Consider This: The House of Up and Down

Most of our lives involve ups followed by downs. This is so familiar because it’s nearly ubiquitous our entire life. It seems as if some are able to break this cycle while others never challenge it. Most of us ride in the middle somewhere, challenging the cycle periodically, and falling back into it casually.

The ease with which we set up shop in the house of up and down is terrifying. Considering the impact on our personal evolution, this house needs to not only be left behind, but be completely obliterated from our lives.

The Daily Living Explorer

For years, I've been exploring new ways of living, with limited means and extraordinary methods. After much consideration, it seemed the proper moment to expand this exploration from a hands-on and on-my-own journey into an ever expanding continuously regenerating opportunity for better living.

This written journey will be called The Daily Living Explorer

Perhaps, through a sharing of my explorations, others can begin their own exploration of their own life.

Infuse your life with Joy. Refuse to take your life any other way.

Making Action With Awareness

Making decisions is a critical part of our lives. Our role as decision-maker affects our existence as well as the existence of everyone else, if we’re aware of it or not.

Mostly, the decisions we make are fairly simple, like what to eat and where to go. At times, we feel compelled to make a difficult decision with predictable, direct and immediate consequences. When we make those difficult decisions, we should avoid resisting those results.

This is similar to eating something we know is going to have a physiological cost, and instead of just enjoying it, we fret about the unfortunate side of the equation. It makes no sense.

In the aftermath of decisive moments, we should avoid resistance to what we opted for through making a tough but necessary call. If we’re focused on the pain and suffering of what we opted for, we cannot freely experience joy or relief. We also leave ourselves ill-prepared for the potential and probable slate of unintended consequences to difficult action.

Resisting consequences extends the damage and the longevity of these in our daily life. Also, it leaves us ill-prepared for the potential and probable slate of unintended consequences to the initial action. Do not allow the slew of ramifications to dissuade us from action. The consequences of acquiescence and inaction have its own slate of pain and suffering.

Finding the best balance of action, inaction and the contemplation of both is a struggle in every day. Conditions change constantly, as the ebb and flow from one moment to the next is never ending. The only avenue toward resolution is our awareness in this moment, not with disregard to the past, but with absolute regard to right now.

We must strive to keep our awareness completely open and unrestrained by the fantasies of our future and the illusions of yesterday.

Let go of yesterday. Leave behind tomorrow. Remain aware in this moment. Act from awareness this day.

Moving on from Letting Go

Letting go is only the first step, leaving behind is the next.

Leaving behind has many different connotations, many of them impart a better-than feeling onto what is left behind. This is not the goal here. That better-than energy is its own tie and tether.

The goal is to remove any dissuasion of moving forward on this path, and one of the most difficult aspects of letting go is leaving people behind to continue their own life in their own way. We truly do not know any better than anyone else. The only thing we may know is that the old model isn’t working for us or in how we impact others.

In transforming our life, the major role people play is usually one of an anchor on ingenuity and independence. This is not to apply intent on these people’s roles in our life--- it’s a simple acknowledgement of the impact other people provide. Most probably, this is a self-imposed impact. Regardless of the source, letting go and leaving behind provide major concerns in making major life changes.

Change is very simple to make. As simple as it is, the true nature of this simplicity is difficult to absorb, as it affects so many aspects of our daily life. This is why, despite the simplicity transformation offers, we mostly decline to move forward. It’s far easier to continue the comfort and security of the status quo, not because it actually delivers comfort or security, but because the histrionics of status quo maintenance keep our life occupied and often overwhelmed.

If we become over occupied with methods to cushion our life from the effects of making change and doing different, we do neither. Also, we are often presented with the challenge of overcoming the last throes of lingering affections of the broken ways we wish to change.

We haven’t been in a continual state of crisis, yet we continue to see the slow decline in our own life. We may even have a sense of comfort and relative stability, yet we feel something is missing. We feel that there’s a great deal more we could do today than simply remaining in the comforts of yesterday.

That vague vision of what is possible is the energy of transformation. We’ve had that transformative potential since the very beginning. There’s ample evidence of it in our life, but only to a point.

Examine the transformation our bodies experience as we grow from a baby into a child into an adolescent and beyond. Our minds go through less obvious transformation, yet mental transformation goes beyond the scope of our bodies. Mental transformation can affect the entire planet.

With transformation, choice becomes key. Certainly, the transformation our body experiences has basic trends, but those trends are increasingly driven by choice as we grow and age. Our minds are driven by choice even more so.

Examine the differences between people and it becomes very clear, and there are countless historic and modern day glimpses of the power of transformation. Olympians are a prime example of choice merging with physical and mental transformation. To become a Gold Medal winning Olympian requires nearly an entire life of stringing choices together toward an objective greater than any one human being.

Truly, transformation is as easy as making a choice. Transformation is just a difficult choice to make, as it is a fundamental shift that straddles our entire day and affects the way we think and feel about everything and everyone. That fundamental shift occurs by making a string of choices, continuously and consistently.

Transformation isn’t about eating a complete breakfast; transformation is about having an increasingly complete day and a fulfilled life.

Decisions in Context

Making decisions is a critical part of our lives. Our role as decision-maker affects our existence as well as the existence of everyone else, if we’re aware of it or not.

Mostly, the decisions we make are fairly simple, like what to eat and where to go. At times, we feel compelled to make a difficult decision with predictable, direct and immediate consequences. When we make those difficult decisions, we should avoid resisting those results.

This is similar to eating something we know is going to have a physiological cost, and instead of just enjoying it, we fret about the unfortunate side of the equation. It makes no sense.

In the aftermath of these decisive moments, we should avoid resistance to what we opted for through making a tough but necessary call. If we’re focused on the pain and suffering of what we opted for, we cannot freely experience joy. We also leave ourselves ill-prepared for the potential and probable slate of unintended consequences to difficult action.

Resisting consequences extends the damage and the longevity of these in our daily life. Also, it leaves us ill-prepared for the potential and probable slate of unintended consequences to the initial action.

Do not allow the slew of ramifications to dissuade us from action. The consequences of the acquiescence of inaction have its own slate of pain and suffering, continuation of the status quo.

Consider This: Trusting yourself

Trusting yourself isn’t about knowing everything or having any answers. Trusting yourself means believing that you’ll be able to get through this moment to the next.

We often get caught up in life not going the way we envision it. This can make us doubt we have the capacity and the ambition to strive to make our vision a reality.

Misteps happen, unexpected incidents occur, yet, we remain. In these more difficult moments, trusting yourself can be your buoy, doubt can be your anchor. Cut the doubt, lift yourself up and get on with it.

Answers to You: The Breathing Connection

Breathing is a natural reflex. Breathing is effortless.

Although breathing is a natural reflex for most, some have to actually focus on breathing evenly. If we strive to allow our breaths to synchronize evenly, then we are able to relax and be more aware. To make breathing effortless would be to conquer fears and doubts.

We're not trying to breathe evenly or in any other way. What we're doing here is just watching the body breathe. Trust me, the body will breathe all on its own and when it needs to do so.

Relaxing all control over the action of breathing is what I'm talking about. Use that mental effort you want to put into breathing into watching your body breathe.

This is not easy whatsoever. Your mind is going to want to intervene. Just relax when that happens and re-apply the mind towards simple awareness of the breathing.

Apply patience often, reduce control and effort. Breathe.

Consider This: The Breathing Connection

“Let this crisp spring day put a spring in your step.”

There’s goodness in every step we take and everything we do. That goodness goes beyond our own life, as the stream in and out of us firmly links us directly into the fabric of everything that makes up this universe.

In order to live, we must take breaths fairly consistently, all day and all night, aware or unaware. We can take those breaths for granted because breathing happens naturally and without any conscious effort.

•Breathing is our direct connection with the universe
•Breathing is our constant giving-and-taking link with everything and everyone
•Breathing imbeds us into the cyclic nature of life, matter and energy

We’ve been constantly giving and taking to and from the universe since before we were born. Mostly, we don’t recognize all the taking and we mostly ignore all our giving.

Taking from the universe continuously nourishes and supports this exchange. It’s the nourishment and support we consciously offer in return that can transform existence by consciously re-ordering it.

Cherish and explore your universal connection.
Imagine every breath you take meaning something--- because it really does.

Considering Daily Living Differently

Our actions and behaviors in our daily life are usually ignored as a source of change. Instead, we use our minds to create intricate and complex dreams and nightmares, not only of the future but of our past as well. Constantly, we are book-shelving this day with a future that doesn’t exist and a past that no longer does.

If that reality is too unbelievable, we can still gain much by considering our daily living differently.

It is simple to make transformative change as we do not have to obliterate our dreams of our future or our memories of yesterday in order to create change this day. We simply need to focus on what we do every day.

We have been led to believe so much that may or may not be true. The truth is that there are countless options of what we could do every day.

From the way we wake up, to the way we rest and sleep. From the way we eat, to the way we get rid of what we eat. From what brings us relief, to what drains our resources. Each of these options plays a critical role in what we can do and how we can do it. Yet, we apply minimal mental resources to these day-to-day operations.

Every single day, we’re missing countless opportunities to increase our capacity by decreasing inefficient and ineffective habits and activities. We all need to eat, but what we eat and what we don’t eat has a direct impact on how we feel and how we think.

Food allergies are a perfect example of this. If you have an allergy to some ingredient in what you are eating, it can completely diminish physical and mental resources by creating both immediate and long-term consequences.

Our daily life may be filled with many of these life-allergens that we choose without even realizing we’re making a choice. Each step we take in our day has significance, if we believe it or not. We could not get to work if not for each and every step taken thus far. It could be that we’re taking too many steps when less would do. The only way to discover better ways is to attempt something different.

There are many different paths to the same place. Say we’re in Los Angeles and we want to go to New York City. There are many ways to make that happen; some make sense, some are ridiculous.

We could fly non-stop directly to our destination. Or, we could go the exact opposite direction and fly the other way around the world and get to the same place. The end of the journey is the same, yet the journey itself is completely different. One is certainly much more efficient than the other, unless you need to pick up some rare Chinese herb in Hong Kong that you can get nowhere else.

Take one aspect of your daily life today and challenge how you approach that aspect.
Initially, become familiar with the choices you take regarding that aspect.
Then, note all the streams leading into that choice and all the consequences that lead from it.
Consider changes, contemplate potential outcomes, witness direct impact.

Begin to access your personal power right here, right now.

The Shame and Guilt Monsters

Shame and guilt are weapons. Weapons we use on each other. Weapons we use on ourselves. Shame and guilt are not simple emotion. It is a synergistic response, tearing us and others down. It is used as a force to control, to silence and to shut down a person or a group of people. Shame and guilt are the monsters of human individuality and the prison guards of human spirit.

The reason shame and guilt are so monster-size is because we can never truly see the monster we’ve been taught to fear. If the shame and guilt is applied as a result of past action, it can cripple us moving forward. If the shame and guilt is applied because of what we think or how we feel, it can taint everything we do and everything we experience.

We experience our life through all of our senses. When we apply a value judgment on thoughts and feelings, we create a blockage that becomes a continuously-generating concern. These blockages create an abscess inside our subconscious, driving us to work against our own best interest and the true best interest of others. It taints all we see and poisons all we do.

These blockages freeze our awareness. The blockages obstruct our ability to deal with the source of that shame and guilt, the way we feel about ourselves. Certainly, people judge others. More than that, we judge ourselves. Either way is equally unfair. It's also ineffective and unproductive because we cannot control the way people think or feel about us whatsoever.

It’s our obsession with the appearance of our self coupled with the reality that we cannot change what has already been done that creates the destructive potential of shame and guilt. In reality, we can only move forward and alter the way we conduct ourselves. In addition, our view of history is not one based in reality, as that past moment does not exist anywhere outside of our own mind. That past is our attempt at holding onto our view of our self. We either wish to be right, or we beat ourselves up for being wrong; neither is actually the case.

To attempt control strengthens the resolve behind what's driving our shame and guilt. What we would suggest is to not push against the shame or guilt but to thoroughly explore and challenge it. What we suggest is to begin challenging the way we perceive, where perceptions originate and how perceptions shape all that we do and do not do.

If shame and guilt work for us and others, than we should continue that. If shame and guilt do not work for us, maybe we should attempt to find another way to learn and live.

Turning shame and guilt inside out exposes the truth behind each, it’s all about us.

The Breakthrough: Emotions as a Sense

The untethering of our emotions from external sources begins a journey of redefinition. This is not the redefining of who we’ve always been, but a discovery of what we really are. This process unfolds as the weights and the strings begin to be purged and sliced from our life. This is a breakthrough, and it significantly readjusts the way we experience and interact with everything and everyone.

Emotions are like a sixth sense. Emotions give us immediate, on-the-spot feedback on our life. That feedback can be a guide or an obstacle. The obstacle would be an unwillingness to remain aware and curious to what our emotions are telling us. This would be much like not removing your hand from a hot burner; it makes absolutely no sense.

Instead of working against these emotions, we could turn it all around by seeing these emotions as guides, not walls. By pushing away what we feel, we’re ignoring a large swath of input. This input is particularly rich in texture and diffuse simultaneously.

The nebulous nature of emotion is what confuses us, much like the cosmos confused humanity for generations. It still confounds, such is the complexity and unfamiliarity with the universe as well as our emotions.

We must take great patience as we embark on this emotional exploration. Following emotions to the origin is difficult, but we can at least have a sense of where those emotions do not originate, from outside of us. This is a most common misstep, the connecting of the cause of what we feel to any external source.

Challenge this premise objectively. Objectivity with emotions isn’t easy initially, just as walking wasn’t easy those first thousand steps. Give yourself at least that many here. We, after all, have been treating emotions pretty much the same way for our entire lives.

When we feel anger, is someone injecting that into us, or is someone bringing our innate anger out into the open?

We’re at the stove, we’re sautéing food and some oil splatters and burns our hand. We get angry. Is it the oil that's infused with anger and that makes us angry upon hitting our skin? Or, is that anger already inside of us and simply needs to be triggered to surface?

When we’re happy, are we being lifted up by someone else or an inner light being switched on by someone else? Often, people will remark on how someone or something makes them happy. Ferret out the truth, here. If someone makes you happy, why isn’t that always the case?

These emotions are similar to switches. Sometimes, the circuits break and the switches become useless. Unlike electricity, however, when the circuits break, the emotions may remain transfixed. This is what happens when we attempt to block out our feelings, it can overload the system.

The ramifications are complex and difficult to manage. Remember, our emotions are not us; our emotions are simply another sense, much like our physical senses. Just like our physical senses, our emotions can be misunderstood and easily misinterpreted.

Emotions are just that, impressions about what we’re experiencing. These feelings fluctuate continuously because our experience fluctuates continuously. It is the application of force and control that creates a blockage of that natural process and creates problems for us.

Try this, just experience the emotions. Close your eyes and simply allow your mind to become familiar with whatever it is you’re feeling right now. This is like watching your body breathe, which the body does all on its own without us even thinking. This is what we’re doing here, we’re not thinking about how we feel, but experiencing it as it is. No control required.

You may discover that there are subtle connections between your physical body and the way you feel. This exercise can provide a great deal of relief in the midst of an intense emotional experience. It is the intensity that our mind reacts to through shutting down the emotional process instead of allowing our emotional state to unfold on its own.

Emotions are our own. Emotions are a sense. Emotions arise to help us, not hinder us. Emotions fluctuate naturally; controlling emotions interrupts that natural process. How we experience and think about our emotions directly affects our daily life. How that experience unfolds is completely up to us.

Do we work against our nature, or do we make it work for us?

The Joy-Spring

The relative stability of our American society remains intact, allowing for the continued exploration of our beautiful world and our beautiful life. Remarkable, the serenity this exploration can impart on us, if we only allow the joy within to sprout and take root in daily life. The opportunities for joy are as plentiful as our willingness to explore this world and ourselves.

Increasingly, the joy in our hearts seems offensive to the sensibilities of others. Joy is a natural spring, refreshing us when allowed to flow freely, suffocating us when interrupted and blocked. It is the joy in our self and in others that we must stand up and protect.

It appears as if the wellspring of joy runs dry for many, but the spring will flow again with a light touch from care, attention and the power of awareness. With increasing distractions from technology and the quickening disintegration of our ways of living, we need this joy-spring more than ever.