This is a story about the following:
• How our ordinary mental processing of day to day events creates our suffering.
• Specific examples about how to rework our processor to harvest bounty.
• How I did it the exact wrong way and turned it around to the right way.
While I am grateful that I live in an area that abounds in mystical and natural beauty, I have regretted the lack of social activities available on the weekends. A discouraging weekend last weekend, inspired a pledge that I was not going to let that happen again. I signed up for a kayaking group that was going to meet at a gorgeous lake some distance away. I didn’t care how far I had to drive. The kayaking trip was going to fill up the hole in my life, known as lack of community.
The drive did not go well as my exit off the interstate was blocked and without a map, it took and extra hour to get to the campground. I looked for the group for an hour and a half when I got to the lake, getting more and more disoriented when I couldn’t find them. Their instructions were specific and I was exactly where they said they would be. The hole got bigger.
The fact that two neighbors in my campground invited me to sit by the fire did not help. I couldn’t wait to sleep so I could get up for the early dawn kayak outing. My sleep was uncomfortable, after waking a trip into the bushes to relieve myself resulted in me being covered with desert stickers, the break-of-dawn kayak group was no where to be found, and 8 am turned out to be the real start time. The hole got bigger.
Frazzled and frustrated, I decided to apply some of the wisdom that I am constantly spouting. “Here I am at this stunning lake in perfect weather and I am miserable. I see once again I am learning that controlling and manipulating the material world is not the path to happiness (i.e. trying to fill the hole with a kayak trip).
We let the mind run wild like a balloon expelling air that slips from our fingertips. The balloon does uncontrollable figure eights in the air, exhausted and flaccid at the end of it. Like the balloon whirling wildly in the air, we religiously gnash our thoughts to figure out how to repair the holes in our lives. This whirlwind builds resistance within us.
Resistance causes our lives to malfunction in all the numerous ways that they are prone to. Releasing resistance shoots us into a state of grace and allows all our best dreams to unfold at our feet.
I begin the set of mental and breathing exercises. I have revised the Buddhist Tonglen practice, added in some Sedona Method and topped it off with the Law of Attraction. I start by breathing in the issue, which in this case is lack of community. I breathe this into me three times. I allow it to fill up the oxygen in my body to invade my blood, to become my heart and my soul. Then three times, I breathe out satisfying, enriching community, giving it away to people who already have it.
I continue with this process, and within fifteen minutes I feel the divinity of this majestic natural setting infiltrate my being. In another, fifteen minutes, I am filled with ecstasy. I then visualize a lovely, fun filled, community filled day.
Then the pieces of my day begin to come together in ways that don't make sense in the logical world. I walk to my car to get something and the kayak instructor calls out to me. He is parked at least two hundred feet from where the from the official gathering place for the kayaking event. There is no visible way to tell that I am interested in the kayak trip and he has never met me. This is technically a scuba event with hundreds of people wandering around and the kayak event is just a sideline.
Then the original organizer of the trip, who I looked for for so long the night before, shows up all of a sudden and introduces herself. Another woman wanders up several minutes later who was waiting for us at the official site for the kayak instruction. She is visibly upset that she missed so much of the gathering. I feel for her that she doesn’t know the art of releasing.
I could have gone to the official site for the kayak event and never found them, because the group never went to the official gathering place. I could have stood down there and gotten madder and madder, as that was clearly the direction in which I was pointed before applying the Law of Attraction..
We collect ourselves, have a delightful paddle, followed by a community filled lunch and a nap. I depart the event happy and fulfilled.
I am seeing that unwinding and turning around these everyday examples of the mind gone wrong is the true fertilizer for abundance. Our emotions give us the signal that we need to check in with our gnashing mind and pay attention to what it is saying. Our knee jerk faulty reaction when we have an unpleasant emotion arise is to look at the circumstances and try to change it. By acknowledging our emotional indicators of vibrational misalignment and redirecting the mind in the right direction, we harvest the natural abundance that the universe has arranged for us.
Deborah is available for coaching at deborah@deborahbird.com
• How our ordinary mental processing of day to day events creates our suffering.
• Specific examples about how to rework our processor to harvest bounty.
• How I did it the exact wrong way and turned it around to the right way.
While I am grateful that I live in an area that abounds in mystical and natural beauty, I have regretted the lack of social activities available on the weekends. A discouraging weekend last weekend, inspired a pledge that I was not going to let that happen again. I signed up for a kayaking group that was going to meet at a gorgeous lake some distance away. I didn’t care how far I had to drive. The kayaking trip was going to fill up the hole in my life, known as lack of community.
The drive did not go well as my exit off the interstate was blocked and without a map, it took and extra hour to get to the campground. I looked for the group for an hour and a half when I got to the lake, getting more and more disoriented when I couldn’t find them. Their instructions were specific and I was exactly where they said they would be. The hole got bigger.
The fact that two neighbors in my campground invited me to sit by the fire did not help. I couldn’t wait to sleep so I could get up for the early dawn kayak outing. My sleep was uncomfortable, after waking a trip into the bushes to relieve myself resulted in me being covered with desert stickers, the break-of-dawn kayak group was no where to be found, and 8 am turned out to be the real start time. The hole got bigger.
Frazzled and frustrated, I decided to apply some of the wisdom that I am constantly spouting. “Here I am at this stunning lake in perfect weather and I am miserable. I see once again I am learning that controlling and manipulating the material world is not the path to happiness (i.e. trying to fill the hole with a kayak trip).
We let the mind run wild like a balloon expelling air that slips from our fingertips. The balloon does uncontrollable figure eights in the air, exhausted and flaccid at the end of it. Like the balloon whirling wildly in the air, we religiously gnash our thoughts to figure out how to repair the holes in our lives. This whirlwind builds resistance within us.
Resistance causes our lives to malfunction in all the numerous ways that they are prone to. Releasing resistance shoots us into a state of grace and allows all our best dreams to unfold at our feet.
I begin the set of mental and breathing exercises. I have revised the Buddhist Tonglen practice, added in some Sedona Method and topped it off with the Law of Attraction. I start by breathing in the issue, which in this case is lack of community. I breathe this into me three times. I allow it to fill up the oxygen in my body to invade my blood, to become my heart and my soul. Then three times, I breathe out satisfying, enriching community, giving it away to people who already have it.
I continue with this process, and within fifteen minutes I feel the divinity of this majestic natural setting infiltrate my being. In another, fifteen minutes, I am filled with ecstasy. I then visualize a lovely, fun filled, community filled day.
Then the pieces of my day begin to come together in ways that don't make sense in the logical world. I walk to my car to get something and the kayak instructor calls out to me. He is parked at least two hundred feet from where the from the official gathering place for the kayaking event. There is no visible way to tell that I am interested in the kayak trip and he has never met me. This is technically a scuba event with hundreds of people wandering around and the kayak event is just a sideline.
Then the original organizer of the trip, who I looked for for so long the night before, shows up all of a sudden and introduces herself. Another woman wanders up several minutes later who was waiting for us at the official site for the kayak instruction. She is visibly upset that she missed so much of the gathering. I feel for her that she doesn’t know the art of releasing.
I could have gone to the official site for the kayak event and never found them, because the group never went to the official gathering place. I could have stood down there and gotten madder and madder, as that was clearly the direction in which I was pointed before applying the Law of Attraction..
We collect ourselves, have a delightful paddle, followed by a community filled lunch and a nap. I depart the event happy and fulfilled.
I am seeing that unwinding and turning around these everyday examples of the mind gone wrong is the true fertilizer for abundance. Our emotions give us the signal that we need to check in with our gnashing mind and pay attention to what it is saying. Our knee jerk faulty reaction when we have an unpleasant emotion arise is to look at the circumstances and try to change it. By acknowledging our emotional indicators of vibrational misalignment and redirecting the mind in the right direction, we harvest the natural abundance that the universe has arranged for us.
Deborah is available for coaching at deborah@deborahbird.com
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