living life fully's e-zine for March 4, 2024

4 March 2024

Thank you for your visit! We're now well into March, the month that officially brings us spring--we hope that you're able to do some great things this month to end your winter well and begin your spring wonderfully!
	The Power of Awareness Richard Moss
	Your Priorities Are Showing! Kathy Gates
	A Lot to Like tom walsh
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Simple and Profound Thoughts (from Simple and Profound)
Don't let life discourage you; everyone who got where they are had to begin where they were. -Richard L. Evans	Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its shortness. -Jean La Bruyere
The secret of success is to be in harmony with existence, to be always calm. . . to let each wave of life wash us a little farther up the shore. -Cyril Connolly	We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about. -Charles Kingsley

The Power of Awareness (an excerpt)
Richard Moss

Any story you tell yourself about who you are, any belief you have, any feeling you are aware of, is only an object of your larger consciousness. You, in your essence, are always something that experiences all these and remains more complete than any of them. When you realize that you are inherently larger than any feeling that enters your awareness, this very awareness will change the feeling, and it will release its grip on you.

Similarly, ideas that you have about yourself are relative, not absolute truths. If you simply look at them and do not let them lead you into further thinking, they will give way and leave your mind open and silent. There is always a relationship between who we believe or feel ourselves to be and something else, the Self that is our larger awareness.

In awakening to this Self-me relationship, we begin to be present with our experience in a new way. We learn to consciously hold our thoughts and feelings in our own larger fields of awareness. Then, even if we are troubled and confused, this non-reactive quality of presence to ourselves allows us to restore ourselves to a sense of wholeness. This is the power of awareness.

Sensation and Perception: Our Original Consciousness

The great Indian sage Ramana Maharshi said that if we want to know our true selves, we must “go back by the way that we have come.”

Our original state of consciousness in childhood is not one of being a separate entity with our own thoughts and sensations, but rather is a relatively undifferentiated domain of sensation and perception. Our parents, having already reached the developmental stage of separate-self consciousness, provide the model by which we begin to develop our own sense of the separate self.

But when we take the developmental step into the consciousness of the separate self and leave behind the universe of immediacy and undifferentiated sensations, as a consequence we also become identified with our sensations. Who is happy? Me. Who is angry, tired, frustrated . . . ? Me. Our feelings acquire names, however, and at the same time, we are defined by those feelings.

The same is true with perception: we may not feel that the sunshine on the trees is me, but we cannot identify it without simultaneously existing as a separate me. In psychological and philosophical theory, this level of consciousness is called “subject-object.” It is the level of ego awareness where most human development stops. We are aware as me, we react as me, we defend as me, we desire as me, but we are not aware of the true self. It is the true self that looks at all we think, do, and experience, including our sense of me. In this looking, a relationship is created that has the power to transform our experience of ourselves and our worlds.

Throughout our lives, the moment we bring our awareness fully into the Now, we enter the domain of the true self, and our immediate conscious reality is once again that of sensation and perception. As I sit in the park, the sunlight brightens the leaves and casts shadows on the ground. I have a feeling of contentment. And as long as “I” don’t create stories about what I am seeing or about the fact that I am feeling content, which leads me away from my immediate experience, what I experience remains simply perception and sensation. The same is true for any feeling, any emotion. In the Now, it is just what it is. In the Now, I “go back” to my original awareness “by the way that [I] have come.” When we directly perceive and experience whatever is present in our larger fields of awareness, it is possible to have a relationship with it without becoming lost in it or defined by it.

Exercising the Power of Awareness

We exercise the power of awareness and strengthen our spiritual muscle by bringing ourselves, over and over again, into the immediate present. To do so, we must become present with what we are feeling and thinking. We can turn our attention directly toward what we are experiencing instead of staying enmeshed in a feeling or blindly accepting our beliefs about ourselves.

It makes all the difference in the world whether we are caught in a negative emotion and say, “I am sad, angry, lonely,” and so on, or are able to recognize, at that moment, “Here am I, all wound up in sensations of resentment. Here am I, fuming with anger.” Awareness of our sensations is not the same as identifying with our thoughts or feelings. Every movement back to present-moment awareness grounds us in the body and opens the connection to our larger awareness.

Even the smallest movement toward exercising the power of awareness, instead of collapsing our larger awareness into our thoughts and feelings and thereby becoming identified with them, restores us to a more complete consciousness. It gives us the power to start from a fresh, open, less conditioned relationship to our experience. This doesn’t necessarily mean that our problems disappear. But as we exercise the power of awareness, our reflexive reactivity diminishes. We respond from a state of greater presence. When we collapse into our feelings, we lose this capacity. We default into me, and this limited self seems like the whole of who we are. Then we have no choice but to react because we feel as if we must defend ourselves.

The Fundamental Relationship

What are we actually doing when we bring our awareness fully into the present and realize “Here am I . . . ”? We are moving into a more spacious awareness and thus creating conscious distance from what we are experiencing. At the same time, we are opening toward our immediate experience to see it as it is, to see it fully, to invite it to reveal itself more completely to us. We are seeing as objectively as we can, without reacting or judging. This lets us more completely realize what we are actually feeling or sensing; we do not merely remain in our heads, interpreting and analyzing.

It is important to point out that moving our awareness into the Now and thereby gaining distance from our feelings and thoughts is not dissociation. A frequent mistake people make with Eastern meditation practices is to try to rise above and detach from an experience, especially whenever the experience is considered negative. To exercise the power of awareness, we are required to become more present in our experiences without losing our larger awareness. With this quality of attention, we gain true understanding. We naturally begin to respond to our experiences in the most appropriate and intelligent ways.

This intimate viewing of ourselves by our awareness is the most fundamental of all relationships. We create the possibility of a conscious, empathetic connection between me (or self) and our true selves, or what is alternatively referred to as the Self. The personal self that we experience as ourselves is held, seen, and felt deeply by that, which will never reject me, never turn away, never judge me. It can see us judging, attacking ourselves, creating our own misery; but it does not judge even this. It is simply present with me.

This presence need not be merely neutral or indifferent. We can let it be our trusted friend, like the Persian mystic poets Hafiz and Rumi did when they referred to it as the “Guest” or the “Beloved,” to whom they offered themselves and who always received them.

The key to cultivating the healing potential of the self-Self relationship is the quality of our attention -- the steadiness, gentleness, and acceptance of the “gaze” we turn toward ourselves. We must be truly willing to experience our feelings and clearly see our thoughts without reaction, allowing the moment to be exactly as it is without defending ourselves against these feelings and thoughts, without our minds moving away into further thought. Then that which transcends our capacity to name or categorize it in any way, is present to us and has the same accepting quality that we present to ourselves. This is also the essence of meditation and prayer. By keeping our attention in the present moment, we can become transparent to what is transcendent. It is the Self’s profoundly empathetic acceptance of self that ultimately sustains us when we face our deepest fears, including even our egos’ primal terror, nonbeing.

* * * * *

Copyright Richard Moss, MD. Richard Moss is an internationally respected teacher, visionary thinker, and author of five seminal books on transformation, self-healing, and the importance of living consciously. For forty years he has guided people from diverse backgrounds and disciplines in the use of the power of awareness to realize their intrinsic wholeness and reclaim the wisdom of their true selves. He teaches a practical philosophy of consciousness that models how to integrate spiritual practice and psychological self-inquiry into a concrete and fundamental transformation of people's lives. Richard lives in Ojai, California, with his wife, Ariel. Visit him at https://richardmoss.com.

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Your Priorities Are Showing!
Kathy Gates

Everybody's heard the phrase, "get your priorities straight." But what does that mean? Often I've found, it means that whoever is saying it doesn't think you have HIS or HER priorities at the top of your list. As a child, whenever my dad would say that in a stern voice to me, I often noticed that it was his goal that he thought I was ignoring, and not necessarily my own.

The term 'creating priorities' goes by a lot of other names as well. Some people call it focus; author Stephen Covey calls it being principal-centered; a marketing campaign says "just do it." What it means is that you choose what's important to you, and you direct your time, energy, money, space, opportunity, etc. towards it. You protect it. You invest in it. You simplify your life so that you are not distracted by things that do not CONTRIBUTE to your priorities.

In a magazine article I read recently, it noted that many of us are overwhelmed by the choices available to us. As an example, there are 597 shades of red lipstick! If you try to examine each and every option available to you, you'll spend all your time just trying to wade through them.   It's important to realize that things that are not directly contributing to your priorities are contaminating them. Establishing a filter to quickly decide if it meets the criteria of your priorities is vitally important.

Stephen Covey mentions how we tend to respond to urgent, but not necessarily important things, in our lives. That is because we don't stop long enough to decide what's important, decide what we want to spend our time on, and most importantly decide what we DON'T want to spend our time on. Instead we just respond to the next ringing phone, the next problem, the next color of lipstick that gets our attention. Distractions don't just take away your time, energy, and money; they actively contaminate your priorities. You must protect your priorities even at the risk of sounding selfish.   When you let go of your priorities to respond to someone else's agenda, you are not only putting yourself at the bottom of your own priority list, you are also responding to THEIR priority.

People often come to me and say, "One of my priorities is to be happy, or to be successful, or to have peace of mind". Happiness is a feeling, or maybe something we experience. The same can be said of success, or peace of mind. To have the life you want you must be able to describe it in more concrete terms. To define your priorities so that you can ACT on them, you must be able to break it down in specific measurable goals. What is it you really really want in your life that would "make you happy"? How do you measure happiness?   How will you know when you're successful?

The modern media has given us the idea that if we are really really busy now, one day out of the blue, our great simplified life will fall out of the sky. That is totally and completely backwards! We can't have it all. We never could, and never will. You must choose. If you create the simplicity now, and direct your energy into your priorities, THEN success will follow. You must pick your priorities and nurture them so that they grow.

Creating priorities doesn't mean that you have to choose between family and career. Not at all. That's about balance (a whole different show!). Creating priorities does mean that you do have to choose the way you allocate your time. Each of us is given the same 24 hours each day. Successful or happy people spend theirs in a way that takes them towards their goals. The key to success here is to examine how you spend your time in relation to what you say your priorities are. "Don't schedule your time around your priorities, schedule your priorities around your time."

You do not HAVE to spend many many hours preparing food, cleaning the house, maintaining the landscape, running errands, watching TV, or playing computer games. You may choose to do that, but then you are making choices that do not reflect what you SAY are your choices about your priorities.

If you choose to spend a large amount of time on things that are low on your list of priorities, then a reallocation of time is the only way that you will ever achieve your most important goals. If you don't do that, then that too is a choice…a choice that probably reflects where your true priorities are.

Creating priorities is where the real "YOU" comes into play. This is a very individual step, and one that requires that you reach into your heart and tell the truth about what you really want out of life. It's time to stop listening to what your mother wanted, or what your friends talked you into in college. What's important to you? How do you want to live your life?

No matter what your priorities are--financial security, healthy relationships, or having more free time--creating and following your priorities can achieve them all. Successful people have known this for years. Now it's YOUR turn to use their secrets to your advantage.

"Though no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending." -- Carl Bard

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from morning to night, as from the cradle to the grave, is a succession
of changes so gentle and easy we can scarcely mark their progress.

Charles Dickens

A Lot to Like

It always fascinates me to see just how critical we are of ourselves, and just how often we express that self-criticism. Many of the things that we say about ourselves we would never, ever consider saying about another person, so why in the world do we say them about ourselves? For some reason, we think that it's okay to say things like "I'm so stupid" about something that we've done, while we would never imagine telling someone else that he or she is stupid for having done the exact same thing.

I do this myself very often, and I really don't like it when I do so. For the most part, I'm pretty fair with myself, and I like the person I am. At times, though, the thought patterns with which I grew up many years ago surface again, and instead of liking myself and the things that I do, I tend to be hyper-critical of myself, and I tend not to like the person I am.

And this is ridiculous. After all, I was created by the same power through which every other person who ever has lived was created, so there's no reason for which I should be more critical of myself than I am of others. I've worked hard all my life, and I've been a very responsible person, so I shouldn't be critical of the things that I've done or how I've done them. Yes, I've done some stupid things (and some idiotic things, and some mean things), but I've never done them purposefully, and they're in my past now.

It is of practical value to learn to like yourself. Since you must
spend so much time with yourself you might as well
get some satisfaction out of the relationship.

Norman Vincent Peale

I obviously can't say that I'm just like everyone else, but I do know from experience that almost everyone I've met is more critical with themselves than they are loving with themselves. Most people dwell on their own perceived thoughts and shortcomings rather than on their own strengths and successes. Even people who are very successful tend to focus on their few failures rather than their many successes. And the problem is that this type of approach often actually keeps us from being successful--because we're so harsh on ourselves, we start to feel inadequate and even incompetent, so when an opportunity to shine does come along, we don't shine because we've convinced ourselves that we aren't capable of doing so.

But think about yourself objectively. Step outside of your skin for a few moments, and look at who you are and what you do from a different perspective. What would you tell yourself about yourself if you were a different person? The chances are that you'd find more to like than to criticize; more to encourage than to discourage; more to love than to dislike.

There's an awful lot to like in who you are. You are a wonderful creation, a person who has made his or her way through a great deal of adversity and a great number of trials, and here you are still, making your way through more. You've made mistakes, but you've also helped other people by giving them encouragement, love, and time, and physical effort. You've made mistakes, but you've owned up to them and did your best to avoid them afterwards. You've even ended up making the same mistakes--and you may still be making them--but you're still searching for the strength and wisdom inside that will allow you to stop making them.

You must love yourself before you love another. By
accepting yourself and fully being what you are,
your simple presence can make others happy.

unattributed

We almost never give up on people we love, but sometimes we're more than willing to give up on ourselves. Perhaps we're mad at ourselves for not pursuing our dreams; while we would tell someone else that it's okay because life sometimes has other things planned for us, we tell ourselves that this is a bad thing and that we're failures. Maybe we made a bad career move, and while we would tell someone else that it's never too late to make a new start, we feel ourselves that we're stuck and that there's no way out--and we never give ourselves a chance to make that new start.

But each of us is as deserving of love as every other person on this planet--and we're especially deserving of our own love. And it should be easy for us to show ourselves compassion, for we know better than anyone else the kinds of trials and adversity that we've been through, the kinds of things that we've had to deal with in our lives.

There's a lot to love about you. You are an amazing creation in an amazing world, and you really have done your best in all that you've done, even if you have fallen short in some ways. Think about the kind things that you would say to someone else who also has fallen short--keep your chin up, you'll do better next time, you did the best you could, I'm proud of you for trying--and tell yourself such things as much as you can. You don't want to lie to yourself and tell yourself that you tried hard when you really didn't, but you also don't want to ignore the efforts that you have made to do right as much as you can.

Most of the time you are growing up, people tell you what's
wrong with you. Your coach tells you, your parents tell you,
the teachers tell you when they grade you. I think that's very
good in the early stages, because it helps you then develop skills.
But at some point in your career, generally I think when you are
in your teens, you look in a mirror and you have to say, despite
all the bumps and warts, "I like that person I'm
looking at, and let's just do our best."

Robert D. Ballard

I've always had a very hard time with this, but I am getting better at it. I'm getting better at giving myself a break and giving myself credit for the efforts I've made, rather than focusing exclusively on the mistakes and blunders I've made. I realize that I am a pretty good person, and I'm deserving of good treatment, especially of myself. And just as I wouldn't insult someone else for a simple failure, I'm not going to get down on myself for such a thing. I'm going to be kind to myself while still having high expectations of myself, and I'm going to be fair to myself at all times. There will be times when it's important that I hold myself responsible for not doing all that I should, but there will also be times when it's important that I encourage myself and even compliment myself.

You, too, are deserving of compassion, love, and encouragement, and perhaps you're not getting enough from others because you're not giving enough to yourself. People are pretty good at noticing the ways that we treat ourselves, and then they tend to treat us in a very similar fashion. So if we're not treating ourselves with kindness, we could actually be teaching others about the way we expect to be treated by them, and many people are all too happy to oblige us by doing what we ask of them.

There's an awful lot to like about you. Give yourself credit for that fact, and treat yourself well. You deserve it, and your life will definitely improve it you simply improve the way that you treat that very special person, your self.