SoulTending.com

The ego is suffering. I am more than the ego. If the ego is suffering that does not mean that I am suffering as well. The ego can be very convincing though. Today, I felt sad and just a bit off. The mind indulged in the thinking of what this might all be about, what I need to do about it and how I can change it. Yet when I looked into the mirror in the bathroom I was surprised to see a beautiful, smiling even happy looking face. I am more than my thoughts. The thoughts might hang on to how things ought to be, when the other parts of the self are enjoying the way things are.
There is an innate wisdom in the body. If given the opportunity it will always find its way back to an equilibrium. The body communicates through sensations. Listening to them helps to get out of the thinking patterns. It brings us back to the present moment, to that which is going on right now. Listening to the sensations and reactions of the body to thoughts and outside influences helps to live an embodied life. There are essentially only two responses; we are either drawn towards something or away from it. Becoming aware of the muscle reaction helps us distinguish very clearly what is beneficial for our system and what is detrimental.
If we are willing to listen to the body’s reaction on this level of awareness, the ego will have a harder time suffering. The mind has received a new job: proprioception, the feeling and sensing within. Instead of being pre-occupied with circular thoughts, the brain is actively engaged in listening and being in communication with the body’s internal systems. This leads to wiser choices, a more authentic presence and an overall happier and healthier outlook on life.

*”How without body, intellect, emotion and will, the ego, can anyone act in this world. The philosophical ideal is a fully developed, mastered, and richly rounded ego.”

By Marty Herling

The ego is not my enemy, has been my constant. The only friend I could find, in the lonely dark inexplicable days of my childhood, when I was under a constant barrage of mixed messages, anger coming suddenly from my gods. It was all I could do, but to stay alive, trying to make sense of my world, not to rock the boat to keep the love of my parents.

The ego has been our refuge from the storm, the only voice we could hear. It is not an alien residing in my body. It is a creation of myself to hold me safe in the storms of confusion. Just as I am not the mind, not the body, not the senses the ego is my tool. Let me get to know this tool, not to shun it, it is part of the whole of us. The gaining of self love (non criticism)  will ease the ego into its proper place in your mind as an assistant. You can then release your unconscious through deep listening. I am the whole. I can only be goodness because I am willing and able to be myself.

This is the order of Paramesvara. **”When you are filled with devotion to the Lord, you are the enlightened ego, that is, there is more Isvara (God) and less of yourself and so your fame (not popularity) increases and you become a source of inspiration to others. When any glory is gained by anyone, only Isvara should be acknowledged for it.”

*”The highest goal in the quest is not illumination gained by the destruction of the ego but rather by perfection of the ego. The ego must be transformed to win truth and find reality. In the end it must surrender itself. The ego’s humility is a pretentious cloak for secret vanity. Surrender the selfish one. The ego must be brought to subjugation to the highest power. It is still there, but is put into its proper place. The ego is the personal self. We need a change in attitude towards the personal self. Then the tyranny of the ego will vanish.”

The ego is a reflection of our higher self, our true self. If we can put the ego into the correct alignment, in submission to the higher self, it would not be a hindrance to the illuminated life, a servant and not a master. We want a fully developed mastered and richly rounded ego acting as a channel for the inspiration and guidance of the higher self. What needs to be overcome is not the entity “ego” but the function of egoism. We need to remove error and establish truth, not merely of the intellect alone, but also of the emotions and the will.

If we analyze the ego, we find it to be a collection of past memories retained from experience and future hopes or fears, which anticipate experience. In fact it never really exists in the NOW, but only seems to. This means it is a phantom without substance, a false idea.

The ego must adjust to two things, to the common welfare and to the source of its own being.

*   Paul Brunton  “Perspectives”
** Swami Dyananda “ Vishnusahasranama, Translation and Commentary”

An excerpt of the book “Soul Mates” by Thomas Moore

A soulful relationship offers two difficult challenges: one, to come to know oneself – the ancient oracle of Apollo; and two, to get to know the deep, often subtle richness in the soul of the other. As you get to know the other deeply, you will discover much about yourself. Especially in moments of conflict and maybe even despair, being open to the demands of a relationship can provide an extraordinary opportunity for self-knowledge. It provides an occasion to glimpse your own soul and notice its longings and its fears. And as you get to know yourself, you can be more accepting and understanding of the other’s depth of soul.
It isn’t easy to expose your soul to another, to risk such vulnerability, hoping that the other person will be able to tolerate your own irrationality. It may also be difficult, no matter how open-minded you are, to be receptive as another reveals her soul to you. Yet this mutual vulnerability is one of the great gifts of love: giving the other sufficient emotional space in which to live and express her soul, with its reasonable and unreasonable ways, and then to risk revealing your own soul, complete with its own absurdities.
The idea of a soulful relationship is not a sentimental one, nor is it easy to put into practice. The courage required to open one’s soul to express itself or to receive another is infinitely more demanding than the effort we put into avoidance of intimacy. The stretching of the soul is like the painful opening of the body in birth. It is so painful in the doing that we often will attempt to avoid it, even though such opening is ultimately full of pleasure and reward.
What I am suggesting about intimacy in relationship here is a particular aspect of the general need to respect the soul’s wide range of mood, fantasy, emotion, and behavior. Most of us contain ourselves fairly well, but eventually some type of irrationality may come to the surface. We all have skeletons in our closets and monsters in our hearts. It can be taken as an axiom: the person who displays his or her sanity and morality most dramatically is likely to be the very person who finds it difficult to be sane and moral.
Being in a soulful relationship is to some extent frightening because by nature such a relationship asks that we show our soul, complete with its fears and follies. In “In Praise of Folly”, the Renaissance humanist Erasmus says that it is precisely in their foolishness that people can become friends and intimates. “For that the greatest part of mankind are fools,… and friendship, you know, is seldom made but amongst equals.” The soul, as our dreams reveal, is not terribly lofty. We may present a high-minded image to the world, but the soul finds its fertility in its irrationalities. Maybe this is a hint as to why great artists appear mad, or at least eccentric, and why, in times of strong emotion and difficult decision-making, we so often act foolishly. More than one person in therapy has confessed to me that the most difficult part of an intense episode of jealousy was the fear of being made a fool by their partner – a sign to me that soul was trying hard to enter their lives in the dress of the fool.
Oddly, then, the most intimate relationships may be the very ones that appear foolish. The couple madly in love are “fools for love”. The most unpredictable couplings sometimes make the best marriages. A person who appears quite ordered and logical at work may engage in outrageously irrational behavior at home. Some of the most tightly knit families don’t hide their battles and jealousies. In short, when a relationship is soulful, the soul’s irrationality will be revealed for all to see.

The following excerpt is by Gabrielle Roth from her book “Connections”:

When you are not resisting, when you simply relax into the flow of your energy, you short-circuit your ego and create a space for your soul to emerge from the dark mysterious quiet within. However, if your surface persona is anxious, tightly wound, or filled with turbulence, your soul will retreat and remain in hiding, leaving the field wide open for an ego invasion.

The ego is the force that gets us into global messes as well as personal ones. It sees the world in black and white, good and evil, left and right. It has to be pro or con. It can never be with. It has to be for or against. It can never be part of it all. It can never just be. It always has to create tension and conflict. It can never let you relax and let go.

… You need a way to access the part of you that is connected to the whole, to find a proactive way to create peace in your piece of the world. You can’t have one part of you struggling against the rest of you or the many parts of you struggling against each other if you want to be fluid and free. Freedom comes when you are receptive to the voices of the oppressed, whether they be your hip, your mother, or downtrodden people. Through deep listening comes right action.

An excerpt of the book “To love and be loved” by Sam Keen:

“Men and women have made war on each other for so long
that much of what is most precious now hides itself.

Wild and tender things have retreated into the forest and will
reveal themselves only to those who respect their shyness.

Each of us lives within a private sanctuary into which we invite
only those who pay full attention to us and who wait patiently
until we open the door from the inside and welcome them.”

FROM THE BUSINESS SECTION OF THE NEW YORK TIMES…THERE IS VALIDATION FOR OUR WORK EVERYWHERE!

May 4, 2008
Unboxed
Can You Become a Creature of New Habits?
By JANET RAE-DUPREE

HABITS are a funny thing. We reach for them mindlessly, setting our brains on auto-pilot and relaxing into the unconscious comfort of familiar routine. “Not choice, but habit rules the unreflecting herd,” William Wordsworth said in the 19th century. In the ever-changing 21st century, even the word “habit” carries a negative connotation.

So it seems antithetical to talk about habits in the same context as creativity and innovation. But brain researchers have discovered that when we consciously develop new habits, we create parallel synaptic paths, and even entirely new brain cells, that can jump our trains of thought onto new, innovative tracks.

Rather than dismissing ourselves as unchangeable creatures of habit, we can instead direct our own change by consciously developing new habits. In fact, the more new things we try — the more we step outside our comfort zone — the more inherently creative we become, both in the workplace and in our personal lives.

But don’t bother trying to kill off old habits; once those ruts of procedure are worn into the hippocampus, they’re there to stay. Instead, the new habits we deliberately ingrain into ourselves create parallel pathways that can bypass those old roads.

“The first thing needed for innovation is a fascination with wonder,” says Dawna Markova, author of “The Open Mind” and an executive change consultant for Professional Thinking Partners. “But we are taught instead to ‘decide,’ just as our president calls himself ‘the Decider.’ ” She adds, however, that “to decide is to kill off all possibilities but one. A good innovational thinker is always exploring the many other possibilities.”

All of us work through problems in ways of which we’re unaware, she says. Researchers in the late 1960s discovered that humans are born with the capacity to approach challenges in four primary ways: analytically, procedurally, relationally (or collaboratively) and innovatively. At puberty, however, the brain shuts down half of that capacity, preserving only those modes of thought that have seemed most valuable during the first decade or so of life.

The current emphasis on standardized testing highlights analysis and procedure, meaning that few of us inherently use our innovative and collaborative modes of thought. “This breaks the major rule in the American belief system — that anyone can do anything,” explains M. J. Ryan, author of the 2006 book “This Year I Will…” and Ms. Markova’s business partner. “That’s a lie that we have perpetuated, and it fosters mediocrity. Knowing what you’re good at and doing even more of it creates excellence.”

This is where developing new habits comes in. If you’re an analytical or procedural thinker, you learn in different ways than someone who is inherently innovative or collaborative. Figure out what has worked for you when you’ve learned in the past, and you can draw your own map for developing additional skills and behaviors for the future.

“I apprentice myself to someone when I want to learn something new or develop a new habit,” Ms. Ryan says. “Other people read a book about it or take a course. If you have a pathway to learning, use it because that’s going to be easier than creating an entirely new pathway in your brain.”

Ms. Ryan and Ms. Markova have found what they call three zones of existence: comfort, stretch and stress. Comfort is the realm of existing habit. Stress occurs when a challenge is so far beyond current experience as to be overwhelming. It’s that stretch zone in the middle — activities that feel a bit awkward and unfamiliar — where true change occurs.

“Getting into the stretch zone is good for you,” Ms. Ryan says in “This Year I Will… .” “It helps keep your brain healthy. It turns out that unless we continue to learn new things, which challenges our brains to create new pathways, they literally begin to atrophy, which may result in dementia, Alzheimer’s and other brain diseases. Continuously stretching ourselves will even help us lose weight, according to one study. Researchers who asked folks to do something different every day — listen to a new radio station, for instance — found that they lost and kept off weight. No one is sure why, but scientists speculate that getting out of routines makes us more aware in general.”

She recommends practicing a Japanese technique called kaizen, which calls for tiny, continuous improvements.

“Whenever we initiate change, even a positive one, we activate fear in our emotional brain,” Ms. Ryan notes in her book. “If the fear is big enough, the fight-or-flight response will go off and we’ll run from what we’re trying to do. The small steps in kaizen don’t set off fight or flight, but rather keep us in the thinking brain, where we have access to our creativity and playfulness.”

Simultaneously, take a look at how colleagues approach challenges, Ms. Markova suggests. We tend to believe that those who think the way we do are smarter than those who don’t. That can be fatal in business, particularly for executives who surround themselves with like-thinkers. If seniority and promotion are based on similarity to those at the top, chances are strong that the company lacks intellectual diversity.

“Try lacing your hands together,” Ms. Markova says. “You habitually do it one way. Now try doing it with the other thumb on top. Feels awkward, doesn’t it? That’s the valuable moment we call confusion, when we fuse the old with the new.”

AFTER the churn of confusion, she says, the brain begins organizing the new input, ultimately creating new synaptic connections if the process is repeated enough.

But if, during creation of that new habit, the “Great Decider” steps in to protest against taking the unfamiliar path, “you get convergence and we keep doing the same thing over and over again,” she says.

“You cannot have innovation,” she adds, “unless you are willing and able to move through the unknown and go from curiosity to wonder.”

Janet Rae-Dupree writes about science and emerging technology in Silicon Valley.
Dawna Markova has been a leading figure in education for many years, specifically around different learning styles/sensory orientations.

“….The masculine evokes a response and I, as a woman, in dark stillness, silently attentive, await the call, which initiates the dance, which spirals deeper and deeper into love, in all its myriad forms and expressions.”
“For many women, romantic love is often our first taste of divine intoxication. But this is a great paradox – that a man offers us a taste of divine love, and yet he is just a man! Can you hold that paradox? That through this person you touch some deep core of the Mystery and yet he doesn’t change his socks! Can you stay with those conflicts and still stay true to love? And not just today, but day after day, year after year?”
“Loving another human being is such a magnificent test and trial. For even as you love him completely, you will never be fulfilled! Because there is always the emptiness inside that belongs only to God, that only God can enter. So time after time we are drawn into love only to be left with nothing!”
“If you stand in this paradox you put yourself into the fire, the fire that burns away this lower nature. For every time you feel that human impulse to reach out for what you want – what every cell of you wants – what you find is the emptiness that has always been there. Then you are tested. You are confronted with your own desires and all your attachments to this world. You want, want, want, and yet the reality is that you will not get what you want. Not from a man on whom you project your desires. And so you can be angry, you can be hurt, you can be rejected, you can stay in all that still binds you and keeps you from His embrace, He who is the King of Love. Or, you can give in, and let go, and love without wanting anything, and in doing so wait patiently for what He wants you to have!”
“If you stay in the fire, true to Love, true to the deepest longing of your heart, a strange alchemy happens. Your expressions of love deepen and become more inclusive; an unfettered love starts to permeate all your relationships; your love becomes more and more selfless. This is mature love, love that wants nothing for yourself, love that is not confined to you and your lover. It is the real love that burns away the ‘you’ so that love can move through you into the world.”
“The ‘Yes!’ in your heart consents to this process, to everything this process includes. And the suffering can be tremendous, the ‘not getting’ sometimes more than you think you can bear. But this ‘Yes!’ will suffer anything in the name of love, all for His sake! And one day you understand that there is really only one relationship. And it is nearer when it is truly absent.”
“Eventually this storming of love, the agony and torment, becomes your most precious possession, the sweetest thing that you would never wish to relinquish. The hunger is somehow like being present at a great feast, the pain full of baffling tenderness. His absence becomes full of His presence, the longing His ‘HERE I AM!’”

Accepting things as they are

When we accept things as they are, there is no more need to judge, make excuses, lie, call names, feel guilty, explain, defend. There is no more need to save our own skin by blaming and accusing others.
Instead we become firmly grounded in gratitude, love, acceptance, beauty and seeing the divine order in everything. We start to lose our limited ego identification and instead reconnect with our soul, the divine spark in us all that connects us as one. We become conscious players in the divine tragicomedy called life. Only now, we are aware that we are not only stuck as actresses with a script somebody else wrote for us, but that we are also able to rewrite the script anytime we want to and direct the play with our own consciousness.
Realizing this can be frightening. “What do you mean, I can rewrite my script and direct the play?” “How should that work?” “If everyone did that, wouldn’t we have complete anarchy and chaos?” “I am scared to do that and even though I don’t like my life and my circumstances, it is the only thing I know. How can I create something that I don’t know about?”
If you conceive it and believe it, you can achieve it. Making the shift is not something that takes place overnight. You actually have all the time in the world to do it. However, at this time in our human-global interaction we all start to perceive the urgency to make a shift happen. Global warming, solar dimming, the Mayan and other calendars coming to an end in 2012, pollution, obesity, increase in child diseases, fertility crisis, shrinking population, war, natural disasters give us glimpses that nothing more than the extinction of our human species is at stake. It is a pivotal time for the critical mass to make a quantum leap.
This shift in consciousness has to happen in each and every one of us. A shift in power starts with the people. We can no longer look at the government or corporations to guide our future. We have to make the internal shift, grow up and take responsibility for our choices. Be they what we consume, what we do, what we say, how we interact, even how and what we think.
Like the actresses in the play, it is time for us to read the script we have been operating on, take a red pen, some new paper and pen and rewrite our role, our habits, our behavior, our speech, our actions, our belief system and our internal dialogue.
Deep in our hearts and souls we have buried the blue print for our life’s purpose. Deep inside of us we know our highest potential. Our heart’s desires show us the way. Gentle excavation is necessary since there is also all the pain and rejection we have ever experienced stored deep within ourselves.

Once we connect with the pain, accept it and use it as the fertilizer for our growth, the happiness, lightness and inner peace that we will gain, is the light at the end of the tunnel. It is the promise to live heaven on earth now in this incarnation.

“The soul, according to many religious and philosophical traditions, is a self-aware ethereal substance particular to a unique living being. In these traditions the soul is thought to incorporate the inner essence of each living being, and to be the true basis for sentience. In distinction to spirit which may or may not be eternal, souls are usually (but not always as explained below) considered to be immortal and to pre-exist their incarnation in flesh.

The concept of the soul has strong links with notions of an afterlife, but opinions may vary wildly, even within a given religion, as to what may happen to the soul after the death of the body. Many within these religions and philosophies see the soul as immaterial, while others consider it to possibly have a material component, and some have even tried to establish the mass (weight) of the soul.

However, atheism and other non-religious philosophies, do not accept the existence of a soul.”
From the encyclopedia at wikipedia.org

A New Year has begun. 12 months, 52 weeks and 365 days are ahead of us. They are pristine as a brand new white canvas. The possibilities are vast. What will we choose, what will we fill these days, hours and minutes with?

The choice is ours. We are eternally free to choose the directions of our life every moment anew. How truly liberating this can be, if we only remember our free will.

However, we have become accustomed to the illusion that we are bound by our past. Bound by the deals we entered into written or unwritten, spoken or unspoken, fully aware or unaware.

We willingly become slaves to what society expects of us, what other people think of us, because we want to desperately belong, be part of, be normal, be accepted, loved and included.

We happily sell our souls to be hip, cool, revered, in, admired, acknowledged, famous, rich and beautiful. We fit in, revolt, become intellectual, knowledgeable or play dumb. We dress to stand out or to hide. We meekly accept what happens around us or protest out loud.

We perceive ourselves as bound by the identity of who we are, by the image we so carefully created of ourselves, by the patterns, behaviors that we needed to survive and grow up, by the expectations we have of ourselves and that others have of us.

All these creations are but a fleeting moment in the eternity of a soul’s point of view. The beauty of waking up and becoming aware of our souls is that we are no longer exclusively identified with the material world and our short lifetime here on this planet.

Once we have embraced that we are spiritual beings having a human experience, a whole new way of perception takes place. We are no longer able to ignore our part in the divine comedy of life. And if we chose to, we can step out of any given situation by bringing this awareness and presence into it. By calling the enmeshment by what it is, by declaring that we are no longer willing to pretend that we are bound and by choosing a whole new way of relating and being.

In this way we shall begin this New Year of 2007. Aware of our fleeting existence here on earth. Aware of the infinite possibilities that each day holds. Aware that we can change the outcome of any situation in a single moment. Aware of how magnificent we really are. Aware of the responsibilities we hold towards this planet and our fellow humans. Aware that our presence, love, patience and understanding can shift an ordinary moment into a magical one.

May 2007  be filled with many happy new choices that liberate you and the people you touch. May you bring peace, love and light into all your actions and thoughts. May 2007 be a magnificent, magical year for all of us.