I’m reading the book that has caught my attention time and time again over the past few decades, Be Here Now by Ram Dass. I’ve seen it on a bookstore shelf over the past thirty years I’ve been drawn to it time and time again, almost as if it was stalking me. In the past I always picked it up and thumbed through it but then sat it back down after thinking “this would be a waste of money”, “I don’t need one more book”, or “This doesn’t synch with the meditation technique I’m learning right now”.
Be Here Now wistfully eluded me until a few weeks ago. On my recent trip back home to Columbus I finally acted on the vague attraction to it and I’m thrilled I did. At first glance Be Here Now is a really odd book, mostly filled with pages scribbled with handwritten text peppered with hippy lingo and drawings that harken back to the Summer of Love. Oh, and it's printed on paper that resembles a brown paper bag. None of it made sense to my rational brain and maybe this is what initially put me off.
I guess what I’m trying to say that, in this life, timing is everything and different things draw us in during different seasons of our life. If it’s the wrong time words of wisdom might seem like gibberish but if it’s the right time those very same words can be transformational. The key is we must’ve become so rigid in our ideology that we stop accepting new things and ideas as we age. To continue to evolve as we age we have to remain flexible and open or else we find ourselves stuck, stagnant, and "old".
“Though we plant the seeds when we like it, and have the freedom to choose the quality of seeds we plant, note that the harvest is brought about by the higher consciousness in its Divine Timing.”― Sanchita Pandey, Lessons from My Garden
The key is we don’t want to continuously jump from one thing to the next or as the saying goes “be so open-minded that our brains fall out”, it requires a certain balance. This why we have to pay such close attention to those things that either enhance or detracts from our peace. This took me three decades of extremely intense work on myself to really figure out and put into practice.
Now, all of us are attracted to plenty of things that don’t serve us – a beautiful person, people who continually pay us empty compliments, a popular book, a fad diet, substances that make us feel good temporarily, but how many of these things enhance our peace?
Also, there are many things in life seem boring as hell on the surface but fill us with a deep sense of joy, sometimes this makes zero logical sense. If you find someone or something that sparks a sense of peace and well-being in you it’s a good sign you should be making a real effort to experience more of them or it. Try this and see how it changes your life. Life is an experiment after all.
After three decades of work, hundreds of books, countless hours of meditation, and lots of mistakes I can strip away the nuances of what I’ve learned and distill them into two basic points.
Pay close attention to those things that enhance your peace and sense of well-being. Make an effort to experience more of this. These are the things that are likely meant for you in this time and season of your life.
Likewise, try to eliminate anything from your life that constantly detracts from your peace and sense of well-being. This will likely waste your time and do you harm.
If we don't pay attention to these two things we always pay in other, often painful, ways like -- wasted time, unhappiness, financial hardship, anxiety/depression, and declining health.
I’ll leave you with one of the first poems I ever wrote. This was written around 1991 when I was twenty and my adult life was just beginning. I remember the day so vividly. I was still living with my parents in the house I grew up in. I was filled with a sense of hope and excitement and scribbled the poem down in a journal I was keeping at the time.
Months earlier I had been through a life changing experience and, subsequently, fell into a deep, dark depression. Then I had the breakthrough that pulled me from the abyss. Just a few weeks before I wrote this poem I found a little book on Meditation by Paramahansa Yogananda, started my meditation practice and nothing has been the same since.
It hasn't been an easy path for me but I can honestly say it’s been worth it. Pursuing a creative endeavor and living a life in which you allow both your brain and your heart to guide you can be very tricky. There have been times of drought, darkness, and confusion where I've questioned everything, especially when it feels like everyone else is passing you by. The thing is, once those seeds are sown, the harvest happens in time and when it does there is no greater joy on Earth than this.
All for now. Trust your instincts, invest in you, live boldly, and take chances.
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Poetry should move us, it should change us, it should glitch our brains, shift our moods to another frequency. Poetry should evoke feelings of melancholy, whimsy, it should remind us what it feels like to be in love, or cause us to think about something in a completely different way. I view poetry, and all art really, as a temporary and fragile bridge between our world and a more pure and refined one. This is a world we could bring into creation if enough of us believed in it. This book is ephemera, destined to end up forgotten, lingering on some dusty shelf or tucked away in a dark attic. Yet the words, they will live on in memory. I hope these words become a part of you, bubble up into your memory when you least expect them to and make you feel a little more alive.
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Most of us have experienced a moment of perfect peace at least once in our lives. In these moments we lose ourselves and feel connected to everything. I call these mindful moments. Words can’t describe how complete they make us feel.
These moments are usually fragile, evaporating in seconds. What if there was a way to train your mind to experience more of them? It’s deceptively easy and requires nothing more than a subtle shift in mindset. My new book, Mindful Moments, will teach you to be much more content despite the chaos and imperfect circumstances continuing to unfold around you. Upgrade your life experience today for only $15.99 on Amazon.com.
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