Life is here. Life is now. This moment is all you will ever know. Yesterday is a memory here and now. Tomorrow is a fantasy here and now. Life is only ever here and now, and it is all you will ever have. The mature capacity to place and keep attention in the present moment and on your present experience without getting lost in it, is what I call Awakened Attention.
Awakened Attention means an intensely energetic and alert attention, never lost in experience yet always aware in the midst of experience. Using Awakened Attention, your habits of rejection, avoidance and resistance to your present experience can be observed. You can learn to observe your Life experience unfolding moment to moment, and your conditioned behaviors, habitual patterns and personal strategies can be brought to light and exposed. By maintaining Awakened Attention , you may also start to notice your habit of compulsively attempting to manipulate your external Life to fulfill a sense of emptiness, incompleteness and dissatisfaction. You look 'out there' for something that will do it for you once and for all. With Awakened Attention it may start to dawn on you that what you are really looking for is much closer, and not really outside of you at all. With Awakened Attention it is useful to look at a framework of 'three times', which include past, present, and future, as well as a variety of practices that would involve exploring and bringing to attention the dynamics of each time including:¨ Looking at your past with Awakened Attention is called healing your relationships and experiences.¨ Looking at your present with Awakened Attention is called living at your highest level of functioning.¨ Looking at your future with Awakened Attention preceeds an unfolding of potential development.
You may contemplate some difficult questions as a means of exploring your beliefs, biases and blind spots. As a practice, you might consider these great questions without ever hoping for an answer. What this means is you probe into a great question using great curiosity and focus, allowing the possibility of an answer to come from the experience of a deep and oftentimes wordless place. The question itself IS the answer. Who am I? What is the meaning of Life? Where am I going? Am I loving well? What is my deepest purpose? My favorite question: 100 years from now we will all be dead, what is important to you???
In summary it is my experience that suffering and attachment are 'wake up calls' beckoning me towards the human capacity to explore the depth of my experience, the unfolding of my potential, and my passion for the mystery of Life. In the last 15 years I have examined the wisdom traditions of East and West in an effort to answer Life's big questions, but at this point the Mystery that is Life has only grown deeper. What I hope I have offered here is not an answer or cure for any of these great questions, but rather a variety of skillful means to enter into the vast and various Mysteries of Life. Of course there really are no answers, and even this understanding is but a swirling pattern in the open space of Mystery that is this present moment ... and this ...
www.wakinguptolife.com
What I Really Am (and so are you and Jesus)
A playful yet controversial view that our true and timeless nature does not need to be confirmed by the great realizers that have come before us.How Do You Define Success?
What would it take for you to define yourself as a 'success'? Hitler was a success in his efforts of conquest and domination, until Moscow and Stalingrad. Jack the Ripper succeeded in maintaining anonymity while mutilating and murdering. Jim Jones succeeded in leading 914 of his followers to drink poison cool-aid before killing himself. I have personally succeeded in deceiving and betraying friends, family and lovers.10 Tips For Mothers of Troubled Teenage Sons
Recently I have been spending more time educating mothers of troubled teenaged sons. What I have found is that the progressive and open attitude of these mothers is hopeful and inspiring. Hopeful, because there is much that a mother can know and do that is essential in this crucial developmental period of their son’s life. Inspiring because the steps a mother might have to take to truly help their sons are difficult, painful and as I will outline, counter-intuitive.