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Pain, specifically physical pain, varies moment by
moment with your state of mind, or more precisely, with
how present or not you are. So does your
vitality. When you are caught up in the thoughts
that generate fearfulness or despair, physical pain can
worsen and weaken you. The moment you relax into
the present and your thinking becomes quieter, the pain
signal may well decrease and your vitality returns.
This can happen in an instant, and that is an instant of
healing. Add up those instants of presence and
decreased pain, and at the end of an hour, or a day, you
will have more energy and optimism. Ten, twenty, a
hundred or more of those moments each day; and you have
an entirely different experience. You are more
healthy than sick, at least in your state of mind.
This is an immediate fruit of the path of learning to be
present: to be your aware self instead of
identified with your thinking--your ego. This is
why the great Indian spiritual teacher Sai Baba has
summarized his whole message to humanity with three
words: "Watch your thoughts."
For most people, the difference between awareness and
thinking is unfamiliar. We have believed that we
are what our thoughts tell us we are, and our world is
what our thoughts tell us it is. When we are told
that we are sick and then we tell this to ourselves, we
believe that we are sick. But the part of us that
is aware of whatever we are telling ourselves about
being sick is not in itself sick.
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Letting
your awareness help you step away from your
thinking--which means being more present--brings you
back to a healthy state of mind. Without
identifying the thoughts that compare how you currently
are with how you used to be, aren't you actually okay
right now? If you don't identify with thoughts
that picture the future in terms of diminishing
capacity, or envision yourself lacking sufficient funds
for retirement, is there any real threat right
now? Without thoughts that generate emotions of
bitterness or hopelessness or of being a victim, this
moment will hold you in peace.
When you turn your attention away from your thoughts and
into the present moment, you restore yourself to a state
of open receptivity to a limitless source of
intelligence, a limitless field of love. You give
that love and intelligence a chance to join you and
transform you. Returning to a sense of wholeness
in yourself is being healthy. It is also the most
powerful way you have to change the future.
The ego, like a bad cell-phone connection that produces
cracked, clipped noise, is constantly producing
stressful mental and emotional noise that obscures the
signal of this deeper intelligence. It makes you
less intelligent. And it weakens your body's
connection to the vibration of wholeness that is the
deeper note of existence. At the level of ego, you
are always more or less out of tune.
Again and again, ego makes you into who you have
been instead of who you really are and can
be. Your ego can never envision the future in a
way that is new; it can only keep projecting what it has
known. When you become present and gain distance
from your ego's thinking, your whole being regains
alignment with that larger consciousness. Now
there is greater room for new possibility, including
restoring physical health.
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