The LifeCrafters Blog

Inquire Within

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 09:34:07 -0500

Within my soul is the joy
my ego is seeking.

A friend of mine who started meditating late in life told me, “All those years I spent looking for love and joy and bliss in all the wrong places, and all the time it was to be found through yoga meditation.”

Wouldn’t it be a shame to come to the end of life only to realize that in our quest for happiness, the things we spent all those years running after were incapable of delivering it? Even more unfortunate would be to discover that that which we had been seeking had been in our possession all along.

In the Himalayan mountains of India lives a strange species of mountain goat which, at a certain level of maturity, emits a musk from a pouch on its stomach. The fragrance is so tantalizing that the animal, not realizing that it itself is the source of the aroma, goes crazy searching for it. Often in its endless quest it dashes about crazily and falls to its death on the rocks below.

Paramahansa Yogananda used this as a metaphor for a human being who, being divinely endowed with a soul, mistakes its own joy for things out in the material world. One of the affirmations he enjoined people to chant inwardly goes: I will seek happiness more and more within my mind and less and less from material pleasures.

When the disciples of Jesus asked him where the kingdom of God was to be found he said, “The kingdom of God is within you.” How is it that we miss this? If all we ultimately desire is closer than our hands and feet, why are we looking anywhere else than “within”? The answer is addiction to the world outside our skins. From the moment we awake each morning until we close our eyes in sleep that night, our attention is directed outside. That’s why the smart money is on what the old employment signs used to read: INQUIRE WITHIN.

To find support for developing this aspect of your life, visit Services page.

So It’s Not Perfect

Sat, 16 Jan 2010 08:31:11 -0500

There are those among us who might be called perfectionistas. These are people who want everything they do to be perfect. No, they MUST have them be perfect. Actually, to place the proper emphasis, they cannot rest until their actions are ABSOLUTELY FLAWLESS. Sadly, such folks must begin each day by embarking on the road to disappointment for, as most of us know, most things are inherently imperfect. (An exception is covered in my latest book, “Perfection and How I Attained It”, a sequel to the best-selling “Humility and How I Attained It”.)

A friend and I met for lunch recently and she told me she was very upset with her life. It turned out that not only is she a perfectionista, she punishes herself continually for not achieving perfection. Her motto is: Not only must life be perfect, it’s my fault if it isn’t.

As we talked, I somehow found the grace to point out something to her that seemed to make a difference. In fact, making a difference was what it was. Wisdom is often depicted as a sword because discrimination--the dividing into two things from what seemed to be one--becomes the source of enlightenment. My friend and I were able to separate two discrete events: (1) the action she beats herself up for, and (2) the beating herself up for it.

If one can hold these two events apart in the mind for a moment, it follows in Vulcan order that the second (the beat-up) not only exists separately from the first (the imperfect act)—it really has nothing to do with it! The first action can be seen as merely an event taking place in the world. The second exists entirely on its own—a habit-bomb which in order to wreak havoc on the self waits only for something to trigger it. And for that, any action will do.

My friend was delighted to recognize the difference, and resolved immediately to begin to watch for signs of self-punishment and do battle with them. We discussed how the first rule of the well-known Art of War is to know one’s enemy. It was delightful to watch her come alive with energy as she spoke of her need to watch for her enemy, the Punisher, lying in wait at every turn of the road, and engage it. She would continue to use the sword of discrimination to separate the Punisher’s accusations from whatever the imperfect action was that she’d just performed. I asked her to name her weapon; she called it Gladiatrix. Her eyes gleamed as she felt the haft of that blade in her hand. I felt like ducking, for I could almost see her wielding it as we sat there.

To find support for developing this aspect of your life, visit Services page.

It’s Perfect

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 11:00:07 -0500

What if everything were perfect, the way it is?

Guess what. It is.

Take a deep breath right now and try to see the moment you’re in as it really is—minus your ideas and opinions about it. If you start to see it that way, you’ll smile. Because you’ll see that if it’s perfect now then it must be perfect in every now.

This perfection of each passing moment is the realization that saints and sages have, the blissful recognition of a truth which is right in front of the rest of us but which we will not see. Whatever it would it take to awaken us would have to be something independent of circumstances – a change not in what we’re looking at, but what we’re looking with.

Sometimes I’m coaching a client and listening to how difficult something is to get through, and I’ll take a chance and say, “What if the way this is happening is the way it should be happening?” There’s a silence, and then they laugh! Just a moment ago they were miserable. Now they’re enjoying exactly the same prospect, and all that’s shifted is their perspective on it.

The delusion we’re caught in from moment to moment is that something about our life should be different. Well, what if it shouldn’t? What if whatever’s happening is perfect because it’s the lesson that the curriculum of this lifetime calls upon us to face? What if it represents the next level of our unfoldment as souls? I guess that would mean that the thing we’re up against is not “out there” in the world. It’s “in here” in us, with our habits and addictions and refusal to grow up and get over ourselves.

So, next time things seem hard, take a breath and remember: It’s perfect.

To find support for developing this aspect of your life, visit Services page.

Will to Develop Will Power

Tue, 5 Jan 2010 09:54:06 -0500

Another year beckons with its promises. There can be much progress ahead -- even undreamed-of success—but attaining it requires us to examine our beliefs about ourselves. Is there something you want to accomplish this year, but you tell yourself, “I can’t do that.” To that little self-limiting voice, you can begin by posing a question: “Can’t or won’t?”

The poet Rumi said, “This place is a dream. Those who think it real are asleep.” In the waking sleep in which we live each day we think of ourselves as minds and bodies. But who we truly are is what inhabits and enlivens these forms—souls, divine beings. When we realize this, there is really very little we cannot do. Mind and body are the tools with which to accomplish what we came to do, but it is the soul’s will power that determines the outcome.

What exactly is will power? The great sage Paramahansa Yogananda explained that “will power is that which changes thought into energy.” Whatever we make up our mind to do, we can do. After all, what are we really here in this life for, if not to work on our own evolution? Since our societal beliefs and educational systems have never even suggested that self-evolution lies within our power, one could ask, “Is that even possible?” Those of us who practice the yoga meditation techniques taught by Yogananda in his Lessons (http://www.yogananda-srf.org) would answer Yes. Right from the beginning we prove to ourselves not only that upgrading the mind is possible but that doing so is of all things most rewarding and exhilarating.

Yogananda suggested a three-step plan for strengthening the will power:

1. Set a goal:
Focus on something small, and don’t stop until you accomplish it. Then choose something a little bigger, but still doable, and finish it. Keep going, so you are always working on some goal or other, and always on the way to achieving it. Putting your thoughts repeatedly on your goal endows the brain with the capacity to achieve that goal. Even if you don’t want to do it, it makes a difference if you want to want to do it.

2. Meditate:
Studies on the effects of meditation show that it produces measurable brain improvement. Dr. Herbert Benson, founding President of the Mind/Body Medical Institute and author of the best-selling Relaxation Response has written: “Research has shown that electrical activity between the left and right sides of the brain becomes coordinated during certain kinds of meditation or prayer . . . When you are in this state of enhanced left-right hemispheric communication … plasticity of cognition occurs, in which you actually change the way you see the world.”

3. Affirm:
Thought creates everything. If you hold to one thought and cultivate it and condition your mind with that thought, you can materialize it. Dr. Herbert Benson states: “If you concentrate after meditation on some written passage which represents some direction in which you wish your life to be heading, this directed thought process will help you to rewire the circuits in your brain. Changed actions and a changed life will follow. The implications are exciting, and even staggering.”

Here are some affirmations you might use:
Whatever I set my mind to do, I can do.
I never stop until I reach my objective.
I am a child of God; His will is invincible, and so is mine.

Yogananda called this a life-changing prayer:

Heavenly Father, Destroy the thought in us
that we are frail human beings.

To find support for developing this aspect of your life, visit Services page.

Celebrate the Lightbulb

Fri, 1 Jan 2010 11:35:54 -0500

New Year’s, since it means a clean slate in a way, still tends to be a time to make those resolutions. Usually the very mention of such brings negative feelings. But I am proposing a plan for using feeling good, rather than feeling bad, to change a habit.

It’s a funny thing a lot of us do when we want to change something about ourselves. We become our own worst enemies. Say we’ve discovered, perhaps through feedback from a friend, that we have a habit of interrupting and taking over conversations here. We don’t like doing that, so we resolve that we are going to try hard to listen, really listen, to people.

The evening after making our new plan, we attend a dinner party. Lying in bed later that night and thinking back over the day, we suddenly realize, with a mental smack on the forehead, that we dominated the table talk once again. When that realization hits us that we’ve done the very thing we told ourselves we wouldn’t do, what is our first reaction? It’s to be disappointed again, right? Only now it’s even more painful because we’ve violated our resolution. We want to beat ourselves up even more about it. However, right here—at the discovery point that we have done the thing we didn’t want to do—is the place to make the most telling change. It’s to do what I call celebrating the lightbulb.

What is different this time from other times? It is the awareness, the consciousness that we have violated our own rule. We did not have that “lightbulb” going on at former times. So here is the place to give ourselves a pat on the back—.

Why should we feel good for merely noticing? Because of the way the mind works. In this instance it’s a bit like a dog we are trying to train. If the mind associates becoming conscious with getting whacked with a newspaper, it will find ways not to wake up any more. On the other hand, if coming awake to something we want to change is the beginning of the change, we should link that waking to good feelings—a nice pat on the head. Only then will the mind, having experienced reward for telling itself the truth, want to repeat the action.

From then on, it’s mathematics. If we continue to “celebrate the lightbulb” each time we realize our mistake, the time between doing what we don’t want to do and having the light come on will shrink. Soon the awareness will hit immediately after we’ve done the old thing. After that, it will be while we are doing it that we see we are doing it, and before long we will have moved the awareness (guided by those positive feelings of waking up) back to just before we choose to do it. Which means we have now empowered ourselves with choice. The old habit is no longer in charge.

So next time you notice that you broke your resolution, give yourself a pat on the back for noticing, and go right on.

To find support for developing this aspect of your life, visit Services page.

Christmas Message

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 12:26:21 -0500

The following letter was written by Fratello Giovanni Giocondo to his friend, Countess Allagia Aldobrandeschi on Christmas Eve, 1513:

I am your friend and my love for you goes deep. There is nothing I can give you which you have not got, but there is much, very much, that, while I cannot give it, you can take.

No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in today. Take heaven!

No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present little instant. Take peace!

The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within our reach, is joy. There is radiance and glory in the darkness, could we but see it – and to see we have only to look. I beseech you, look!

Life is so generous a giver, but we, judging its gifts by the covering, cast them away as ugly or heavy or hard. Remove the covering and you will find beneath it a living splendor, woven of love, by wisdom, with power.

Welcome it, grasp it, touch the angel’s hand that brings it to you. Everything we call a trial, a sorrow, or a duty, believe me, that angel’s hand is there, the gift is there, and the wonder of an overshadowing presence. True joys, too, be not content with them as joys. They, too, conceal diviner gifts.

Life is full of meaning and purpose, so full of beauty, beneath its covering, that you will find earth but cloaks your heaven. Courage, then, to claim it, that is all. But courage you have, and the knowledge that we are all pilgrims together, wending through unknown country, home.

And so, at this time, I greet you. Not quite as the world sends greetings, but with profound esteem and with the prayer that for you, now and forever, the day breaks and the shadows fly away.

Just in Time

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 22:56:22 -0500

Interruptions have become a way of life. The average knowledge worker spends more time handling interruptions than working on original plans and projects. Are you able to fulfill a day—or even an hour of a day—precisely as you expected? Are you constantly required to stop what you are doing to answer a phone call, respond to a spoken request, or serve the demands of a host of urgent emails? And do you take agonizing amounts of time after being interrupted to find your way back to what you were doing in the first place? Do your goals look like you thought they would when you arrive at them? Or have you expended great effort in trying to make them fit the frames of the pictures you started with, only to have the facts win?

One bit of fallout from a period of dramatic transition is attachment to the way things used to be when things moved more slowly. Millions of people still go to work every day anticipating getting certain things accomplished, only to spend hours wrestling with continuous intrusions and following maddening detours. The effects of this on their productivity and peace of mind is inestimable.

In fact, there’s a hopeful substitute for the frustration of having your plans changed or interrupted. It’s called just-in-time living. Just-in-time living is calmly doing things on the spur of the moment, as circumstances shift and needs arise. It’s acting like a downhill skier who relaxes and concentrates on negotiating a steep slope with lots of humps and moguls that prevent him from seeing each move that must be made until the last few seconds.

Just-in-time living requires just-in-time thinking. That’s the ability to let go of how we thought things would be in order to handle things as they are. The kicker is the letting go part. The mind wants to hang on to its plans and pictures. There’s an old truth that goes: expectation is a function of disappointment. It means that the only way you can experience what we call disappointment is to expect something to begin with. A great yoga master once said, “No one can ever disappoint me, for I expect nothing from them.” He didn’t mean he had low expectations. He meant he had no expectations.

So if we want to live without disappointment, the place to start is by controlling the mechanism in our brain we might call the expecter. We can train ourselves, as we approach a situation, to realize we are expecting a certain something out of it and, having identified what that is, to calmly abandon it. We can develop the mind’s ability to hold ideas and images lightly, so as to be able to let go of them quickly and easily, as it makes sense to do so. The Eastern sages call this the practice of detachment.

Sound rigorous? It is, particularly at first—the part of breaking the clunky Western mind out of its pampered habit of wanting its own way (even when it rarely gets it). The point of it all, of course is being happy. We have no idea how much misery we could give up, were we to learn to detach, quickly and cleanly, from the way we were so sure that things would turn out.

To find support for developing this aspect of your life, visit Services page.