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I will be focusing on writing for the next few months and will not be offering any seminars or trainings. Offerings will appear here when they are resumed. Thank you for your continuing interest in Facticity and for your courage and commitment to your own personal journey. May you continue discovering just what it means, practically, to be both Human and Divine, and a Marketplace Mystic in our modern world. Please feel free to write me anytime. I’d be delighted to be in touch.
May you be happy and find peace.
Ragini
Do you ever wonder what to do with your negative thoughts? If you’re like me, they come unbidden and sprinkle themselves throughout the day. When you feel a negative thought plaguing you, notice what sensation is accompanying the thought, and where it is happening in your body – a clenching of the jaw, a tightening of the shoulders, a lump in the throat. Then, consciously take a breath and breathe into the sensation itself. Notice the spaciousness that comes with this breath. Then imagine this spaciousness flowing out to the edges of the sensation. You will be surprised how this simple act of kindness to yourself causes the thoughts and sensations to soften without any other ‘doing’ on your part.
 The thoughts of the mind and the sensations in the body are like clouds in the sky - transitory and impermanent. Although they come uninvited, the spaciousness of your breath offers a constant backdrop, like the blue of the sky. In this way you can receive the theatre of your body and mind with kindness. The next time you become aware of a dark cloud passing through, I invite you to rest in the vast arms of your conscious awareness by taking a deep breath and breathing into the cloud, noticing it for what it is - impermanent and transient - yet a part of your journey here and now.
Perhaps you are one of many experiencing a renewed concern about the value of having purpose and meaning in your life. Curiously, this renaissance of ‘contributing to the whole’ as the road to fulfilling yourself and your destiny has created a curious and unintended consequence. This drive to find purpose and meaning has increased the amount of time and energy we expend on accomplishment and achievement. Perhaps you too have embraced the idea that 80 hours of work a week (whether at the office or at home) will cause you to find and manifest your purpose, and harness the deep meaning for your existence with greater speed and effectiveness. Working the traditional 40 hour work-week with the other 40 hours devoted to resting and reflecting has almost become equal to a statement of not caring about the larger world. Today, stopping to rest and reflect is often accompanied by a sense of being useless, wasting time, or being non-productive, resulting in self-descriptions such as lazy, ineffectual, inadequate, worthless, valueless, incompetent, inept, selfish, and even narcissistic.
When we decide to stop our “purposeful action” for a minute with the intention of taking time for rest and reflection, an unconscious aversion and uncomfortableness usually arises with the idea of "doing nothing". This results in feeling as if you’ve on your way to becoming a lazy, idle, lethargic person without significance or importance. And this is an incredibly difficult feeling to tolerate and accept. The need to contribute and have an impact on our world has somehow grown into an unconscious command to “be engaged in action” all the time - and - if you don’t, you should be questioning your commitment to creating a better world. So what to do? Feel purposeful, or feel useless? A no-brainer? Not really, because you intuitively know that rest and reflection are as necessary to a purposeful life as taking action and achieving your destiny.
We often think of purposeful action as being helpful, constructive, positive, valuable, or keeping on target. When we feel we are contributing and moving to fulfill a purpose, we feel good. And when we find a satisfying way to fill an inner void, we believe we have discovered our reason for being and the point to our journey. Yet, paradoxically, rest and reflection are the most powerful ways to “know” what is yours to do - and to have the clarity to do it from your heart, with awareness and compassion.
Managing The Dilemma
 To remedy and rebalance this cultural polarization toward fulfilling purpose and away from idle lazy uselessness, we must once again turn to the notion of interdependent polar pairs and the nature of duality. Purposeful and useless are an interdependent polar pair by virtue of the fact that they define each other. Thus, you cannot have one without its accompanying defining partner. In our rush to find purpose and meaning, we may neglect our mystical heritage that guides us to directly, “Look within!”. To navigate the outer world successfully, Mystical Wisdom dictates navigating the inner world first. It is here we find the key to understanding and accepting our destiny and purpose and its role in the larger scheme of things.
When you find yourself screaming on the inside, “Stop the world! I want to get off!”, it is a clear sign that rest and reflection are being requested. But the edict to ‘keep on moving’ is in the very air you breath. How can you “stop and reflect” when the world is falling apart and “going to hell in a hand basket”? “You should be doing, doing, doing! Action is the answer!” “Don’t just sit there! Do something!” This results in feeling overwhelmed, exhausted and confused, leading to less than wise decisions for the whole and for the individual.
To open to the gifts and guidance of rest and reflection, I invite you to explore, if even for just awhile, the experience of being useless - just sitting for even 5 minutes at the beginning or the end of your day. Not thinking, but just sitting and listening to the world around you, or feeling the presence of your body with all of its sensations, or watching with your mystical eyes the diversity of beauty surrounding you. If you can then extend that 5 minutes to 7 minutes and then to 9 minutes and then to 12 minutes and then to 15 minutes, you will increase the probability of becoming clear and precise about your purpose in this journey and the deeper meaning of your life. Being present to the spaces between your thoughts at any time, brings a reprieve of rest and openings for reflection, and thus insight, to arise.
I invite you to take a moment and assess the degree of imbalance currently unfolding in your life around purposeful action and just being useless for awhile. It’s incredibly refreshing to be able to just sit and do nothing and discover how the energy of life simply arises and gives you all that you need to move on to your next purposeful step.
To visit this month’s new Reflection highlighting Ramesh Balsekar , please click here.
 
1. When your mind is filled with negative thoughts and is driving you crazy.
2. When cleaning the bathroom seems more appealing than meditation.
3. When your mind is engaged in self-flagellation (beating you up with style).
Remedy:
Positive thoughts and negative thoughts are the two sides of the Coin Of Thinking. More often than not, the inner critic issues a barrage of negative thoughts, despite conscious efforts to think positively. Because your mind is designed to compare, there is a fine line between a critique and a criticism Thus, your unconscious mind will often guise its negative thoughts as constructive commentary. For example: “If only you did it this way or that…,” “If you had learned that lesson last time…,” “If you were a good person…,” “If you were thin, beautiful, rich, intelligent, wise….,” “You should have said…, done…, worn…, eaten…” The list goes on and on.
Negative thinking in the extreme gives rise to self-hatred, contempt, despair, insecurity, self-doubt and even depression. Extreme positive thinking can also give rise to unpleasant states, such as arrogance, righteousness, conceit, excessive pride and even grandiosity. What is important to understand is that none of these thoughts are indictments about you, because they are not statements about who you are. Rather, thoughts arise unbidden like gusts of wind through the trees, balancing the flow of thought from positive to negative and back again. Understanding this paradoxical reality builds flexibility of mind, allowing you to flow with the inevitable stream of change. And, much to human dismay, change rests in the dance between positive and negative. As you develop this flexibility of mind, you will discover a distance arising between your thoughts and your sense of self. This distance shifts your relationship to thinking itself – recognizing it as a function of the mind and not the essence of who you are.
Give it a try. Let your thoughts flow through your mind like a breeze through the trees and relax into the space between them. It is here you will find inner peace and the stillness that allow all the movements of your life to unfold.
“This Facticity work certainly changed my way of thinking – of myself, and of the world around me. This new way of thinking has helped me explore, with great joy, the perspective that I am ‘a spiritual being having a human experience.“
Helene Kongsbach, Owner, NLP Huset, Denmark
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All material (C) 2007 Ragini Elizabeth Michaels, www.facticity.com or ragini@facticity.com |
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