Choices

Today I wanted to share another essay from Jan Frazier, she does not know this, but I believe she is my guru :-). She would laugh. Happy Monday! XOXO

Choice in Surprising Places

Jan Frazier March 4th, 2011 -->
Choice lies quietly in many unexpected places, like an animal in hibernation. You come very near it many times a day, but you never know it’s there. The potential for choice lives in dynamics and processes you might never think to notice, let alone go looking for it there (never mind actually exercising it). This is the kind of choice that hides in plain sight, and if only you realized it was there for the looking, there for the seizing, your life might dramatically change.
Have no doubt: the change would be for the better.
It isn’t because of awakening that option now exists. It’s that seeing from the awake perspective makes it possible to recognize the freedom that was there right along.
Many spiritual revelations are of this nature: places there turn out to be option (which is to say, freedom) where they had not been seen before. When someone wakes up, it is all clearly seen. It’s a true shock to the system, the discovery of all the places freedom has always been — but unrecognized. Understand: it isn’t because of awakening that option now exists. It’s that seeing from the awake perspective makes it possible to recognize the freedom that was there right along.
The choices are seen to flower everywhere, abundant as air — ubiquitous as suffering was before. You recall vividly how at the time, on the deep level of understanding running beneath daily life, it never felt as though choice had any part to play in much of the activity of your mind, or how life was experienced by you. It’s the knock upside the head that says: I needn’t have ever suffered. But you sure as heck couldn’t see that at the time.
Then again, maybe you never thought to look.
When the idea of choice in a human life is considered, it’s usually in the context of action, behavior, decision: the choice to live here or to live there; the choice to eat this or to eat that, to pursue this career or that one. We tend to think we are pretty much stuck with all the interior stuff, that it is given, simply part of who we are. It’s the deck we are dealt, the way life has unfolded. We tend to believe option comes into play only at the level of behavior. But observable action is the least significant realm where choice operates. The truly life-changing choices are realized inside, silently, often passively, almost always unconsciously, below the level of seeing. What is not seen cannot be done differently.
How often do we say or think I can’t help it. My mother made me this way. It’s genetics. It’s because I’m a Scorpio. It’s my karma. My conditioning. My age. My difficult childhood. On and on and on. How many ways we come up with to say — I am at the mercy of something larger than myself.
There’s more to it than what we ordinarily see.
The purpose of this present looking is to reach down into the dark of the unrecognized and to pull it up into the light.
Here are some generally unrecognized choices:
♦ React or not (inwardly as well as outwardly)
♦ Where to focus attention right now (the situation or your inner state? the present or some mental item?)
♦ Feel your real feelings or escape into a head full of defensive/resistant thoughts
♦ See life as a drain on the spiritual or see it as the arena where aliveness is experienced
♦ Let outer circumstances determine your inner state, or not
♦ Resist or accept
♦ Let the recent past cling (Velcro), or let it slide off (Teflon) in favor of experiencing this new moment
♦ Believe your thoughts or not
♦ Haul around your painful past or set it down
♦ Give attention to something (notice it, be with it) or think about it (evaluate, obsess)
♦ Identify with your conditioning, your beliefs, or just see them as conditioning and beliefs
♦ Judge your thoughts and behavior or simply see them
♦ Judge others or simply see them
♦ Use your mind for what it’s good for (learning, planning, deciding) or let it run you
♦ Believe in the absolute reality of your familiar self . . . or decline to
That last is the big one. That is the mega-choice. It’s the difference between being awake and not. It’s the choice to live as though you are pure ego, or to live as though you are pure awareness.
The items on the list are explored, in detail, throughout this book [book in progress]. But they bear looking at as a group. The invitation is to begin to notice how you experience the absence of fundamental kinds of choices in your own life — to see if you can find where you draw heavy boundary lines for yourself, where you place limits on possibility, and you assume those lines are fixed by some overwhelming force, not subject to relocation (or removal). Discover the limitations you believe to be inherent to the human (or your particular) condition.
It’s the assumptions you don’t know are operating that imprison you.
Just by setting in motion a gentle background inquiry into your assumptions about choice or its absence, your eyes can open to fresh seeing. Being willing to look at this can lead to a shifting of the lines around what is possible for you. The discovery of an unexamined assumption opens the door to the possibility that I could be wrong.
Maybe you’re not as trapped as you think you are.
We are all two selves. There is the familiar self we each seem to be, the one that is able to suffer. Then there is the other self. This one is pure, featureless, diffuse awareness. This self does not have gender or beliefs, nor has it been affected by any experience. This self is the same in each person. (It’s the same even in “bad” people, though the mind may not welcome this idea.)
This self does not mind a single thing. Imagine.
But it is alive. It is exquisitely attuned to the real. It does not experience itself as separate from anything. It does not age. It does not fear death.
This self is undifferentiated. It is spaciousness itself. When it notices the presence of itself, in moment-to-moment life, there is an experience of barely discernible sweetness, like watery maple sap right out of the tree. Not the concentrated sweetness of the boiled-down version, like mystical bliss or physical orgasm. It is subtle. This self is so all-pervasive, so yielding and tender, that it is able to contain the misery and variety of the whole world, all the while sensing its own presence everywhere.
The primary unseen choice that is constantly being made is to identify with something that is not that.
Seldom does anyone consciously choose to identify with the familiar self — the one subject to experience and belief. But it’s happening. Every single day, every moment of ordinary life, the identification is ongoing. Even just to recognize that it’s happening — to see the artificiality of it — can enable awareness of the other to leak through sometimes into a moment.
It might come in a moment of particular stillness. A moment when you’ve become lost in the feathers of a bird you are looking at. A moment on the edge of sleep, or one in which you’re riveted on a dancer on a stage. Or when you have a paintbrush in your hand, and all the world grows still, and there are no problems anywhere that you can find.
The awareness could come in a war zone too — in a situation where things are so terrible that you could die the next moment. Yes, it can be in such a place and time that this thing comes to you. People have spoken of knowing this exquisite self when they were in concentration camps, of sensing the living presence of a reality apart from the hideous one they were trapped in.
It is everywhere, always. Like maple sap, thin as water, it runs, spills, soaks all it touches. Including you, at your essence. This is what you are. Directly sensing this, you take the rest of what you are to be incidental. It becomes lightly held. Even as you age. Even as people you love die. Even as there are wars. Even as the polar ice caps are melting.
I’m trying to tell you something.
We choose every moment we live to identify with something limited and in constant flux — with our narrowly-defined selves. We can opt not to. It may not look as though we have option. That doesn’t mean we don’t.
We are, mostly, blind.
[From book in progress] by Jan Frazier.

A Happy Life

I start my mornings with these essays by Jan frazier. She is a miracle for me. I love her. I have spoken to her on the phone and she is the real deal. Enlightened. Wanted to share the one I read today. Happy Thursday! xoxo


There is Nothing Wrong with Your Life

Jan Frazier December 25th, 2011 -->
There is nothing wrong with your life. Whoever you are, whatever your circumstances, this is the case. But — but — you say. Honest, it is true: nothing wrong.
You could say it like this: fixing all of the things that seem to be wrong would not leave you with a good life. A good life isn’t about nothing being wrong with it. It’s about it not mattering if there are wrong things.
How can it not matter? How does that happen? When you don’t rely on your life to make you happy. When you don’t let what’s wrong with it affect you. Because that’s when you get a happy life. A great life.
What makes a person unhappy is that they think there is a connection between the life stuff and their happiness. That is the problem.
But then you say — How can happiness come, if not from the life stuff? Where does it come from?
It comes from nothing, from nowhere. From nothingness.
You could also say it like this: all kinds of stuff is wrong with your life. And none of it matters.
What makes a person unhappy isn’t that there is something wrong with their life. Though this is what they suppose, that they are unhappy because of the stuff that is wrong: the lousy marriage, the inadequate income. The excess weight. The skunk that lives under the porch. The car that won’t start on cold mornings. The kid that refuses to do homework.
What makes a person unhappy is that they think there is a connection between the life stuff and their happiness. That is the problem. Once you get out from under that confusion, then it pretty much doesn’t matter how many wrong things there are, or how seriously wrong they seem to be. Even all piled together, coming all at once on the same day, they can’t make you unhappy. If they were all fixed, that wouldn’t make you happier. What a revelation.
This is the revelation. This is the good news. (What else do you suppose Jesus was talking about?) Who will believe it though? It isn’t what anybody expects. But what a relief.
Everybody can take a break from trying to fix their lives. Talk about relief. Instead of trying to fix the body, the car; instead of trying to get rid of the animals under the porch, the imperfect spouse — none of which will make you happy, even if you could bring it about (you know this) — instead, figure out how none of it has anything to do with happiness. Make a little project of it. Just do that one thing. It’s all you have to do, really. Figure out how disconnected the wrong stuff is from who you really and truly are. How far away it all is. Not even touching it.
This is equally true of the right stuff — the parts of life that are going well. They aren’t any more connected with how you are doing inside, deeply, than the wrong stuff is. None of it has anything at all to do with it.
Are you surprised? If you can find your way to the beating heart of who you truly are, you’ll discover it’s never cared a fig for what’s been wrong out there, nor has it even noticed any of it, really. It can’t get interested. Even the good stuff in your life can’t get its attention. It’s too content to notice.

Sunday Inspiration

I am a big fan of the writer Jan Frazier and whenever I need a shot in my spiritual arm, or feel anxious or sad I go read one of her essay's and always come away feeling full of grace.
Here is what I read today:
Jan Frazier April 23rd, 2011 -->
Open the Door

On the other side of the familiar is the extraordinary.
Have you always known this was so?
That quiet hunch, that there is more to you?
More to life than the day-to-day absence of satisfaction?
Everything a door, every wall an opening, on second look.
Every floor a trapdoor.
Every solid thing you lean against, a thing on hinges.
When you walk through and look back, it’s gone.
When you drop through and look up, there’s only sky.
You are floating but nothing’s holding you up.
It isn’t the way it appears to be.
You aren’t what you think you are.
When you think you’ve got it, and you put your fingers around it,
your hand comes up empty.
There never was anything to be afraid of.
Outside the room of every terror,
someone is looking in the window, smiling.
That’s you.
Give it a go. You don’t have forever.
What if you had only a day in which to do
the one thing that matters?
Today is the day.
Don’t try too hard to figure out what this means.
Smell something burning?
It’s the inside of your head.
Just let yourself fall backwards.
Never mind wondering if you’ll be caught.
Be quiet.
Let yourself rest from all the effort.
It isn’t a dream.
It’s real.
You are the dream.
Know what you know.
Open the door.

I hope you enjoyed this thought provoking bit of writing.
I am off to work on paintings I have been struggling with for weeks. I went to an art show last night and was very inspired by a Taos artist named Tom Dixon. Hopefully some of that inspiration will help :-).
Happy Sunday! XOXO

EPIPHANY!

I had a huge epiphany this morning, thanks to the wonderful writer Jan Frazier, she had a little audio on her site called Getting Unstuck and I listened to it and I cried the whole way through because she was speaking to me. What it all boils down to is that my whole adult life and some of my childhood I have been on a spiritual quest to wake up. Jan has woke up and she has become an important guide. What I learned this morning is so huge, so big that I know it is life altering, though what that will look like in time I have no idea. The main thing I learned is: You cannot take refuge in your larger being to avoid dealing with what is going on, the painful stuff. Wow.

I have been taking refuge in my larger god self my whole life, I thought it was what you did to be a spiritual person, to wake up. No wonder I have been feeling stuck for most of my life!!! It also goes along with my work with "The Process", part of the process is that you are to jump into the uncomfortable stuff, a step I sometimes gloss over. Clearly I like to avoid pain, don't we all? But Jan says in order to move away from the pain you have to feel it first, usually when I feel any kind of pain I use one of my spiritual techniques to push the pain away and I feel so good that I was able to stay happy. Nothing wrong with happiness, but nothing wrong with pain either, that's the point. I don't mean wallow in victim hood and woe is me, I mean just feel what is happening in each moment and deal with it instead of trying to always fix it. I know many of you are also on a spiritual quest so I wanted to share this information. Go here and listen to the audio yourself, you will be glad you did. Happy Sunday!!!! XOXO

Winds of change

I am not sure what is happening to me, well I am, but I can't really explain it, but what it means it that I am in a state of joy like you can't believe. I have so much energy and things are flowing in such a sweet way that I just could not hold it in and had to share. I also feel a new body of painting work coming, something fresh and different for me, not sure what it is yet, but I feel it forming around this new found happiness. I have opened the door to my spirit and finally it is free. How did I do that? Can't really tell you how, I just opened the door, the door we all keep shut out of fear or disbelief. If you really want to know what I am talking about go get Jan Frazier's book, at this link: http://www.janfrazierteachings.com/blog/, she can't tell you how to get this joy either, but she explains it a whole lot better than me. All those that are totally confused, sorry, this is my blog and I am allowed to be confusing :-). Happy Saturday! What are you up to today? I always want to know. XOXO

Sharing the adventure

A peaceful life can’t be provided for in a comprehensive way — taking care of the imagined future, for instance, or reaching out to the larger surroundings to insure security and comfort, a certain way of living. How to have a peaceful life really comes down to a very small thing: how to have a peaceful moment. This is a doable thing. -Jan Frazier

This post is my attempt to share my spiritual journey with you. I know many of you are also on your own journey and this post is for you. I also have many readers who don't give a fig about any of it and that is okay too :-). My story of how I came to this place today in my journey would take a zillion posts to relate, so I will try to explain it in a way that won't put you to sleep :-).
Since I was small, say 6 years old, I have known that I have a spirit inside and I have had a deep relationship with it. The last year it has grown deeper still and now I am on a cliff ready to jump into the adventure of my life. To dwell always in the blissful energy that is my soul. I have had many teachers on my way and the one who is helping me at the moment is a wonderful writer by the name of Jan Frazier. She has written a powerful, awe inspiring book called"When Fear Falls Away" The story of a sudden awakening. This book shows us what is possible and I relate because I have already tasted of the nectar she so beautifully writes about. Is it possible to be in a state of love, bliss and trust all the time? Yes, yes it is and she is proof. The most amazing thing is that it is our choice to do so if we wish it. If you have an interest I would urge you to check out her site and her book, it will blow you away. Happy Monday! XOXO