Author Archives: Ancient Seeker

Don’t Stop Walking

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I found every single successful person I’ve ever spoken to had a turning point.  The turning point was when they made a clear, specific unequivocal decision that they were not going to live like this anymore.  They were going to achieve success.  Brian Tracy

I want to grow.  I want to be better.  You grow.  We all grow.  We’re made to grow.  You either evolve or you disappear.  Tupac Shakur

There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.  Nelson Mandela

Good things are coming down the road.  Just don’t stop walking.  Robert Warren Painter, Jr.

Those things that challenge the worst in us tend to strengthen the best in us.  Richelle E. Goodrich

It’s our challenges and obstacles that give us layers of depth and make us interesting.  Are they fun when they happen?  No.  But they are what make us unique.  Ellen DeGeneres

Although I’m a big proponent of formal meditation – for the discipline, joy, and calm it brings – I’m moving into an even greater phase of being fully present all the time.  It’s a heightened state of being that lets whatever you’re doing be your best life, from moment to astonishing moment.  Oprah Winfrey

Deep Cleaning

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Deep cleaning my house has been very slow.  It’s taken months.  I’m finally getting to the point where I’m vacuuming my very filthy carpet.  As I vacuum, I think about things.  It’s been a trying time.  There are so many things that I need to do that I can’t do: maintenance my car.  I have deep cracks in my ceilings.  In my bedroom, the ceiling is bowed.  According to the Internet, this signifies that I immediately need to call a structural engineer.  But I can’t afford it.  I’m hoping that the issue is not the foundation.  I’m thankful to get through each day without my ceilings falling in.

I think, “why why why is my life like this?”

The thought came to me that I was the one who wanted to change my life, to turn my life around.  If you want to learn a sport, to become healthier, or to become proficient in anything, there are certain things that you have to give up.  You have to give up refined sugar, sitting in front of the television all day, drinking and hanging out every night, especially when you’re “of a certain age.”  Even though, to me, giving up income is not the same as giving up ice cream or cookies or TV, it still is, in a sense, a giving up of something.

The intent that I expressed to change my life has somehow overridden my desire to have instant money.  Left to my own devices, I would continue to do the things that have caused me to gain weight, to sit all of the time, to be unhealthy, to be unhappy and stressed out of my mind.  The Universe, responding to my intent, stopped and blocked me and said “no no.  You’re not going to do this.  You’re going to do THIS.”

My solution would be to win a million dollars.  This would solve all of my problems.  I don’t know why I can’t win the lottery when others have.  Apparently, that’s not in line with my intent.  Perhaps that outcome would change my life, but would not change me, which is my ultimate intent.

The path that I used to take seems to be closed to me right now.  Perhaps in the long run, looking back, I will see that it was a good thing that it was closed because otherwise I would continue to do the same thing.  It was easier to get and go to a miserable job every day to obtain money.  That’s what I’ve done for the last 25 years.  It’s been a good way to pay my bills.  If I could do the same thing that I had been doing, which is to be able to get a job quickly, then I would be working right now.

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From A Path With Heart by Jack Kornfield

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Every spiritual life entails a succession of difficulties because every ordinary life also involves a succession of difficulties, what the Buddha described as the inevitable sufferings of existence.  In a spiritually informed life, however, these inevitable difficulties can be the source of our awakening, of deepening wisdom, patience, balance, and compassion.  Without this perspective, we simply bear our sufferings like an ox or a foot soldier under a heavy load.

Quoting Don Juan, “Only as a [spiritual] warrior can one understand the path of knowledge.  A warrior cannot complain or regret anything.  His life is an endless challenge and challenges cannot possibly be good or bad.  Challenges are simply challenges.  The basic difference between an ordinary man and a warrior is that a warrior takes everything as a challenge, while an ordinary man takes everything as a blessing or a curse.”

Spiritual maturity understands that the process of awakening goes through many seasons and cycles.

We began to see that the spiritual path asked more of us than it appeared to offer.  From romantic visions of practice, people began to wake up and realize that spirituality required an honest, courageous look into our real-life situations, our family of origin, our place in the society around us.  [T]hrough growing wisdom and disillusioning experience, we began to give up the idealistic notion of spiritual life and community as a way to escape the world or save ourselves.

Quoting Lao Tzu, “She who is centered in the Tao can go where she wishes without danger.  She perceives the universal harmony, even amid great pain, because she has found peace in her heart.

Looking Back: Connecting the Dots Part II

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Dot Six

In 2013, everything seemed to fall apart.  I had been off work since 2010 and used savings, retirement, and credit cards to pay my and my mom’s expenses.  I had never had a problem finding work; but, after my mother’s passing in 2012, I could not get back into the job market to save my life.  I started work/trade at a yoga studio for classes.  After only a month or so, I was fired!!  Can you imagine?  I couldn’t even keep a free job!!

The next day, I broke my foot.  Now I had no money, no job.  I was immobile.  No swimming, running, bicycling, yoga, showering, walking without crutches, or sleeping comfortably.  Every month I would return to the doctor who would tell me that the bone was not healing.  I was in a boot for seven months!  I wanted to kill myself.  While I was going through it, all I felt was struggle, pain, and horribleness.

Looking back, I realize that I moved to another level.  My journal entries are critical because I wouldn’t remember the details today if I had not documented every emotion, thought, activity, and insight and every angry, hopeless, fear-filled, enlightened, relieved, and joyful moment.

Reading A Path With Heart by Jack Kornfield lets me know that I am not the only one to experience a succession of difficulties, mistakes, fear, painful patterns, and dissolution that comes from not having the life I desire, expect, and feel that I should have because of my ego-centered reasons: I earned it, I’m a good person, I’ve done the right things, other people live well and prosper, etc.

As part of my spiritual practice, I used to recite a Tibetan prayer in A Path With Heart:

Grant that I may be given appropriate difficulties and sufferings on this journey so that my heart may be truly awakened and my practice of liberation and universal compassion may be truly fulfilled.

After awhile, I disposed of that prayer.  I had had enough difficulties and sufferings.  Time to move past that.  I couldn’t even remember where I found that prayer until I started re-reading A Path With Heart.  It must be time for me to become reacquainted with it.

Sometimes, going through life’s challenges, we are growing exponentially and can’t see it.  Looking back, the growth that I experienced during 2013 and 2014 would not have been possible without the seeds that were planted between 1994 and 1998.  Those were the years that I got off of my first treadmill and resumed an inner focus that began when I was 19.  The next 15 years were my experiential, living-life years.  That period made me find my dormant seeds and start watering them.

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Follow Your Own Heart

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Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart.  Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakens.  Carl Jung

Make no mistake about it – enlightenment is a destructive process.  It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier.  Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth.  It’s seeing through the façade of pretense.  It’s the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true.  Adyashanti

Once I stopped listening to what others were telling me to do and followed my own heart, I realized who I truly was.  Unknown

Ignoring your passion is slow suicide.  Never ignore what your heart pumps for.  Mold your career around your lifestyle, not your lifestyle around your career.  Kevin Claiborne

If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life.   Abraham Maslow

Looking Back: Connecting the Dots Part I

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Dot One

When I moved to the East Coast as a young adult, I found my element.  New York and Washington, D.C. matched an energy that could not be totally expressed in my hometown.  Everything that I pursued manifested.  I was assertive and confident.  I felt powerful.  Whatever I decided to do became easily within my reach.  I flowed.

Dot Two

Then I made the decision to return home.  Six months after I began my new job, I knew it wasn’t for me.  But I stayed.  I was devastated to realize that I didn’t want what I had put so much time, effort, and expense in obtaining.  Now what?  I felt lost.  I didn’t know what to do.  During my fourth and last year at my firm, I spent almost a month in Hawaii.  There, in peace and free to think, I made the decision to be a writer.

Dot Three

I mostly wandered for the next year.  Tried to find myself.  Meditated.  Explored.  I travelled.  I tried to start my own legal practice.  I kept getting thoughts that this was to be a period of rest and rejuvenation and that I wasn’t to worry about future income.

At one point, I asked God, “What is my destiny?”  I went over my past and asked why I had gone to law school and accepted employment at a corporate firm.  It hadn’t seemed to accomplish much.  The answer I received was that law school and the firm enabled me to return to California.  I wouldn’t have come any other way because I wanted to retain my income.  California was where I needed to be in order to be with my father during his last year of life, to resolve my differences with my family, and to move beyond where I was on a spiritual level.

I then asked, “Why did I start my estate planning business?  The answer was that I needed to get away from the firm.  I needed a reason to leave.  In addition, it was practical, as I would need to plan for the distribution of my own estate and my mother’s when she passed.

Reading this many years later made me realize that most of what appears externally is not the essence, the reality, the why of what is occurring.  If we could see the larger picture, we wouldn’t worry and become fearful and despondent.  We would know that all is for our good and everything will work out ok.

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Renew Yourself

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Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.  Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.  The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of Autumn.  John Muir

We can be tired, weary, and emotionally distraught; but, after spending time alone with Nature, we find that our bodies are injected with energy, power, and strength.   Charles Stanley

Make sure you take the time to feed yourself with what your spirit has to offer.  Darren L. Johnson

Sensitive people feel so deeply they often have to retreat from the world, in order to dig beneath the layers of pain to find their faith and courage.  Shannon L. Alder

You’ve done it before and you can do it now.  See the positive possibilities.  Redirect the substantial energy of your frustration and turn it into positive, effective, unstoppable determination.   Ralph Marston

Solitude is where I place my chaos to rest and awaken my inner peace.  Nikki Rowe

Recharge

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Last week I spent four days in Sequoia National Park, courtesy of a dear friend.  I woke up every morning, ate breakfast, and spent the entirety of each day walking on different trails.  Much of the time I was by myself, surrounded by nature.  Thinking I would have a lot of quiet time, I brought my laptop and journals, planning to write and get a head start on a few Ancient Seeker posts.  Total waste of energy and space.  Our phones did not work.  There was no wi-fi, no cellular, no internet.

After walking all day, my friend and I talked nonstop until we went to sleep; then, woke up for another day of hiking for me and retreat activities for her.  On our last day, we hiked together.  For both of us, it turned out to be the most beautiful hike of our trip.  I was filled with immeasurable gratitude for being in the midst of a modern day Garden of Eden, complete with black bears with which I learned to share paths.

It took me a week after returning home to turn on my computer and that was only because a friend wanted to Skype.  I didn’t feel like doing anything.  I didn’t post Ancient Seeker.  After a few days, I became depressed.  I didn’t know what was going on, what was wrong with me.  Prior to the trip, I had been eating healthfully and exercising; afterwards, I began to stuff myself with ice cream and buttered popcorn and chips and pasta.  What was going on?

A week after my return, I hit rock bottom – again.  I’ve had many rock bottom episodes throughout the years, where I feel like I cannot take another step.  I cannot continue to live like “this.”  I feel tired and hopeless and cannot see any way out of this mess.  Nevertheless, as I lay down to sleep, I remembered Job and didn’t want to complain as he did and express my frustration with God.  As long as I remained awake, I repeated my mantra: “I praise God.  I thank God.”

When I awoke, I felt like meditating.  I love my meditation room and feel so blessed to have it.  As I sat this morning, I left outside my worries about the mortgage, very much needed repairs, financial concerns, and other life challenges.  Right this very moment, the walls have not fallen.  I can walk, kneel, bow, praise, and be thankful.  I can sit and feel the infinite magnificence of the Eternal.

I had a wonderful meditation.  I was focused.  My mind wandered very little.  I felt that I went deeper than I had in months.  I felt joy.  I felt connection.  I saw the trees of Sequoia again, not visually, not in physical form, but with a seeing that was through some other type of eyes.

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Don’t Be a Hamster

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If you make the acquisition and retention of goods or status your aim in life, this is a way to anxiety and sorrow.  Muso Kokushi

Once we started to urbanize, we put ourselves on this treadmill.  We traded away stability for growth.  And growth requires change.  Geoffrey West

Get off the treadmill of consumption, replication, and mediocrity.  Begin lifting the weights of creativity, originality, and success.   Ryan Lilly

The problem with working, I mean not self-employed, is that you have to get up and routinely do something that you do not want to do, plus you get talked down to, ordered around by twats you know you are better than.  In reality, you are no better than a hamster running on a wheel.  You could say the hamster likes to run on the wheel, the hamster runs on the wheel by choice.  But do not forget, the hamster is always in a cage and will never be anything else but a hamster running on a wheel inside a cage – unless it escapes the cage.   Robert Black

Do not go where the path may lead. Instead, go where there is no path and leave a trail.  Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you want to fly, give up everything that weighs you down.  Toni Morrison

I must be a mermaid.  I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.  Anais Nin

An empowered life begins with serious personal questions about oneself. Those answers bare the seeds of success.”  Steve Maraboli

Are You on a Treadmill?

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Sometimes we get on a treadmill and can’t imagine how to get off.  We don’t even know that we should get off.  A lot of it has to do with our family/religious/societal conditioning.  Most of us are not living according to our own true nature.  We have incorporated time-honored tenets into our day-to-day living:

  • “You don’t get anything worth having without struggle and hard work.”
  • “You always need to be busy and productive.  Doing nothing is unproductive and will lead to ruin and disaster.”
  • “Taking time for and giving to yourself is selfish.  You must always be doing something that gives to others and puts something back into society.”

Most of us have never been taught to look within and discover ourselves, to discover our needs and desires separate from those imposed upon us by our parents, our neighborhood and community, our ethnicity, our church, and any other status external to our own individualized inner being, which is the essence of who and what we are.

At a very young age, we are given a plan that is responsive to entities outside of ourselves: go to school, mind (or kiss up to) the teacher, and make good grades in order to go to college and get a good job.  The instinctual reliance by children on their intuition and on their feelings is gradually replaced by the need to please, to fit in, or to accomplish.  Always becoming, never just being.  Knowledge is for the purpose of becoming a lawyer, a doctor, something more than the parents, something to give the child the “advantages” of life.

Knowledge is not advocated simply for the sake of knowing and learning to be more aware of where and what you are right now.  Knowledge is not taught as a way to productively and consciously manipulate a universe that consistently responds to our every nuance.

Societal circumstances cause many adults to relinquish their dreams and give into a conditioned reality.  It becomes too hard to “fight the power.”  Many parents are trying to grow up themselves.  Not being taught to search within for answers, some turn to alcohol, drugs, sex, work, and dependencies on other people to find solace and satisfaction.  This behavior is then passed on to the next generation until someone decides to stop the cycle and find another way.

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