In most of your lives there is grief, not necessarily as deep and profound as the grief of a parent who loses a child, but the grief again of a lost dream, a lost love, a lost xxxxx. The grief blocks you, holds you down, keeps you living in the past. Let us say that you are in grief over lost love. You smelled the perfume of that lost love. Your MIND stops you from experiencing it, and then the next day when you drive to work you see that your boss wants to see you in his office immediately. You are filled with fear, you are frightened and filled with anxiety. The reason being that you are frightened of your own responses and the biggest reason for that is that you didn't allow yourself to grieved yesterday afternoon when you smelled that perfume. The more you run from pain, the more you run from hurt, the more fear runs a rampage through your life. Because what you are really afraid of is NOT that boss, you are afraid of yourself, and the pain that is within you. But the heart, the center, is infinitely strong, it can withstand any pain that there is. It can withstand whatever needs to be withstood, because love is infinite and when you feel the pain it disappears and goes away. When you feel the pain, it opens the heart and lessens the hold of the mind upon you. When you feel the pain, you no longer have the fear, and when you grieved the daily losses in daily life instead of running from them, then you are prepared to face the larger losses.
At the center of fear is the belief that you are separate. The belief that when someone dies or when something is lost, that it is gone. But when someone you love dies, and you open the heart you will ALWAYS feel the presence of them there. It is only when you live in he MIND that you believe that you are separate. A loved one is a tremendous mirror. A mirror for the self, when that person is gone, you feel the loss of the mirror. You feel the loss of what that person saw in you. You feel the loss of a dream the loss of a hope, the loss of what could have been.
It is because you DO NOT ALLOW yourselves the pain, that you are afraid of the pain that you spend your lives living in the past, or living in he future. You lose the present. You lose life itself, which is in the present. By living in the past, by living in the future to PREVENT the pain of the past in he future, you STOP being in the here. By stopping that, you stop living. You die in the moment. How much of your day is spend thinking...I need to do this..... I should do this....I have to do this....I am so tired I need to rest.... I better do this..... Instead of doing what is in front of you to do. You are worried that XXXX will happen or YYYY won't happen or WHAT IF ZZZZ happens. This prevents you from living in he moment and when you do that you cannot be happy, you cannot be alive. You are projecting your energy into the future or projecting your energy in he past, instead of using the energy that is simply there ahead of you. The energy that exists within you that BRINGS YOU ALIVE. You do not trust yourselves. You do not trust that abilities that lie within each of you to deal with the pain, both past, and future. You do not trust yourselves to open your hearts. You do not BELIEVE that you can cope, that you are connected, that there is something beyond that you are part of. So you SHUT the heart down and when you do that, you lose the life force itself and die inside. Then you ask yourselves why you feel so filled with angst, why you are filled with anxiety and why you NOT happy?
Imagine if you will a place, a room where you are totally safe, where there is NO pain. Give the room furnishings and create in this space only things that you love. Give it a color that gives you great comfort. Spend time in the room, then slowly feel how good it feels to be safe within this place. For five minutes or ten minutes there is NO pain, there is NO fear, there is only safety within this room. Nothing can hurt you here. Only beings and things that you love and that love you can enter into this space. Notice how relaxed you feel, then do you notice that the minute you are TRULY relaxed, the mind turns on and suddenly there is much in your mind that wants to TO get out of this place? For this moment simply tell it to go away, to shut off for a while, that for ten minutes you can be safe. When you feel totally safe. What feelings come next????? Do you feel lightness, an opening? Does everything suddenly seem brighter, better? Do you feel as if you were a flower that was beginning to bloom? After you have experienced this feeling of joy, leave...
That feeling that deep feeling of joy is WHAT you CAN feel each and every day and indeed is the more natural state of being. What prevents you is the mind that intruded in your space of safety. The mind DOES NOT believe in it's safety and because of that, never lets you rest enough to open your heart. The mind is afraid of what lies within your heart, and what your pain will do to you. That you cannot survive it, so you spend your life half-alive running around avoiding the present. Make a practice of spending a certain amount of time, allowing safety in meditation and then safety in your daily life. Ask yourself when faced with a difficult situation how would I face this, if I BELIEVED that I was safe? How would I deal with this situation if I KNEW everything would work out?
Deep grief, the loss of someone close are the same feelings that exist in everyday life multiplied. Those feelings of separation, of believing in separation, of longing for the mirror of love cannot be ignored. Begin to let go of the small griefs of everyday life. Let go of the grief of not getting that raise last month. Let go of the small failures and then the big failures become so much easier to bear. Learn to live in the present in daily life now. Feel the sensation of waking in the morning and feeling JUST the sensation of that particular morning. Samantha lives in the woods, and sometimes she walks, and she notices that everyday there is SOMETHING different in the same woods, in the same spot. There will suddenly be a huge bloom of flowers literally overnight. Or the tree that yesterday was green in the fall will within a day become red or yellow. There is constant change. Begin to see the fluidity of everyday life, and experience that fluidness, when you live in the moment you DO that. Suddenly you don't rush around anymore and you feel at peace. Allow yourself the feeling of safety and the belief in yourself that you will be OK, to let down your guard and let peace in.