Author: ratnadyer

Are you always looking for the next best thing?

Relax back into now. This moment. The silence. Simplicity is the haven of the heart. It holds the most fulfilment.

You will not find fulfilment in any future moment. Only this. This moment.

Listening is like breathing, if we stop, we are not fully alive.

Sometimes we tell ourselves we don’t need to look or question or consider something anew, as we think we are already aware and knowing on that thing.

This puts a ceiling on our expansion, on our ability to listen with freshness to each moment.

Remaining humble and curious and willing to look again and again and again with each moment being a new life lived, this is the magical path. This path appears before you like golden bricks forming one step at a time, and leading you into your innermost home and clarity.

When we really truely deeply listen to what is here, what we are in truth; our deep heart, one with life.. When we really listen and we learn to move from there, we will find ourselves being of the most service in creating change in the world.

We can’t be a part of true change in the world before we have really listened inwardly and done our own deep work.

And let’s face it, sometimes we have to go through stuff that is pretty unfair to help us heal.

Just let the emotion be had and let it move through. When allowed its existence, it’s expression, it can eventually dissipate.

Find healthy ways to express anger. Use your body. I lie on my bed and throw a cushion as hard as I can at the wall again and again. Or I garden hard out and rip out weeds or dig the earth with a vengeance. Find whatever safe way works for you.

Balance allows movement. If an emotion has you like quick sand for a long time however, it’s necessary to look at what thoughts are linking to it and perhaps keeping you entrenched.

None the less, none of it is wrong.
You are not wrong for feeling.
You are not wrong for thinking.
You are human.
And you are learning.

Self compassion, self acceptance is key.

Awakening is a continuous, ongoing way of being, not unlike breathing.

It’s kind of like a movement of seeing.

It’s not some static goal to be attained.

There are stages within it where we attain higher understanding.

However it is not something we can say we have ever finished or that we can hold.

It moves inside us like space.

Un-graspable.

Ever being, ever becoming.

A colleague said to me recently:

‘You take all that you can get.’

I saw clearly in that moment that I could take it in two ways: one through the lense of self judgement, stemming from an old wounding, where I had been made to feel I was wrong and rejected as a child.

Or, through the lense of love and celebration…. Where I said, with my arms spread wide ‘Yeah! That’s right. Bring it on! I’ll receive as much as you can give me’. I was so happy to notice my response and hear myself celebrate 😊

I thought about it after.. mulling on whether she could have been taking a dig or not. And I realised that even if she was making a dig, it couldn’t hurt me unless I was listening through my old wounded idea of myself.

And that if I listened with openness and love, then whatever is not wholesome can only fester in it’s own bad feelings where it is coming from, and for that I can have compassion and send blessings.

This is the nature of mind. We create the quality our experience through how much love we live in within ourselves.

Love is all that will give us healing and peace in the end.

Watching this video I had a clarity in seeing… we are the rock; constant, unmoving, present. And life’s experiences; activities, thoughts and feelings are like the reflection moving across the surface.

We get so transfixed in watching what is moving in our life, that we forget ourselves, our beingness, our awareness, our stillness, and that we are always there as the base.

There is no experience that can exist outside of your awareness. Awareness is the base. Without that, there is nothing.

In some of the earlier stages of spiritual seeking, it is often that people think of learning to be present as something they need to try to do, to come into the present, to become more present.

This is a good start and a helpful practice for a time, however it can become an impossible, never ending task and another way of feeling we’re failing, and spiritual practice is too hard.

Think of it this way: It’s not about continually trying to come into the present moment. As if there is you and the moment as two separate phenomena.

It’s actually about connecting. It’s a connecting in with our awareness, with feeling the energy of life unfolding, within and without, alive. This is only happening in the now.

In practicing this connecting in, with guidance we come to recognise ourselves as presence itself.

You are presence itself.

Presence is never experienced apart from your awareness. They are one.

This is yoga.