Author: mysticheartsong

“I’m allowing myself more and more to trust my intuitive wisdom rather than my analytic mind.  My analytic mind can’t really handle the complexity of the situation, so I go from moment to moment, just listening.

When you ask me a question, I stop for a moment.  I go empty.  I’m not thinking about the answer.  I’m going empty because in the emptiness is the answer — a better response than I can come up with when I use my analytic mind to figure out what I should say to you.

What has happened to me over the past several decades, I’m sure partly through psychedelics, partly through meditation, through grace, and through evolution, is that when I don’t need to think about something, my mind is empty.  I’m not thinking.  I’m empty.  I’m just here.

Listening is an art that comes from a quiet mind and an open heart.  Listening uses all your senses, and it is a very subtle skill, not only with the ears but with your whole being.  Your being becomes the instrument of listening.  Your sensing mechanism in life is not only your ears, eyes, skin sensitivity, and analytic mind, but also something deeper in you, an intuitive quality of knowing.  With all of your being, you become an antenna to the nature of another person,”

Words of Wisdom: Quotations from One of the World’s Foremost Spiritual Teachers, Ram Dass, p. 4.

Ram Dass, formerly Dr. Richard Alpert, became a multigenerational spiritual teacher and cultural icon spanning from the 1960s through his peaceful passing at his home on December 22, 2019. Be Here Now sparked a watershed of Eastern spiritual traditions and practices.  Ram Dass devoted his life to service, founding the Love Serve Remember Foundation, the Hanuman Foundation, and co-founding the Seva Foundation, Lama Foundation, and the Neem Karoli Baba Ashram in Taos, New Mexico. For talks, podcasts, or more information, visit ramdass.org.

“Accept everything just the way it is.

Acceptance is perhaps the most important attitude to overcome mental challenges in life.

It’s a state of mind. There’s no destination or goal with acceptance. It’s simply the process of exercising the mind to be tolerant of anything life throws at us.

Why is it powerful?

Because instead of fighting against negative emotions like anxiety and stress, you’re actually accepting them the way they are. You’re not bitter, and you’re not creating more negativity out of your negativity.

Through acceptance, you pave the path for negative emotions like anxiety to become less powerful. You’re not fighting against them and making them worse.

But to be clear: Acceptance is not the following: It’s not indifference or apathy. It does not involve giving up or not trying. It’s simply about accepting things without judging them.

It is what it is. Whatever happens happens. It’s about being patient and allowing the natural flow of things to take place.”

awaken.com, Leonard Jacobson

“The first step in letting go is to let in.  To let in an experience is to allow it more fully into awareness, to become curious about what is going on.  Take the risk of letting in how it feels.  In the present moment, if there is pain, it’s real, it’s there. Resisting the pain doesn’t help; it only adds to the discomfort.

The second part is letting be.  By accepting it as it is and allowing the sensations to be just as they are, we may well find that we don’t suffer quite so much.  As you let the experience in and let it be, you might notice that it begins to change.  A sharp sensation might soften.  An ache might grow stronger, and then fade.  Numbness might give way to other sensations.  A tense muscle may begin to unwind of its own accord.

If I open up to it more fully – letting it in and then just letting it be – the natural wisdom of my body often shows me what needs to happen.  Several muscles that I did not realize were tight begin to relax, the area softens and my body readjusts itself.  Without my doing anything, the pain goes and comfort returns. The body does the releasing for me — once, that is, my conscious mind gets out of the way.

Werner Erhard taught a similar process in EST — Erhard Seminar Training — a pioneering program of the 1970’s human potential movement.  He would ask people to describe a pain in terms of its shape, size, color, and texture to rate each on a scale from 1 to 10.  He’d then ask them to go through the process again, rating how it now felt.  As they continued repeating the process, the intensity of the pain would tend to decrease, often disappearing completely.  By using these sensory metaphors, people were opening up more to the feeling of pain. They were in effect, letting it in and letting it be.

In other situations, where the pain has become deeper, a long-term cause, it may not go away but our relationship to it can change, making it easier to bear.  A meditation practice may allow a relaxing around the pain or opening up to it. The pain may not change but the relationship to it can ease.”

Letting Go of Nothing: Relax Your Mind and Discover the Wonder of Your True Nature (An Eckhart Tolle Edition), Peter Russell, pgs. 7 – 9.

“Be forever willing to reject guidance from outer sources and listen in total stillness to your own small voice.  It is your one true personal guide in every situation.  If you cannot quiet your ruffled feelings enough to be still and listen, while you practice you might pray for Me to help you.  Think of the beautiful peace that passes understanding and let your prayer be one of trying to comprehend this inner peace.

From the depths of this total stillness, the voice of intuition will spring up like a musical note and you will hear its message as unmistakably, as understandably, as the message from your conscience.  Not only will it lure you into more creative thinking, it will be your source of truth, and you will know what you believe, and what you want to do, without knowing how you know it.

You will soon understand that your still, small voice has two aspects to its nature. One is your conscience which redirects you when you wander.  Conscience does not condemn you for the mistakes you make, it merely helps you find the way again. The second is the peaceful answer that reliably intoxicates you with its guidance.

You need only to turn to the inner voice, to trust, obey, and love it, and your receptivity will increase until you never have to doubt that My wisdom, indeed, is guiding you infallibly.  Ask Me anything you want to know, then wait in quietness and carefully watch your thoughts. 

If you are not sure it is My voice you hear when you are in silence, prayer will liberate you from this confusion too.  You can pray to know My voice, and as you do your sensitivity will be heightened until you are quite familiar with this beautiful Light of Wisdom.”

The Door Of Everything – A Guide To Love, Faith, And Your Personal Ascension, Ruby Nelson, p. 70 – 71.

“Although they’re rooted in the past, our core beliefs feel current and true. The thoughts and feelings associated with them filter our experience of what is happening right now, and they prime us to respond in a certain way.

The Buddha taught that if your mind is captured by the fear and misunderstanding of limiting beliefs, ‘trouble will follow you as the wheel follows the ox that draws the cart.’ Traditional translations of Buddhist texts speak of the mind as ‘impure,’ but this can be understood as ‘distorted,’ ‘colored,’ or ‘tainted.’ As the Buddha put it, ‘With our thoughts we make the world.’

If we pay close attention, we can see how our beliefs about ourselves and the world give rise to the very behaviors and events that confirm them. If you believe that nobody will like you, you’ll behave in ways that broadcast your insecurities. When people pull away, your sense of rejection will confirm your belief. If you believe that others are waiting to attack or criticize you, you’ll probably act defensive or aggressive. Then when people push back, your fears will be justified.

We loosen the grip of these beliefs by training ourselves to recognize the fear-thinking in our minds.  In the moments of mindfully noting fear thoughts (you can mentally whisper ‘fear-thinking’) there is a little space between us and our beliefs. This space gives us the opportunity to discover that the thoughts and underlying beliefs are ‘real but not true.’  They are real– they are appearing. They come with a very real and painful experience of fear or hurt or shame in our bodies.  But they are interpretations of reality, mental images, and soundbites we have produced that represent the world and entrap us in a confining trance. They are not truth, itself.

If, rather than subscribing to beliefs as truth we can connect with the actuality of our present moment experience, we directly weaken this trance. We take refuge in presence by moving our attention from thoughts to the felt sense of our body’s experience. As we rest our attention in our moment-to-moment experience, our aliveness, intelligence, and innate compassion naturally shine through.  Each time we move in this way from fear thoughts to our embodied experience, we are increasingly able to see past the confining stories we tell ourselves about our own unworthiness, badness, and unloveableness.

They are real but not true.  With practice, the veil of beliefs that has confined our lives dissolves and our trust in our true nature guides us in living and loving fully.”

True Refuge: Finding Peace And Freedom In Your Own Awakened Heart, Tara Brach, pgs. 11 – 14.