Friday, 26 August 2011 15:31 Written by Nirmala
A friend just finished college and wrote to ask:
Which kind of work or profession do you think will best support my spiritual path? I just finished studying journalism, and now I'm searching for a job. I love to write, but I some how feel moved to have a more simple job since journalism can be such a high pressure and hectic job. Do you have any suggestions?
I responded:
I can only point you towards your own heart. Only you can know what is right for you now.
However, there are some suggestions that might help you in exploring the direction you want to go. First, I would invite you to find out what you really want to do right now. Our passion and our desire are good guides when it comes to this kind of decision. What inspires you? What excites you? What makes your heart sing? What do you do just because you love to do it? As always, the truth is what opens your heart and quiets the mind, so notice how the different possibilities affect you as you consider and explore them.
Another suggestion is to think outside the box, and consider lots of possibilities. Especially at this point in your life, you can still try out a lot of different ways to support yourself. Here are some examples of thinking outside the box possibilities:
1-Join a commune.
2- Volunteer in a third world country.
3- Work half the year and travel the other half
4- Take whatever job shows up just to see what it is like.
5- Find a simple low-pressure job that is part time, and then spend your free time as a free-lance journalist or writer.
The last example is to suggest that if you love something, you do not necessarily have to do it for a job, or at least you do not have to do it full time. Sometimes when we make something we love into a job, we end up hating it because of the deadlines, pressure and also just from doing it too much. So if you can support yourself with a part time simple job, then you can also do what you love on your own terms. A simple part time job may allow you to write what you want to write, and if you happen to make a little money from it, that would be great also.
Finally, I would suggest that it does not really matter that much what job you take. You can always change your mind next month or next year or in five years. As far as your spiritual path, it really does not matter what you do as it is always possible to explore and discover your true nature in any job and in any situation. Even if you try a job and it does seem to interfere with your spiritual life, then either change jobs, or first use the experience to explore why that particular job is able to interfere with what really matters to you, and then change jobs.
It is funny to say, but because it ultimately does not matter what you do, then you might as well do something you love to do for its own sake. If it really does not matter, then why not find something that is enjoyable and inspiring? Or why not take a simple job so you still have time and energy to also do what you really love to do? I say it is funny, because sometimes when we hear that it does not matter, we decide that means you should just take any job. This is true, but it is also true that if it does not matter, then you might as well do what you really want to do, even if it means taking a part time job or not taking a job at all! Seeing that it ultimately does not matter can free you to make the choice that feels the most true for you in this moment.
I had a friend who had a large rock in her living room, and carved into the rock were the words: Nothing here is written in stone. All of our decisions matter, but they do not matter that much. And furthermore, since nothing is written in stone, you can always change your mind. The bigger question is "What will you do with the rest of your life?", and that question will take you the rest of your life to answer. You do not need to answer the whole question today or even this year. You can try out hundreds of answers to that question, and you will still not be done with the question. It is such a big question that it will take you the rest of your life to answer it fully. So, you might as well enjoy the question because this question will be here for the rest of your life.
There is more about living with questions in the article, Living Life as a Question here.
Sunday, 07 August 2011 16:48 Written by Nirmala
In asking for a mentoring session someone shared they have a problem with guilt. Here is my brief response:
As for guilt, I would point you to the contraction you probably feel when you feel guilty. This is telling you that it is not very true that you are guilty. The truth is what opens your Heart and your sense of Being, so when something causes a contraction that means it is not very true. (There is much more about this in the free download of Part 2 of the book, Living from the Heart, available here.)
Of course there is some truth to the idea of guilt, but overall it is not a very useful or meaningful concept. And it usually does not lead to useful or meaningful action, so this is part of the way it is not really very true or important. Guilt does not often even lead to the desired outcome of changing or correcting our behavior. Because of the discomfort in the contraction we feel when we feel guilty, we often act less kindly and compassionately when we are feeling guilty. This suggests a more practical definition of truth as that which is useful or which leads to a desired outcome. If something does not lead to a desired outcome, then it is not wrong or bad, it is just not very true.
When you feel that kind of contraction, you can just let it be here, and possibly become curious about what else is true. If it is not very true that you or others are guilty, then what else is true about the situation? Small truths are not bad or wrong, they are just quite incomplete. If you or someone else has done something that triggers a sense of guilt, then there is lots to discover about that experience besides how guilty it makes you feel. What else is true about your actions? What were your intentions? How have you been conditioned to act in that situation? What other effects did your action have besides the ones you feel guilty about? Are you even sure that you hurt or harmed someone? What else did you also do in the situation besides the actions that you feel guilty about? What else do you feel besides guilty? What can you do now that will also affect the situation? Is there something you can apologize for or something you can do make up for your unkindness to someone? How important is this experience in the overall context of your life? And finally, what else is going on in your life besides this particular situation? Guilt may be here, but there is probably a lot more happening than that!
There are endless questions that can uncover more and more truth. Why settle for a not very useful or meaningful conclusion about any experience?
Friday, 29 July 2011 17:06 Written by Nirmala
Someone emailed me this question:
The recent congressional budget crisis has brought up a lot of fear and frustration. We've been told that the consequenes of a stalemate would be "catastrophic". It is difficult to deal with the emotions that come up around this possibility, partially because this isn't just a personal concern; a lot of people would be affected. The pundits say that it would hurt most economies around the world, and that's difficult to think about. Accepting this placidly seems impossible. Can I ask how you are coping and how you would advise in handling the fear and sadness that this situation brings up?
I replied:
The problem with our fears is that they are all true. Anything we can imagine could happen, and so all of our fears have some truth to them. However, none of our fears have much truth. In fact they have very little truth, and most of them have a ridiculously small amount of truth to them.
First of all, none of our fears have come true yet. If they had,we would not be fearing them anymore! So in that sense, all fear only exists as thoughts in our minds. Fear only exists right now as the movement of thought and feeling, and that is a very small existence. Yet, it is something that we have been taught to focus on. We have been asked over and over, "What do you think?" and "What do you feel?" As a result we pay close attention to the movements of thought and feelings in our mind and body. What do I think about this? What do I think about that? So even though their actual existence is very slight, they can seem much more important and true than they really are. We even use the argument, "Well, that's what I think!" to make a point, as if the mere fact that I think something makes it true!
Secondly, even when a fearful thought comes true, our ideas about what that will be like are usually very incomplete and inaccurate. Using your example of the debt crisis in the news right now, if the worst case scenario happens and the debt ceiling is not raised, it is still unlikely that all of the disasters predicted would actually come true. For example, it is unlikely that the debt ceiling would never be raised. Many of the terrible scenarios depicted by the media would only happen if the government was unable to borrow more money for months and months. And most likely the congress would finally act after the deadline passed and then fix the problem That is what happened back when the TARP program was only passed after the first attempt failed and then the stock market dropped dramatically. A few days later the congress passed TARP on the second try. And who knows, this whole dramatic episode might even shift our political process into a new and more productive direction. So the specific content of our fears is never a very complete picture of what will happen or can happen.
When we shrink our fears down to actual size, they turn out to be cute little unimportant thoughts. However, because they are actually such small truths, they're very effective at contracting our awareness. In this way, they can provide a lot of intensity and drama to our existence. It is this intensity and drama that fuels our tendency to become hypnotized by the media and its focus on the fear producing stories out there. The contraction of awareness is truly a kind of hypnosis or trance that fear triggers in us.
With any form of hypnosis, the antidote is awareness. The more aware you become of your thoughts and fears, the less hypnotized you become by the content of your thoughts and fears. You can also become aware of the underlying structure of thought and feelings. Thought mostly functions to contract our awareness and put us into various trance states. This is not a mistake, but like any other game, it does get old after a while. And then we naturally feel drawn to experiencing more often the flow of awareness without any illusions getting in the way.
The key again is awareness. Years ago, I studied a form of therapeutic hypnosis. As we learned how to induce a hypnotic trance, the instructor explained that by understanding more about how hypnotic trances are triggered, we would become less susceptible to them. We would recognize that someone or something is hypnotizing us and then we could choose whether to follow the suggestions or other trance inducing process.
One of the methods for inducing a trance is to get someone to focus their awareness. One example is the classic method of telling someone to focus on a swinging object like a pocket watch. Similarly, the dramatic and extreme images of dire possible future outcomes get us to focus intently on the images on the television. We are hypnotized by the images on the TV. Television uses many of the techniques I learned for hypnosis. And even more amazing is how our own mind uses those same techniques to shape our own awareness. We have learned what images and thoughts will trigger the deepest trances and so we become hypnotized by our own thoughts! Again this is ultimately not a mistake as consciousness wants to experience all of the different states that are possible, including all of the trance states we call fear.
But there is also no reason not to wake up from your fear trances. Notice the contraction of awareness that comes with every fear. This is a direct sign that your awareness is leaving something out. The more contracted your awareness is, the more expanded your unawareness is! You can wake up from a fear induced trance by simply noticing what else is true besides the content of your fearful thoughts, or by becoming very curious about the feelings and sensations in your body. How true is the content of your thought? What else is true? What else is possible? How do you even know what you are thinking right now? How do you know you are afraid? What sensations are present that let you know you are afraid? Are they really bad sensations or just different sensations?
It is a bit tricky, because directing your awareness in this way to the mental structures and visceral sensations of the fear can start dissolving the fear. It is like the mirages of water you sometimes see on the highway: as you get closer they always disappear. As we get closer to and more curious about our fears, they tend to disappear. All that has disappeared is a thought or feeling that was patterning your awareness. Without that thought or feeling, your awareness expands again to include more of the truth. And it just turns out that the biggest truths here are the truths of love, divine intelligence and the mystery and beauty of life. These bigger truths are not very scary at all! At any moment, you can turn away from the television screen, or from the "television screen" of your own mind, and then you can see what else is here besides your thoughts and fears.
Personally, I am fascinated by all of this. I enjoy occasionally watching or reading the news and especially enjoy watching all of the reactions it can trigger in me and in others. I also enjoy the moments where awareness penetrates into all of this in a new way. For example, as you become more curious about your own fear, you may start to see how much of our society is driven by fear. These political battles are often between one set of fears and another set of fears. And both sides cannot see how their fears limit their view, which naturally leads to extreme or imbalanced approaches. The antidote is always more awareness and truth. The truth really does set you free.
I hope this helps.
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