Letting go of the person you used to be

I’ve mentioned this before, and I’m sure I’ll mention it again, but a huge component of change is remembering to let it happen.


Change, by the way, is inevitable. If it’s involuntary (or someone else’s idea), resisting it can be downright painful.

But a lot of times we resist changing even when we say that’s what we want, and sometimes the resistance is almost unconscious. We simply forget to let go of the person we used to be.

For example, as noted yesterday, you might have an intention of living love. But there’s this little part of you that is either afraid or … well, afraid to actually love (tomorrow: trust). So we fall back in the habit of judgment, as though being critical protects us. Take the homeless person begging for change on the corner. When I started tonglen practice, I found this was an easy place for me to start, although it got tougher when I stopped making up stories about why he was there. Regardless, many of us find it safer to judge him for being there. Not necessarily negatively—judgment is just another word for making up stories.

At any rate, remembering to practice, just as with any other change, involves letting go of the person who didn’t practice. Getting up at 5:30 in the morning to write involves letting go of the person who slept until seven. Quitting smoking means letting go of being the person who reaches for a cigarette.

And so forth.

One practice to bring in here is to consciously let go of that person with a breath. Acknowledge that at this moment, you might want to be that person, but you don’t have to be. Acknowledge that you aren’t the same person you were ten years ago (no one is), and then release being the person you were five minutes ago.

Expansion = love

If you practice, and then pay attention, you can feel your heart expanding.


Yup. Just like the Grinch.

It’s a neat trick, and I highly recommend it. It starts by actively practicing love, and actively practicing joy, which I will admit can be tough sometimes. Feel free to start with the easy moments and work your way up to the tough ones.

Aside from having to remember to practice (more on this tomorrow), this is far easier than it sounds, though. Active love and active joy involve taking time to step back and find those things in ordinary circumstances. It also means taking time to step back and release—or simply fail to attach to—those moments that don’t promote love and joy.

Instead, attach to expansiveness. Not in the sense that it becomes an addiction, because therein lies a danger of attaching instead to repelling those things that fall the other way, but rather in the sense that you automatically seek the expansiveness, inclusive of love, joy, and compassion, in every moment.

Love is expansive. Remember your tonglen practice—we breathe in that which is tight, painful, anguished; we breathe out the space of love, which feels like space, feels expansive and glowing. In the hardest of circumstances, in the most mundane of tensions, in the most ordinary exhaustion, we can still take a single breath that begins to turn things around. But…the practice isn’t in order to turn things around. The practice is to bring all of those experiences into our practice of experiencing life as love. In other words, we don’t do this for an external goal (if I practice breathing love and expansiveness into everything, my life will become problem-free), we do it because the goal (in this case) is the practice of love—and trust me, your life won’t suddenly become problem-free! I’ve found, though, that when problems arise, they’re a lot less stressful, which is an excellent bonus.

Weekend practice: back to synchronicity

What happens when synchronicity doesn't pan out? That is, you have this intention, or this desire, or even a big fat clue, and seemingly synchronous events are happening, and they aren't going anywhere? Now what? You're meeting people, ideas are popping, suggestions are flowing in from multiple sources, and ....nothing.


You know what? I'm not going to tell you what I think. I'm going to ask you what YOU think.

When stuff starts glowing

Saturday's major synchronicity—and this relates directly to yesterday's closing paragraph—was this: I was reading a book, and, because I'm in the middle of three on similar topics, I don't remember which one it was...something by Sanaya Roman. An exercise in this book had to do with imagining yourself infused with light, and imagining the objects around you infused with the same light. Then I went off to teach dream interpretation. I got to my location and because I was a little early, checked my Twitter feed. There was a tweet by Marianne Williamson (@marwilliamson—in case you want to follow her) suggesting imagining this same practice: infusing objects around you with light as a daily practice, throughout the day. Looks like I'm on to something. Today (I admit, this is Sunday), Hiro Boga (@hiroboga), as I'm checking to make sure I have Marianne Williamson's Twitter ID correct, is tweeting about letting your soul's presence radiate...which is also key to this practice that I've been doing. Huh. I follow these two brilliant women on Twitter for very different reasons, although the reason I'm drawn to them out of all the choices is much the same, so when they're talking about two angles of the same thing I'm investigating through someone completely different....I'm listening.


And looking to see what glows in resonance.

Resonance and synchronicity

Events update: don't forget, In Your Dreams is tonight at 7pm at 1412 Trovillion in Winter Park. Email me if you need parking information.


An event: a meeting, a piece of information, an option, an idea that is synchronous has a sort of energy about it. If you've seen the movie version of Celestine Prophecy, you may remember the scenes where things start glowing as the hero is drawn to the synchronicities that further his intentions. As a rule, when you're walking around town, you probably aren't going to see things lighting up (but see tomorrow's post), and when you're looking for synchronicities, you're paying attention to a lot of different things: instinct pulling you strongly in one direction, even though you'd planned to do something else; a chance sentence in an overheard conversation that makes you listen a little harder; dreams that seem important, even if you can't put your finger on why.

Imagine that that energy is radiating just a bit stronger because it's resonating with your intention. So whether you see it or feel it, you're tapping in because—well, I was going to compare it to a telephone that's on a party line, but then I feel old...so let's go with a search engine. You type in what you're looking for, and results are returned, the most relevant ones (or at least the ones the search engine THINKS are the most relevant) at the top. That's synchronicity (although in this case, it's manufactured synchronicity. True synchronicity would be getting a search result that gives you an answer to a question you didn't think you'd get from a computer search engine.).

On a deeper level, synchronicity brings to us events, people, ideas, and suggestions that answer bigger questions (like: why am I here, what's my soul purpose, how can I heal?) because while intention may be involved, these bigger questions relate to soul purpose, and thus the answers resonate on a soul level.

Resonance, not rejection

Several years ago, reading Jack Canfield's Success Principles, I came across this gem of advice: there is no such thing as rejection.


Sure. How does that work, again?

Well, if I remember Canfield's proposition correctly, the idea is this: we ask someone for a favor, or we ask someone on a date, or we send off that treasured manuscript or ask for advice about putting into practice a fabulous idea that will change the world (if we only knew what to do with it!), or what-have-you. And we get a 'no.' Even if it isn't accompanied by hysterical laughter, it might as well be. We're crushed. (Most of us are. Or we've been there at least once. Or we simply don't care what others think, in which case we're probably undiagnosed sociopaths and have another set of problems. Everyone's got issues. But I digress.) The thing is, we get that 'no' and we feel like we've lost something, but Canfield points out that you can't lose something you never had, so when you present the idea or invitation, the only thing 'no' does is keep you from moving forward in the way you imagined at exactly that time with that person.

Okay. I guess that works. Kind of hard to keep in mind, though, when your brain is spinning with multiple voicings of the word 'but.'

Last week, several of us were discussing our visions and how we were bringing them into being at the latest CFES meetup. One of our group had given us a visual that reflected how soul resonance might work—how we're drawn to people who resonate with us, and perhaps we merge our paths for a time, or maybe we're drawn to people for just a moment, before going on our separate ways.

And it hit me: if we can hold a vision of soul resonance, of understanding that we're drawn to each other for different times and different reasons, how might that change our feelings of being rejected, of lack, of loss? Imagine being so in touch with your soul's purpose, that you recognize that there is also purpose in every action, every meeting—and that "rejection" is just a sign that your soul isn't resonating with that person, that action. It may be that what you are doing or feeling or seeking is exactly right, but the timing isn't lining up just so, or the other people involved are resonating at a frequency that's just slightly off balance from you...so you can appreciate what is, instead of needing it to be all-important, or needing it to be what you originally thought it was.

This week's practice: acting on synchronicity

A couple of weeks ago, a friend suggested I take a particular action in regards to my interest in soul families: in essence, asking to attract more of my soul family into my daily life, and seeing what happened. It didn't occur to me until this past Saturday that several things that came into my life over the past week or ten days were directly related to the nature of my request. Because what happened isn't really the point, suffice it to say that I had a couple of resources fall into my lap, met a couple of really interesting people, and found some new practices and insights into how we can manifest our vision of the world that is becoming into the world that is.


So....now what?

Happens a lot, doesn't it? A synchronous event occurs, we are aware of it, and...we let it drop, because while the idea of synchronicity is really cool, there are any number of reasons to let it go. We're afraid to talk to that person we've run into three times in the past week (especially if we don't know them!), we hesitate to ask for a favor or the support that could result in the resources to act on the opportunity that's clearly knocking, we're afraid that...well, we're afraid. Of looking foolish, of being wrong, of all sorts of things. Sometimes, we just don't know what the next step is.

This week's practice, for me, is to find a way to move forward, even if it's the smallest of baby steps.