For reasons not entirely known – who can say? – in some areas of my life the middle ground is hard to accept. This difficulty gets expressed in form, so, for example, I need to restrict what I eat for health reasons.
Since all creation starts within, can I embrace the middle ground within and smooth out some of the conditions in the physical?
This is my pleasure reading. Seriously. It’s a book about the teachings of Ramana Maharshi who lived and taught in southern India in the late 19th and first half of the 20th century. He awakened at age 16, with no prior interest in spirituality.
He said, “The ‘I’-thought is only limited ‘I’. The real ‘I’ is unlimited, universal, beyond time and space.”
What emerges with the limited “I” thought, however, is the world as we know it.
Today when I look out at the gorgeous green land around me, the luminous clouds in the western sky climbing the hill, I see the beauty and I see the unreality. It makes me feel sad. But that, apparently, is not the final word. We shall see.
Business “how-to’s” are important, but far less important than most people think. Business strategies are given power they do not possess. The power of your business is in your consciousness.
Work on your inner state, especially self-compassion and self-love. Your inner state is the most powerful business tool.
You become magnetic to what you desire, including the business you love and all its mechanics.
“The karmas carry the seeds of their own destruction.” – Ramana Maharshi
We wish we’d said it differently. Better. Smarter. The job interview. The first conversation with someone we’ve had a crush on. The speech we gave. We think we could have done it better. We’re sure we SHOULD have done it better. Can you accept the perfection, the genius of what you did just as you did it?
Can you take a stand without taking a side?
We are wired to gauge the “rightness” of something by how good it makes us feel. This is not always what we should use to measure the rightness of an action or path. Please understand, I am not saying we should ignore feelings that indicate something is wrong. We should not do that.
However, we might be taking the right action at the right time and it doesn’t necessarily feel good. Feeling good is a perceptual filter. If we use our wisdom (our own wisdom) we might benefit from some investigation about the value of an action or experience if we look beyond the feeling state it engenders. The feeling state might be an old habit. The action or experience might be something beyond the known. And perfect for us right now.
Your success is less about – if at all – the paying public “out there” and more – or all – about how much you will accept and allow.
This isn’t a post about whether gender is a matter of conditioning. Or whether it exists at all. This is a post about the old-fashioned issue of our societal conditioning as women. And how that conditioning, like all conditioning, becomes a perceptual filter.
Yes, it becomes psychology and behavior and culture too. But at it’s root, it is a series of beliefs, which create a perceptual filter. And that filter lives and breathes in each individual.
I find it useful to be aware of the filter, how it operates in my psyche and, in turn, my life. But I am cautious: it is double-edged and I know it. It acts subtly to increase my sense of separation and, ironically, instead of freeing my mind, intensifies the feeling of being a victim, of being less-than.
When I am perceiving and maybe acting out of society’s ideas or mandates about how to be a “good female,” it helps me to be aware of those tensions, so I can make different choices. But I focus on the other ingredients mixing around in the mindset. Things like: “I am woman, I am this, you treat me like that, you are that, you have always treated me like this, look what you did, it will always be this way.” No. I do not welcome that. That is a prison. I let it go.
Use the filter. Do not be used by it.
Inner Tools™ Blog: Times of Intense Rapid Shifts 