We think of it as inevitable, but that is not true. Suffering arises in the unquestioned mind and spreads from there. It is an ingrained habit, no more. And we can change habits.

Our thoughts run into the past and the future, imagining what was and could go wrong. Observe it. These regrets and worries are not ‘problem solving’, they are ‘problem creating’. They are the habit of old and future pain. None of it is real. One, the future, has not yet happened, the other, the past, is over.

What is real is the Now. Can you be here for it? And when you are, look, what is there to worry? And what old hurt would you voluntarily carry there?

Yes, suffering is an ingrained habit. Let’s change it. That’s how we become part of the change we want to see in the world.

For more go to: http://skillsforawakening.com/teachings/#03

We don’t want to suffer. So what do we need to do when it comes, small or big? Grin and bear it? Hope for a better world after we die? All that has been tried. I prefer to end suffering.

Many voices that will tell you it’s impossible, that suffering is part of life. But not so fast! There are after all people who are free of it. These accomplished beings among us are showing us the way. The fact is, if just one person can do it, we all have that same potential. It may take us awhile to get there (or not), but what’s the alternative? Continue to suffer. (Not good.)

And if the Buddhists are right, we have done it since beginningless time. (Not good at all!)

So if we look closely at suffering we see that it arises in us. We need to fix it there, rather than trying to change the world so it won’t offend us. We’ve tried that for thousands of years and it hasn’t worked so well.

Let’s do it together, day by day. I will give you tips in these blog posts. Please let me know how it goes for you, give me your questions and problems and I will try to answer and respond as best I can. We’re in this together. Let’s walk this amazing road to the end of pain!

For more go to: http://skillsforawakening.com/challenges/3-causes-of-suffering-and-their-remedies/

Most of us cannot even relate to this language – ‘Self-Love,’ it sounds like narcissism, like self-indulgence, somehow over the top and too much. And yet, when we look at its pure manifestation, it is the most important quality we can develop.

In truth most of us are rather removed from loving ourselves much of the time. We are in too much tension. We are burdened by conflicts and stress and there is an inner dialogue going on that does not let us relax. We are our worst critics and we rarely give ourselves a break.

If this describes you at least some of the time, ask your self, “How is it working for me?”

It’s a revealing question because it is not judgmental. It just invites an observation, a greater awareness of what works and what doesn’t. And if the way you have been conducting some of your life doesn’t work – change it.

That is where Self-Love comes in. Do you deserve to be happy? Please don’t answer this question so quickly. I know you want to say Yes, but look at your behavior, look at the way you have been treating yourself in those parts of life that are not easy for you: has it been an expression of Self-Love?

Are there areas in your life where you could be kinder to you? Where you could open yourself to a greater love than you have known? Go there. Pay attention to these aspects of your existence. These parts of you are like children starving for love.

You can use this imagery: is there a little boy or girl self in you that has his or her needs not met? This is true for most everyone and usually we try to ignore this inner need. It’s unpleasant to deal with and so we choose to lose ourselves in distractions.

But have you noticed, this inner voice will persist. And it’s better to listen to it now, before it grows a cancer or manifests in some other great conflict that cannot be overlooked.

You have the choice – make it now. There are so many ways to love. But how can you love if your heart is not open to you? Only as much as you love yourself can you love others and allow yourself to be loved.

It starts with a decision we have to repeat often at deeper and deeper levels of our being. A decision to do whatever it takes to gain freedom from the conditioning of old pain. This decision opens the door so we can remove what stands in the way of love, our stressful thoughts and emotions. And as we clear them, this inner well of infinite goodness, the Heart, opens and we can drink from it and its life-giving nectar can flow from us into the world.

We will become a light in this world, an increasingly awakened being, no longer conditioned by the inheritance of fear. Being love leads to giving love and giving love leads to receiving love. And the cycles of stress and fear are transformed into the ability to live and express what we truly are in the core of our being: pure love.

It is beckoning you. Will you listen? Will you do the work of clearing the conditioning of fear that keeps you in stress? Take a step today and another tomorrow and gradually but inevitably you will come to know the infinite source of love in your heart. It is the heart of God, your heart, the pulsing, alive core of your universe. It is calling to you to come to know your true Self.

And how can you do it? Associate with those in whom this flame of love burns brightly. Love and devotion are passed on this way, person to person, in a deep and fulfilling relationship where trust can build and the kind of friendship that can last for life times.

There are teachers like that. Seek them out, for that is the fastest way to get to know you. Love and let yourself be loved and all other things will fall into place. As the sun in your heart rises, all the shadows will dissipate. This sun is already rising.

The first and last and most important of all questions you can ask is “Who am I?”

The answer to this question will put enlightenment in the palm of your hand.

But it’s a trick question. It doesn’t have an answer that can be told. You have to BE the answer to know. And you already are that answer.

Here is one way to look at it:

The core of your being is the spiritual Heart. It is where the above and the below, the left and right, the male and female in you meet and are one. It is the point of balance and harmony.

The experience of the Heart is unconditional love, profound peace, unlimited energy (shakti) and the supreme intelligence that can heal mind, body and soul.

To live with an open Heart is happiness itself and although we are confused a lot of the time, everyone seeks this elusive state of a deep happiness that can last.

We seek it everywhere where it cannot be found. We look everywhere but where it actually already is: in our Heart.

There, in the very core of your being, it waits patiently until you notice.

So why is it so hard to find?

Because the Heart is obstructed by the ‘10,000 things’ of the world, by constant distractions, desires and aversions and by confusion.

This is perplexing, but if you look closely, you can see that the 10,000 things you stress over are really just two things.

The true cause of stress and confusion are your stressful thoughts and emotions.

So when you know how to free yourself of these two things, you have the key to a masterful life. You have the key to true happiness

It actually is this simple! The wisdom of the ages boils down to this: If you have the skills to

• Free yourself of stressful thoughts,
• Release negative emotions, and
• Nurture yourself deeply from the Source in the Heart…

… then you know the secret of true health and happiness.

Using the Skills allows you to enjoy real and rapid improvement. This is not a temporary state of comfort that ends in pain again, but lasting and true freedom.

Still, awakening (or enlightenment) is an experience of grace. We cannot ‘engineer’ it, no matter how hard we try or how skillful we are. Grace comes from surrender and not from an act of will. Awakening comes when we stop fighting against reality as it is, when we find peace in the here and now.

In that surrender to your reality you increasingly become who you really are. You become clear and in that clarity you will find the best path.

The best path leads to you. It leads to your ability to find in your Heart the grace of this moment, the wholeness that is in you, waiting for you to notice.

Because we are asleep to it, it is when we are shaken by hardship that we have a great chance to awaken. When we make it a habit to awaken ourselves, we do no longer have to wait for hardship to shake us. This can help us avoid hardship.

I wish you the peace of knowing that you do live in a universe that is above all a loving place, where even hardship can lead you to grace.

]]> http://blog.skillsforawakening.com/blog/spiritual-anatomy-the-secret-of-your-happiness/feed 0 http://blog.skillsforawakening.com/blog/can-the-body-heal-itself-of-cancer-2 http://blog.skillsforawakening.com/blog/can-the-body-heal-itself-of-cancer-2#comments Fri, 09 Apr 2010 21:52:37 +0000 Ram Giri http://blog.skillsforawakening.com/?p=192

This is a question many are debating, but it’s not a question for me. I have experienced it. I know. There is no doubt in my mind and the more I speak to other cancer survivors, the more stories I hear: Yes, definitely the body has the ability to free itself of cancer. It’s abilities are amazing.

When I was 23 I was diagnosed with Hodgkins disease, a deadly cancer that was untreatable at the time. I got a second opinion, and a third, and everyone said the same. I walked around under a death sentence. If you’ve been there yourself, you know how I felt… It was a very dark moment.

And then, suddenly one day, standing in the middle of a city, I had a deep internal spiritual experience. It gave me not hope, but the unshakable certainty that I was not going to die from this cancer. A great wave of profound unconditional love flooded my heart, which had been burdened almost to breaking by this threat to my life. And my heart opened again. And at that instant all the fear and stress and terror left and never came back.

I was at ease. The mind became peaceful again, and my emotions came into balance and harmony.

And right after that moment of freedom a prayer arose in me. I prayed from the bottom of my heart that one day I would be able to share with others this love, this life-giving, exhilarating, all-embracing love. It arose from within me. It was all around me. I was bathed in it and it didn’t depend on anyone, so no one could take it away.

That is the pure divine love every single one of us carries our hearts. It is the fundamental essence of who we are, and it is available at all times in the very core of our being, the ‘Heart cave’ in the middle of our chest.

This pure universal love in us is the most healing force in creation.

I knew it, I had experienced it, and my cancer melted away. It was an experience of grace which to this day I do not understand completely, but I know it was real. I am here after all, am I not? That’s quite real to me.

I knew then that I had work to do. It was a long journey to find the answer to my prayer. After 35 years of study and practice I began to share what I had found: the best and quickest ways we can discover this gift of healing and love in us.

No, I am not promising miracles. I am promising that you can free yourself of what burdens you, what shuts down your heart and what obstructs the healing in you.

And it is clear to me now that we can do it. We can open to this love in us. It is here. It is not out there as we have always assumed. It is here in the depth of our hearts from where it can heal us. And we can remove the stressful thoughts and emotions that obstruct it! And no, you don’t have to have cancer to do this.

This amazing way of freeing yourself of stress, fear and pain and of opening to universal love, is now at your finger tips in a wonderful online course. For 6 weeks you will get daily HeartSourcing meditations that train you systematically to live more and more out of your heart. And you will learn to unburden your heart with skills, that for me are nothing less than miraculous.

I sat in a cave in the Himalayas, meditating. And I noticed I couldn’t escape from myself. I brought all my ‘stuff’ with me into that cave, my stressful thoughts and emotions, and they just kept recycling. Meditation is great, I still do it every day, but I found it is slow compared to the new skills that we are gifted with now.

So if you want to clear your mind, live happily with your emotions and create the best internal environment to heal whatever is wrong with your body, this is as good as it gets. I know my prayer was heard. And I know there is a way we can live in love, in a solid way, as a lasting state, not a momentary glimpse that vanishes again all too soon.

This, and life itself, is the blessing I received and I would love to share with you as much of it as I possibly can.

……………..

To sign up for a FREE 10 day trial of the Course: “Complete Wellness and Deep Healing”…

….please go to BecomingWhole.com -  I’ll see you there!

This is a question many are debating, but it’s not a question for me. I have experienced it. I know. There is no doubt in my mind and the more I speak to other cancer survivors, the more stories I hear: Yes, definitely the body has the ability to free itself of cancer. It’s abilities are amazing.

When I was 23 I was diagnosed with Hodgkins disease, a deadly cancer that was untreatable at the time. I got a second opinion, and a third, and everyone said the same. I walked around under a death sentence. If you’ve been there yourself, you know how I felt… It was a very dark moment.

And then, suddenly one day, standing in the middle of a city, I had a deep internal spiritual experience. It gave me not hope, but the unshakable certainty that I was not going to die from this cancer. A great wave of profound unconditional love flooded my heart, which had been burdened almost to breaking by this threat to my life. And my heart opened again. And at that instant all the fear and stress and terror left and never came back.

I was at ease. The mind became peaceful again, and my emotions came into balance and harmony.

And right after that moment of freedom a prayer arose in me. I prayed from the bottom of my heart that one day I would be able to share with others this love, this life-giving, exhilarating, all-embracing love. It arose from within me. It was all around me. I was bathed in it and it didn’t depend on anyone, so no one could take it away.

That is the pure divine love every single one of us carries our hearts. It is the fundamental essence of who we are, and it is available at all times in the very core of our being, the ‘Heart cave’ in the middle of our chest.

This pure universal love in us is the most healing force in creation.

I knew it, I had experienced it, and my cancer melted away. It was an experience of grace which to this day I do not understand completely, but I know it was real. I am here after all, am I not? That’s quite real to me.

I knew then that I had work to do. It was a long journey to find the answer to my prayer. After 35 years of study and practice I began to share what I had found: the best and quickest ways we can discover this gift of healing and love in us.

No, I am not promising miracles. I am promising that you can free yourself of what burdens you, what shuts down your heart and what obstructs the healing in you.

And it is clear to me now that we can do it. We can open to this love in us. It is here. It is not out there as we have always assumed. It is here in the depth of our hearts from where it can heal us. And we can remove the stressful thoughts and emotions that obstruct it! And no, you don’t have to have cancer to do this.

This amazing way of freeing yourself of stress, fear and pain and of opening to universal love, is now at your finger tips in a wonderful online course. For 6 weeks you will get daily HeartSourcing meditations that train you systematically to live more and more out of your heart. And you will learn to unburden your heart with skills, that for me are nothing less than miraculous.

I sat in a cave in the Himalayas, meditating. And I noticed I couldn’t escape from myself. I brought all my ‘stuff’ with me into that cave, my stressful thoughts and emotions, and they just kept recycling. Meditation is great, I still do it every day, but I found it is slow compared to the new skills that we are gifted with now.

So if you want to clear your mind, live happily with your emotions and create the best internal environment to heal whatever is wrong with your body, this is as good as it gets. I know my prayer was heard. And I know there is a way we can live in love, in a solid way, as a lasting state, not a momentary glimpse that vanishes again all too soon.

This, and life itself, is the blessing I received and I would love to share with you as much of it as I possibly can.

….

PS: If you want to find out more about the Course: “Complete Wellness and Deep Healing; How to heal your life through the power of love” please go to BecomingWhole.com.

For 4 months Inga has been able to feel the tumors in her body, painful, swollen and aggressive. She was diagnosed with a very dangerous form of breast cancer and opted not to go for the recommended standard treatment but work with a variety of other methods, including HeartSourcing, Open Attention, The Work, Homeopathy and Jin Shin Jyutsu. Here is what she sent me today after a medical exam:

Actually, I want to weep, down on my knees… I am so very grateful for all I have gone through during these four months– yes, exactly, I was given my “diagnosis” and the instant corresponding treatment plan (chemo, full mastectomy, radiation, another surgery, and hormone therapy) EXACTLY 4 months ago– on November 4th. This has been a long and strange winter! I have relived my life speck by speck, digging, opening, looking at the shadows lurking, going into my fears and the surrounding darkness, looking and looking, clearing and… loving all that got me this far. Finally loving my very Self truly! Yes, I am weeping in awe!

I am so very happy with and for Inga. She is one courageous woman who is traveling her path despite great challenges. There are true heros in our world and she is one of them. I am proud to know her.

……………….

(And just to clarify, let me add here that I do not recommend different choices of treatment. Everyone has to find what is right for them. The most important thing seems to be to be true to yourself. If we do that, then the work on mind, Heart and emotions can have its greatest effect on the body as well.)

Fear is the mind killer. It makes us into slaves of all the stressful emotions that spring from fear. It stifles our immune system, which can make us sick and keep us from healing.

The cure for fear is love. Love gives life. Pure, unconditional love is the medicine for what ails us in life. It springs from our spiritual heart.

Pure Love is the best of all drugs. Here is how you can tap into the infinite source of  Love in your Heart.

Enjoy!