Really, it is not a requirement, and neither is any other habit, practice, or technique - nothing is a requirement for life. But all these amazing tools are available to us - so what do we do from here?

“Meditation is what we are, not what we do; the separate self is what we do, not what we are” Rupert Spira

I was talking to someone in the Heartfelt Presence room last week who was struggling to meditate. I presume he’d been told, or read somewhere, that meditation could help with his addiction. But it wasn’t having that effect. He had resistance to it and wasn’t finding it useful at all.

We talked about meditation not being required to reconnect to who you really are, or indeed to change your experience of life, but that if meditation makes sense, it’ll keep happening, and if it doesn’t make sense it’ll stop.

Because meditation, or no meditation, you can be no further from home in any experience than the day you were born.

Of course, it can feel like you’re miles from home, miles from being who you really are, but you aren’t, not really.

And so the same is true of any spiritual exploration, or indeed any personal development journey.

Prior to discovering this work I do now, I really thought you needed to work hard at being a good person, or your best self, by ‘using’ practices or applying techniques and I’ve tried many of them! I’ve ‘used’ gratitude practices, personal reflection, journalling, NLP techniques, vision boards, mindfulness, meditation, walking in nature, chakra work, breath work, sound therapy…there’s an incredible cornucopia of things available!

And there is nothing wrong with any of them, but we’re brought up in a paradigm of ‘learn and apply’ - ’read these top tips or success strategies and apply them to your life.’ All of it founded on ‘you’re not OK but do this and then you will be because you’ll be there’ with ‘there’ of course being the elusive and illusory idyllic future where the equally elusive and illusory ‘self’ imagines it will be dancing through daisies every day.

But the paradoxical thing is that the more the elusive and illusory self tries to get ‘there,’ the more ‘there’ is out of reach. Its own activity of thought veiling the very beauty, connection, and security of home that it seeks.

What’s going on?

When we apply practices or techniques from the space of a separate self that is not OK and which thinks it needs to be somewhere else, the suffering will continue in some form, quite possibly now in the berartion of the self that can’t successfully apply the technique, or can’t do it well enough, or not consistently enough.

But the problem isn’t in fact that you’re terrible with the practice or technique, nor that the practice or technique is faulty, it’s because the thought-created-self is layering stories and judgements over the top of it all.

It can do this from the very beginning, putting the cart​ before the horse by using its ‘learn and apply’ strategy - ‘they’re doing it and they seem to have that wonderful life so I’ll do it too’. But the wisdom that made that technique work for that person at that time and in that way, was perfect for them - not for you.

If or when the time is right for you, practices will come into your life with ease at that perfect time and have the desired effect, and then they might go again. All good - because none are required for you to be OK.

And if there isn’t the ease of practices ebbing and flowing, there’s an experience of the self trying to make life do what it thinks it should be doing based on ‘my’ thought-constructed agenda and timelines - which is also fine - the suffering in that experience is also perfect, beautifully timed and the exact discomfort you needed in that moment to wake you up from the dream of imagining you were lacking.

What now?

In hearing that meditation, or any other practice, is not required the mind can say all sorts of things.

1. It might resist the suggestion that a practice is not required, especially if it’s one which the self believes is keeping ‘me’ on an even keel, or keeping me emotionally intelligent or enlightened. It’s OK - no practices are being taken off the table. Everything is still available and, as I said at the start, they’ll continue to happen for as long as they make sense to happen.

2. The mind might also say, well let’s just stop it all then! What’s the point if they’re not required? Notice this kind of coin-flipping of the mind from I must do this’ to ‘well what’s the point?!’. That level of the mind only works in black and white so it doesn’t know, and can’t imagine, any other possibilities. Instead, consider that we are the same as nature, and nature evolves and changes gently and emergently. If a practice is going to come or go, it’s going to do so gently and emergently. Dramatic lurches are usually a sign that the mind is trying to ‘do life right’ by its own limited, black and white rules, and it’s own made-up version of ‘right’.

Instead, just notice for yourself

With any practice or habit or technique you’re using, where is there contraction?

*Where is there an idea that I need to do this in order to be OK?

*Where do you notice that, when something stressful happens, you now reach for the meditation whereas before that was the wine or a cigarette? (For sure it’s preferable to rise above than numb-out below thought, and yet the idea of lack and need is the same.)

*Where is the idea that you need to do it at this time on this schedule or in this way; creating more stress rather than less?

*Where is there self-narrative chattering away telling you you’re terrible at it, that it’s not working for you because you’re not capable of doing it right. Or maybe saying you haven’t got time for it, why are you doing this, look at all this other stuff you could be doing?

*Even notice where the narrative says you’re better than others by doing this - I am more conscious, enlightened, got-it-more-together than they do. A sure sign of the self at play because it does judgement, separation, and comparison very well.

*And lastly, notice if the practice has become deadened. Are you just going through the motions? Still doing it, even though the magic of the practice when you first started seems to have waned.

All of these point us back to see that the habit, practice, or technique is not the magic in and of itself. The magic is in the experience of doing it at the perfect time for you: whether that’s because it’s bringing you the very change you’d hoped it would bring, or because it’s here to show you the resistance of the self-narrative for what it is - and maybe both!

In being present to all of this, you find you more easily wake up to the confusion of the illusory ideas of a self who needs to be fixed, or better, or more enlightened. You remember who you really are, you remember you’re home and that you never left, and then you watch to see what practices or techniques come in or don’t; which drop away and which stay. Now enabling more change than ever seemed possible when you were trying to use them to make change happen. Freedom.

You are already the space of meditation that the practice of meditation is intended to get you to. There is nowhere to go. Meditation is not required.

With love, Helen

It was Michael Neill who first raised my awareness to this distinction. Have a read and see what occurs to you.

What are we looking at here?

A couple of people in my life this week have been in touch about feeling stressed and anxious even though they don’t have a lot on. And then of course there are times when we feel stressed when we do have a lot on. Consider that ‘stress’ is an exaggerated form of ‘busy’, and that busy feelings are a reflection of a busy mind, not of a busy life.

Busy is a feeling. Having a lot on is maths.

Have you ever had a situation where you felt so busy, frantic busy? But then something shifted and you realised that you didn’t actually have that much to do and you just got it done; one thing at a time?

And have you had a situation where you were powering through mountains of work with ease like a work-eating-demon but without any sense of being busy?

So being busy and having a lot on are not bedfellows. One isn’t causal to the other. It just so happens that sometimes we have a lot on AND feel busy at the same time.

Given it’s the frantic busy feeling we tend not to want, and therefore try to get rid of, what’s going on with that.

Have you ever made a feeling happen?

In your life, when you’ve been happy or sad, loving or mad, clear or confused did you ‘make’ any of those feelings appear?

Maybe you’re pointing outside of yourself right now saying they made me mad, they made me happy, that plan gave me clarity, the gift gave me joy.

But when has the apparently same behavior from someone or something not made you mad, or not made you happy, and when has the same plan looked daunting or a gift seemed meaningless?

So if those ‘things’ can’t have caused your feeling state, did you do it? Did ‘you’ make those feelings appear?

Now think about when those feelings disappeared, did you make that happen?

Again you might be looking outside yourself. Pointing to things that have seemed to change your mood — going for a run, meditating, having a coffee, talking to a friend.

But when has a run, or meditation, or coffee, or a friend not been able to disappear the feelings?

And therefore again, if those things can’t be causal, were you? Did ‘you’ make the feeling disappear?

In doing this, was there an emotional bias?

Notice in that last example did you only think about disappearing the bad feelings. Times when it looks like you made the ‘bad’ feelings go away by doing something about them.

What about when happiness disappeared and merged into normal baseline-of-life feelings? You didn’t ‘do’ that, and I’d bet that neither did you look for a way to get rid of the happy feeling like you did with that bad feeling.

And notice the ease with which it happened. It didn’t require you to be involved for it to change.

The same is true of all feelings, and that includes busy-ness. Busy feelings appear, hang around a while, and disappear.

So then what is it we think we’re doing when we try to make a feeling go away? Seems like they do it perfectly well on their own.

So do I do nothing?

We’ve been so well conditioned into doing something about feelings that things might still get done to try and ease the ones we don’t like. If you’re busy, maybe you write a list, go for that run, cry. Whatever happens is all that can happen. No right or wrong. You’re always doing what makes sense.

But the more you see that feelings are just doing what feelings do and that they aren’t something for us to manage or control, a lightness opens back up. We stop piling meaning onto them or searching for things to blame ‘out there’ as the cause, and therefore also stop trying to wrestle our way out of them.

Then, like with happiness returning to your normal baseline, so too for the busy. Busy feelings appear, happen for a while, then return to normal baseline. Anything you do in the meantime is what you do.

There is no right way to do anything and the more we think there is the more we live in imagined limits and paradoxically create more tension in an experience.

So then, is ‘having a lot on’ really just maths?

Having explored the nature of busy-ness, how it’s always a function of whichever thoughts are believed in the moment, what about having a lot on? Is it really just maths?

Have an explore…is there something in your life or work that you do regularly, doing a pretty similar activity or process each time?

For example, each Friday I write my newsletter and set up the coming week of social media. Some weeks this takes me 5 hours. Some weeks it takes me 2. Not because in one week I’m doing less ‘stuff’, the same number of activities are done, but some weeks it just pours out, for some it feels like a stop-start and for others a trudge.

So we can’t even actually know if we have a lot on because there’s no reliable calculation to say ‘this will take X hours and therefore I have too much on’.

There’s no harm in estimating and blocking a theoretical amount of time out of a diary but it’s really useful to know it’s not a fixed thing. Just because we think it will take that long doesn’t mean it will. The moment we think our idea of ‘it will take this long’ is a truth or a rule, that life must now conform to, we will suffer the moment life deviates from that.

When I fight with reality I lose, but only 100% of the time. Byron Katie

And it’s so brilliant that we suffer. When you know it’s always showing you that you’re taking an idea as reality you always know what’s going on. And, given no feeling lasts forever, that there’s always a return to baseline, you come to know that you’re really OK no matter what.

What my client noticed

A senior leader and mum in a busy business, my client felt like there was always so much to do and never enough time to do it. But then, while we were working together, she took some holiday. When she came back to work she noticed — oh! I’ve come back to the same number of meetings, the same volume of emails and the same length of to-do list, but it all feels fine. I don’t feel rushed. I don’t feel under pressure. I’m just getting things done in the order that makes sense, knowing that’s all that can happen, and re-prioritising as I go.

What had changed? Nothing but the busy-ness in her mind. The holiday had settled her thinking so that the world of work looked entirely different on her return — even though the content of it hadn’t materially changed.

She recognised how there was a different idea in play that ‘it’s OK to not be all over everything, you’re just back from holidays’ which of course came with reduced feelings of pressure. Over the coming days she noticed the old thoughts returning; ideas of having to perform, and do her best, and be on-it but this time the thoughts didn’t look so convincing. In seeing that the stressful feelings weren’t coming from the work, and were only coming from believing ideas about what was required, it wasn’t making sense anymore to follow the thoughts that would create that stressful experience.

Our system really is very intelligent when we show it what’s actually going on.

So what now?

Get curious…start to question what might have looked so rock-solidly true in your experience of busy feelings, and in the idea of having a lot on.

And I’d love to hear what you discover!

With love, Helen

Where is frustration prevalent for you right now? This is my client’s story (she gave me permission to share). She’s a Sales Director and we’d had a few sessions by this point. Through her previous sessions she’d had significant insights into the constant truths of where our experience is really coming from and who we really are. This is the story of an in-session exploration that uncovered more. Have a read and see what occurs to you.

It started with an email from a colleague (you know, one of those colleagues who are ‘always’ really annoying) and it made her fizz with frustration — or at least that’s what it looked like at the time.

She didn’t reply. She recognised the fizzing — this was her first moment of clarity with this situation, right in that moment, fresh thinking—‘don’t reply right now’.

But she still felt caught-up, stories whizzing around her mind and being believed about ‘this person — again! Always this person, how can they be so frustrating, why have they sent this email??’. Immediately the email became a fixed and definite problem, the other person a fixed and definite ‘always frustrating’ person.

It feels like it’s true because it feels so real. But it’s not true. We’ve been taught as children that, if we feel frustrated, look to the outside world to find the cause. But there was never a cause. We’ve learnt to correlate our inner experience to an outer happening. We’ve been taught to blame these feelings on something out there.

By now we’re so practiced at this that the correlation is instantaneous and the stories get believed immediately. To make it a really convincing 4D production, even the voice in our heads is perfectly edited in to say ‘yes, you’re right, it’s them again’.

What’s really true is that the fizzing feelings are a wake-up mechanism to the fact we’re lost in a story, out of alignment with who we really are, out of connection with life. Caught up in the Content of the story.

The only thing our feelings can tell us about is our thinking, they have no idea about the outside world — how else could we have scared feelings about a virus when we’re safe and well in our home?

Thankfully our default setting is to have fresh thinking, realisations and insights and so, in that moment, the chink of light was there for that fresh thought to come through and not reply to the email.

But the same Programming (that which created the fizzing) still went to work trying to solve it. ‘How do I fix this, change this, change them??’.

Fundamentally in this we’re asking, ‘how do I make myself feel OK again?’— but we’re coming at it from a misunderstanding that it was the email and the person that caused the uncomfortable feelings in the first place and that therefore the person and the email need to be changed.

“We cannot solve our problems from the same level of thinking that created them” Einstein

When we’re trying to solve an imagined problem with the very same conceptual imagination that created it, it’s like a dog chasing its tail. Endless.

In truth, change happens through realisation.

We’ve just not been looking towards that and instead have kept relying on the conceptual mind’s stories — those limited ones that spend their time playing a game of ‘match’ between inner and outer in an attempt to keep us ‘safe’. Correlating a vaguely similar situation to a vaguely similar past-narrative and then applying an over-used fix-it strategy. Fizzing round and round all at the same level of thinking.

Change happens through an upstream realisation and we’re not in control of when realisation comes. Think of it for yourself, when you get a fresh idea. Notice how they appear by themselves, naturally, with no choice from you to make them appear. But it is these that shift us out of the same level of thinking that we’ve been fizzing round and round in.

When we look to what’s really going on — instead of to what we think is happening — we see the workings of the system for ourselves, the fizzing looks less convincing and we find ourselves lost in confusion less of the time.

So, back to my client.

That evening she went for a run. She finds it a useful time to just let her mind wander. She dropped back into the quiet before thought, into innate brilliance. The upstream space of nothingness from which fresh thinking, realisation, insight and ideas spring.

The email came to mind…and suddenly she was laughing about it. The illusion had popped. What had looked so compelling and terrible and fixed and definite in the moment, now looked like no big deal. She saw how she’d been clinging to an idea of how he should behave and how he should communicate and how he should back off from ‘her’ turf.

In an instant, all the confusion disappeared, and she could now see multiple possible responses to the email — all of which felt adult and grounded in clarity.

“How had I made such a big deal out of that?”

Of course ‘she’ hadn’t ‘done’ that. The conceptual mind is not who we are.

It’s a program running that we didn’t choose the programming of, and we don’t control what gets pattern-matched in a particular situation. It’s in the belief that we are doing this and that we need to do something about it that in fact causes more confusion.

The more we see the truth of this the less we have ideas of needing to make it be different, and the easier our experience becomes, as the very feeling of connection the conceptual mind has been scrambling around to find is innately revealed in its absence.

The more we look to what’s innate, to what’s true, the more the stories programmed into the conceptual mind get dissolved or left to run with no effect on our experience. And all with ease. No effort needed from us to ‘do’ that.

Truth is never found in the conceptual mind.

Truth is found by looking to what’s constant, ever-present and reliable. By looking to our default settings.

So look towards the fact you have realisations, fresh thinking and ideas — from nowhere.

Look to the fact an experience changes the moment thinking changes.

Look to the fact it was never the outside world causing you to feel anything.

With love, Helen

I’ve been watching alot of Ken Wilbur this week and I love his Integral Theory with stages of: Waking up - Growing up - Cleaning up - Showing up - Opening up.

Waking Up

is the altered state of consciousness that gives us a first person, direct experience of oneness and connection to all things. It can be increassed / maintained via the progressive path (e.g. ongoing meditation and spititual practices) or via the direct path (e.g. non dual and advaita vedanta).

Growing Up

can be segmented in different ways but has been repliacted in various places to show the general stages of development: Egocentric - interest in and compassion for self. Ethnocentric - interest in and compassion for the group (which therefore creates an ‘other’ group different to ours for which we don’t have compassion). Worldcentric -interest in and compassion for the world and all that’s in it. Kosmocentric - interest in and compassion for the whole cosmos.

Cleaning Up

is shadow work. Bringing to awareness the repressed emotional drives which were disallowed as children. Eventually these become so troublesome in life that we’re urged to act upon them. Life becomes unmanageable as we project our shadows onto ‘them out there’ when it’s in here that we need to bring our attention to. For example, when we think ‘they’re being controlling’ but the problem is coming from the projection of our own, un-owned, need for control.

Showing Up

is working in service, accepting responsbility and carving a self-initiated path to become who we are - unencumbered by the shadows we’ve been trying to keep hidden!

Opening Up

is recognising the gifts you bring, in the only way you can, and sharing them with the world. Ken talks about how we have multiple intelligences beyond the cognitive and verbal we are primarily taught in school and that those who don’t excel at those are likely to have strength in another intelligence, e.g. emotional, musical, aesthetic, spiritual.

So what does this have to do with some people being an awakened ass.

Well, it turns out that we interpret a Waking Up experience according to our stage of Growing Up.

So if you’re at Worldcentric or Cosmocentric  -  great! An awakened person at those levels is going to enable significant change for the good of the many.

But if you wake up at an Egocentric Level then you’re going to be an awakened ass! The self-centric behaviours are still in play and aren’t changed or developed through an awakening experience. Even at Ethnocentric, the ‘othering’ that goes on at that level with judgement about ‘the kind of people we like’ and ‘the kind of people we don’t’ will continue to play out.

I wonder though…it seems the Growing Up and/or Cleaning Up stages would happen more easily if the person was awake. If they put themselves in those opportunities, without an idea of self in the way to clog up the process, would they move more easily through the stages?

And is it in fact entirely OK that we have awakened asses, perfect just as they are to bring challenge to others and therefore beautifully equipped to help someone else go through their own process of Cleaning Up.

One last thing, if you’re seeing another as an ass, and given Cleaning Up is about recognising where we’re projecting our own shadows onto another, maybe do a bit of inquiry first to check what’s true about your own ass-like behaviour. Byron Katie’s The Work is a great place to start with that.

What do you think? I’d love to hear.

With love, Helen