Worry Does Not Help You

When we allow worry to come front and center in our lives, we are displacing the present moment and trying to live in the future. It is a futile effort. All we have, all we ever know, is the moment we are experiencing right now. Words like “tomorrow” and “yesterday” are abstractions and useful to tell a story, but they are never something we experience. We are always in the Now.

Don’t Miss Out On Life

We often live as if we are supposed to be ahead of ourselves, doing more, being more, and someday we’ll have time to sit back and become aware of what is going on around us. Of course, that isn’t what happens. Instead, we keep on racing to get somewhere we think we have to be. Once we get there, we tell ourselves, then we’ll be successful. Then we’ll have achieved something worthwhile, whether our goal is money, status, physical perfection, or expertise in the field of our choice. Those goals do have value–but not if we achieve them by missing life, by letting it pass by unnoticed.

There is a quote I take to heart: “Life is an infinite series of probabilities” from Jane Robert’s book The Nature of Reality. What it means is that every moment leads into another, but each moment is total unto itself. Each instant of time gives us — if we are open to it — awareness of our absolute being-ness and of the intricate, remarkable choreography that shapes our lives.

Living Without Worry Enhances Your Life

Consider this as an example: If you start to leave your house and almost open the front door, but then go back to get your keys, that means you will open the door two minutes later than you intended. The whole world has changed by then. Nothing is what it was two minutes before. The wind blows against the leaves of the trees in different ways. The cars passing by are not the same. The sky has more clouds than it had two minutes before, or fewer. The light from the sun has become brighter or it has dimmed. You have changed as well. Your body has carried out a billion processes in that time, each cell shifting and moving and creating more of itself. Your emotions have changed, a physiological fact, but in a natural way, feelings that flow in rhythm with who you are and the day itself.

Each moment of life is the result of a new probability, meant to be acknowledged and noticed for its own sake. This is what we are here for, to feel ourselves present in our life and to know that no two moments are the same, but each one holds the essence of who we are and what we have become and will become.

The Real Effects of Worrying About Anything

What happens to all this if you are worried and decide to stay worried? The worry dominates. Everything else is pushed aside. Your worrying accomplishes nothing, does not add an iota of value. It diminishes your energy, your will to take action, your ability to think clearly, and your ability to appreciate life in each moment. It prevents peace of mind and hurts the heart.

Some call worry a kind of half-death, because while you are immersed in it, you are in a stasis that is a partial paralysis of living and being.

Let It Go

Worry comes to us all, but we have a choice — to yield to it, or to take action in some way that mitigates it, that benefits us and the people around us. We decide not to give ourselves up to the worrying. We let it, not life, go past.

That is when we find that solutions come to us, often remarkable solutions, for we have allowed the awareness of our creative purpose in each moment.

Loving the Landscape of Joshua Trees

Creating a List of What You Love

Each day I am aware of the things I love, be they ideas and thoughts, places I have been, or objects. Either they come into my mind in some fleeting way or I see them before me. One day I decided to write them down. The list began this way:

• Joshua trees in the Mojave Desert
• Medieval documents and times
• Norman architecture
• Neolithic monuments
• Books and music of Hildegaard de Bingen
• Julian of Norwich
• Being in Presence
• Walking the wall surrounding York

Expanding the List of What You Love

Other thoughts crowded in and other objects were noticed, so I began to write the list of what I loved in a stream-of-consciousness mode, just whatever came to mind, and ended up with this:

Maeshow, writing stories, working with people involved in the evolution of human consciousness, Renaissance and baroque music, William Byrd’s motet, Harry’s care, practicing Celtic harp, following old sci-fi movies, writing blog posts, Skype talk with friends, coffee shop with friends, podcasts with friends, QiGong, following wildlife groups, bougainvillea, the color indigo, hearing chimes, UFOs, reading mystery authors and other books, reading the Seth books and Edgar Cayce, experiencing the natural world, Shawangunk mountains, and prayer and attending to spirit, golden retrievers, wolves, conserving the earth, Jane Goodall’s writings, medieval herbalists, scribes in abbeys, illuminated manuscripts, prehistoric monoliths of Northumberland and Wiltshire, ancient bells of England, Old English words, Northern Cardinals, silence of snow falling, sparkly things…

There are more, and yet time seems to stretch and accommodate everything. I keep expanding the list. And recently I began collecting images of the list, some of which I show below. This, too, I am continuing to do.

Your List Reveals Your Heart

What comes to mind most of all is that all these things bring a response in my heart — they are not transitory — they are aspects of this precious life given to me to know and encounter. It is their particular presence in my life from inner and outer journeys taken that makes their combination unique to me, a shaping force, if you will. Writing them down and gathering images of them brings a great peace of heart.

Neolithic Spirals Carved into Rock

Shawangunk Mountains in the Hudson River Valley

A Medieval Herbalist

Precious Gray Wolves

Large Neolithic Rock Spiral in Northumberland, England

Visions Being Received by Hildegaard of Bingen

Each of us has such a unique list, both in words and in images that circumscribe who we are, a list of what we love.

What might such a list of your own look like–become? Do feel free to share any part of it in a comment below. It is in the sharing much of it comes to life.

It is human nature to let ourselves become fixed in certain patterns that can hold us back by constricting the heart, limiting what we are able or willing to feel and know. It is by changing these patterns that you can allow your heart to express fully and to give light and love to yourself and then out into the world.

Our tendency is to seek out patterns of safety and comfort and security, but in truth these are transient and fleeting, often mere shadows of what we had imagined they could offer to us. Their magic does not last long, for our discontent surfaces eventually.

Why the discontent? Part of the reason is that we are not made to remain static or unchanging. We are wired to be curious, to move beyond what we are. We are created with an insatiable curiosity to find answers, to experience life, and to allow the vulnerability of love.

The Energy of the Heart

The heart seeks love. The heart IS love. This gives it immense power.

There is scientific evidence that an electromagnetic field of energy operates in your heart just below your conscious awareness:

“The heart generates the largest electromagnetic field in the body. The electrical field as measured in an electrocardiogram (ECG) is about 60 times greater in amplitude than the brain waves recorded in an electroencephalogram (EEG). The magnetic component of the heart’s field, which is around 100 times stronger than that produced by the brain, is not impeded by tissues and can be measured several feet away from the body.” (HeartMath® Institute)

Imagine that kind of expansion, feel it extending out from your heart as you stand still in one place. That field  informs you about what is going on around you every moment — and you can decipher those messages if you don’t react to emotions you feel but instead “listen” to the awareness that lies beneath them. If you remember that those emotions are as transient by their nature as the “fixed” patterns you cling to. If you are open to allowing that awareness of the heart’s field to speak to you.

Heart Awareness

You experience this electromagnetic field of the heart every day, every moment. It apprises you of the presence of others. Through it you intersect at the energy level, the electromagnetic level, and sense your connection with other human beings — it informs you of the true nature of that connection.

The thought of changing our ways and beliefs — our fixed patterns — can frighten us, and some of us would do anything to prevent whatever we think that change means or could bring. We feel threatened by it. Yet if we yield to that fear we begin to close down the heart and attempt to shut down its expanded field, to retreat from  connection and communication with others who do not share our “safe” patterns.

Yet even that does not really work. Eventually, all things change. And that is the conundrum — as humans we seek security and predictability, but as humans, it is the last thing we are capable of sustaining.

We are always, in the present moment, in the midst of change that appears in the next moment, and the next, and the next. It is life. It is the heart of life. We are meant to live within that awareness.

Angels in the Snow and Rain

We get chances, opportunities for clarity about our path, and they come to us again and again until we see them for what they are and take hold of their wisdom — and there are angels among us who help in this by showing up with a map into our inner awareness. Eventually and at last we awaken to those opportunities — some might say, in the nick of time.

But what about these angels? How do we know if we’ve met one?

We usually don’t until later, often not until they’re gone. It’s more than likely they share our space and life for just a short duration, yet in that time we are in some way transformed.

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Eye of a Hurricane

In hurricanes, the eye is characterized by light winds and clear skies, surrounded on all sides by a towering, symmetrical eyewall. Storm chasers who fly across its diameter, which can be up to thirty miles across, describe the feeling of peace the eye holds in the midst of the absolute chaos of lightning and thunder and category winds. The sun or stars can be visible for a time. The fierce tropical storm rotates around the eyewall, leaving the exact center, the eye itself, calm.

In much the same way, a raging storm at sea lies only on its surface. Far beneath, on the ocean floor, the pearl takes its time forming in the oyster that, surrounded by calm currents, is unconcerned with the chaos above.

Our Human Response to Chaos

In our human state, we are alert to chaos, and sense it in our world to some degree every day. Some of this reaction derives from our ancient self, our primitive response to danger. Yet that response was formed at a time when physical survival required such diligence. Our modern world is not free of potential danger, but for most of us, the day does not bring the threat that we cannot physically survive.

No. The alertness we experience is emotional and psychological stress because we are afraid — every day — that something in our world is not going the way we want it to, or think it should, or else is hammering at our sense of well-being.

We Choose What We Feel

We tend to forget that every response we have, every reaction, is personal. Whether it is the best response or not is not in question so much as why we forget it is a personal emotion we feel. We think it is outside of us — something outside of us making us feel at odds with life and with ourselves. It never is. We choose what we feel, though often we do so unconsciously.

So what, we might ask? The feeling is real enough. So it is. Yet, what if we decided, deliberately, to choose to feel calm no matter what is going on? How would that change us, and possibly the situation?

How to Stop the Fear of Chaos

When something goes through your mind that brings with it a feeling of chaos — an uncertainty and dismay — there is a way to stop the stressful reaction very quickly.

In that moment, enter the stillness that lies always at the center of your being. You are never without it. It is the God-force in you always present whether acknowledged or not. It is always available to you. You are ONE with it. When you enter that stillness everything changes.

You let go of personal reaction and response, and see with a wider vision what is going on, and find then, in its truest form, the action that serves best not only you, but life.

Look out at the world around you, the world you apparently can detect through your five senses — the table, the street, the sound of a car passing by, a leaf falling from a tree, a voice calling out nearby, a blue vase on a windowsill, a letter or email you receive, a train’s whistle in the night — and a million more such things that come before us, that we think are real. But they are not real in the way we believe.

For a long time now quantum science has opened for us the scientific fact that we have no proof of this world’s existence without our consciousness of it. We actually have no proof, scientifically, of what exists beyond our physical eyes — they are but translators to the brain of data that apparently (and unproven) exists in time and space at a particular frequency. In physical terms, if we shift the frequency, what we “see” changes, which could account for access to alternate states. Then, physiologically, the brain reconstructs what we think we see based on only partial information. Imagine how absolutely individualized that process must be for every human being!

What we do see without question are representations of our inner consciousness, states of mind that we have created ourselves and expressed through our reactions to the world and everything in it. We may share these states with others, but they can change on the instant. People interpret what they see according to what they want to see, even if that wanting is subconscious and they are unaware of its inner origin and effect. Since 95% of our perception is subconscious, we can pretty well be assured we aren’t getting the whole picture about our own consciousness — unless we decide to become more aware of how our inner self sees.

The quickest way to become aware is noting what happens around you if you feel sad, angry or emotionally upset in any way, or by contrast, feel at peace, happy, and content. What is the state of the world you see then? Always, it reflects your state of consciousness, which changes constantly. But if certain emotions stay front and center, then your world collapses into the expression of those emotions. If you feel angry for an extended period of time, the outcome can be volatile in expression and engage you with inner suffering. If you feel gladness and joy for an extended period of time, your world expands and embraces all around you with compassion, tolerance, and love. You are the decider. Your world is the one you create.

Thus, if we create heart consciousness — if we cultivate compassion — we can begin to change the world — a world our headlines tell us has need of us in this way. We are so much more than we have conceived through our five senses until now. There is so much more within us to discover.

And each step towards this inner awareness and heart consciousness changes what we see, and therefore, what the world becomes.