Have you ever experienced total peace, total flow? Have you felt complete inner Silence, feeling (not thinking) completely a part of your surroundings, when time has stopped or slowed down? Open up your senses. Meet perception half-way. Listen to the sounds around you right now. See if you can meet them half-way, so that there [...]

The word enlightenment conjures up the idea of some superhuman accomplishment, and the ego likes to keep it that way, but it is simply your natural state of felt oneness with Being. It is a state of connectedness with something immeasurable and indestructible, something that, almost paradoxically, is essentially you and yet is much greater [...]

Notes to self. Get in the flow of Awakening: There is no end-game. It’s an ever-going process. However, there are thresholds, and with some practice, we can be in the flow of awakening, where it will continue to ebb and flow, go forward and recede, on its own, and the movement will be towards a [...]

Finding Answers Last week I wrote about how adversity in my life brought me to awakening about three years ago, and not surprisingly, the article struck a chord with many. Most of us are rather too familiar with discontent. I’ve been through many cycles of examining my life-situation, as I’m sure you have too.  And [...]

The Struggle Two Zen monks were walking through the woods. Suddenly, one Zen monk turned to the other and slapped him. “Ouch! Why did you do that!” cried the slapped monk. The first said, “I’m Zen monk, I can get away with shit like that.” It is so very simple. And the ego loves to [...]

Awakening humbles me. A strange thing about awakening is frequently we feel we are very conscious, but then life throws something at us and we react in the same conditioned way we always did. It’s a humbling experience, and that’s the point of it. A year ago I had severe and debilitating anxiety. It was [...]

What can we do with those pesky recurring thoughts? They are usually of a negative variety: about longing, or anger, or humiliation, or perhaps vengeance. You’re thinking of something unjust that happened to you or something someone said to you. Or perhaps, you want someone to act or feel a certain way. Sometimes it’s your [...]

Being Present The present moment has always been available to spiritual seekers, but as long as you are seeking you are not available to the present moment. “Seeking” implies that you are looking to the future for some answer, or for some achievement, spiritual or otherwise. Everybody is in the seeking mode, seeking to add [...]

Awareness Now Awareness Now, Effortless meditation, passive watchfulness, no-mind, True Meditation, formless meditation, natural being, flow—they’re all the same thing. True meditation is not a practice. It is being—just being, without the movement of becoming. It is Awareness. Just stop and look, just be, passively, without the effort of thinking and without the effort of [...]

Do you find meditation difficult? The mind is empty only when thought is not. Thought cannot come to an end save through passive watchfulness of every thought. In this awareness there is no watcher and no censor; without the censor, there is only experiencing. In experiencing there is neither the experiencer nor the experienced. The [...]