Don’t Just Do Something, Sit There
For just a moment in your frantically busy life, don’t just do something. Sit there.
We are, after all, called human beings, not human doings. Perhaps there is a message in that. Perhaps there is a hint. In the Soto Zen practice of Shikantaza meditation is called “just sitting”. Meditation is already doing far too much. We often have a goal when we meditate. We want to become peaceful. We want to silence our monkey mind. We want to become enlightened. This is doing. So just sitting is far better. But even just sitting is doing too much.
What about just being? Is that not enough? Just being what? you may ask. Not being anything at all. Just being.
In our helter-skeleter, always doing world, we are constantly trying to become something. We are trying to become better, smarter, thinner, more successful, more compassionate, more spiritual, more enlightened. We have completely forgotten how to simply be. We have forgotten this absolutely incredible, mind-blowing miracle of simply existing.
And this is why we’re always trying to become something else. We don’t have a clue of how amazing it is to simply be what we are because we don’t have a clue of what we are. And we’re never going to find out what we are if we don’t stop this constant doing and, for just a moment, take a breath and simply be.
We can’t make an effort to be. That would just be more doing. We have to stop doing, stop trying, stop thinking, just stop and simply be.
What could be easier than this? You already exist, don’t you? There, you have succeeded. Mission accomplished. Now relax. Take some time and savor the rewards.
How else can you discover who you are if you can’t simply be? This is not something you can discover in any book or spiritual teaching. This is not something you can discover through exhaustive spiritual searching and practices. It is far simpler than any of that. You are already It. Now discover what that It is. And you can only do that by simply being.
The Spiritual Mid-Wife
I am a spiritual mid-wife.
I take people lost in fear, regret, anger and grief, in human suffering, and help them discover the great freedom of their Enlightened Self.
Is life not quite as fulfilling as you know it can be? You’ve worked so hard on yourself, but still there’s something missing. You don’t feel complete yet. You can almost taste that indefinable something but it always seems just out of reach. These are your birth pains.
What is it you are seeking so desperately? What is calling you? What are you yearning for? Is it a love that never fades, that always loves you completely no matter what? Is it a peace that is always here no matter what circumstances come or go? Is it a deep inner well-being, satisfaction and joy that is always here and depends on nothing at all?
Yes, My Dear, that is all here. All of this is true. And this is what you will discover. This is what is coming to you. This is the realization you are giving birth to.
I am a spiritual mid-wife. I work with people who are ready to pop, like you, ready for that next breakthrough that will liberate them.
The deepest wounding any of us can experience is the sense of separation from others, from life, from God. All misery stems from this. All anger, fear, grief, doubt and confusion comes from this feeling of separation. And all of us experience this. And yet this has never been true. We have always been one. We have always been free. We have always been complete. And this is what I help you discover. This is the job of a spiritual mid-wife. I help you give birth to your True Enlightened Self.
Can you feel it coming even now? That great longing you experience is just birth pains, just contractions. It is a process, just like birth, and you may need some guidance. I am here for you. That is my purpose. I’m a spiritual mid-wife. And I am here to help you give birth to your True Enlightened Self.
Living Words
There is a wonderful teaching in Zen about words that are alive and words that are dead. Living words arise spontaneously. They are fresh, creative and original, like life itself. Living words are always born new and innocent in each moment. They never carry the carcass of the past with them. Living words can only arise from the heart in this very moment.
When one speaks or writes living words, there is never any thought of what one is going to say. It is as much a surprise to the speaker or writer as it is to the one who hears it or reads it. This is why living words can only come from the heart and never from the mind.
Dead words come from the mind. They come from the past. It may be a thought you had only a second earlier that you feel like sharing. But this is already dead. When we speak about things we read or events we remember, we are dragging the past into the present. We are speaking dead words.
If we speak purely from our heart, if the past and future completely disappear, then words can be re-born and become living words. We don’t need to analyze words, speech or writing to know which are living words and which are dead words. This would be impossible for the mind. Fortunately our heart always knows.
It’s something we can pay attention to in our own life. Are we speaking living words? Are words flowing spontaneously from our heart, from a place beyond the mind and thoughts? Do they flow effortlessly as if we, as an individual person, are not speaking them? Do they seem to have a wisdom far beyond our own. Are they perfectly suited to this moment and the one they are spoken to?
Or are we merely speaking our thoughts? Is it just a rehash of things we have thought before, perhaps combined in a new way? Are we merely regurgitating things we have read or heard that we believe are true? Or that simply sound good? If so, these are dead words and they keep us and our listener from being fully present. They keep us from being truly alive.
Notice if any teachers or experts you have read or heard speak use living words or dead words? You cannot notice this with the mind. The mind loves hearing new facts and intriguing information. The mind loves being entertained. The mind loves dead words. It doesn’t really know what to make of living words.
The mind also doesn’t know what to make of Truth. Truth can only be in the present moment as this is all that is real. And the mind lives in the past. Lets say you need to make a speech or simply speak to someone tomorrow. You plan out in your mind what you are going to say. If it is a speech, you may even practice it. In your mind you are imagining that tomorrow will be exactly like today just one day later. You are imagining a whole scenario for how you hope the speech or discussion will go. When tomorrow comes you are so focused on what you imagine is going to happen that you completely miss what is actually going on. You take words that may have been appropriate yesterday when you were planning them and bring them into today where they may not be appropriate to this moment at all. And you wouldn’t even realize this. This is speaking with dead words. This is bringing the dead past into the living present.
It takes a great deal of trust and faith in the present to surrender all that mental planning and imagining and simply be in the moment and speak spontaneously from that moment. It doesn’t mean you can’t prepare facts or information you may need. But be fully present and speak to that present. Don’t carry the corpse of the past with you into the present. It kills your awareness of the present and it kills your life.
When you use living words, you are alive. When you use dead words you are dead and so are the ones who hear you. You kill everything with dead words. The whole world becomes dead, trapped in the past.
When you are present you are aware of everything. You are aware of what your audience needs to hear in that exact moment. You are no longer caught in “I, I, I”. “I want to share this.” “I need them to hear or do this.” “I hope they like me and what I am going to say.” This limits your entire reality to just the “I”. When you do this you have drastically limited and chocked off the reality of life in this moment. When you do this you are disconnected from life. This is what it means to speak with dead words. This is what it means to carry the corpse of the past into the living present.
Speak with living words. Be present. Let the present take care of itself. If you are fully present you will know exactly what to say in each moment. It is not your mind that will be speaking, but your heart, your entire being.
You Are Infinite Awareness
Expanded awareness is coming into realization of what you actually are. This expanded awareness can be experienced to incredible expansion, infinite expansion. So this must be what we are. We are aware of the infinite and the limited both simultaneously, so we must be this infinite awareness. If we were the limited awareness we could not possibly also be aware of the infinite awareness.
So this infinite awareness is what we are. Little by little we accept this more and more. Little by little we let go of the belief in this limited self and allow ourselves to experience more and more of our unlimited self.
Awakening is a process of letting go of the untrue and realizing the true that has always been here. It is the realization that you have always been Home.
Who Are You?
Don’t be satisfied with any answer.
Allow the question to
burn up all answers.
Allow the question to
burn up all questions.
Allow the question to
burn up this “I” completely.
Right now. Right here.
Who are you?
Welcome Home.