Posts Tagged True Self
Stop Cooking Your Own Goose!
Posted by davev in Start Thinking on June 18, 2009
Any time you sit, think about, and “stew” over what someone did to you, or simmer in anger about some past event, the real reason for your pain is because you’re cooking your own goose!
Have a Happier Relationship with Life
All relationships suffer when stagnation sets in; whether in a pond or our personal dealings with others, everything must be continually refreshed in order to realize its true potential. For us this means each re-appearance of some old resentment, fear, or regret, chokes the life out of our chance to love one another, which is our spiritual responsibility. What’s so hard for us to understand is that the real reason these old painful patterns go on as they do isn’t because other people don’t change. The truth tells a very different story if we will dare to listen.
Here’s why we continue to run through unwanted patterns in our relationships with others: our continual attempts to resolve the pain within us — by holding others accountable for it — has utterly failed.
Any new course of action we arrive at by considering what’s wrong with someone else transforms nothing other than the way we will again have to suffer that relationship. Trying to resolve our problems this way is like looking out at a field we have planted on our own property and wishing, every day, something other than what grows there would take hold and flower. If we wish to have true harmonious relationships with others, then it is we who must change. We must assume responsibility for what our relationships reveal to us about us, and then do the interior work it takes to plant the seeds of a new Self.
If we are ever to realize the integrity and consistent kindness of our True Self, if we long to know something of heaven while we live on earth, then we must sow the seeds that bring that higher life into fruition. One cannot expect to reap what one does not sow; and merely hoping for a higher life is not sowing true spiritual seeds, any more than climbing an imagined mountain is the same as reaching its top.
To sow spiritual seeds means that we do spiritual work. Spiritual work is always interior work first, even if, as a matter of course, this work becomes
manifest through exterior action. What is this interior work by which we sow the seeds of the celestial within us? Following are four ways to sow the seeds of a higher relationship with life:
1. We must work to not burden others or ourselves with past regrets, disappointments, or fearful future visions, even as we learn to ask truth for more insight into those unseen aspects of our present nature that are reaping their regrets even as they sow more of the same dark seeds.
2. We must learn to sit quietly with ourselves and wait patiently for the light of God’s peace to replace those dark, noisy thoughts and feelings telling us that we have too much old baggage to make the journey home. Each time we sow these seeds through some quiet meditation, we reap the strength that comes from realizing that this silence that comes to us is our true home.
3. We must deliberately remember our intention to start our whole life over every moment we awaken to find ourselves reliving some past conflict. To cultivate this refreshed outlook, born of remembering that our true life is always new in the Now, is to let go of who we have been and to begin reaping a life free of anger and fear.
4. We must learn to look our fears, weariness, and anxiety directly in the eye, and instead of seeing what is impossible according to their view of life, sow the seeds of a new self by daring to doubt their dark view of things. Our refusal to identify with self-limiting negative states reaps us the reward of rising above their inherent limitations.
Being Fearless, Fulfilled, and Free… Now!
Posted by davev in Start Thinking, Take Action on May 14, 2009
When we know — deeply realize — that what we’re really looking for in this life is what we already are — and not what we may become — we stand on the threshold of a new order of being that is effortlessly fearless, fulfilled, and free.
Bright New Actions that Lead to the Fearless Life
Fear’s power over us is nothing more than the way it causes us to forget the truth of ourselves, which is this: we are created to eternally transcend the limits of our present nature, to transform who and what we have been in the very moment it ceases to serve the good of us. But, because we have forgotten this or — more accurately speaking — because we are asleep to its power in us, we are compelled to search for, find, and then believe in “powers” outside of ourselves that always betray us in our hour of need.
Actualizing our spiritual right to live without the frustration of fearful limitations is not a question of achieving something new; it begins with choosing to end a relationship with that which has never been true. So, it isn’t a question of “What do I do?” but “What must I bring an end to?” Hence, the Christ’s saying:
“Whoever shall lose his life shall gain it.”
Here for your study and consideration are two very common, but false beliefs about what one must do or be in order to transcend the limitations in his or her life. Study them closely. See how their unquestioned socially accepted convention serves to both frustrate and limit our natural right to be fearless. Also included with each example is a suggested new action whose purpose it is to help realize the limitless life of your True Self.
First of the fear-producing false beliefs: We must prepare — in advance — for everything that might happen to us.
The world we live in “tells” us it is wise to worry, to stress ourselves over every eventuality, regardless of personal cost to our health, family, or friends. But recall here Christ’s admonition: “Take no thought for the morrow.” The truth is, the more we prepare to be fearless, the more afraid we become! Here’s the new action to find the fearless life: Meet every moment awake to what it wants to give to us: a life essentially limitless in its newness. At the same time, detect and reject any fearful imagining about what might be lost should we step into the unknown moment before us.
Second of the fear-producing false beliefs: Before we can make those real changes in our lives, the ones that will bring us the freedom we seek, we must first secure the approval of others for our actions.
Most of us don’t realize how dependent we are on the approval of others, and how we weigh our life choices on scales that not only belong to others, but that are broken as well. Here’s the new liberating action: Deliberately release any thought or feeling that would have us believe the freedom that we long for can be found by wearing the yoke of popular opinion.
Here is one last encouraging, fear-busting fact and the bright action it helps to inspire. The source of our True Self is love-in-action. And since love transforms whatever it touches, any limitation can be transcended given our willingness to test this last truth: our True Self is created to neither serve, nor believe in anything other than the living Light that is fearlessness itself. Prove this truth to yourself, and you will know its powers.
