The Golden Threads of Awakening
What we are exploring together is the art of engaging with life exactly as it is rather than always trying to manage it. To make the intent of what I’m offering clearer, I want to share with you the four golden threads woven through all the blogs, radio shows, books and online courses I offer.
The first thread is that most of the time you experience life just through your thoughts. When you were first born there wasn’t a thought in your head. You were pure awareness showing up for life as it unfolds. But as you grew up, your head began to fill up with thoughts, which diverted your attention. Rather than being here for life, you began to follow your thoughts wherever they go. In fact, you, like most people, began to believe that you and your thoughts are one and the same. So, there is a very good chance that you live in stories about life rather than experiencing the real thing. And yet what all of us most deeply long for is an alive, intimate and trust filled connection with life as it is.
So I share stories that evoke wonder about life along with ways you can use your senses to actually make contact with life exactly as it is. This allows you to see that right outside of your thoughts is a whole other world of beauty, intelligence, creativity and aliveness. Just moments of reconnecting with the freshness and newness of each moment brings forth the joy of being alive. At the beginning this may only happen for a moment or two, here and there. But these moments accumulate, and it becomes easier and easier to be life rather than always thinking about it.
The second thread is the art of discovering how to use your mind rather than being lost in it. The mind is an exquisite creation and it is absolutely necessary for maneuvering through life. But rather than using thought for the amazing tool it is, we have become lost in it. Once you see that your attention, rather than being here for life, follows your thoughts wherever they go, you become curious about what your thoughts are talking about.
The joy of learning how to see thought rather than believing what it is saying is indescribable. It is the difference between saying, “I am afraid,” and instead, stepping back so you can see the story of fear. By aligning yourself with thought by saying I am afraid, you are totally at the mercy of your thoughts. But learning how to step back and use your attention to see thought, you have taken a step out of the morass of your thoughts, for you are now relating to them rather than from them. When you relate to a mind that is afraid, you are not afraid. When you relate from a mind that is afraid, you feel threatened.
The third thread is the re-awakening of your aware heart. Your heart contains a radiance which heals everything it touches, including the parts of you which you deem unacceptable. For all of us, our hearts are deeply sensitive and sensing systems, but we were roughly handled when we were growing up, causing our hearts to close. To be cut off from the wisdom, the nourishment, and the radiance of an awake heart is soul crushing. But it is possible to loosen the armoring around your heart in order to have access to its vast and healing essence.
After you learn how to see your thoughts, rather than always being lost in them, true healing comes when you can enfold your thoughts and the feelings they generate with the healing balm of your heart. And just like when somebody meets you with kindness, the struggles in your mind let go under the gaze of your accepting heart. In this you discover a deep truth – there is nothing inside of you that is bad or wrong or needs to be fixed. All the parts of you that have caused you to struggle with life, rather than being open to it, let go under the gaze of your accepting attention.
The fourth golden thread, which the other threads bring us to, is about relearning how to experience life as it is unfolding, rather than spending your energy trying to make it be what you think it should be. For what life has in store for you is far better than anything that you can try to create on your own.
Pema Chodron, one of the clearest teachers of awakening, defines enlightenment as relaxing into life! The more you show up for life as it is, the more you begin to see that your life is not a random series of events. It is a highly intentional process that gives you the experiences you need to clear the clouds in your mind so you can become one with the river of creativity that is life. The more you clear your clouds, the quicker you can unhook from the victim mode, from the idea that life is happening to you. Instead you reconnect with the truth that life is for you. It is not always likable, but it is trustable.
And finally, as you live more from your aware heart rather than your mind, it becomes far less likely that you will cause harm to yourself, to your loved ones, to strangers and to the earth itself. Living almost exclusively in our minds, this disconnect has fostered wars, violence, the denigration of the earth, competitiveness, abuse, heartache and the pain of feeling all alone. But this is the time of the aware heart and as more and more of us clear the clouds of our minds so we can live from the wisdom of our hearts, we will finally realize that we are all in this together on a tiny, blue green jewel of a planet and that there is not one person, even the most heinous of dictators or criminals that doesn’t need or deserve the healing of the heart.
You then become a healing presence wherever you go.
Are you willing to explore one of these golden threads today? And if your mind is resistant, ask yourself if you’re willing to show up for your life as it is, so that all the children who are coming after us don’t have to be as deeply caught in struggle as we were. And remember, even just a moment or two throughout the day, where you are experiencing life directly, is a moment of healing on our planet.
First, thanks you for all you write and share. I really try hard to embrace these ideas. The line that stops me up is “For what life has in store for you is far better than anything that you can try to create on your own.” A friend of mines best friend just got into a car accident where she was driving and her son died and daughter is in critical condition but she and her husband are ok. I don’t understand how a person is supposed to deal with that. And how the aforementioned quote can relate to her situation. How will this woman move on? How is life better for her? I don’t mean to sound cynical-I am not-I am desperate to understand how to apply this philosophy to those types of situations. Thank you for any insight.
Hi Lorin,
Sorry for the delay in responding. Your question touched me deeply and I wanted to find the time to respond skillfully. This is a question many people are asking too. Would you be willing for me to put your question and my answer in a blog? It can be totally anonymous. I think a lot of people would receive benefit from it.
To watch our fellow human beings suffer is so painful because we have lost trust in life. We don’t see that challenges are not here because they have done something wrong or it is karmic retribution or God has fallen asleep on the job. Our challenges are where we grow and they are tailor-made to wake us up out of the dream of struggle. Eckhart Tolle speaks directly to this when he says, “Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at the moment.”
Both of my children have been deeply challenged by health issues for many years. But when I agonize over it, I am no longer present for them. When I trust that their soul knows what it is doing, then my heart opens again and I can see all of the gifts they have received from being this challenged. I don’t like that life is happening this way but I trust it.
To help open to the healing that is always embedded in the difficult parts of life, we can look at the yin-yang symbol. It is a powerful symbol that points to the truth that life is made out of dark and the light – the easy and the difficult, the joyous and the sorrowful. The dark and the light in this symbol are nestled together. They aren’t fighting with one another. They are companions. And in the dark side of this symbol is a point of light and in the light side of the symbol there is a point of dark.
It is challenging to discover that point of light in the big challenges of our lives for we are used to resisting and running away from them. When we do that we suffer. But slowly, we begin to see, that underneath our struggling self is our true nature – filled with light and love and peace and joy – and that life is bringing us our challenges so we can see and see through our addiction to struggle so that we can rest in our natural being.
There is beautiful quote by Cynthia Occeli that speaks directly to how our challenges, if we don’t fight against them, can bring great healing:
“For a seed to achieve its greatest expression, it must come completely undone. The shell cracks, its insides come out and everything changes. To someone who doesn’t understand growth, it would look like complete destruction.”
We are the seed she is talking about. And we surrounded by the shell of our struggling self. But we are so much more than just our minds and bodies. We are the essence of light and love! What happens when the shell of our struggling self is cracked open by the big challenges? We begin to recognize and rest in our true nature.
Your friend’s friend does not need to know these truths in order to open to the healing this painful time is bringing her. And you don’t need to share them with her. When we are that raw, we are like skin that has been blistered by the sun. But you can hold them for yourself and for her too. And even talk to her in your heart. That makes a difference even if you never speak to her! This is what my children most want from me – to trust that their life is unfolding as it needs to be, even though it has been very painful.
I leave you with a poem my mother sent to me when I was in my darkest times.
NO OTHER WAY
Could we but see the pattern of our days,
We should discern how devious were the ways,
By which we came to this, the present time,
This place in life;
And we should see the climb
Our soul has made up through the years.
We should forget the hurts, the wanderings, the fears, the wastelands of our life,
and know………..
That we could come no other way or grow
Into our good without these steps our feet found hard to take, our faith found hard to meet.
The road of life winds on and we like travelers go
From turn to turn until we come to know
The truth that life is endless and that we
Forever are inhabitants of all eternity.
Martha Smock
Mary,
Thank you so much for such a thoughtful and caring response. I already had such great respect for you and what you do to make the world a better place-but you taking the time to really try to help me figure out how to help my friend and her friend and me deal with this tragedy is truly wonderful. If feels like a hug and a comfort. Of course you can use this story for your blog! I am positive many people struggle to figure out how to respond when true tragedy strikes. It is still difficult to accept that the death of her child might be here to heal her somehow-but in the larger context you explain-I suppose I can accept that there are forces much greater than us at work in life and we sometimes just have to trust. I will definitely be “talking to her in my heart” as you say. Thanks again.
Dear Mary,
Thanks so much for your work, letter and the time to quietly check in and read your words…and to ‘be’, stepping away from my most usual mind-connection. So grateful to be in the quiet of pre-dawn as it is right now….letting go of the old thought that I have much to fix before I start my day…..such a wonderful gift to share this moment with you. Have a wonderful day!!
I hope your day was wonderful as well. Thank you.
“Your heart contains a radiance which heals everything it touches, including the parts of you which you deem unacceptable.”
As always, bless you, Mary, for this wisdom. It seems as if the heart space is the space before birth; the eternal one lit heart space, and if we can quiet the mind noise, we can feel the deep peace of being. Godspeed always!
Thanks for always taking the time to comment.
Beautiful Mary!! I have set my intention to bring forth all the ideas you have so wisely presented today. I am forever grateful for your love, wisdom and presence made possible by these words.
Thank you for sharing!
It sounds good, Mary, but life is always as bad as it is good. Duality as a plane for consciousness is not only a mixed bag, but having been hijacked by parasites it is more bad than good. At 64 I feel I have had drinks, appetizers and an entree in this restaurant called Earth and I very decisively have no interest in ordering desert. It’s a lousy place and I will not be coming back.
The expansion phase of life (childhood, career and children) is addicting and fosters a false optimism that all but disappears once the contraction phase sets in. On the individual, societal and species level we dance to an oscillating sine wave: expansion/contraction, Kali Yuga/Satya Yuga, etc. Consciousness may or may not be the root problem, but being sandwiched between a selfish
gene and a selfish soul is clearly not something to wish for. Surely we are all fools of the highest order. How else, why else, are we here?
It is certainly a challenge to trust it all! In my world, we are living on this plane because we are ready to learn and grow so we can see, even with all of the contraction and expansion, that who we really are is so much greater than that!