I had a client once who asked me to explain further a comment I made to him during one of our sessions:
When you can for just this moment, just for this one moment, completely, utterly totally, beyond accept, love your experience right now, then you have the power to do something about it.
I have seen, in many contexts, the idea of accepting, allowing or welcoming one’s experience. It seems to me that this is a crucial step to letting go or healing any issue. But these terms, welcome, allow, accept, really don’t go far enough in my experience. They do help, but they don’t have the force, the utter radicalness that brings incredible freedom and power. The more radical approach for me is to love my experience.
Let’s say that you experience a bit of hardship or unpleasantness, something like a break-up in a relationship. You are experiencing sadness, unhappiness, a sense of loss and rejection. The question I would often ask a client is “Could you accept or welcome the sense of rejection or loss?” This question helps the client to get in touch with the feeling, to experience it more fully. From there, it is possible to feel a spontaneous release or freedom around the feeling. And that is very good.
However, as I have discovered in my own experience, if you can go beyond welcoming or accepting, and actually go to loving the feeling, even more power is unleashed. For in the moment that you love something, you are saying in effect, “I am 100% happy with the way things are. I don’t need to change a thing.” And that seems to me to be the source of something miraculous. I think it was Eckhart Tolle truly means by The Power of Now.
The Surge of Peace
Every time I do this, no matter what it is I am loving, I feel an incredible surge of peace, happiness and well-being. It is truly remarkable. It goes far beyond feeling a little better about an issue. It transcends releasing or any other process. It feels as if I have activated some hidden power source deep within me, one that goes out into the world through me, liberating me and everything else from suffering.
I encouraged my client in this instance to go beyond just accepting his problem and feelings about it because of the incredible power of love. But it has to be genuine. It requires a bit of radical thinking. It requires a huge leap. Or maybe not. Maybe it just requires a willingness to see what truly is the Truth. The truth that love is all there is.
Right about now you might be saying, “But Tom, I really do want to change an aspect of my life. How can loving something to the extent that I’m, in your words, ‘100% happy with the way things are,’ allow me to make changes in my life?” I’ve heard these questions before. The answer is quite simple, really. Nothing, repeat nothing can change if you first don’t accept it as it is, at least to some extent. And the more you can accept it, ie, go beyond acceptance and love it, the better.
Think about it: let’s say that you are wanting to lose weight. You’ve tried and tried, but to no avail. You have done everything, but nothing works. Why? The odds are pretty good that you are experiencing a massive internal conflict that is locking the weight in place. You are fighting reality. You are fighting life as it is right now. You are overweight. That’s reality. That’s the truth.
Subconsciously, you can almost hear the battle. “I hate being fat, I don’t like myself,” and on and on. And then there’s the other side: “I want to lose weight, I must lose weight, I should lose weight, I want to be thin!” Accepting things as they are drains the fight out of you. It weakens the battle. Your feelings relax, subside, and you feel more peaceful. And loving things as they are, well, it takes this process an order of magnitude further. The fight is gone, the battle forever done. You love yourself as you are. Nothing to change.
Change Can Be Effortless
My experience is that when I do this important step, change often just happens, with little effort on my part. Things simply improve. You might get on the scale and find that 10 pounds of anger and animosity has been shed from your system and your waist by shifting to love. Peace brings harmony and flow. I recall reading one time that “retained hate = overweight.” Could be, don’t you think? It is easy to see how this process would work if that were true.
So, pick an area of your life that is stuck. Look at it, examine how you are not loving things as they are. Make an effort to drop your criticisms, your judgments, your struggle against it. First accept, then move toward love. For now, simply identify what isn’t working and see how you are not being loving to things as they are. It will make a profound difference if you do nothing else. In future posts, I will talk more about how you can work this process on any issue.
In case you can’t tell, I love working with my clients and helping them to experience radical growth in their lives. I personally learn a great deal from them. I’m glad to be able to share this learning with you. Namaste.
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I’ve never been a big fan of affirmations. Many spiritual people are, and I respect that, but I’m just not certain they work. The first time I ever tried doing affirmations, probably 15 or more years ago, I felt, well, incredibly fake telling myself something that just didn’t seem true. As they say around here, you can dress a pig in a bonnet, but you still got a pig (you just gotta love rural America). So, I rarely if ever used them. And I never use them now.
Of course, affirmations are probably the most ridiculed aspect of the entire self-help movement. Remember Stuart Smalley? I loved Al Franken standing in front of the mirror on Saturday Night Live and saying, “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and dog gone it, people like me!” There seems to be a almost cultural bias against affirmations. So, maybe it isn’t just me.
So what isn’t quite right about affirmations? It seems to me that affirmations are fundamentally flawed. They always have an underlying assumption that says “something is wrong with me.” For instance, lets say that you are Stuart Smalley and you think you aren’t very smart. Every time you look in the mirror you say to yourself, consciously or otherwise, “God, I’m stupid.” You have come to believe this statement, deep down, with all the attached emotions and feelings associated with it.
Affirmations would have you start repeating to yourself, “I’m smart enough.” The idea is to counter the negative statement with a positive one. But does it work? Not for most people. Let me give you an illustration to show you why I say that affirmations don’t work. (Thanks to Hale Dwoskin for the following illustration which he often uses at Sedona Method retreats.)
Affirmations start with the negative statement, “God, I’m stupid.” Let’s represent this negative statement with a frowny face:
When you say an affirmation, you are attempting to change the negative to the positive belief, “I’m smart enough.”
Everything should be good now, right? Well, no. While you may repeat the affirmation, the negative belief hasn’t gone anywhere. It is still firmly planted in your mind. So what you get, in fact, is this:
And if you keep repeating the affirmation, day after day, it will get more and more in conflict with the old belief until you end up with a mess:
Is this what will always happen with affirmations? No, of course not. Sometimes they are successful. But millions of people have attempted to make changes in their lives with affirmations and, unfortunately, they quite often do not work. You simply end up with a subconscious mess. So, what can you do?
It seems almost obvious to me now that the better approach is to root out the negative belief instead, to let it go. If you look in the mirror and say, for instance, “God, I’m fat and ugly,” you are making a whole series of judgments about yourself that may, in fact, not be true.
Have you ever questioned these basic assumptions? Have you looked at the feelings that hold these judgments in place? Have you asked yourself what you might be gaining from believing that you are fat and ugly? Have you looked at your fears about being overweight, or your fears of being thin? What messages did you hear as a kid about being thin or good looking? You could ask a dozen more questions about yourself and thereby call into question your mantra, “God, I’m fat and ugly.”
In fact, you may discover that there is absolutely nothing wrong with you. Nothing. You aren’t skinny. So what? I mean really, right at this moment, are you any worse for wear? Are not all the negatives you’ve heard about being overweight somewhere off in the future? Are any of them here right now? Are you going to die right now if you don’t lose 50 pounds?
Whenever I get firmly rooted in right now and out of the fearful future, I quite often find that I’m far more capable of acting, far more motivated to make changes. I’m more open and more willing to try, to risk, to dare. And you probably are, too. Losing weight, exercising, whatever your personal challenge may be, suddenly becomes less daunting and more doable.
In a recent article, I wrote about the Sedona Method, a great program for helping to undo the negativity and judgments that we carry. Another program that I’m a fan of is Byron Katie’s “The Work”. Both of these techniques can be useful tools in letting go of the judgments and negative beliefs that keep us stuck. And they are, in a certain sense, valuable tools to have on the spiritual journey. They help us to uncover a much truer perspective about ourselves that helps us to see the fundamental truth about who we are.
And one last thought for you: I have a hunch that every time affirmations seem to work for someone, it is because at some level the person actually let go of the original negative belief. The success stems from the letting go, not the affirmation. That’s just a hunch, so I could be wrong. You never know!
I’ll leave you with a funny video that I watched this morning that got me thinking about affirmations. If affirmations work for you, then by all means, use them. But if not, I think you will get a kick out this video. Enjoy!
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I’ve mentioned the Sedona Method more than a few times in past articles, so it feels like time to write a comprehensive review of it.
Your Key to Lasting Happiness, Success, Peace and Emotional Well-Being!
If you go to sedona.com you will see the above prominently displayed at the top of the page. So the question foremost in anyone’s mind who is exploring the Sedona Method is: does this program work? Will it really bring me lasting happiness, success, peace and emotional well-being? The short answer to that question, for me personally, is yes, it really did all that it claims. So read on to see the details of this review.
The Sedona Method is a program for teaching you how to let go of any emotion or belief. When you begin reading the book or doing the audio program, you are given the background for what the method terms releasing, i.e., letting go of emotions. The Sedona Method teaches that releasing is natural, and if you pay attention, you will notice that most feelings come and go quite easily if you do not repress them or attach to them in some way. The only reason a feeling sticks around is because we don’t allow it to be felt and then flow out.
Initially, the Sedona Method focuses on letting go of negative feelings, the ones that cause problems for us in life, like fear, anger and apathy. And you let go of feelings initially in the program by asking yourself 3 simple questions:
Could you let this feeling go?
Would you let this feeling go?
When?
It is interesting that these 3 simple questions could be the catalyst for letting go of a painful emotion, but they do work. Since releasing is a natural process, since feelings want to be felt and then flow out of our awareness, the power behind these questions is that they invite you to let this natural process happen. In fact, releasing is less something you do and more something you allow to be done. It is a process more of allowing the emotions to leave than anything else.
Once you’ve mastered the use of these 3 questions and have applied them to a few areas of your life, the Sedona Method gets a bit more involved with what it refers to as the wants that underlie all emotions. In its model, we are all being driven by 4 wants:
Wanting control.
Wanting approval.
Wanting security or safety.
Wanting separation and oneness.
While I initially found this focus on wants to be effective in going deeper with releasing and letting go of more and more difficult emotions, I found after a while that it was way too heady. Over time I became aware that all feelings were being driven by all the above. And at the core always seemed to be some sense of wanting either to survive or to be in control.
Interestingly, too, I began to see how almost every feeling I had could be reduced to anger or fear, and in most cases, anger seemed to be generated by a deep seated fear. And by seeing that it has become easier to release any emotion.
Welcoming and Allowing Feelings
In addition to the above, the Sedona Method uses other techniques for releasing. Probably the simplest, easiest to use, and most profound for me, though, was welcoming or allowing a feeling. Remember, the basic premise of the Sedona Method is that releasing is natural, that feelings merely want to be felt and then pass through. If you think about it, that is what ultimately happens with any feeling.
So, the process of welcoming a feeling is a conscious decision to feel, a conscious choice to allow what you are feeling to be exactly what it is. I had the most dramatic release one day by using this technique that permanently ended panic attacks that had plagued me off and on for almost 30 years. I woke-up one morning feeling extremely anxious, and then slipped into a full-blown panic attack. That familiar feeling of impending doom and death engulfed me. If you’ve ever had a panic attack, you know what I mean.
I had released on panic attacks before, with some success, but never had been freed from them. So, I began releasing on this one, and this time I had no luck. I was deep in panic. And then I remembered something I had heard at one of the retreats I had been to, and so I let myself sink into the panic, going deeper and deeper with it, allowing the panic to completely engulf me and even, I remember thinking, to get stronger if it could. I fully allowed the panic attack and welcomed it. In a sense, I embraced it.
And then, like a fever breaking after the flu, it left, it released, it was gone. Not only was I no longer panicked, but I knew, I absolutely knew that I would never have another panic attack. And I didn’t. Now, as I look back on it, I can’t even conceive of how I ever had panic attacks. They seem an utter impossibility to me. Chalk one up for releasing!
Who Created the Sedona Method
The man who created the Sedona Method, Lester Levenson, was an interesting character. I’ve heard him described variously as a saint, a modern day mystic, an enlightened master, a miracle worker and a shyster businessman from New Jersey. From all that I can gather of the real life Lester, he was quite likely all of these. One man I know described him as “a black hole, so egoless that nothing really could attach to him.” He sounds like he was quite a character and a remarkable man.
Lester’s story is a fascinating one, as it is the story of the awakening of a modern day spiritual master. Others have told his story much better than I can. You can read more about Lester’s life and Lester’s realization and awakening at The Sedona Method website.
Who Teaches the Sedona Method
After Lester passed away in 1994, there was a bit of the inevitable power struggle amongst the faithful. The clear winner was Hale Dwoskin, who was granted the rights to the name “The Sedona Method” by Lester and who probably is the most well known of those teaching some version of Lester Levenson’s technique. I’ve looked into most of them, and for me, Hale has proven to be the most interesting, the most helpful and the clearest, both as a person and as a teacher.
On the whole, I like Hale and his teaching style. He is a kind man, gentle with most people and truly interested in helping them. A popular question at Sedona Method retreats revolves around how enlightened Hale is, a question I know he personally laughs at. In my estimation, Hale has had a definite bit of dropping away of his ego, at least to some extent. He feels “clean” to me. He is fairly honest and straight forward. It feels good to be in his presence.
Hale is a former New York City businessman, so a bit of that shines through his personality, too. This aspect of him caused me problems at first, because the Sedona Method is a for profit endeavor, and Hale is not hurting financially. I know that this aspect of the method bothers others, too. Hale likes to hang-out with the big names in the personal and spiritual development arena, and Jack Canfield in particular is one of his buddies. Yes, Hale was in the Secret, and he knows a lot of those people quite well.
I eventually resolved all of these issues by realizing that he’s no saint and the Sedona Method isn’t perfect. And so what? It works, Hale’s an honest, delightful person, and I’ve benefited from all he does tremendously. I have learned a great deal about my own personal hang-ups about money and success in the process and gotten a fair amount of freedom going in those areas. On the whole, I like Hale a great deal.
Here is a short video of Hale discussing how to let go on the little annoyances of life, to give you a taste of his style and personality:
If you go to the Sedona Method web site, you can read hundreds of testimonials from people who have benefited from using it. You can also read all the marketing material as well. But one of the most powerful things to me has been hearing how the Sedona Method has benefited people I know. So, here is how it has helped me:
A permanent end to panic attacks.
Less anxiety by an order of magnitude (in other words, a lot!).
Little if any concern about the future.
I survived a painful divorce. More importantly, my ex and I get along great, and I can honestly say I love her more now than I ever did when we were married because I’m now capable of really loving someone. Amazing.
I’m a much, much better father these days. My son and I have bonded to an extent I wouldn’t have thought possible a few years ago.
I don’t feel desperate about life the way I used to. I’m much happier to let life happen, to flow with life, to be a part of life rather than always fighting it.
I had chronic fatigue for a number of years. My doctor said at one point that he thought the fatigue would resolve when the anxiety resolved. He was right.
I never was diagnosed with depression, but after a few years of working with the Sedona Method I felt a fog lifting from my mind. It was strange, like I had been living in a haze for at least a decade. And I never knew it.
I finally allowed myself to fully grieve the death of my father 16 years ago. At a Sedona Method retreat, I had a realization that I had been somehow expecting my father to come back to life. I shared this insight with the group, and almost immediately I start crying, sobbing actually, and couldn’t stop. I didn’t want to stop. I cried for 20 minutes. And then I was done. Done. And I knew it. A huge weight had lifted from me.
I finally have a sense of what I’m doing with my life. Writing, coaching, teaching, all these things are pointing me in a direction that I never had the will to move in. Now I do. I can’t say I know exactly what I’m doing, but I’m doing it, and it feels right.
And lastly, for all the years I’ve spent in spirituality, I never really took the idea of spiritual awakening seriously. That is, until Hale started discussing it, in his own way, at one of the retreats I attended. He introduced us to spiritual inquiry, and I took to it like a duck to water. The releasing that occurred from doing inquiry was tremendous. I dove into inquiry from that point, which lead me to all the wonderful teachings I’ve explored since then (and the retreats with Adyashanti). And “best” of all, it has lead to a fuller experience of what I truly am.
In case you can’t tell, I like the Sedona Method. I use it in some form with all my coaching clients. The techniques are quite powerful and supportive of you at just about every stage of your spiritual and personal journey.
How to Learn the Sedona Method
The best way to learn it is to purchase the audio program. The audio program is quite complete, consisting of 20 CDs of recordings at a live class (I was in the audience for the recording). Hale teaches releasing from the basics to the advanced exercises. Moreover, he applies a lot of the material to the three areas of life that concern most people: money and success, relationships and health and well being. You can buy the audio program here. By following the same link, you can also ask to receive a sample CD and DVD of Hale teaching releasing at a Jack Canfield seminar (and yes, Hale really does laugh that much in real life).
You can also buy the book, The Sedona Method, by following this link to Amazon.comthis link to Amazon.com or heading to your local bookstore. The book is where I began, but soon after I started I bought the audio program. It helped tremendously.
Once you’ve gone through the book or audio program and learned the method, you can head out to Sedona, Arizona, for a 7 day retreat with Hale. He also offers a 9 day advanced retreat and a coaching course. I’ve loved the retreats I’ve been on (I’ve been to 6 retreats, 3 coaching trainings and 2 other weekend courses with Hale). And I’m heading back to Sedona in June for 2 weeks of retreat and additional coaching training. I can’t say enough good things about them.
In conclusion, if you want to dive into a personal and spiritual development program that is as good, if not better, than anything out there, and lives up to its hype and claims, then go grab the Sedona Method.
Disclaimer: all the links in this article are affiliate links. I make a commission from each copy of the Sedona Method audio program sold from this website. I think it should be obvious that I’m not reviewing the Sedona Method primarily to make a buck, but if you decide it is right for you, your purchase does support this website and my writing. Only fair to let you know, don’t you think?
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I have a coaching client who has quite a bit of difficulty using his hands and arms due to a long-term problem of pain and stiffness. I frequently type notes for him during and after our sessions so he has a reminder of what we discussed, plus it is a good way to make certain he knows what he will be working on between sessions.
We’ve been working together for a while, and I have worked with him often on his beliefs about the various issues in his life. Obviously from my last few articles, I’ve had thoughts, beliefs and thinking on my mind of late, and during our coaching session last week, I said something to him about his thoughts and beliefs on a few subjects, and then I typed the following into my notes for him:
You will discover, if you are open to it, that much of what goes through your head, your thoughts and thinking, look suspiciously like the behaviors of a drug addict or alcoholic.
He pondered this statement for a day or two, and then he left me a message yesterday asking me to explain further what I meant by the above. I typed a response and sent it to him, explaining what I meant and why my emphasis on thoughts and feelings is helpful and extremely practical. He left me another message this morning begging me to post my response on my website because, in his words, “it was freaking brilliant and would help far more people than I could ever help by coaching alone.” Well, who am I to argue with a statement like that? So, here is what I wrote to him (with minor editing to preserve his privacy):
“Our minds, if we are honest, are quite obsessive. They get stuck on a topic and they keep going round and round and round about it. They don’t stop. Like an addict, they go back for another hit, another high, sticking with a subject or a belief until they literally fall apart from it. Just like an addict.
“We continually give energy to our thoughts by believing them to be true. We say, ‘Well, since I thought it, it must be true.’ But a touch of honesty reveals that most of what we think is no where near true. I would contend that none of it is true. It is all just mental noise, far removed from our actual moment to moment, minute to minute experience.
“So, what I’m encouraging you to do is to suck some of the energy out of the stories you tell yourself. That’s why I always emphasized working with your beliefs. Beliefs are stories. You only believe those things you don’t know to be 100% true. Do you have to believe in breathing? Do you have to believe in gravity? No. You may not know what gravity really is, or how breathing works, or whether gravity will be working tomorrow, but it seems to be the case that every time you jump, you come right back down. No believing really required.
“Let me be very blunt with you. You believe that you can’t make money because of your hands. We’ve discussed that many times. Do you have evidence even remotely as strong as gravity to justify this belief? Or did you decide at some point that it must be true? Do you see? You’ve repeated that story so much that if you will look, you will see that you are clinging to the belief that until your hands get better, you can’t earn money. But is it true? Is it real? Where’s the proof?
“And when you start to doubt your own beliefs, you will find that your creativity will skyrocket. Suddenly, things that seemed impossible start seeming possible. You have new prospects, new perspectives. But only when you question your old beliefs. This process is releasing in its most basic form. Real and true and deep Sedona Method releasing. Exactly what Lester Levenson did when he awaken and healed himself from terminal heart disease.
“Plus, as you shed these beliefs, your body will have a chance to relax. It will not be under so much constant mental stress. And who knows what good things might happen if you relaxed your body!
“Is this making more sense? Let me know….. Tom”
I’ve been thinking lately of writing more articles that focus on how to live from consciousness, spirituality, etc. Personally, I think that spirituality is the most practical approach to life and life’s issues. That’s why I work with people. That’s why I write. To help people with life’s ups and downs.
Spiritual awakening seems to me to be the absolute best solution to all of life’s problems and issues. It is difficult to explain, but it is truly amazing the relief that you feel when you start realizing that all of your problems are not a big deal because they aren’t your problems. Quite simply, there is no you to have them. They are just stuff, part of life, but they do not ultimately threaten who you truly are.
I encourage everyone reading this article to do what I encourage my clients to do: challenge your beliefs. Start to see that they are just thoughts, just ideas floating around they mind, and that they aren’t true and they certainly are not you. You will be surprised by what happens when you start to let all this stuff go. All I can say is, “magical.”
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A few days ago, a potential client wrote to me asking a few questions about how coaching and The Sedona Method would apply to his career, professional commodities trading. With his permission, I’d like to share his question with you and my response (with a few additional thoughts added).
The Question
Hi Tom
I am wondering since you are familiar with the [commodity] trading aspect [of my work], how do you deal with the difficulties of trading when you don’t take losses after you said you would and doing the opposite of what you planned to do? How does, or even does, this work help with that?
My Response
In a nutshell, if I’m following your question correctly, you are asking “how does the Sedona Method and coaching in general help with the fundamental problem of all traders: discipline.” I can’t tell you how many times I read when I was learning to trade commodities that successful traders do not pay attention to their emotions, but stick to their plan, their trading strategy. Obviously, having a way of dealing with your emotions is central to that. Here is how I see the work I do as helping:
The two emotions that are the most important with regard to trading are fear and lust (some call it greed, but the word lust is more appropriate in my view). Traders make lousy decisions when they operate from either of these two. The Sedona Method has numerous ways to approach these, but the simplest of all is to simply get in touch with them, give yourself permission to actually feel them as fully as you can, and then give yourself permission to let them go. The process is simple, quick and effective. It often takes many repetitions, but sometimes it works very quickly. You never know.
More Intuitive from Letting Go
Another benefit to doing this type of work is that one is often more intuitive the more open you become. For me personally, I feel more in sync with what is occurring around me. The markets sometimes feel more transparent. I’m not a professional trader, nor do I follow technical analysis, but I do some trading and tend to hold longer-term positions. I almost exclusive use options so I don’t have to worry about many of the problems that are inherent with futures contracts. I follow a financial writer who is quite often accurate in his ideas about the markets, but he is VERY doom and gloom. I can’t tell you how I know, but I just KNOW that we won’t see what he predicts. That’s what I mean by more intuitive.
In essence, as I have dealt with my fears and my lust/greed, the better my trading/investing has been. I still get afraid at times, but I can release through it easily. I’m less subject to hoping things will turn out okay and then being disappointed. And, I’m less subject to the lust part of the equation, which really caused me some difficulties in the distant past.
Working with Lust and Greed
The way out the lust/greed side is to recognize the inherent feeling of lacking, of craving, of wanting inside the lust. If you close your eyes and think about something you’ve really been wanting, you can feel that lusty, greedy feeling inside of it. In an of themselves, desires and wants are not really a problem, but that greedy feeling can really get in the way.
You can work with it in the same way as outlined above: first allow yourself to feel it. Then make the choice to release it, to drop it, to let it go. Finally, see if you can feel paste your prior feelings of lust and craving into the state of actually having things. You know you are there if you have a sense of completeness. It is a much better place emotionally to feel “I have” than “I want.” And it is a lot better for making good investment decisions.
I hope the above makes sense. If not, ask me for a clarification. I will be glad to help.
And the same offer goes out to all my readers. As you can see, I’m more than happy to answer questions, time permitting. If you have a question, be sure to ask.
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Today I signed a contract to sell my house. I told a friend how it finally sold, and his response was, “Wow, this spiritual crap really works.” Yes, indeed, it really works. Let me share the tale with you:
I’ve been wanting to sell my house for over a year, but for various reasons I didn’t get it on the market until last October. In the distant past I had a brief “career” as a real estate agent (the horror!), so I thought I would sell it myself. Given the disastrous state of the real estate market, I had virtually no success selling my home. It sat empty and lonely for over 3 months with virtually no interest.
So in January I listed it with a high volume agent who insisted that I had to lower the price if I wished to sell it. I was resistant, but she won the argument because I pay careful attention to economic matters and knew that the housing market was in bad shape and getting worse. So, I cut the price to the bone, way below the last appraisal, in hopes it would sell. But for the first month, again, no one had any interest in the house. Even an open house on a sunny day with lots of visitors yielded nothing. Earlier this week, I began to feel a bit of concern as to whether I could even sell the house at the drastically reduced price.
I woke-up yesterday morning, and since I had the morning open, I lounged in bed doing a bit of spiritual inquiry and in general allowing everything to simply be as it is (this is a powerful “practice” that I learned from Adyashanti). My mind wandered a bit, and I soon found that I was thinking about my house. I allowed my feelings about it to rise to the surface, then suddenly in a burst of understanding, I became quite clear as to what was keeping the house from selling. Suddenly, it was so obvious. My history with the house, my story, was the problem.
My ex and I had bought the house in 2000, an old house that needed some work. What started as a basic remodel of a 100 year old house became a full blown restoration complete with an addition. We hired what turned out to be a horrible contractor who, we later learned, was cheating his business partner out of his share of the profits and, most likely, was overcharging us on the renovation. I’d like to claim that I was too smart to be ripped off by a scoundrel, but, in this case, I was almost surely the proverbial sucker born every minute. Needless to say, we spent a fortune on the house, more than we ever would hope to get from selling the house unless we lived there for 30 years.
What I realized in that flash of understanding yesterday morning was that I had been walking around for 7 years feeling like a victim, angry at the contractor for his part in the debacle, but more angry at myself for letting it all happen. I felt not only like a victim, but I felt like a fool, which is a hard thing to admit to yourself when for most of your life you have prided yourself on your intelligence. But a fool is what I felt like, even if I had repressed that feeling most of the time.
But yesterday morning I allowed myself to really feel foolish. Moreover, as the feelings washed over me, I realized that this story I had been telling myself was, in fact, just a story, a tale about the events that occurred. The story had drama, had strong emotions, had a certain Shakespearean flare, at least in version I repeated. I had told myself this story so many times that I had become identified with the main character, Tom, the guy who foolishly wasted his money. I was attached to the story because it was the story of me, because it set me apart and formed a part of my identity.
As you can guess, my emotional and mental investment in the story and this poor house made it almost impossible for me to part with it, both consciously and subconsciously. My overt intention was to sell the house, but underneath that was a tremendous attachment to it. Who would I be without the house? What would become of my story if the house were no longer mine? You can almost feel the weight that the house had in my subconscious. Again, how could I really part with it?
But as the feelings washed over me, as the impact of the attachment came to full light, I knew that I could easily let go of all of it. I could simply drop it. I wasn’t being cheated out of my money. I wasn’t a victim. I hadn’t been a fool. I had spent money. The house was worth less than I had spent. The house was simply a house, a place to live, not my identity. I wasn’t defined by a house. I am what I am, consciousness, awareness, Self, not a house nor a guy named Tom who used to have this story about a house and a contractor.
And as everything shifted, as the attachment lifted, as my awareness shifted to the light of my being, I had the vaguest sense that maybe I would work on this some more when I had some time, but that for the most part, the situation had changed. I had no thoughts that the house would now sell, but I did feel that I had gotten to the bottom of the issue. I felt lighter, freer, and very much at ease about the house. And as I got up out of bed and went about my morning, these thoughts faded from my mind.
Well, later that day, my real estate agent emailed me to say that someone had contacted her earlier that day about my house, and that her assistant had shown it. The prospect was interested and might want to see it again. And today, as you can guess, my agent called to say that the prospect had written an offer, just shy of full list price, cash, to close in 45 days with no contingencies. Yes, I signed it, no counter offers or questions asked.
While I cannot say for certain that my realization yesterday morning directly caused the sale of the house, I know for certain that it opened me more fully to letting the house sell. I have experienced many, many instances of having a shift in consciousness being followed by what seem to be obvious changes in the outer world. These experiences certainly would lead one to believe that shifts in consciousness can cause change in the world. I don’t know if that is really true, but I know for certain that the peace that comes from the shift is worth it, no matter what happens in the world. So, I will keep doing what I’m doing, as you can guess.
Moreover, I find that no matter how little or great our experience of consciousness, awareness, presence, or God is, whether we are “grasshopper” or the master, tales similar to the selling of my house are a frequent experience for those on this journey. Opening to awareness, letting go of beliefs, feelings and thoughts, experiencing awakening, however you choose to describe it, is a never ending source of joy and surprise and delight.
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All of our thoughts are conditioned. We all are thinking exactly along the lines we are conditioned to think. Programmed like a computer. Anybody who thinks they are actually choosing of their own free will the line of thinking that they have is completely deluded by their thinking.
Behind most spiritual practices is the belief that you have to get someplace you’re not- a destination called realization or enlightenment. But realization isn’t someplace else; it’s the naturally occurring human state. It doesn’t belong to anybody. It’s who we all are. Spiritual practices also set up many pictures of what this state looks like. For example, when I described how much fear was present, people told me the fear meant that something must be wrong, because fear was an indication that I wasn’t in the proper state. But fear is just what it is, and it’s there too in the vastness of who we are.
In spiritual life there is no room for compromise. Awakening is not negotiable; we cannot bargain to hold on to things that please us while relinquishing things that do not matter to us. A lukewarm yearning for awakening is not enough to sustain us through the difficulties involved in letting go. It is important to understand that anything that can be lost was never truly ours, anything that we deeply cling to only imprisons us.
Those who awaken never rest in one place.
Like swans, they rise and leave the lake.
On the air they rise and fly an invisible course.
Their food is knowledge.
They live on emptiness.
They have seen how to break free.
Who can follow them?
We always want someone else to change so that we will feel good. But has it ever struck you that even if your wife changes or your husband changes, what does that do to you? You’re just as vulnerable as before; you’re just as idiotic as before; you’re just as asleep as before. You are the one who needs to change, who needs to take medicine. You keep insisting, “I feel good because the world is right.” Wrong! The world is right because I feel good. That’s what all the mystics are saying.
. Both of these techniques can be useful tools in letting go of the judgments and negative beliefs that keep us stuck. And they are, in a certain sense, valuable tools to have on the spiritual journey. They help us to uncover a much truer perspective about ourselves that helps us to see the fundamental truth about who we are.
this link to Amazon.com or heading to your local bookstore. The book is where I began, but soon after I started I bought the audio program. It helped tremendously.
Today I signed a contract to sell my house. I told a friend how it finally sold, and his response was, “Wow, this spiritual crap really works.” Yes, indeed, it really works. Let me share the tale with you:
