James Yates

There are three essential ingredients for creating the life you want: support, support, support. Building a strong support system serves as your foundation for making any major change, whether it is making a lifestyle change, changing careers or going after your dreams. You may have heard the saying, “It’s not what you know. It’s who you know.” Absolutely! In order to create the life you want, you need all the support you can get. This flies in the face of the American myth of individualism, the “self-made man,” and “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.” If you look at the research and throughout history, successful people who have accomplished amazing things have received loads of support from others.

Another myth is the idea that you have to love yourself, first. Your capacity for self-love arises as a result of being loved and accepted just as you are. This involves internalizing the love and support you received from family, friends, teachers and others who have given you encouragement, compassion, comfort and understanding through thick and thin. Once you have experienced such love and support, you are then able to provide the same for yourself.

Sadly, for most us, we didn’t receive the love and support we needed as we grew up. As a result, we didn’t develop the self-love and support needed to deal with life’s difficulties and to embrace life’s opportunities. We are left with what I often call a “black hole for love.” It is not too late to fill that hole!

This reminds me of the question: “What is the easy way to enlightenment?” The answer: “Surround yourself with enlightened people.” This is in keeping with a principle in complex systems theory that complex systems (e.g., people) tend to shift their behavior and resonate with the systems in their environment. Love and acceptance begets love and acceptance. You are not obliged to allow in your inner circle those people who are critical, abusive, passive-aggressive and withholding. In order to fill that black hole and develop your capacity for self-love and self-support, you need to seek out and be with people that love and accept you just as you are, as well as support, encourage and exemplify all that you aspire to do and be.

You may want to make regular use of the Appreciations Log, as it is a great tool for training yourself to focus on the gold that is glittering in your life. I have found this exercise to be an effective way to change my perspective when I am focused on doom and gloom. When you can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel, this exercise awakens you to the light coming through the holes in the sides of the tunnel.

As I heard a Zen teacher once say, “Your attention is like a watering can. Whatever you focus on will grow. You have a choice to water the flowers or the weeds.” You may have found that you tend to focus more on the weeds. This—what researchers call “negativity bias”—has been found to be true of all us humans. Our tendency to focus on the negative severely limits our ability to feel joy and ease in our lives. The good news is we can retrain our brains to focus on the positive.

Guidelines: Make a list of what you appreciate throughout the day in a pocket notebook or digital device. Add each appreciation to your list when you experience it. There is a lot that you will miss and not remember if you wait till the end of the day to make your list. A brief phrase or sentence that will remind you of each appreciation will be enough, e.g., listening to the birds, looking up at the blue sky or lunch with your best friend. Include brief glimpses as well as more profound experiences. Be sure to include yourself as an object of appreciation, e.g., presenting a good idea at a meeting, listening to a friend in need or making a good joke.

Why write it down? Life coaches have a saying, “Ink it, don’t think it.” If you commit it to paper, the observation becomes more concrete, giving it more significance than an ephemeral thought. When you take the time and physical effort to write it, you are embedding the experience deeper into your consciousness.

Presence first;
Thought, speech and action second.

Presence is awareness of what is here and now. Presence is being present with whatever is arising in our awareness both inside and outside of us. Presence is a priori, the foundation of our experience. It is always…present. Thought, speech and action arise in and from presence. Right thought, speech and action flow from presence. When we rest in the ground of awareness, the appropriate, effective and compassionate thought, speech and action arise, just right for the current situation.

We cover up presence when we put thought first. We bury the ground of awareness under our preoccupation with thought. This focus on thought is propelled by the following mistaken beliefs:

• Thought is the source of the solutions to all our problems.
• We are our thoughts located somewhere in our heads.
• Our thoughts about reality are real; more real than our experience of the here and now through our senses.

This preoccupation with thought is a long-standing habit that cuts us off from presence—the ground of awareness of what is here and now. Because of this separation, this habit unknowingly takes a lot of effort and energy to maintain, and ends up causing all kinds of problems. Presence, on the other hand, takes no effort at all, because it is the foundation of what we are; it is always there.

The difficulty is breaking or, better said, letting go of the thought habit, and allowing the ground of awareness to be our source, our identity, our reality. Try as it may, thought cannot break or let go of the habit. No philosophical insight will do the trick. That would be a case of throwing gasoline on the fire. Nor can thought grasp or bring about presence. That would be like a single, microscopic organism of plankton trying to swallow the ocean. Finally, presence is not a question of replacing the old habit with a new habit. Presence is not a habit; it is our true nature.

Just as every grain of sand and each of us is unique, the pathless path for each of us to uncovering the ground of awareness is unique. There are many paths up this mountain; this mountain that we are. What a wondrous adventure!

A Tasty Present

Presence,
Open, loving awareness of the here and now,
Is a present that is eternally present;
A cake out of which pops just the right
Thought, speech, action,
Beings, places, things.
Our just desserts are always being served;
A smorgasbord of ever-changing flavors:
Bitter, spicy, bland, sour, sweet.
Let presence do the tasting:
Indescribably delicious

Here’s a simple and effective awareness exercise you can do. Pause throughout the day, even if it is just a moment, and ask, “With no problem to solve, what is here and now?” Without trying to answer the question in words, just drop into awareness of what is present. This was borrowed from Shift into Freedom by Loch Kelly.

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Carlos Castaneda spoke of the shamans of his lineage as navigators of infinity. We are all navigators of infinity, the unfathomable, boundless, eternal field of energy that is the source of everything. Most of us are at best dimly aware of this as we have set a finite course, imprisoned on a seemingly safe, comfortable excursion that severely limits our capacity to behold and express the wonder of our existence. May we all discover that we are infinity navigating infinity on this miraculous voyage.

Someone once asked a Zen teacher, “What is Buddha?” The teacher replied, “What is not Buddha?” ‌—‌ unknown origin (quoted in Nothing to Grasp by Joan Tollifson)

Life is not a problem to solve; it is a mystery to experience. (A retooling of a quote by Frank Herbert)

My daily burden
Is to follow my heart,
Wherever it may lead.
“A path that is not
For the faint of heart,”
Replied a friend who agreed.

It’s not easy following our heart, our passion, that which gives us joy and fulfillment. When breaking new ground, fear and excitement go hand in hand, as with diving off the diving board for the first time. Once we begin on a path with heart, internal and external obstacles arise. It takes courage to go on. Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the ability to go on in the face of fear. The notion of fearlessness is a myth. A soldier without fear is a dead soldier. Fear is essential to survival and meeting our needs. We need to listen to the wisdom of our fear and identify the valid, important need underneath, while staying true to our heart. Remember Eleanor Roosevelt’s advice, “Do one thing every day that scares you.” I recommend that thing be what we love, what gives us joy and fulfillment.

Endarkenment:
The flip-side of enlightenment.
Light and dark,
No dark: no light.
Carrying a lantern,
We unwittingly explore darkness in vain.
To know darkness we must
Enter into,
Be present with,
Experience,
Be
The dark,
Unknown,
Hidden,
Painful,
Fearful
Places within ourselves
And our world.
Know dark: know light.