What Are You Feeding Yourself?

You know, life doesn’t always look like happiness and light, and “wow, I’m so glad I’m alive”. Life can look like "failing" a lot at whatever expectations we have set for ourselves. Then it can look like shaming / trying not to shame ourselves for that perception of "failing." When life doesn't look like happiness and light and "wow, I'm so glad I'm alive," it's often, I'm noticing, because I'm perceiving something in my life as wrong or bad or not as it should be. Coloring my life with this filter also leads to compulsive behaviors. I’ve figured out, I think, that nearly all my compulsive behaviors have an emotional trigger. Emotional triggers can stem from all sorts of things. They can be in response to not having enough or in response to suddenly having after a long period of not-having. We can feel triggered from a conversation we have with someone in a connection which has a lot of emotional weight or history. We can feel ...

Okay, so it's great that I want to help people remember to meditate, remember the truth of them, remember to do good practices, and remember what they already know. But I honestly do not have those sorts of elevated thoughts and practices all the time. I get bogged down by my triggers and ego and self-pity and egoic reactions too. So now it's time to tell on myself. (I have a feeling I'm going to be doing from time to time. I've got lots of opportunities for that.) All my life, it has been my goal to be "perfect." And even now - even while  knowing  to my core that perfect isn't a real thing, that having a standard of what I do or who I am in order to accept myself isn't realistic - I don't want to be "not perfect." Really, I don't want to make any mistakes whatsoever or ever let anyone else down. Deep down, that's rooted in the desire for acceptance. If I don't do everything right all the time, will they still accept me? Wi...

Caroline Polachek sings like an angel. Her song "Door" is one that gets stuck on a loop in my brain, and I find that oftentimes, songs stuck in a loop are teaching me something, helping me realize something I haven't yet allowed myself to see, or that of which I need to be reminded. "Doors" brings to mind a vision I had in meditation one cloudy day in December. Outside of Portland, near the gigantic Forest Park, I was tending a puppy and a cat while their owners were traveling for the holidays. I drew myself a bath and declared the waters to be that of waters of insight. I added scented epsom salts and lit candles. I put on a guided YouTube meditation and lowered myself into the tub. I followed along with the guidance, and then there was a period of just music, creating that sacred space to meditate. I was pulled into a vision of a hallway of doors. One of the doors opened, and I stepped through to find another hallway, full of doors. This process contin...

Indeed, we are not our thoughts. But from where do our thoughts originate? Why do we believe what we believe? What do we truly  believe? What feels false, even though we may have long ascribed to those premises and beliefs? What resonates to the core of us? We can't see our thoughts - where do they even exist? These are all good questions to ask ourselves. Because our lives truly begin in our thoughts - especially in those thoughts we repeat to ourselves enough to become our beliefs. And by changing our thoughts, we can change our experiences. So how do we do that? A good way to start is just to take a look at what we're thinking, to question. Is this something I want to remain a part of me? How does this feel in my body? Where do I feel this in my body? How does this feel in my emotional body? Every thought is actually an opportunity to make a choice for whether we want to hang onto it or not. Many thoughts - up to as much as 97% of them - are just regurgitations of the th...

You are not your thoughts.      Thoughts arise, live for a time, and subside, (and are replaced by other thoughts or actions) You are not your emotions.      Emotions arise, live for a time, and subside. They are not sustainable long-term. You are not your body.      The body arises (is conceived, incubated, born) lives for a time (grows, changes, ages) and subsides (dies). You are eternal. Immortal. Pure consciousness at the level of being. Connected to all that is. You are a Spiritual Being having a physical experience. All too often, we mistake our physical experience as the sum total total of our being, of our essence. We get lost & bogged down in the Avatar we've created to interact in the physical world, forgetting that we chose to play this game, forgetting that we are still connected to the "outside". Outside is the realm outside this Matrix, where our Higher Self has a bird's eye view of all the goings on, all the pote...