Your Guide to Using the Skills for Awakening

Overcoming the causes of your suffering is of greatest importance. Your health and well being, your peace of mind, your happiness and family harmony rise and fall with it – and so does your ability to perform your best at work and in your private life. If you don’t address it skillfully, your suffering will not only cost you enormously, it will also not go away.

So l et’s make something that can appear extremely complex very very simple.

What’s so complex and can be very confusing is how to fulfill the human desire to be free of pain and gain a lasting and deep state of happiness. This is the basic impulse in all beings toward liberation. This is why you are listening to this recording. Reaching this greatest of all goals appears so difficult and complex because the ways we are unfree and conflicted appear limitless. But they are not.

Here is how it becomes uncomplicated and simple:

At the core of our being lies the Spiritual Heart. All the happiness, peace and unconditional love that is possible is already there, in each human Heart. The Heart is already and always enlightened, and when it opens we have increasing access to this unlimited well of grace. The inner reality of our Heart contains dimensions upon dimensions of universal, divine love, without end. To live fully out of this Heart is full enlightenment.

But our Hearts are closed much of the time. They are burdened and often we do not have access to this well of grace. When we look at what burdens the Heart we can point to many things: pain from the past, disappointed hopes, fear of the future, all the things we wanted and didn’t get, and all we had to contend with that we did not want. All this inner turmoil creates confusion, the forgetfulness of what we truly are, of our free and divine nature.

And here, again, is how it gets simple:

What burdens the Heart are stressful thoughts and emotions. That’s all; there is nothing else.

Like an oppressive crust, stressful thoughts and emotions cover the Heart much of the time and refuse us entry into this most sacred space within us. If we free ourselves of these stressful thoughts and emotions, the mind will become peaceful and clear and our feelings will come into balance and harmony. This is what the Skills for Awakening do. Then we will have access to the grace waiting for us in the Heart.

We can then fill ourselves from the well of unconditional love, and, deeply nurtured like this, the desire to share this love will naturally arise in us. So the blessings will spread and we will take part in the miracle of love: that as we give it away we get more. This is the root of universal abundance for there is never a scarcity of love in the Heart. What is limited is only our present access to it.

So we have work to do; if we want to experience the enlightenment of the Heart – Jesus called it the Kingdom of God – we must free ourselves of stressful thoughts and emotions. This can now be done systematically and more quickly than ever before. The time is right. The human race is in the middle of a quantum leap into a new, heart-centered consciousness. There is no time to waste; our very survival on this Earth depends on this transformation – on your transformation. That is why we are given the Skills, to accomplish quickly what used to take a long time.

Here are the details on the three primary Skills for Awakening.

The Heart

HeartSourcing allows us to drink from the well of unlimited love right now. If you can become still enough and focus inward into the Heart Cave, you can feel a subtle sensation. It is the flow of Heart Essence. It is the water of life. It may flow like a trickle at first, a few drops at a time. But with practice you can open this well until the trickle becomes a stream and the stream a great river.

If a river of love flows from your Heart, the aspects of your life that have looked like a desert will green, will come to life. Your desert will become a garden with many flowers, a paradise that nurtures you and anyone you come in contact with. The Heart has such power.

The Emotions

To allow the waters of life to flow we must get free of the burdens of stressful emotions. We have not understood our feelings. We have chased after the good ones and tried to escape from or repress the bad ones, we have indulged and complained. It hasn’t worked. When we treat our emotions poorly they always come back.

So now we do the exact opposite. With Open Attention we open to our feelings and we pay close attention. This allows stressful emotions to dissolve and with them the patterns of fear, discontent and confusion we have suffered again and again. Open Attention – or Presence, as it is also known – dissolves the pain body, our patterns of stressful emotions.

And the Thoughts

We need to learn to see through our stressful thoughts and beliefs so they lose their binding and blinding effect on our consciousness. Imagine if you could be completely at peace with your mind. That is what The Work of Byron Katie can do for you. Through a simple sequence of 4 questions and a process called Turn-arounds you can see through the mind itself and discover the liberating truth which has been hidden from you. This truth will set you free.

We are neither our stressful thoughts nor our emotions. We are the liberating force in the Heart. We have fallen into a trance of no longer recognizing the light and the love we carry in us. It is time now to awaken. This awakening is not left to chance: you can systematically pursue it. As you clear away the debris of limiting thoughts and emotions, the grace inherent in the core of your being will arise and transform your world.

Of course we learn and practice one Skill at a time. So where should you start?

Again this is simple. If you’re drawn to experiencing the bliss of the Heart, begin with HeartSourcing. If you are under the spell of stressful emotional states, Open Attention might be the place to start. And if you suffer from conflicts and stressful thoughts and beliefs, The Work may be where to begin.

You will find out if one or the other of the Skills is working best for you. Then go with that one. Your preference may change over time. You can combine the Skills any way you like and use them with other methods or skills. Use what is most helpful to you. Trust your inner guidance. If you listen to the voice of the Heart it will guide you correctly.

What is most important is to have a clear and strong yearning for freedom and then act on it. The forces of confusion and suffering are strong. The darkness may be very deep. But it cannot survive the awakening of the light. When the Light of the Heart awakens, the darkness is already gone.

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What you can do next:

You can subscribe to any of the free offerings on our website, choose any of our recordings on how to apply the Skills for Awakening to a particular challenge, or get the study courses on HeartSourcing, Open Attention or The Work. Beyond that there are many other ways we offer support.

And then I invite you to practice. Practicing is the key. Knowing the Skills will do next to nothing for you. Practicing them can do everything.

Thank you for your time. I hope to meet you in a state of ever increasing freedom and love.

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The Goal of this Practice