But upon waking, you must deal with the condition of your own house.

Moves to reorganize your context will create conflict with your whole world. Your house will shake at the foundations and all the people inside will feel it.

They may support you. They may resist you. They may envy you. They may follow you.

But change in you affects everyone around you.

Everyone has to make room for it.

Everyone has to respond.

The fall of the house of pain

You will feel different to the the people you know and love. And you will relate to them differently.

The details that characterize your life will change, and those new details will require adjustments in the details of the lives of those around you.

This creates pain in others, who, in their turn, must learn a constructive response to pain — just as you did — in order to benefit from the opportunity it provides.

And the details you choose to change will cause other details in your life to change, almost automatically.

For example, negative behavior relies on negative thinking to sustain itself. Start working on how you think. How you act will change.

This will bring more pain of course, more conflict with your existing context, and continued need for constructive response.

But after a lot of that, the result is a life reorganized.

Reconstituted.

Redirected.

Renewed.

Lots of people doing this would have a similar effect on the world.

Self love is essential

Embracing pain may not take it away. It may not cure the cancer or save the relationship. But your immediate experience of life will be altered.

Yet, without vigorous self love, without a strong efficacious desire for your own well being, you won’t dare permit pain to spread through your house.

You will not allow yourself to fully penetrate your suffering.

You won’t undertake the rigors of revising your context.

You will refuse to acknowledge the information pain conveys. You will ignore the nonconstructive ways — that pain reveals — in which you are weak, ignorant, vulnerable to distraction.

But if you can face pain, weather it, allow it to emerge, expand, contract again, you will grow.

You will learn.

You will begin to listen to your pain. To heed it. To see it as an indicator.

To read it like a marker on a map.

You will see people, the world and yourself as they really are.

Your illusions will shrivel up and die.

Leaving only the crystal morning of pure presence.

A new baseline

You were born to experience life. Building a relationship with your pain will provide a sturdy basis for doing that.

A reliable beginning point.

A new nexus for experience.

What you bring to each moment will change, so that how you experience each moment will be different.

Purposeful. Non-escapist. Real.

Its potential ready, at the surface.

Real may not always be pleasant or easy. But it’s always the best place to begin.

If you can stay in it when the pain comes, you will continue to manifest God.

Continue to radiate light.

Continue to fully be you.

Or begin to.

The sidelong glance at the universe

The Life Force does not quit. This Great Making of which we are a part is unstoppable.

And it is bent on only one thing: our prosperity.

It wants us to thrive as it thrives. Thrive with its thriving.

To be facets of its burgeoning and to ride that burgeoning into the unknown, unforeseeable reaches of possibility.

Every last one of us.

This Life Force, this Great Making has been working with our machinations for as long as we’ve been pulling them.

It flourishes in spite of our foolishness. Our fear. Our resistance.

Each one of us feels it, inside, always just beneath the surface, grating against our lethargy, our laziness, our negativity.

Insisting there is another way. Demanding we try it. Pointing out our potential and juxtaposing it with our unwillingness.

But we don’t trust it.

It’s as simple as that.

Instead we live in a constant state of readiness for catastrophe.

Trust in life

Still, the seeds of prosperity are contained in the heart of every moment of every day of our lives.

Waiting to be cultivated.

To sprout.

And to grow.

But that requires our participation. Which requires our trust. And of all the risks that life places before us, the hardest is risking trust in life itself.

If we could learn to move with the Great Making instead of against it, our moment-to-moment experience would change.

Our sense of ourselves would expand.

Our capacity for joy and our awareness of beauty would open.

We would see life for the mythic adventure that it is, fraught with peril and reward, risk and challenge, struggle and respite. With an ultimate goal of full life only got to through long endeavor.

It is the distorted perspective on pain that thwarts this long-range view, that confuses instant gratification for fulfillment, and distracts us into an unwillingness to live.

Cultivate basic trust in life and your willingness to engage in it will intensify.

You will grow thirsty for it in all its forms.

And more adept at shaping it according to your sense of possibility.

Of loss.

And to an underlying, even unconscious, sense of separation from the rest of everything.

From each other. From the world. From God.

From ourselves.

It’s that separation from self on which the whole thing rests. When you deny some aspect of yourself, you are cut off from the whole.

Separated.

We grab onto whatever we’re used to. A known quantity. Even if it does not serve us. Even if it’s destructive.

A behavior.

A fantasy.

A situation.

A relationship.

For fear of being left with nothing.

Not realizing that our birthright and our most natural state is to live in connection and prosperity, based on the full, free expression of who we are.

Fullness of life.

But the only way to experience fullness of life is to do it with your whole self. So you have to practice reaching out to the various parts of your being.

Even the parts that hurt.

Because you are your own access point to the richness and fullness that is possible in this life.

A heritage of pain

We have experienced pain throughout our history as individuals and as a group. Harshness, darkness and catastrophe are stamped on our brain stems.

As a result, each of us, to varying degrees, experiences a lack of trust in our own well being.

The simple fact that our lifespan is limited creates a pressure nobody can escape.

This lack of trust is like a net, capturing and accumulating more and more pain, more and more distrust of the universe. We pass it on to our kids and they create a new version of it, adding details from their own experience.

And as a group we weave it into our social fabric. We devise systems to work around it and prevent it’s presence from becoming too noticeable.

We fashion from it a context.

Such a context does not necessarily support a trusting view of the universe. It makes it hard to establish a baseline of confidence that everything we need to thrive right here, right now in the world, is all around us all the time.

But it’s important to remember that this is a context of our own making.

And if we made one context, we can make another.

Stuck at the starting line

The alternative is avoidance. Denial. Pretending the pain is not there, or living with it and with the distorting influence it has on your perspective.

But trying to avoid pain requires flight from the now.

You have to check out.

And when you check out your life passes you by.

You become ineffective on your own behalf, and on the behalf of those you love.

Because denial keeps you from facing pain. It keeps you from going to to the place in yourself where pain lives. And if you don’t face pain you can’t let go of it. And if you don’t let go of it you remain stuck in it.

The only way to really deal with pain is to head into it, face it, make room for it in your day.

It’s taking up space anyway. More than it should. More than it really needs to. When you avoid pain it starts to overstep its bounds and crowd out other things.

Things you need.

Like joy.

And relationship.

And creativity.

And stuff.

When you don’t face pain and learn to move with it, it becomes an obstacle to life.

And your context does not change.

The cycle of pleasure and pain continues.

Altering course

The first step in revising your context in favor of fullness is to face the pain you’re already in. And to learn not to add to that pain unnecessarily.

Above all you accomplish this by having compassion for yourself, and by allowing that compassion to advise you in making choices that support full life. Even if those choice are hard, or bring challenge.

Choices made moment to moment can keep your situation fine-tuned for prosperity. With practice and attention, you develop the perspicacity to discern the best choices, and the reflexes to make them quickly.

Through a slow steady adjustment of momentum, you can turn the ship around.

By stopping to encounter pain when it comes, and not turning to the next convenient form of imbalance, we can begin to arrest the cycle of pleasure and pain in which we tend to operate.

The counter-intuitive alternative to that cycle, is to accept the pain, embrace it, and engage with it time and again in a constructive way intended to resolve it.

It runs against instinct, reflex and the demands of the fear-stamped brain stem.

And it feels hopeless when you’re trying to do it. Because you’re not just altering your own momentum and perspective, but those of your ancestors, which are built into you.

Like the color of your eyes.

Changing the color of your eyes

But with enough practice, you begin to see above the pain. You get a view of life’s expanse, and a more certain awareness that although life contains pain, it is not contained by it.

As you engage in this process you engage in the exploration of your inner landscape. You seek and find aspects of yourself previously hidden or held captive by pain you did not want to face.

You stop clinging to the agencies of pain that hold you in conflict with the flow of your life and the movements of the universe.

You step into connection.

Into sync.

Into trust that your life as it is now contains everything you need to fashion for yourself the life you want.

Into a willingness to act on the belief that fullness is waiting for you beyond the negativity you may have come to rely on.

It’s weird.

And it perpetuates pain.

It causes a state of lock down. We hate the recurring pain in our lives, but we do not change the root causes. In fact we repeat them, sometimes on purpose.

We don’t change the little things we can change. Because they are familiar and predictable.

We cling to life as we know it.

Because we know it.

Even if we hate it. Even if it frustrates or endangers us.

This lock down chokes off possibility, hinders vision, and creates an addiction to relief.

Not progress or growth. Not constructive, incremental change.

Relief.

The temporary superficial alleviation of pain through distraction.

The cycle of pleasure and pain

There is a revolving door between pain and relief. We tend to alternate between these two states in a never ending loop.When pain arises, we shift to a different imbalance, one we think we can manage.

It happens by reflex and we don’t recognize it for the avoidance that it is:

Booze.

Work.

Sex.

Jogging.

Television.

Or the bizarre anti-pleasure, the strange shelter of self negation.

Just something other than the pain we’re in.

Then the pain passes and we feel okay again.

At this point we begin the inner monologue that says it was no big deal. It isn’t a problem. It has no root cause, and on and on.

We pretend it will never happen again. That it has not happened a thousand times before.

We move on from the pain and don’t look back. We transition into a place that feels manageable, even if still unsatisfactory, and from there we continue to live our lives.

Until the pain returns.

When it does, we escape, wait it out, and reemerge to keep walking when its gone.

Until it comes back again.

This is the cycle of pleasure and pain.

And the pain always returns.

Always.

Because it never really left.

Original pain

Original pain is the pain you’re in anyway, no matter what your life is doing.

It is the accumulation of moments when you were not loved, when you were rejected, when you were ignored, back when your circumstances were beyond your control.

Added together these experiences determined your base expectation of what life can be, and have provided momentum for continued accumulation of similar experiences ever since.

This pain is in everything we do, always lurking in the background. And it takes a unique shape in each unique life. It organizes and presents itself based on our attitudes, circumstances and experiences.

It’s in the details with which we have saddled ourselves over time.

When external pain comes, in whatever shape, it interfaces with this original pain.

Rubs against it.

Adding to the external exigency a refreshed experience of the pain you were already in. Which only makes the external exigency harder.

The deep roots of this pain are ancient. Older than you. Older than your parents. Older than your grandparents.

It comes down to you from times lost, but has been sustained, like heredity, through the generations.

And suffered by all of them.

It’s trans-generational pain, onto which more and more pain is added, until we do something about it. To work with it, to heal it, is to do so on behalf of your entire family working backward into the mists of the past.

Trap door into the cycle

This under-the-surface-pain swells up when external pain comes. It makes tough situations tougher. Pain from the outside gets sifted through your understanding of pain which is based on previous experience, and you go through it in that acquired, semi-voluntary way:

The sense that you can’t escape.

That it’s never going to change.

That you’ve been singled out by the universe.

These distortions and others like them make external pain much worse than it needs to be, and push you toward temporary relief.

You, trying to wake up

In the cycle of pleasure and pain, we keep meeting circumstances in life that rouse the original pain. Circumstances that change in detail, but are actually repeat experiences of the same persistent pain.

If you look, you’ll notice patterns. Similarities shared by the pains you go through in life. Different details but the same underneath.

Repeat frustration. Repeat disappointment. Repeat pain. It can seem truly hopeless.

But it’s not.

It’s you seeking the healing you need from life. It’s your life force compelling you into circumstances you need to get your weaknesses tweaked, prodded, aggravated.

So you’ll see what you need.

This explains the sense of being drawn to what hurts you.

Annoys you.

Destroys you.

It’s you trying to wake up to your situation.

It’s you exploring your pain. Learning it.

So you can heal it.

So you can grow.

Or, it can be.

A different kind of door

Look at your responses. Look at how you think and feel in various circumstances.

Begin.

Observe.

When you find yourself in pain, try to separate from it. Get a look at it. Just to see.

It’s really hard to do at first, simply because it’s hard to remember to do it.

But do it.

Because if your original pain were healed, or tended in a conscious way, the external pains of life, however big, would change.

Your sense of safety would not be tied up in them. Your sense of well being would not be contingent upon them. Your notion of who you are would not be based on them.

Sorrow, disappointment and loss still happen. Pain is still a radical experience.

But purified.

Freed from the original pain. The inherited pain. The acquired pain. The pain that latches on to the present moment to fill it with irrelevant static.

The pain that in reality has nothing to do with you, but was foisted upon you by ignorance, at a time when all you could do was absorb it.

With that out of the way, or at least out in the open, you will be far more effective in dealing with the turns of life.

You will have access to your self, your joy, and all your inner resources, no matter what kind of storm is raging.

We tend to recoil from pain. So we don’t easily learn from it. It can take repeated, prolonged encounters with the same form of pain before insight happens.

From malfunctions in relationship, to taking things personally at work, to holding on to anger, to world wars.

It’s the same problem: in recoiling from pain, we move not toward balance, but toward a different form of imbalance.

And that’s guaranteed to perpetuate pain.

To make it worse. To compound it over time. To weave it into the fabric of how we do things.

…a distorted experience of pain…

Each time we do it we traumatize ourselves. We place ourselves in damaging circumstances from which there is no escape.

No escape because our response is not transformation.

Instead we reorganize the pain into a less noticeable form. And that difference provides a moment of distraction which we mistake for change.

In doing this we heap trauma on top of trauma before the previous trauma can heal.

And it tracks back to the days when we were not responsible. When we had no control over our circumstances. We crossed over into responsibility with a distorted experience of pain.

A distorted understanding of it.

Dysfunctional methods of responding to it.

Or no methods at all.

Face to the storm

The only way to mitigate pain is to head into it. Let it wash over you. It’s literally like standing in heavy surf: you have to do it on purpose.

This allows you to observe your pain, discover the behaviors and attitudes from which it stems, and change them.

The behaviors and attitudes, specific and unique to you, that create friction with the universe.

Behaviors and attitudes you picked up early on, which have been strengthened and polished by your experience, and by your responses to experience.

Which flow from your behaviors and attitudes.

…keeping your balance is crucial to witnessing the opportunity of pain.

It’s a circle that keeps you standing in one place.

If you can arrest your responses to pain and adversity before they come flying out of you, stop and pay attention to what’s happening, you’ve got a shot at changing them.

Because when you can do that you can keep functioning in the midst of your pain. You can keep your balance.

And keeping your balance is crucial to witnessing the opportunity of pain.

But we tend, as individuals and as a species, not to do this.

Your are not your circumstances

There is a distortion in our perspective that claims our circumstances are all there is to it.

That life is comprehensively described by our pain. Our frustrations. Our failures.

That notions of improvement and change are fantasy. Unattainable. Reserved for others.

It’s not a conscious choice to think this way. It’s an autopilot setting. On the dial next to the I suck setting and the it’s too late setting.

Ingrained into you while your perspective was still being shaped. By circumstances, by experiences, and by people who had already advanced their own lives along the same misdirected path.

Once this is up and running, it’s hard to see possibility.

Or take it seriously when you do.

Pain begets pain

On this unstable foundation, layer upon layer of experience accumulates, all distorted just a little, into a world view and a set of emotional reflexes that keep us set up for pain.

It’s no way to live.

Because the fact is, even if your circumstances can’t change (which is rare), how you manage them can.

What you bring to them can.

What you contribute to them can.

And what you take from them can.

Over time these factors influence if not determine what your circumstances are.

One circumstance becomes the key ingredient for the next. And so on.

Until we wake up to how we interact with our circumstances we will tend make bad situations worse, and prevent  good situations from being all they can be.

Because pain begets pain.

The only way out is through

The first step in transforming this situation is to recognize yourself as separate from your circumstances. To realize that your circumstances come and go, while you remain.

That you are bigger than, more important than and not at all defined by your context.

Your context may be grim. But it is not who you are.

This is important, because if you take a stride in the direction of positive change, you will set off a chain of events.

Your context will react.

Changing an aspect of your approach will cause ripples in your life.

Disturbance.

Pain.

But it’s chosen pain, not the kind foisted on you by your conditioning.

And it’s constructive because it comes from a movement toward health.

Balance

And prosperity.

Without darkness there is no light. Without sorrow there is no joy. Without this there is no that blah blah blah.

Blah.

Whatever.

That’s not the point. There’s little sense in trying to explain or understand the existence of pain unless you’re going to do something about it.

The real constructive effort lies in learning how to experience it.

Because you’re going to.

Realize, however: you can engage with pain in a way that helps unlock the potential for growth hidden inside it.

We don’t have to live in fiefdom to pain.

In servitude to the exigencies of life.

Pain is a gift basket filled with vital information.

No, okay, not really a gift basket. But it’s filled with clues to what each of us needs to prosper.

Castle in the sky?

All the big wisdom traditions mention the possibility of a transfigured mode of existence. Basically, a life above pain.

I completely believe in that.

Each of us can reach a point in our evolution where we flow so perfectly with the universe that pain and struggle fall away into the radiance of pure being, unobstructed by distraction.

A world in which we make it a priority to discover and reveal our gifts and ideas, and to respect the gifts and ideas of others.

And make use of them.

Build our world with them.

And we can get there as a society, a world society, a species.

I’m convinced.

It’s why we’re here.

It’s called fullness of life.

And it’s your birthright.

Pain is a clarion call

But for now we experience pain. So we have to find a way not only to deal with it, but to make the most of it.

Because pain is a stepping stone on the trail toward that castle in the sky.

Our task is to integrate our disparate energies into a unified whole so that we become capable of stepping into sync with that flow of the universe.

Pain is message from your underworld about your acquired self.

Pain is telling you that your acquired self is a problem. Pain is telling you that you have work to do in order to become free of that acquired self and manifest your full self in the world.

All pain qualifies

This is true of all pain. Even the self inflicted or inexplicable kinds. Tragedy, even the kind with a perpetrator you can identify, contains information.

Our ability to access that information may be limited, but it’s there. And it can tell us a lot about how we operate. How we interact with our surroundings and with each other.

But I’m mainly talking about psychological and emotional pain. The kind that reverberates across generations and makes it hard to enjoy or fully experience life.

The kind that stands in the way of thriving.

That’s the pain everyone feels. You don’t need famine or cancer or bombs going off to feel that kind of pain.

But famine and cancer and bombs going off are evidence of its existence.

Basic friction

There is a basic inner friction caused by our perception of separateness from one another, from the world and from God.

We see ourselves as separate but we are not. Yet this sense of disconnect influences our every thought, word and deed.

This friction is where all pain, suffering and conflict come from.

Even disease and natural catastrophe, because human imbalance puts everything out of whack.

How we interact with life in this context, as individuals and as a group creates disturbance that shows up as pain of every kind.

The flow of the universe is distorted as it passes through us into the world, to emerge as a choked, bent version of the original. Cluttered by the toxins in our filtration system.

Inspiration becomes craving.

Relationship becomes competition.

Difference becomes threat.

The proverbial carpenter’s angle gets wider and wider. And layer by layer we step further and further from our potential.

View yourself as separate and you have a victim. View yourself as part of a whole and you have a single organism hurting itself.

Small comfort, yes.

But this awareness is the root of the solution.

There’s more to life than pain

Pain is a marker on the path back to integration. It signals the existence of the friction and lets us know when we are out of sync with the universe.

It helps us to be aware of the presence of imbalance.

And imbalance must not be taken lightly.

War is imbalance.

Starvation is imbalance.

Abuse, neglect and rejection are imbalance.

The roots of a beginning

Once you understand that pain is not who you are, that fear is not who you are, that harming and being harmed is not who you are, you can begin to see what is true about you.

Really see it. Know it. Derive your orientation in life from it. Allow it to motivate and guide you.

Step by step, pain by pain, you can win through to this realization. Dust off your own self worth. Recognize your irreplaceable value. Discover your unrepeatable place in the scheme of things.

That is the beginning of transformation.

That’s what presence is: simple being with focused consciousness.

You simply are. And you know it.

Presence is not spooky or ghostly. There’s no buzz or euphoria. It’s nothing unusual.

The fuller it is the more normal it seems. It’s just you getting up in the morning.

But really doing it.

It’s ordinary on steroids.

Really, really ordinary.

So ordinary it’s mind blowing.

It’s you and the world as they really are.

Full tilt awareness of that which is.

…falling into place on the continuum of being.

Your place in things

Real presence is you falling into place on the continuum of being. That continuum begins in God, flows into this world as you, and culminates outwardly in your thoughts, words and deeds.

It’s a gradation on which shades of difference are perceived, but really it’s all one.

You can be aware of this continuum all along the way, including at the God part. And you have an unrepeatable place in it. Your participation is desired, crucial, effective.

But access to it is only available in the present, and only perceivable with self love.

Because that’s what self love is: the love of God activated in you. From there, loving others is a matter of pointing that self love at the world.

This love of God is there with or without you, churning and chugging along, holding everything in being.

Everything. Matter, spirit, ideas. You, me, everyone.

All of it.

The now is that churning and chugging. The now is the love of God being there with or without you.

Obviously, the “with you” option is preferable.

Full experience of the now is how that happens.

…celebrate the beauty, heal the pain…

Fill the now with yourself

The more present you are in the now, the more of your full self is available. Since full experience of the now hangs on self love, it follows that the more self love you bring into the present moment, the more you manifest your full self.

The more you fill the here and now with your uniqueness.

Creativity, deliberate action, compassion for yourself and others.

Your particular version of those things.

And the less room there is for judgement, fear, doubt, rejection, and the attitudes and orientations that drive us in the direction of absence.

By way of distraction.

Basically you fill up the now with yourself.

With what is really you.

To celebrate the beauty, heal the pain, mature the young parts.

You crowd out all the acquired fear, anger, jealousy, prejudice.

This crowding out is a painful process during which you must experience all those things. Forgive them in yourself and others.

Let them go.

…we will balance out, over time, into wholeness.

We decide how God shows up

If you really allow yourself to be what you are, good, bad, ugly, you will be purified into awareness of God in all of it.

God as all of it.

God manifests according to the balance between distraction and presence.

Through the practice of presence, you will see that “badness” is simply God manifesting in a destructive way because of our limitations.

And the obstacles to the love of God posed by those limitations.

War is a form of God that we have chosen.

God does not choose to manifest as war. We choose it.

God does not choose to manifest as starvation. We choose it.

Or enough of us do. Or the right people do.

But these things are God, allowing the imbalances of our approach to determine his shape.

In the same way, peace is God. Love is God. Harmony is God. Creativity is God.

If we so choose.

But if we continually relax into the now, allow our real selves to show — painful and embarrassing as that might be — we will balance out, over time, into wholeness.

And the stuff we think of as bad will recede into proper proportion, to the point where it no longer blocks our view.

We learn that there is nothing to fear in loving others.

And we will stop choosing the terrible form of God.

To be ruled by love.

No middle ground

In the now, you are required to either love or not love. And you discover that there is no in between. No middle ground.

The imbalance we see around us is the result of excessive absence. We have built a world out of the distractions that arise from fear.

There is only action arising from distraction. Or there is action arising from presence.

There is only presence or absence.

Presence born of self love.

Or absence born of distraction.

The goal is to be ruled in thought word and deed by the promptings of your own inner beauty.

To be ruled by love.

Which is always available right now.

And which is only available right now.

…responsiveness to the energy of your surroundings.

Manifestation happens

If you develop the reflex of returning to the now, authentic experience of your circumstances and emotions will follow.

As will the ability to call upon the full energy of your life to assist you in living it.

That’s what fullness is: the constantly increasing ability to experience everything that is with everything that you are.

It is a state of mind that tends towards sensitivity and responsiveness to the energy of your surroundings.

Of your relationships.

Your struggles.

By cultivating the now, staying present to your outer circumstances and your inner condition, you will open the necessary channels for free exchange between the outer world and your full self.

That’s called manifesting. And it’s necessary for fullness of life.

Cultivate the now and it will happen.

Love will flow through you…

Unimpeded flow

There is no greater act of love for yourself than to allow this process to unfold.

And when you love yourself, love for the world follows naturally.

Each time you enter the now, you walk in on the workings of the cosmos. The shimmering musical gears of existence.

The hum of the universe.

Creation just being itself.

And you take your place in the grandeur.

After repeated dives you start to feel at home. No longer out of place.

You get comfortable in the now.

And therefore in all situations. All circumstances. In the presence of no-matter-who.

Because when you manifest your full self you cannot be shaken. The granite foundation of the now, of actuality, of what really is, becomes your footing.

And part of what really is is your own power, beauty and magnificence.

You will carry this steadiness with you into your life. Your relationships. Your solitude. Your creativity.

Love will flow through you, unimpeded, by the tangles of fear, doubt, self hate, hesitation and the other mechanisms of escape.

That is what the now is: experience purified of all impediments.

Witnessing your life as it happens.

And being in on it.

Did you find this post  useful?

It’s the fifth and last installment in a series. Part 1 lives here, part 2 here, part 3 here and part 4 here. Thanks for reading, and don’t forget to shout at me in the comments!

These things are information about how you are inside.

About aspects of you that need expression and haven’t found it yet.

In the present, if you observe, you’ll see your attitudes and orientations. The involuntary aspects of you that may or may not serve.

Stories about the past.

Stories about the future.

Stories about others.

Stories about yourself.

They show up as potential distraction. Little chances to wander away from the present into fantasy.

With work you can notice them, isolate them, heal them, and integrate them so that they no longer distort your perspective or have a negative effect on your experience.

…start to address the roots of distraction.

Following the breadcrumbs

It’s amazing where a single stray thought can lead. It’s a breadcrumb trail. One thought slips in, unnoticed, and the next thing you know you’re up to your neck in fantasy.

Fantasy isn’t always flashbulbs and book signings, or lying on the beach with your checkbook, or being interviewed by itblog.com.

Fantasy is anything that is not right now, and which is involuntary.

That could be the dry cleaning.

Whatever it is it represents some level of concern, or anxiety, or dissatisfaction.

Or it would not be happening.

But if you notice the breadcrumb trail without following it, you can start to work with the energy it represents. The experience it echoes.

And you can start to address the roots of distraction.

 Nobody doesn’t have work to do.

Clues to what you need

When you’re balanced and content, you are present, because the present is a nice place to be.

You don’t run away.

If your inner foundations are sound you will be present even when your circumstances are difficult, because you have access to enough of your own inner resources, and enough trust in the world generally, to stay in the game.

But any time you leave the present there’s a reason. It’s become more than you think you can take.

Your distractions, the things that chase or lure you out of the now, are clues to what you need to feel safe and stable in life.

And they are clues to the fact that you don’t feel completely safe or stable.

That you have work to do to establish trust in your general place in things.

Nobody feels completely safe. Nobody doesn’t have work to do. That’s why we all get distracted.

 …your only access to your own life is in your memories.

Insidious, hidden

The real power of distraction lies in the fact that we don’t know it’s happening. Before we begin the work of transformation, distraction comes and goes at will in our minds and hearts.

It takes over, runs the place, and backs off only on those occasions when life itself calls you back to the present.

As it does.

Until you wake up and reach for fullness, you can wander around in distraction most of the time.

Most of the time.

Most of your life passes by unnoticed.

Literally.

We collect it with our memory, but that becomes our only access to it.

Memories.

Imagine it: your only access to your own life is in your memories.

That’s no way to live.

…managing and learning from distraction.

The self love response

But self love gets beneath distraction and shakes out the messages it contains.

It enables you to observe the distraction as a feature on the landscape of the present. And not focus on it in a  way that leads you into escape.

And that will enable you to remain present in a way that is consistent and strong over time.

It is an aspect of self love that you constantly give yourself a chance.

You don’t waste time castigating yourself for mistakes. Instead, over and over, you waste no time in forgiving yourself and making the adjustments necessary to get yourself back on track.

This approach is absolutely bottom-line essential to managing and learning from distraction.

…undivided, singular and chosen.

Unity

The idea is to be open. Unblocked. Fluid. To make your full potential actual.

To be whole.

Whole is the goal.

Each of us can become a unified, organized creature of power, through whom the creative force of the universe flows without obstruction.

Or not.

It’s a choice.

Presence involves the ability to choose your state of mind and to know what your options are, based on what your circumstances and emotions are telling you.

You can operate from an orientation that is undivided, singular and chosen.

…you bolt and disappear into distraction.

It’s voluntary

The voluntary nature of presence is important. If you do not choose presence you are absent.

And absence always indicates a disconnect somewhere in yourself. An inability to access some vital part of you.

Usually your emotions.

For example, if you are involuntarily blocking joy, you lack connection to a vital region of your own being, the region where joy lives.

That blockage is rooted in unhealed pain.

When an opportunity for joy presents itself, you flee.

In some way.

It’s a reflex. The present moment becomes, for that moment, unendurable, so you bolt and disappear into distraction.

You can see the path to wholeness.

Standing your ground

The first step to arresting this flight response is to stop and feel that fear, doubt, hesitation, sadness, whatever.

If you can do that even for a moment, and let the emotion in, you see your lack of presence while it’s still fresh.

You can actually witness the transition into distraction.

And that’s an eye opener.

Because it’s often the transition into some destructive behavior. Or a bailing out on some opportunity. Or a missed moment of richness that you cannot retrieve.

By witnessing this transition over and over, while simultaneously forgiving yourself for the occurrence, you will transform the involuntary reflex of escape into awareness of an obstacle.

And suddenly you can see the work you need to do.

You can see the path to wholeness.

And following that path is the reason you’re here.

Did you find this post useful?

It’s part 4 of a series. Part one lives here, part two here, and part three here. Don’t forget to shout at me in the comments!

Fullness of life involves openness to whatever life hands you.

Hard.

Easy.

Whatever.

The only way to experience life with balance and completion is to be all in. Each aspect of you. Nothing left in the cupboard.

Nothing ignored, rejected, forbidden, forgotten or lost.

The fury, the lust, the child-like animation, the reliability, the volatility, the tendency to be late.

It’s all you.

You have to be all of it.

You don’t have to DO all of it. But you have to accept it. At least to start.

Then you can change it if necessary.

Because some of it’s not fun or easy.

But through exposure in the now to the energies inside you, you can learn to redirect and adjust how they show up in your life.

You can shed light on your blind spots.

…in the smithy of the now.

You can integrate those disparate energies that manifest in behavior you’d rather not exhibit.

Organize them into a manageable array without damaging them or shutting them down.

Because you need them. They’re part of your vitality.

This is a difficult, challenging aspect of being yourself.

It requires a connection between your inner and outer worlds. Your emotions and your circumstances.

And that connection can only be forged with the hammer and anvil of self love in the smithy of the now.

Emotional experience

Life must be felt to be lived.

A huge part of human experience is not accessible with the brain.

You need to feel it.

That’s what your emotions are for. They’re like senses for detecting and responding to life.

An organized emotional response to your circumstances allows your whole self to be involved in the experience. It gives you access to resources and strength you can’t get any other way.

But it can be uncomfortable to give your emotions room if you’re not used to it. And mediocre results are possible without them.

So, mediocrity can start to look good compared to the burn of vulnerability.

The wound

The word vulnerable literally means wound. It comes from the Latin word vulnerare which means to wound.

And who doesn’t love a good wound?

Heh.

Pretty much everybody. At least not at first. But only because we’re mostly unaware of the enhancing effect of the healing process.

And because wounds hurt. There’s that.

But when we are emotionally wounded, we almost always heal to a whole new level of strength and resilience. A level we could not have imagined occupying before.

That’s the magic of vulnerability.

All the little mini hurts of the day-to-day become a slow, steady training program.

And you gain a basis of perspective on the big hurts.

But to experience the magic, open the gates.

You have to let life in.

And in doing so you let yourself out.

Cues from your full self

The basic emotional response, the involuntary emotion that emerges in a situation is almost always dead on the right one.

It takes practice to learn to acknowledge and trust it. Or, for some of us, to even notice it.

It’s tough to  give your emotions a voice in your responses to life. Because emotional experience lacks the manageable parameters of logic.

Emotional experience feels unsafe according to the sense of safety most of us are used to.

The truth is accessing and experiencing your emotions is actually the safest thing you can do. It makes you more safe in life, not less so. Because it brings more of what is into your field of view.

…your emotions go to work for you.

Brings it out of the shadows.

Makes it known.

When emotions come up in a certain situation, that’s information about that situation. Information from a region of your being you can’t access with thinking.

Information provided spontaneously from your full self.

Information that can better inform you aboout your circumstances, and enable you to respond more effectively.

The trouble is, inside your emotions, you’re always a little out of control. And there’s nothing you can do about that.

But you can become at home in being out of control.

If you can do that your emotions go to work for you.

True perspective

Your mind, your decision making, both benefit from the additional information provided by your emotions. Your emotions can “notice” details in a situation that your mind can’t see.

Details that can mean the difference between success or failure.

The more you clear access to your emotions the more you can polish them into an effective navigational mechanism that will enrich your life and make deep connections possible.

And bearable.

It will lead you where you belong, by helping you identify your inner calling, then  joining it to the outward circumstances most conducive to living it out.

A mature mix of your full emotional range is key to fullness of life. Nothing shut down. Nothing overly emphasized.

It unifies you. So you can respond with all your capacities, all your energy, all your creativity, to whatever life hands you.

Hard.

Easy.

Whatever.

How self love factors in

Real emotional experience only happens in the now. Outside the now there is only distraction. And you can’t experience anything in distraction, except distraction.

But the now being all full of reality like that makes it a dangerous place sometimes. Only self love makes it possible to go there.

To delve it.

To navigate its waters with openness to what you discover.

Because you’ll have to forgive yourself.

That takes self love.

And you’ll have to not turn and run from your own magnificence.

That also takes self love.

Without self love presence is impossible.

It is a characteristic of presence is that you do not judge what you see. However messy, unattractive or disappointing it might be.

Judgement is an escape from presence. When you are strong in presence, you can see your own behavior without escape.

The escape of shame.

The escape of frustration.

The escape of self aggrandizement.

To face what you find in the present — in others, in yourself, in circumstances — without judgement, is presence.

Without self love presence is impossible.

Escape is inevitable.

Did you find this post useful?

It’s actually part of a series. Read part one here, part two here. And don’t forget to share your thoughts in the comments!