence, from the most authentic and natural part of our being.  As we grow up and become conditioned, we lose track of some of them, while we develop others. Part of what it means to grow into wholeness is to learn how to access these qualities that have been covered or hidden.

One way of doing this is to think of them as seeds you are cultivating and nourishing inside your own being.  Find a pot, fill it with good soil, and plant a seed, or more than one, in the pot. At the same time, choose a quality from the list below, or find one of your own. As you water and care for your seed and watch it emerge and grow, imagine that you are doing the same thing with this quality. Be curious, be playful in the way that you do this. Try thinking of it as a flame you are fanning, or a seed you are watering, rather than something you are lacking.

Discover for yourself how you can call forth this quality. Watch what works and doesn’t work. Listen to your body and your heart. You can focus on it first thing in the morning, and see what the day reveals to you about your quality.

Or you can ask your body, “How would it feel if I was more -----?”

In the list below are the colors associated with some of these soul qualities, called the ‘latifa’ in the Sufi tradition.

* Curiosity and Playfulness-Yellow
* Boldness and courage-Red
* Commitment and persistence, staying the course-White
* Kindness and compassion-Green
* Stillness and depth-Black like the night sky
* Openness and spaciousness-Blue

--
“Wherever you are is the entry point” (Kabir)
Shayla Wright
Barefoot Journeys
Coaching, facilitation, courses and workshops
250.352.7908
1.866.795.4968
http://www.barefootjourneys.net

I’m writing this in order to encourage you all to let inquiry be an organic and natural process, instead of something that you feel you have to ‘get done’ or impose on yourself.

What I suggest is that you really allow your heart and body to discern which are your questions, which ones are alive and full of meaning for you. And then it’s not about finding time to answer them, it’s about allowing yourself to live with them. For example, Echart Tolle’s question is “What is life asking of me right now?”

Write your questions down and put them on your computer, bathroom mirror or fridge. Carry them into your day, drop them into your body and your heart, and listen to see what emerges. Engage in dialogue about them with anyone else who is interested.

You are not looking for an answer with your mind. There is no answer to these questions. Your whole life is the answer. But if you really live with them, it’s a bit like being on a treasure hunt, and clues will start to appear, as you follow the living thread of your own inquiry.

I hope this helps.
love
Shayla

In his dialogue with Oprah, Eckhart Tolle speaks of a question we can all ask ourselves: “What does life want of me?” Instead of “What do I want of life?” turn it around and ask, “What is life asking of me right now?” If you really ask this question, not just with your mind, but with your heart and body as well, it acts as a
gateway to a whole new way of being in the world.

The other one I love is “What is my relationship to this moment? Am I fighting it, resisting it, arguing with it? Or I am open to it, one with it?” and “What do I want my relationship to this moment to be? Do I want to fight with it, or hope for a better moment in the future? Or do I want to rest here, as I am, and allow this moment to reveal itself to me?”

The way I relate to each moment is the way I relate to this vast mysterious thing we call life.

Enjoy your day.

Love
Shayla

Here is a great example from Adam Dreamhealer, in response to someone who asked him what he actually sees when he is engaged in his healing work.

Indra’s Net

This universe is like an endless net of invisible threads of energy, of life.  The vertical threads are time, the horizontal threads are space.
In every place where the threads cross, there is a living being, shining like a jewel in this vast net.
The light of Being shines through and penetrates each living point.
And every being shines, reflecting itself, and also reflecting everything -all the reflections of all the reflections in the universe.
We are not separate (Adam Dreamhealer)

There is a wonderful website called livingthefield.com (Lynne McTaggart) that has a lot more information about the field of non-local energy that connects us all.

with love
Shayla Wright
‘Barefoot Journeys’ coaching, courses, workshops & retreats
http://www.barefootjourneys.net

Something happened to me recently that was very much like that experience in Ottawa . It all began with gratitude. Over the last while some miracles have happened in my life. I don’t really know how or why these powerful blessings have emerged. I call them miracles because they appeared all of a sudden, for no reason that I know of.  Events like these do not explain themselves! They remain forever connected to a profound sense of mystery.

What has happened in me since the occurrence of these miracles is a growing sense of gratitude, a gratitude so deep that it feels a lot bigger than happiness or joy. In fact it’s not a feeling at all; it’s something much deeper than a feeling. The sense I have is that if I was totally grateful, every day for the rest of my life,
that would not be enough time to really express or embody this gratitude.

The other night I was working on- line and a small glitch happened, one of those things that is always happening on the computer. I felt a wave of irritation, and the whole field of my thought began to display itself before me. It was so extraordinarily clear, as if the radiance of the gratitude was illuminating it all.
I was aware for the first time of hundreds and thousands of thoughts, strung together like beads. Many of them were soft, like a background hum in my being.
And a lot of them had this tone to them of frustration, annoyance, difficulty and struggle- a kind of negative glaze interconnecting them all. I realized with some shock that I had been cultivating these thoughts over a lifetime. That every time things did not work out, every time I experienced loss or grief or bewilderment or
despair, this subtle background field of resistance and struggle would light up and get stronger, even though it stayed far beyond the reach of my conscious awareness. 

In all of the years I’ve been practicing meditation, inquiry and yoga, I never perceived the vast field of my thought in this way. I began to understand why in the Buddhist tradition, they say that your thought-stream is your destiny.  It’s something we rarely see because we are looking through it at ourselves and the world.

Somehow the gratitude revealed to me this hidden underlying stream of thought:  all of the ways in which I am still resisting the flow of life, the ways I shut myself down and refuse to trust, refuse to open to the fundamental goodness of life.  What I realized that night was that my attachment to this global mood, this whole field of thought, is being released. I am amazed at how much it has influenced and formed my identity as a human being. 

It’s strange when things open and shift around. It’s not like I made a major decision and committed myself to positive thinking. Those kinds of things have never worked for me. Instead there is a simple and clear sense in my body, and in my heart:  “Now that I’ve seen what was invisible to me before, I don’t have to go along with it.” But not because these thoughts are bad or wrong.  Not at all.  Simply because none of these thoughts align with the gratitude. They are simply irrelevant in the face of that deep thankfulness.  Thankfulness for the gift of life and awareness.  A gift we are given, moment after moment, with every breath.

Think of all the events in the universe, in the infinite web of life, that had to converge in order for you to be alive right now, reading this lifeletter. Think of how many times you or I could have disappeared from this world, and here we are.

Happy Spring to all of you, except of course, those of you in the southern hemisphere. In the north, our birds are back, and the days are so much lighter.

love and blessings.
Shayla

Peter said, “Of course that happens. It happens to all of us. No matter how skillful we become at accessing that place 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 for psychological work, and that this aspect of our no-practice is often left out of spiritual work. We might talk about it, but there is often a feeling of “Let’s get on to what really matters-realizing that I don’t exist, that I’m not separate. So 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.

I cannot believe how much I have resisted opening to this whole way of being, and how radically simple it is. I think sometimes that the most profound and life-changing insights are the most obvious. My daughter Coco keeps saying that these days:” All of these things were staring me in the face all along, but I wasn’t ready to see them.” It’s been staring me in the face for 30 years that I can’t hold on to my so called “higher” or “more expanded” states. But I didn’t want to face it, because I wanted what I wanted.

So the minute I try to live this moment according to any ideal, I create the same struggle in myself, the same gap.  Over and over, until I finally get to the point where I’m willing to be with myself as I am.

with love
Shayla

--

There is a lot of controversy in spiritual circles about all this. What to do? How to proceed? Do I embrace my identity? Do I expand it, do I dissolve it?  Is it real? Is it an illusion? Do I need therapy, or coaching, or meditation? Or three years in an ashram? I don’t think so.

The whole conundrum seems so much simpler to me now than it used to. I think that’s because I’ve learned to trust my own experience, and the experience of my students and friends. For me, the simple truth of the matter is this: we all get tired of ourselves!  Being a separate person all the time is exhausting. That’s why it’s so hard on people when they can’t sleep. Sleep is a total release from our whole waking-state identity.

Sometimes people who come to me for coaching say, “I really need a break. I just want to get away from everything for a while.” When we look a little deeper, it usually turns out that what they are tired of is themselves. They are tired of the same thought patterns, the same habitual responses, the same conditioning.  No matter how you feel about your identity, it’s a profound relief to be able to take a break from it, to rest in that place of ‘I am,’ before you add the qualification: “I am this” or “I am that.”

Somewhere, deep inside, we all know that we are more than this static and separate identity. It’s not even a matter of being spiritual. I was having lunch with a lumberjack once, who had never even heard the word ‘meditation.’ He told me about what happened on his 60th birthday. “I went to the mirror and looked at myself,” he said. “And I knew that I am not 60 years old! No way! I am the same one inside that I was when I was a child. Something has never changed. I just don’t know what to call it.”

“Who cares what you call it,” I said to him. “You’ve recognized it-that’s enough.”

I’m always asking my yoga students about this, in relation to the body. “Okay,” I say to them. “When you look at your body from the outside, it looks like a solid object. But close your eyes and hang out there awhile. What is your inner experience of your body? Does it feel fixed? Does it feel solid? And if not, what happened? Where did the static, separate feeling of your body go?”

No-one has ever answered that question, but everyone agrees that when they open to the immediate experience of the body, something is there that they had not really noticed.  A sense of space, openness, aliveness, being. It’s right here, and we miss it, because we get fixated on the sense of our own identity.
That simple sense of spaciousness, of openness, of presence, is so easy to overlook, to pass on by, because our conditioned mind does not know how to value that. It feels too much like nothing, and our human training has convinced us to keep chasing after all the somethings. We sure can pile up a lot of somethings before we start to wonder about doing something different. 

Sometimes we think we want so much, and all we really want is a rest from our whole identity. The following Sufi tale about this is one of my favorite teaching stories.

A long time ago there was an Emperor, celebrating a great victory in war with an enormous feast.  His attendants were busily preparing the Great Hall as the evening of the feast approached. Suddenly the door of the hall slammed open, and a wild, raggedy fellow walked inside. He was old, and disheveled, and no one recognized him. His face burned with a strange radiance that made everyone there uneasy. They wanted to stop him, right where he was. Instead they just stood and watched as he strolled across the great Hall and sat down in the Emperor’s chair.

The Chief Steward drew himself up to his full height, put one hand on the sword that hung at his side, and approached the strange fellow.

“Welcome good sir,” he bowed low. “By the look of you, you have come from far away. Perhaps you do not know that you are sitting in the Emperor’s chair?”

“My good man,” came the reply. I know perfectly well where I am sitting.”

“But sir,” said the steward, “Why do you sit there? Are you a great lord?”

The old man sat back, and looked up through eyes that were unfathomable. “Not a lord,” he said. “I am greater than that.”

“Greater than a lord?” said the steward, his voice cracking. “Are you a king?”

“Not a king,” came the reply. “I am greater than that.”

“Greater than a king sir?  What are you telling me? You must be an emperor!”

“No,” said the strange old man. “I am greater than that.”

“Sir,” said the chief steward. “I cannot make sense of what you are saying. You know, as well as I do, that the only one greater than the Emperor is God Himself!”
“
Oh, “ the fellow replied, softly now. “Is that what you think? Well, then, I have to tell you that I am greater even than God.”

“Now sir!” came the steward’s voice, and it was sharp now, like a whip. “You’ll not be playing these games with me any longer. I don’t care what you tell me-nobody, nobody, is greater than God.”

The old man stood up, finally, and the fire in his face and body filled the Hall with a great silence. “Yes,” he said. “I am that nobody.”

with love
Shayla

How we know ourselves, how we imagine ourselves, can feel so solid and static. And how quickly it can change. Our whole identity can open and expand in a moment, no matter how much resistance we are feeling.

About a year and a half ago I came to a turning point in relationship to Mother Earth and my willingness to live a sustainable life. I realized that prayers, recycling and emails to our government were not going to do it for me. I felt this longing, deep in my heart, to take a big step forward. And I kept wondering why we humans so often wait until things are totally desperate before we are willing to do things differently.

Gradually it became clear to me that I wanted to learn to live without my car. I was quite surprised by this, as I was very attached to my car. It was a Honda Accord I inherited from my mother, after 25 years of living in India without one. It represented freedom, mobility, and the spirit of adventure. I would think about letting go of it and feel a lot of resistance.

But the longing was even stronger than my resistance- I knew that to be true. I was preparing to go to a Radiant Mind teacher training course in France this fall, and in July it became obvious that the only way I would be able to afford the trip was by selling my car. Isn’t it strange how the universe conspires to help you evolve and grow, even when you think you are not ready?

I put my car on the market and started walking everywhere, in preparation for the time when it would be gone. It is six blocks down from our house to town. It was very hot walking up the hill in July and August, and I was not fit enough to do anything except huff and puff my way home. But in a very short time, I got a lot stronger. I watched myself almost trotting up those six steep blocks, and realized I was actually starting to enjoy it.

I sold my car, and we went to France for the teacher training course. I returned home at the beginning of November. In Nelson it’s a dark, cold time that many
people find quite difficult. Now I was really missing my beautiful little Honda. I would remember great trips I had taken in it, and even started dreaming about it at night- the world whizzing by outside my window as I listened to Adya Shanti on my CD player. I was full of regrets, and complained a lot to my partner Jonathan about the prospect of walking up and down that hill in the winter. “It’s going to be awful,” I moaned. “Icy, slippery, freezing cold.”

Jonathan was not even slightly interested in catering to my mind. “You have no idea what it’s going to be like.” he would say. How I love him for that response!

“Yes, I do!” I argued. I know what winter is like here, and I hate it!” I could feel the negativity bubbling around inside me, and this feeling of being deprived, left out in the cold by myself.

“You are making this whole thing up,” he replied. “Just let go and see how it is. You might really surprise yourself.” So I did. Only because I had no choice.  It’s truly liberating to be choiceless sometimes, even though this six year old inside me was having a major temper tantrum.

I just kept walking, and the more I walked the more I liked it. The poison was turning to nectar. Winter came, dark came, and I walked- in snow, in rain, in sun, in fog, and in moonlight. I started to notice how different I felt, how much more vital and alive. Sometimes Jonathan or my daughter would offer me a ride, and I would say no. I didn’t want to miss the walk.

Before I began what I now call ‘my walking life’ I was convinced that I could never afford all that extra time. Now I laugh about that. I feel like something inside me has slowed down; my whole relationship to time has transformed.

“This is really strange,” I said to friends over Christmas. “Now I’m even liking winter! It’s so different when you’re out in it, instead of looking at it through a pane of glass. The sound of the wind, the snow on the trees, the way the clouds move over the mountains-all of this was lost to me when I had my car.”

So that’s how I came to understand how nectar and poison can change places with each other.  Now I would never exchange my walking time for the warm and cozy interior of a car.  And if you had told me a few short months ago that a steep walk up the hill in the middle of winter would be one of my favourite things, I would have laughed at you. This was not the way I knew myself.

with love
Shayla

My intention is to offer some pointers, some radical new perspectives that will shake you up, and loosen the fixed ways you have of looking at yourself and your world.

Instead of filling you up with more information, these pointers can awaken you to a field of intelligence which I am calling ‘The Heart.’ This field of intelligence functions in an entirely different way than your conditioned mind.

Discovering the nature of this wisdom for ourselves allows us to ask ourselves some powerful questions about what is actually working in our lives, what we really want, and what matters most. 

The purpose of this inquiry is to bring us into direct contact with an intelligence that lives inside each one of us, an awareness that does not judge, struggle or blame. The nature of this awareness allows us to take radical responsibility for our lives, and to open to the courage, compassion, generosity and freedom of our authentic self.

The way we live and move in this world transforms as we begin to feel the truth of what John Donne wrote over 400 years ago: “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main....”

Did you ever notice how certain themes run through your life, rising up and falling away, only to appear again sometime later, maybe in a slightly different form?  For me, over the last while, it’s been about creativity, spontaneity, the flow of life which is unstructured and unrehearsed.

We had a great discussion about it one evening in my ‘Alchemy of Writing’ group. I’ve been offering to my students a vision of creativity as something that is innate and universal, because it is our true nature. It’s not something that belongs to anyone, and especially not to a privileged or special group of people. Creativity is how the whole universe emerges into form- over and over it demonstrates this spontaneous power of expression at the very heart of life.

When I really allow my heart to open to the sense of this vast field of creative energy, I realize that each one of us was born to discover ourselves through this process of free expression- to experience directly that who we are is not a fixed and static thing, but a flow of energy that is always new and dynamic.

As we explored this way of looking at things in my class, we realized that a lot of confusion happens when we equate creativity with skill. They are not the same. Skill is a learned thing, something acquired through practice and intention. We can practice creativity too, but only in the sense of learning how to open, to surrender to something that we can never control.  Rumi was pointing to this when he said, “The more skill you have, the further you are from what your deepest love wants.”

I heard something very close to this when I was listening to a coach called Michael Bungay Stanier recently. He spoke about the difference between good work and great work. He described good work as the work we do when we are inside the area of our competence, functioning consistently, and with confidence and surety. 

Great work takes us into another universe. When we do great work we venture out into the unknown. We have no clue how it will turn out. There are no guarantees. We don‘t know what we are doing. There is often fear in this place, and a lot of aliveness and presence. But we keep going, because we have learned to trust something, even if we are not quite sure what it is.

I would describe great work as something that comes when we are living on our creative edge. I’m reminded of something that happened when I was in India, with my teacher, Swami Shyam. One day, a few hundred of us were all sitting together, listening to him and other learned teachers and scholars speak about life, oneness and consciousness. Right in the middle of someone’s talk, a small child from the audience wandered right out into the middle of the stage and dropped his diapers. Immediately the whole place dissolved into wild laughter, and the speaker was totally forgotten. And even after he resumed his speech, we all remained captivated by everything this tiny human was doing.

My teacher said something that day that I have never forgotten. “Just look,” he said, “how all of your love and attention naturally flows toward that small child. What does he know compared to the speaker? He has no skill of that kind at all. But his innocence, his spontaneity, that’s what we all love, more than anything, because that is our inner nature, our real self. There is no speaker on earth, no matter how famous, no matter how skilled, who can compete with a one year old child losing his pants on stage.”

What a mysterious thing to consider-that who you are when you are not trying to be anybody is the most beautiful way you could ever be. You at your most natural, most free, is the way your basic goodness and sanity will flow out into the world. What an amazing piece of good news. And what a radical departure from most of what we have been taught. It takes a great deal of courage to live life with that level of trust. What would it take for you to begin to trust yourself in that way?

with love
Shayla

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