A friend once told me that my practice was a type of self-soothing. It pissed me off. To my mind, the deep shadow work, the search for truth was anything but soothing. I wasn’t trying to feel better, or so I thought, I was after the big prize: Truth with a capital T. I’d sat …
Category Archives: enlightenment
Wherever Your Focus Lies There Lies Your Truth
I start laughing whenever I try to write. Nothing is true, so why bother. It’s all pointers and even that is going too far. I enjoy reading the words other characters in this play string together and seeing where they go, as well as where they don’t, what lines are drawn in the sand unawares, …
Door Number One or Door Number Two?
There are some things we simply know, even though we squirm a bit putting that knowing into words. It feels more accurate to say what it isn’t but even that is filled with potholes … deep potholes, lose your car in them, deep. It seems to me that reality is so much more than …
Infinite Aliveness: Unraveling the Mysteries of Existence
It’s a dream. You’ve heard it said before, whether you believe it or not, is another story. You’ve read about lucid dreaming, perhaps even experienced it. To be lucid within a dream means you are aware you are dreaming while you are dreaming. While lucid you can push the threads that knit the dream together, …
You Don’t Want This
You don’t want this, and when it finds you anyway, you won’t have needed me, or anyone, to show you how to get it. You say you want IT, but you don’t. You want a better life, a sweeter deal, not this. No one in their right mind wants this. It’s beautifully simple, and minds …
Every Moment is the Rabbit Hole
Most mornings, Sophia and I go down the rabbit hole, no, really. That’s what one of the trails at Whipple Creek is called. Whipple is our favorite of many great walks here in Southern Washington. The great news is that it’s less than two miles from my front door. What a treat! Every time …
Awakening to the Dream: Embracing Enlightenment Beyond Definitions
What do you want? Don’t answer too quickly. Take a moment and let the question settle in. Whatever you want is what you want and it’s not wrong, whatever it is. Many of the people who read spiritual stuff believe the answer to that question is enlightenment, waking up from the dream, seeing through the …
Authentic Love: Lessons from Jesus’ Teachings
I recently wrote about loving as Jesus did. It sounds yummy but it has a hitch in its get-along. You see, Jesus didn’t just love the easy ones, the ones who followed him, who thought like he did. He loved the tax collectors, the prostitutes, the Samaritans, the lepers, and he even loved those who …
How Far Down the Rabbit Hole Can You Go?
Years back, it must have been shortly after Ken died, I was meditating and had an epiphany. It was like Kenny stopped by to tap me on the shoulder, give me a smile, and let me know how truly laughable I was. I felt him winking at me and got the gist of his message …
Does It Really Matter?
Does it matter if life is illusory or real, if this a material world like most everyone thinks or a dream? It looks and feels real, it offers sensations and feelings that attest to its realness. Discovering what this is only matters to the ones attempting to escape their reality, and even that is not …
Vulnerability: Nothing to Run From
Vulnerability is up today. I love the feeling of being vulnerable. How about you? Not one of us isn’t vulnerable, no matter how many stories we tell ourselves about our ability to weather any storm. Vulnerability is life. We are all exposed, no matter what we do or don’t do. Not one of us is …
Out Here Where There Are No Rules
what are you willing to trust in to rest in with absolute certainty it’s a big step to stick your neck out to risk failure to hazard the break-up the chance of endangering the fantasy but you can’t know if it’s real or not until you begin falling it’s the reason most of us are …
The Mind Trap
Today has been an interesting day. While mowing an acre of grass, taking a hoe to the vegetable garden, and enjoying a three-mile walk with Sophia, I’ve been pondering life, this appearance of duality that is physically dubious and yet remarkably, manifests shamelessly as the material world. It is the veritable impossible dream. I’ve been …
Look for the Consummate Swordsman Who’ll Take Your Head
If you add to your experience (which life is always doing for you) the appearance of the manifested world can’t help but change. It’s being created with every breath, every constriction of fear or expansion of your ability to love, to be love. It changes with each tweak of the field, each data point of …
Waving Your Bubble Wand
Are you any less present when what you are present to is anger or hate? Granted, it feels crappy, but Is presence itself any less present when your skies are filled with intense black clouds? Can you not be present? Is that even possible? Wherever you go, there you are. You can’t get away from …
Amaya Gayle 