Category: Awareness

Birds Don’t Know How and Neither Do You

Birds don’t know how to build nests. They just build nests. Nests are built as this thing we label ‘bird’ instinctually does some stuff.When it’s migration time, they don’t know how or when or where to fly. Wings are flapped and flying happens. Birds’ knowledge, their decisions, their ability, or their clarity have nothing to

Another Place to Look

Everything about our psychological experience is temporary, in motion, and relatively superficial. We feel impacted by it, no question. But the impact we feel is the moving, changing energy taking form as thoughts and feelings. It’s our psychology, our human weather. Those weather patterns move through us, we feel them, and then they’re promptly replaced

There is No Reason

What if there is no actual reason for anything? I mean, there is and there isn’t. In the linear, cause and effect, mentally created story of life, there are oodles of reasons. Everything has a reason in that world. In a way, that world is completely made up of reasons, causes, explanations, and if-this-then-that’s. In that world, you’re

Marching Orders

I was talking with someone the other day who was telling me that she has some decisions to make about her kids’ school. I asked what she needs to decide. She didn’t answer my question. Instead, she explained that every time she pulls through the drop-off line, her mind starts spinning. Are we in the right

You Don’t Have to be OK With Anything

It’s fine if you’re not okay with what you’re experiencing. Really. Being okay with what’s arising is not a requirement. It’s not the ticket to freedom or the key to satisfaction or anything that dramatic. Experience doesn’t care how okay with it you are. Experience is just experience; it is thought, rising and falling. No biggie. And “okay with”

Think of Who Created Thought

Rather than being drawn outward, toward thoughts, sensations, stories, and the world “out there”, stay as the awareness of it all.Rest as the screen rather than getting lost in the movie.Rest as the light that illuminates what’s constantly moving and changing, rather than identifying with the moving and changing things being illuminated.Rest in your heart

Hand-Me-Downs

I’m the oldest child in my family and the oldest of my 9 cousins, so I never wore hand-me-down clothes. I’ve definitely worn some hand-me-down thoughts, though. I carried around hand-me-down opinions and preferences for decades. I’ve adopted boatloads of hand-me-down worries, and lots of hand-me-down identities.Many of them felt familiar, like they fit. Like they had been

Gazeless Gaze

“Establish a drishti, a gazeless gaze toward something in the room that’s not moving,” the teacher tells the class. My eyes settle on a grain of white wood molding where the floor and wall meet, about seven feet in front of me. The instant my gaze settles into that spot, my body is steadier. When we have

The Game of Life is No Different from The Game of Life

Life is already living you, making your decisions, steering you along the way. It always has been.Life doesn’t care if you see that it works this way or not. It’s still living you. There is nothing you must see or know in order for this to be the case.I’m not talking about things being predestined;

Not It

I’m not a quiet person. I’m not a guarded person or a person who loves control. I’m not a high achiever or a modest achiever or any kind of achiever. Thought that was consistent with some of those qualities moved through me in the past, and I identified with it and acted accordingly. But that no longer looks