Tomorrow, I will write Part 3 of my Secret Ambition. Today, I woke up inspired to share another journey – my journey to become fully awake!
As the year began, I shared five goals for 2022 that were important to me. Number one on my list was to establish a reliable Presence Practice so I could reduce triggers and experience more Joy. After six months, I am excited to share my progress as it made my announcement tomorrow possible.
I hired an experienced teacher who had ten years under his belt studying presence. The very first lesson that my teacher taught me, is that there are two pathways to Enlightenment. This is a fancy word that means joy, self-love and peace.
One path is to follow your bliss through doing that which makes you come alive. Since you have heard me use the word bliss WAY too often, let’s label this ‘Doingness’. The second is to become present to the here and now. Let’s call this ‘Beingness’. It is doubtful that you have heard me mention that concept, well, ever!
My teacher was quick to point out that I was a 99% ‘Doingness’ person. Why 1%? Well, I am known for REALLY appreciating sunsets. Otherwise, I am 100% a “Doingness” machine.
In the past, if I tried to go thirty seconds doing nothing at all, about ten seconds in I would start daydreaming my next great act of doing! I think this is why sunsets have always been so significant to me, as they are the one thing that reliably allowed me to taste presence.
How long have I been this way? Since I was about four years old. So strong is this habit in me, that my teacher pointed out that this would be the most significant journey of my life. It was hard to believe it at the time, but now, seven months later, I am a believer. But, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let me share my learnings with you.
The hallmark traits of Presence, is to feel more stillness, spaciousness and emptiness. Or put another way, it allows your mind to feel more silent and absent of thoughts. Achieving this makes space for your own thoughts to emerge. Thoughts emanating from your soul, rather than from your Ego, but I am again, jumping ahead!
When my teacher explained that 99% of suffering is from NOT being present, he got my attention. The thought that negative emotions are a form of suffering made sense to me. He helped me draft my reason for deploying a Presence Practice. This is what I wrote down:
To reduce 99% of the thoughts created by the un-invited roommate so I can tap into my own thoughts more often to experience more joy and far less suffering. This is the most self-loving thing I can gift myself.
My secondary reasons for deploying a Presence Practice were to:
- To gain the tools to stop triggers in their tracks
- To see what life is like with less daydreaming & perhaps, less doing!
- To reduce waiting for the next great moment and be more present in this moment
- To wake up the real me
- To receive more miracles
My teacher kicked things off by helping me see that I am not my thoughts. That another entity exists – an un-invited roommate known as my Ego. To prove this to me, he asked me to write down all of the qualities I would attribute to me Ego. I was surprised how easy this was.
I wrote down that my Ego is arrogant, petty, and has a need to feel superior. It is cocky, disrespectful, aggressive, and manipulative. It constantly objectifies, judges, and is the bearer of negative thoughts. It does not value the present moment and it has an insatiable desire to be right. It doesn’t know the path to joy. In fact, it prefers pain and suffering. It serves up useless info describing things that don’t need description – like “that’s a tree”. Thanks for that obvious bit of info! It annoyingly dwells on negative experiences from the past and attaches to fear and anxiety about future outcomes before they happen.
In short, my Ego does not value the present moment at all. In fact, it seems that its primary goal is to prevent me from being present and experiencing more joy, self-love and peace.
When I completed this exercise, I asked if I could nickname my Ego. My teacher smiled and encouraged me to do so. I named is Johnny Joyless.
This exercise led to my first big discovery that only the Ego makes mistakes, never the Soul. I figured out that somewhere along my journey, Johnny Joyless (aka – my Ego) took over and was responding for me. It had assumed the position of CEO of me. It loses its shit when it feels disrespected or shown a lack of gratitude. My Ego needs to be respected and appreciated. Show it the opposite and I would show you a triggered person.
After clearly seeing that it was no leader worth following, and more of a Court Jester, it was an easy decision to promote my Soul to take over as CEO. Knowing I could not rid myself of my Ego forever, I made the decision to demote it to taking out my trash.
To achieve this, I had to deconstruct the belief system that my Ego had firmly implanted in my thoughts that I needed to be appreciated and respected. My prescription was for respect and appreciation to not be so important to me. This was my work to do and it would not be overnight.
As the months went by, I started to experience the many benefits of a Presence Practice. It turns the world from black and white to brilliant colors. It gives me greater focus and better creativity. It creates a connection to wisdom capable of thinking brand new thoughts. And it isn’t hard. It is effortless. Pain and suffering by comparison, are WAY harder.
I started to became aware of competing thoughts and developed tools to NOT have them. I learned that I could dispel thoughts by acknowledging that they showed up in my head but that I could then deliberately and consciously set them aside. This allowed me to change how I viewed situations. I could choose to leave them or surrender to them. I regained my power to choose, by making my Ego powerless. I become the Observer of my thoughts.
The primary tool I learned to process really bad feelings, which could lead to devastating triggers, was to catch the feeling being produced by my Ego’s thoughts, trace the wires back to the source (discovering why I am really getting upset), and choose to allow things to be as they are instead of fighting reality by going to a dark place where I say – ‘It shouldn’t be this way”. This one thought brings so much pain, taking me down a rabbit hole of pain and suffering that is unnecessary and harmful.
This led me to my second great discovery, that suffering is optional. By accepting events as they are instead of attempting to deny that they have happened, should of happened or deserved to happen to me, I can eliminate the lion’s share of the suffering from all thoughts and events. I know this sounds pie in the sky, but I humbly encourage you to give it a try. It took me months to actually learn this, but when I finally had the breakthrough, it made so much sense. It was actually quite simple to implement once I fully understood it.
Applying this discovery to my daily life, I learned that Presence Practice helps with ungrateful people, lack of appreciation, outright disrespect, uninspired people and most of all – all forms of drama.
Fearing this newfound power, my Ego evolved trying to manipulate me into believing that I need it to protect those that I love – from me! I dismissed this as bullshit. I instead discovered that it is NOT possible for anyone to get hurt by me when I am being my best self in my highest vibration. My Ego wants to play out imaginary arguments, but I laugh, and decide not to engage.
I am just beginning to work on discarding habits that no longer serve me and developing new ones that do. For instance, due to the fact that I work a fair amount, I have a habit of finding moments to turn off my brain sort of as a reward of R&R. I use my SmartPhone, TV and Day Dreaming as mechanisms to do this. These habits deny me of being present in the here and now. I am going to instead chose to be present over time killing. In essence, I am going to trade time killers for future miracles.
Why am I bothering with all of this? It’s pretty straight forward. After decades of Doingness, accomplishing many of my dreams and successfully navigating bliss journey after bliss journey, I came to the realization that I was not awake. I had a strong outer purpose – to be inspired to transform in the direction of my bliss (aka - happiness and joy). This served me well over the years but it denied me of one very important ingredient to enlightenment – peace.
Over the last four years, while in some of my greatest moments of manufactured joy from Doingness, I allowed a couple of preventable triggers to destroy my peace. They brought me significant pain and suffering, presented a threat to key relationships and made me feel extremely lonely. And it was pretty clear to me after the fact, that they were mostly a figment of my imagination – or more succinctly, my thoughts. I needed to address this head on.
I have since learned that I can just acknowledge that an event has happened, and no amount of complaining to myself or others is going to change it. Acceptance is not resignation. It’s not defeat. It has nothing to do with what I will do in the next moment about it. There is really nothing to gain from railing against something that has already happened. I am not resigned to doing nothing. I am just accepting that it happened.
If I could wave a magic wand and gift everyone on the planet one thing, it would be the full understanding of what I just described above, as taught to me by my teacher. The belief that suffering is optional. We have the tools to stop it. We just need to develop them and work at it.
After months of practicing the above, I came to an important place in my journey. I discovered that doingness on its own, does not deliver peace. It can deliver all kinds of success, rewards, joy, respect, appreciation, and even self-love, but it does not deliver an inner purpose.
This led to my third significant discovery, that inner purpose is universal. It is to be awake.
My teacher is now focused on teaching me how to redeploy my doing nature. He is teaching me about the concept of Awakened Doing. I don’t have to give up doing, I just need to embrace that in any situation, my state of consciousness is what will determine the quality of each moment and my life overall.
My Ego is losing its shit over this threat. It is aggressively serving up all kinds of fear, doubt and resistance in the form of “He wants you to do nothing. If you do this, you will become a Loser! You will lose all your wealth. You will be a joke.!”. Wow, thanks Ego! How do you really feel?
Fortunately, I now know that my Ego is a Court Jester and not worth listening to. Instead, I am thankful that my Ego is exposing what I need to work on. I have lots of questions for my teacher about Awakened Doing. I am so excited to learn more!
In a few months, I will share my additional learnings on this subject and others that are sure to arise. I can’t wait for this journey to continue. Kudos to my teacher Patrick Combs as well as his teachers, Eckhart Tolle, A Course in Miracles and Parmanhas Yogananda. You have been an Astounding Guide.
Thank you for reading this. I hope it inspires you to begin your own Presence Practice. My new mission is to place my inner purpose as a higher priority than my outer purpose, because it is of higher value.
