In case you haven’t figured it out yet, the thing I’m most passionate about is awakening to our true nature.
It’s amazing to know that in any moment we can shift our attention away
from thoughts and feelings that bring about suffering and rest in the luminous timeless presence, here right now, that underlies everything.
Without the belief in the personal self, we’re knowingly conscious, alive, openhearted, and peaceful.
It’s always possible
to:
- Form a new relationship with programmed habits so they lose their power;
- Embrace feelings with deep love and care;
- See situations through clear eyes, not ones veiled by fear and lack; and
- Know that your true identity is not anything your thoughts tell you that you are.
Isn’t that fantastic? Once you realize you’re suffering, you know that you can be free of it! You can expand your attention beyond the ideas of the personal self into spaciousness and essential well-being. It’s liberating!
Suffering comes from identifying with conditioned habits. They grab your attention and pull you along so you feel like there’s no other way to be.
That’s why the fire for awakening is so helpful. It invites you to step off the familiar treadmill of conditioning
and open to everything without resistance.
Whatever is in you to be felt comes out of the shadows and into the light of loving awareness. Even though it sounds like a paradox, the end of hiding from your own pain is the beginning of the deepest peace imaginable.
So how do we stoke the fire for awakening?
The Fire for Being Aware
Life breathes itself into form, layered with personal reactions, needs, and desires. When we’re
unaware of these experiences, we live as if they are the truth of who we are. But when we turn our attention into them, worlds open up.
We get to see that what our thoughts are saying just isn’t true. We get to feel emotions without being caught up in the story of them.
Bringing awareness to your experience is a revelation!
The Fire to Investigate
Awakening shines the light of consciousness on everything. No longer identifying with familiar patterns and mental ideas,
there’s space to open fully to your experience.
Amazingly, you realize you can befriend fear, get curious about a sense of lack that may be present, and meet long-standing sorrow with infinite compassion. Then you learn how these feeling experiences drive the behaviors that keep you stuck and unhappy.
Become an expert in how you suffer, and so you can make the choice to be free.
The Fire for Love
Loving whatever arises stops the inner war with your experience. You welcome what appears with so
much acceptance that it begins to dissolve.
No longer stuck in trying to figure everything out, you’re available to whatever arises in daily life with generosity and openheartedness.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
The fire for awakening burns up everything in its path. Take your habits and conditioning, your beliefs and stories, and throw them all in the holy fire of truth. Then see what remains.
Here you are—fresh,
alive, and free!
Sending much love...💛
Gail
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