Are you willing to wake up, really wake up? 

In these times of great change, chaos and overwhelm for
many, more and more are asking the question, "How can I
move beyond living like this?"  The answer is not nearly
as complicated as it may seem. 

First, it's important to fully recognize that the way
your life is going is not working for you.  You've
heard that one definition of the word "insanity" is doing
the same things over and over again but expecting
different results.  What  you have been doing and
thinking has not been paying off for you with higher
levels of calm, wisdom and happiness.

For many who want a more satisfying life, it's very
important to get to a place where you are completely
fed up with how your life is going.  I am not
suggesting that you should get angry, hopeless or
frustrated; what I am asking you to do is to simply
say to yourself: "Enough  is enough."

Get fed up!

Getting fed up is a motivator, as long as you are
not also loading your mind up with thoughts of present
overwhelm, fear, depression or suffering.

So the second key is being present.  It's so common
for people to focus their attention on self-judgment
for past actions or fear for what is coming up soon.
True empowerment is only possible when one is willing
to be with each moment as it is while having trust in
one's own ability to deal with whatever life will bring
to you in the future.

The third key to waking up is shifting the way that you
identify yourself.  Identifying with the body or mind is
a very direct way to confuse and frustrate yourself. 
Both the body and the mind have inherently insane ways
of responding to life.  Each has sets of demands that,
when followed, tend to be destructive.  The body and
mind can both have addictive and destructive demands. 
When you cave to those demands, you weaken yourself. 
Those who give in to such demands on a frequent basis
are more and more integrating a sense of mistrust in 
themselves.  It is not possible to have a sense of
true personal power if  you are regularly doing or
thinking things that prohibit trusting yourself!
Please think about that.

It takes courage to move through the challenges of
life in a powerful way.  How do we build courage?
Trust is necessary.  If you don't trust that you can
deal with what is to come, and if you don't trust
that your life is simply a series of opportunities
to integrate a more loving way of being, then you
are allowing your life to be run by your fear.

If you are living in fear, you really are being run
by your head, by the imaginary egoic self that
exists only as it is fed.  Please contemplate this.

There is a simple way that you can move beyond the
fear-based, head-run life:  You can recondition
yourself.  We tend to be conditioned to certain
patterns in how we live our lives.  Many of these
patterns are based upon sets of lies that we have
heard so much in our lives that we think they are
true.  We've been conditioned by the propaganda of
religion, governments, educational institutions, the
mass media, and our families and friends to think
many lies are truths.  The lies are virtually always
based on somebody's fear.

When you take the radical step of identifying
yourself as the will and the wisdom of your heart
and soul, you open up for yourself an entirely new
way of dealing with the world with spiritual sanity.
By finding clarity about the loving intent of the
heart, you open the door to creating more calm,
happiness and wisdom in your life.

Once you are clear on your beliefs, you are then
able to prioritize your actions so that they are
more and more consistently loving.  Just as you may
have become conditioned to the fearful life by seeing
hearing, reading and otherwise experiencing
falsehood, you can recondition yourself to a more
loving way of living by practicing action and thought
that is consistent with the loving will and wisdom of
your own heart and soul. 

This is what we have all come into this life to do.

So my challenge to you today is to consider
prioritizing your loving reconditioning as the most
important purpose of your life.  NOthing could be
more important than becoming what you came into this
world to become.

LIfe is just a process of unfolding your love fully,
and I have a deep sense that we all can keep coming
back into new lifetimes until we fully realize our
loving nature.  As we prioritize this process, living
becomes a more vibrant, happy and calm experience.

When you trust, it's so much easier to wake up.

Are you willing to consider prioritizing your own
realization of your love?  What could ever be more
important?  As you prioritize this realization, all
the challenges of life lose the harsh edge that you
may have experienced at times. 

Please read this article a second time, pausing at
least briefly at the end of each paragraph as you
ask your heart if what has been expressed is true for
you.  "Click on" your internal pause button.

Feel your own truth.

All Love,
Carlo Ami

It sure is strange what is going on for so many of us at this time.   We want stress relief.  We want to learn how to trust.   The world is shifting as we are shifting.  Many of us feel less grounded, more chaotic.  Lots of people tend to think that this is a “bad” thing.  Is it, really?

The mind tends to lead us down all sorts of dead-end alleys, self-destructive paths and pain extenders.  Its basic design is to help us to take care of practical matters like when to eat, when to pee and what to do when there is a red light in traffic.  If we misguidedly make the mind our master in dealing with emotions and our spiritual nature, we set ourself up for a treadmill of pain...until we change our mind about how to use it.

It seems that the natural way to ground oneself is in the Earth.  As we are evolving individually and collectively, we are being pushed to consider another source for our grounding: our heart.    I see this intuitively as a truth.  If we see the Earth and the mind as vehicles, rather than as who we are, then the question arises: To who or what do I identify myself with as me, as my essential self?

When we have been challenged by stress, by the apparent chaos of life, how do we respond?  The old-school way takes one of two approaches:  The first is to look for ways to explain and solve it with the mind: psychological theory, religious scriptures, common sense, or what some teacher told you about how you should think.

The second approach, also very common and generally counter-productive, is to use the mind to “explain a problem away” or to avoid it as much as possible.  We can convince ourselves that a challenge is not a challenge if we tell ourselves so often enough.  When that doesn’t work, it is easy to slide into avoidance behavior such as addiction to distract ourselves from the pain we experience.  This kind of short-term “solution” not only numbs us temporarily, but it saps our strength to physically and emotionally deal with what is in front of us to face.

Especially during this high-change time of the Summer Solstice, we are served to find our balance in attuning ourselves with---and identifying ourselves with---the heart.  I suggest that you play with this as you have times when you are challenged emotionally.  See your heart as the essence of who your are, as your true home, and as your conduit to the feeling of connection with all Life.

To try to explain with clarity and verification why we are experiencing what we experience is futile.  Yet, taking two simple steps can make a significant impact on your success in more gracefully moving through life.

1. See everything that happens to you and all of the people in your life as your teachers.  Seeing anyone as simply a terrorist or tormentor wastes the lesson they have for you.  And it is suitably difficult to be upset with someone if you recongnize them as teaching you something of value.  Sometimes, their lesson to you is to say goodbye to them.  Sometimes their lesson is for you to be more loving.
2. Identify with your heart.  While so many identify with the neediness and chaos of the ego, seeing and feeling yourself as the will of your heart is empowering.

Are you dissecting what has been said so far here with your head?  Please stop it, already!  Pause for a moment and ask your heart: "If you are me, what would you have me know right now?"   Close your eyes as you ask this and then hush up and listen, feel.

In these shifting times, the messages that the apparent world gives to you can be food for the useless ego:  That you need some pill to make you happier, that your next partner will be kinder to you and that will solve all your problems, that the world will treat you better after you have lost a few pounds,  that the next job will be more supportive of you….

A major step along the path for so many of us as we learn how to trust and integrate the often simple perspective tools for stress relief comes when we more fully allow our lives to be managed by the will of the heart.

An experiment:  Read the sentence below three or four times and then close your eyes, focus on your heart, and be aware of any feelings or thoughts that arise:

I attune to the loving will of my heart

as I sense my true loving power

connected to all of creation

as one loving body.

*********************************************

On Thursday evening , June 24, 2010, hear Carlo Ami on BlogTalk Radio's "I Love Authors" Show with Melissa Lierman.

See http://www.blogtalkradio.com/iloveauthors for details.

Much of what is written below is written with line breaks that are there for a purpose.  The end of each line is an opportunity to pause and to contemplate what you have just read before moving on to the next segment.

The world seems a mess.  Anxiety seems to be running rampant. The world seems to be imploding.

Is it time to wake up from the ignorant dream?

Has the time come to claim our fully loving nature?

How do we do this?

How do we become what be came here to become?

 

In the claiming of love comes the release of the imaginary ego,

That counter-productive imagination that sucks our loving energy, but only if we feed it.

Collectively, we have fed it by identifying with it, as if it is who we are.

We are challenged to see and feel and know that we are not that ignorant ego.

To do this, the true challenge---positively-stated---is to claim our true power.

 

Ego perverts the definition of true power.

For true power can only be an aspect of that which is based in love.

What is it to be in one’s true, full power, all the time?

It is to see, feel, taste and hear and trust the love in every experience,

And then do our best to practice always the fully loving response, in every moment.

It is too see the love in the most beautiful of creatures just as you see the opportunity

To practice it when confronted with the face of an angry, violent zealot.

It is to hear the love in the silence of meditation which is a ticket, of sorts,

To loving consciousness when practiced with optimum frequency and duration.

It is to hear it in the drone of a loud ambulance or fire truck siren,

As an opportunity to send love to someone who may be injured.

 

It is to taste the love in the most flavorful culinary delight just as you can choose loving patience and presence when you taste something extremely bitter, spicy or otherwise challenging.

It is trusting that whatever occurs in my experience can be accepted with grace,

Allowing  me to be more fully at peace with myself and my world.

 

We are collectively on our way to integrating this trust.

This is what I trust: That there are basically two kinds of experiences along the path.  One is the kind of experience that is easy to enjoy, easy to appreciate: the caress of your lover, the witnessing of the most kaleidoscopic of sunsets.

That brand of loving experience is easy to love unless you have bought into the foolish idea, fomented by misguided parents, political leaders and religions, that you are unworthy of experiencing joy and contentment.  I challenge you not to condemn those who would have you believe such lies, but to simply steer your life clear of their influence.

The other kind of experience that has been not so easy in the past to deal with is the emotionallychallenging one.  It’s when your world seems to scold you, judge you, manipulate you, ignore you, hate you or otherwise challenges you to be with what is just as it is. It is usually the opportunity to practice giving love to either yourself or another or both of you, or to just be calm in your response.  It’s your opportunity to respond to life with love.

While the term “enlightenment” can be defined in many ways, here is a simple way that might make sense to you:

There are three steps to it.

(1)  First is to deeply understand what true love and true power are.

Artificial love is a product of pity, guilt, obligation, condition, domination , manipulation or repression of the heart’s expression.  True love is unconditional.   False power is based in the false self of ego, enforced by the same factors shown above that make artificial power unreal.  All real power is loving power.

(2) Feeling worthy of living completely as a reflection of that kind of power.

(3)  Prioritzing your practice of fully loving power.

This means more and more ruthlessly choosing awareness, discipline and trust.

Are you willing to choose this, or would you just rather remain oblivious to your own deep power?

Please close your eyes now and contemplate what you have just read.

Press your pause button now and ask your heart: "Is it time for me to wake up from the ignorant dream?"