No matter who you are, no matter what you do, where you are from, who you were raised by, what your circumstances were growing up; No matter your age, your relationship status, the color of your skin or the culture you're immersed in... WE ALL seek the same things.
Belonging, safety, love, peace, joy, purpose, happiness, success, health...
Can you take a wild guess as to where you find them or who you need in your life to achieve such graces?
You might've guessed it but I'll put it to you loud and clear...
You have them all, and then-some, within you, RIGHT NOW.
Prepping to write this, I sat for a few minutes with my eyes closed, my forehead relaxed and my tongue released from the roof of my mouth (I highly recommend doing this right now if you aren't already). I put on one of my favorite meditation tunes from my husband (Click here if you'd like it for yourself), and I imagined myself falling back... into myself. Does that make sense? I visualized myself literally falling backwards, or rather, floating backwards, into an abyss... into my Consciousness. The feeling that washed over me was pure peace and tranquility, then the tears came. Tears of immense gratitude for feeling all of those graces I mentioned above: Belonging, safety, love, peace, joy, purpose, happiness, success, health.
Now if I threw you for a little loop by saying consciousness, never fear, I am here to share how I came to understanding it more clearly for myself. It has taken some chipping away at the overused version of the word that often times brings thoughts and feelings of hierarchy or someone achieving some level of understanding that you will never achieve. Divine Consciousness is purely our gift of awareness that resides within ALL of us, all the time. It is within this awareness that we can realize for ourselves that we have all of the answers to all of our life's qualms... answers to questions that each and every one of us has. As Sydney Banks says in his profound book that I refer to on a consistent basis for deepening my understanding of our experience of life, The Missing Link:
Mental health lies within the consciousness of all human beings, but it is shrouded and held prisoner by our own erroneous thoughts.
Side bar: Those thoughts are why our level of consciousness can go up and down throughout the day. When we're believing our stressful thinking {still happens to me, even if just for a moment - I'm human, too!}, our consciousness is in the ground because we're flailing around trying to find answers in those crappy thoughts as opposed to our wisdom, our gut instinct. When we are peaceful inside, in flow with our wisdom, we have a higher consciousness because we are aware that our knowing has us, and will continue to reveal answers as we need them. Ok, carry on with Syd...
This is why we must look past our contaminated thoughts to find the purity and wisdom that lies inside our own consciousness.
When the wise tell us to look within, they are directing us beyond intellectual analysis of personal thought, to a higher order of knowledge called wisdom.
Like the sun, your wisdom is always present beyond the clouds of your erroneous thoughts
Isla Mujeres, Mexico
When I fell back into myself in my brief meditation, those tears of gratitude were not only coming from the peace that washed over me from feeling the depth of truth that all which we seek lies within us; But from this place I felt expansive, a deep feeling of love that unleashed a flood of memories where I felt this same feeling because I was present and totally aware (conscious) of how pure the moment was. Nothing that was extraordinary, but absolutely ordinary: flashes of memories with my family sitting around the table with coffee or going on a bike ride, me at a tiny age in the back seat of my parent's car, collecting myself to head out on an exciting day trip adventure. My husband and I on a walk talking about our dreams, watching a sunset in Joshua Tree on vacation with my friends who are family, a moment where I sobbed in traffic because immense gratitude hit me so hard I couldn't contain myself, looking up at the stars during an outdoor summer concert...
Have you had these types of experiences? The kind where something hits you out of no where and you think to yourself how perfect a moment, an experience or a feeling is? And you're totally aware of it and grateful for it? You even say to yourself "I want to remember this forever."
In those moments, you were just completely aware of YOU - the brush and branches of any thinking that may have normally gotten in the way was gone, and you were experiencing YOURSELF in pure alignment form. It may have looked like it was the experience you were having that brought on all of those beautiful feelings, but you were truly just experiencing yourself, shining bright and effortless. The more you can realize for yourself that that IS you 100% of the time, even when you are distracted by your thinking, the more your thinking will stop distracting you. The feeling is so incredibly amazing that you'll naturally continue to make the effort to ignore your stressful thoughts. Like I've said many times before about this understanding: it feels like pure magic that no one told us we had.
Throughout your day, whenever you experience peace wash over you, even if it's just for a moment, pause to sit with it if you can or at the very least, just notice it. If you are reading this and thinking "There is no way I can have even a moment of what she is talking about - I work a stressful 9-5, I have kids, I have to make the meals, I barely even have time to take a crap in a peaceful state of mind." Well, to that I say, you are proving my point that we all innocently believe that the life that goes on outside of us is where we seek: Belonging, safety, love, peace, joy, purpose, happiness, success, health... But the truth is, when you are aware of what exists within you underneath the chaos of your mind, it makes no difference where you are, what you're doing or who you're interacting with - you can experience consistent, beautiful peace inside - because it's YOU; And nothing outside of yourself can take you away from YOU, only you can do that by continuing to believe your old script.
As a 15 year old client of mine said so clearly to me the other day when she had a huge insight into her anxiety, "OMG! It's like I'm choosing to get caught up in my own drama! My thoughts are my drama! They aren't real, they're just drama!"
Mmhmmm.....
All my love and see you next week,
Jessie
