Ever Now - Being The Leader Of Your Own Life (Recorded Live)

Let me invite you to take your meditation seat then.

And as I've been saying quite a lot in my different sessions around the here and there,

Is I want to invite you to notice if there's a bit of a setup that you do inside yourself conceptually as you begin to settle for meditation.

So that you perhaps try to adopt a certain mental or emotional state,

Or that you try and force a quietude upon yourself.

So I want to invite you to give that up.

So let's take a little bit of a kind of a Zen like route today around the idea of giving that giving up of that status thing,

Which we won't do as an egoic thing.

We will just by finding the luminescence within ourselves,

Kind of come into our sort of,

You know,

True dignity rather than the false added dignity of being a somebody,

As it were.

So let me invite you to allow yourself to be here.

Allow yourself this time since you've decided to be here.

I want to speak to you or speak to your authentic heart,

The authentic part of you that wants to be here.

So I want to invite you to give up trying to be here,

Trying to be present,

Trying to be a meditator and simply find that authenticity in you.

However fine that line is and give yourself this short period of rest,

Retreat,

Love,

Time in spirit,

Whatever words you would use for it.

And I want to invite you to allow your heart in this moment.

So rather than trying to make your mind do something,

Allow your heart.

Not the story that you think is going to affect your heart,

But allow your heart.

Allow your breath.

Allow your mind just as it is to be here.

Allow your body.

Allow yourself to be aware of the space of the room.

You're aware of your feet against the floor,

You're aware of yourself seated.

You allow yourself an alive,

Upright,

Unforced seat.

And you allow your five senses.

Perhaps just rotating through the senses for a moment.

Be aware of the sense of touch,

Clothes against skin,

Feeling of yourself sitting in the room,

The air in the room,

The sense of smell,

Incense burning,

Fresh air,

Essential oils,

Vaporizing,

The sense of taste in your mouth,

The sense of light coming in through your opened or closed eyes,

And of course your sense of hearing.

Notice the mind's tendency,

And this may be you,

May be not you,

But for a lot of people it's this tendency.

Notice the tendency to label your sensory input that the mind chirps and comments on the sensory input.

But notice that there is something in you that is aware of where those senses land in your consciousness.

So dropping to the heart if the mind flips and takes over,

Hand on your heart if need be,

And just by feeling as gently as possible within yourself,

Following the senses in,

Either one of them or all of them,

To the place where they land.

And then you notice that the mind moves,

The emotions move,

That the body wants to move,

And so on and so on.

So we don't repress ourselves,

But we just come to the center in this way.

And I want to invite you to allow yourself to begin settling into that space that the senses are reporting to.

We'll call it awareness today.

Well of course awareness is only a word that we use,

It's not the thing itself.

Just like the labels that we are applying to the senses and the things we believe we are meeting,

Our projections through labels.

But when we rest here,

Notice the more direct experiencing.

We might call this non-discriminating awareness.

So instead of looking and judging,

We are simply with what is.

And then from that place of awareness,

As you allow that establishment,

Notice the sense of your own being.

How,

With no effort whatsoever,

That perhaps you have a greater sense of clarity,

Dignity,

Almost a kind of luminous quality within yourself.

And if we were to allow ourselves to reflect on our statuses that we grab for,

The things we think we are,

We'd see that we are so much more than them.

And yet at the same time,

We just are this,

People of no mark.

The fact that this is the highest state of being,

Higher than any world title that one can apply to oneself or have given to oneself is really quite astonishing really.

And of course,

Notice that you're not believing in this.

Notice that you're just allowing your truer self,

And that the result of this is that state of experiencing that we call presence.

This is just one of the many routes in.

Of course,

We all know about the life in the body way of doing this.

We can enter this through Anapatasati and so on.

Many routes,

But at the heart of it,

The experience of self.

And I want to invite you to do something quite radical.

I just want to invite you to allow yourself to notice what that inner space or that sense of wholeness is asking of you.

So we've got to be careful not to flip up to the head and put our heads wishes.

You can sneak in here really easy and pretend that it's the consciousness.

But I want you to listen into your spirit,

Listen into your soul,

And don't search for a mind answer.

But if something is being said to you here,

Allow that seed and that knowing.

Or it may be that you have a sense of kind of remembering who you really are,

That there's a thread in you that has always felt like you and suddenly when we sit like this.

Ah,

There I am.

There I am.

It was all getting a bit crazy there.

I thought it was somebody else for a minute.

I thought it was all these other things.

I thought I was the boss of this or the person of that.

You can do those things,

But we have to know who we are.

You might have this sense of self-remembering or it may be a sense of just this luminosity of yourself or dignity or wholeness or it may be that you're shown things or shown as something.

That's not the radical bit by the way.

This is the radical bit now.

So what we normally do or I have observed in 45 years of practice and heading on for 30 something,

35 years of teaching,

That this bit is easy.

And then we just throw it away and we just carry on.

We go back out in the world and we just carry on and we let that assert its dominance over us again as if that's the real reality when it's conditional.

It's built from condition upon condition upon condition.

That's how it gets as it is if you ever want to know.

We don't unpick the conditioning.

That's not how we're going to cause any change or movement.

We don't need to become somebody other than we are.

But we do have to let ourselves be who we are.

So the radical bit is to allow your soul,

Your spirit,

Your inner voice or whatever you would call it,

Not to eagerly add to you,

But to light up through your being and to move you in your actions.

So allowing yourself to be changed,

Allowing yourself to be what life wanted you to be in the first place,

The reason that you were brought here.

That's very different from I'm going to open an organic cheese shop or I'm going to train in yoga or something.

Because it will be right within the field that you're already in.

It will be right within the family that you're in,

The person that you are,

The ordinariness of your incredible life.

This is what meditation is for.

It's to bring the light and of course you are the light.

I know this to be true because it says it on this postcard just behind me.

And notice you can't do this by will,

Though will might be useful from time to time.

You can only do it by getting out of your own damn way.

And that might need some reflection.

We all keep resisting,

But we have to get out of our way.

And that doesn't mean subjugating ourselves.

It means actually allowing the light to change us.

This is why yours truly,

Inverted commas,

Teaches.

Because I'm the wrongest guy to teach you.

You want some quiet,

Nicely spoken person.

But the light,

As it were,

Has got a completely different idea about who this person is.

Although I do know what the function of this body is and person is in this world.

And so it puts me on this cushion without having a single word to say.

And not knowing how to do this and somehow these sessions happen.

So I don't know.

I know it.

I trust it now.

So we have to allow for these strange things.

But we also have to allow the light to move us.

How else is the world going to move in the right direction?

You know,

Except through you.

I mean you,

Personally.

And notice,

Just continuing with our Zen idea,

That there's no status involved with this.

That it's not about being recognized as being a somebody.

Unless that's a useful tool for.

.

.

Whatever the light is asking of you.

So time on the clock says it's time to draw this to a close.

And yet we're only here right now.

That's why I called this session today Ever Now.

Because there's nothing to go back to.

There's no ending of this.

It only moves more into the foreground or is a bit more in the background.

It's interesting how,

If you listen,

Whilst you're being asked to be what is being asked of you,

Allowing that to rewrite you non-egoically into the fact of being.

In many ways it's asking you to lead.

It's asking you to be the conscious and present person in the situations that your ordinary life places you in.

Which doesn't mean saying anything different and trying to lead people necessarily.

But it is asking you to be the light bringer or the representative of presence.

But always by not being a somebody.

But just by virtue of the truth of this practice,

The authenticity of your practice.

Because it shows.

It shows on you.

And people know,

Even though they may not have any words for it or know in any way in a surface way.

They know.

So let's just simply shift state back into the more daily experience.

We can allow this to move to the background a little bit.

But we're not pushing it back.

And we're not racing to try and suddenly change ourselves.

Because the mind can get hold of all sorts of things and the ego can get hold of all sorts of things.

And think it's spiritual or sacred.

So there's no rush.

The only thing that matters is the authenticity of our practice.

I keep coming back in to presence very strongly while sitting with you.

But let's just draw this to a close for now and we'll have our chat.

Thank you so much for your practice.

Bless you.

You're amazing.

Thank you for sitting with me.