It is no longer love for somebody; it is just the force of love feeding you
from inside. Once you open your heart to that level, it will always be
beautiful inside, as long as you choose to focus your awareness on the love
instead of what is left of your lower self. We now know what it means to open your heart. At every level, it
means to stop closing it. Your heart’s natural state is open. It’s just like the
water in a stream; its natural state is to flow freely . If somethin g’s blocking
the strea m, don’t waste your time trying to make the water flow around the
blockage—just remove it. The same is true of the flow of shakti through the
heart—just remove the blockages and love will be your natural state. Removing block ages is spiritual purification. That is what life is all
about. As you remove your blockages, the energy will start to flow freely
and love will no longer be something you need or something you look for. At this stage, love has nothing to do with another person or what job you
happen to be doing. You feel love and inspiration all the time. You find that
the natural state of your being is to love everything you do and everyoneyou see. You actually have to hold yourself back to contain your passion for
life because there is such a powerful flow of energy feeding you from
within. This is the state Christ was describing when he said, “Man shall not
live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of
God” (Matt. 4:4). You no longer live solely off what is coming in from
outside. Y our ener gy is coming from within, ef fortlessly , from its source. Your heart is one of the most beautiful things in creation. In time, if
you work on yourself, you will come to appreciate what you’ve been given. Not only can your heart feed you with unconditional love, but it is the
gateway to the higher centers.PART VI: 
The Human Predicament and BeyondChapter 26. The Human Predicament
The most meaningful questions  regarding quality of life are not about what
you own, or what you do, they are about how you’re doing inside. Most
people can relate to a response similar to: “There are moments that are so
beautiful I wouldn’ t trade them  for anything. But there are also moments I
don’t want to last for another second. In general, I work hard to keep it okay
in here.” Such is the human predicament. For most, that is a fair description of what it’s like to live in there. So
far our discussions have laid the groundwork for understanding why it is
that way. Throughout our lives we’ve stored patterns inside ourselves,
samskaras, based upon past experiences we resisted. We then used these
stored patterns to build a self-co ncept consisting of what we like and don’t
like and how to get events in the world to unfold accordingly . If we succeed
in our ef forts, it’ s generally nice inside; if we don’ t, it’s not. It is important to understand that every external event is the expression
of all the energies that have come together to create that event. When this
flow of the event’ s energy comes into you, it must make its way through
your mind and heart, and then ultimately merge into your consciousness. When you use your will to block an experience from passing through, the
flow of energy has to find a way to keep moving. Energy can’t stand still. Energy is power , and when it hits the resistance of your will it is forced to
circle around itself. That’ s the only way energy can stay in one place. The
circle is such a powerful form in creation. It allows something to keep
moving yet stay stationary . This is how samskaras are formed. These stored
patterns from the past keep trying to release, but you keep pushing them
back down, either consciously or subconsciously . By now, you can see how these samskaras are running your life. To
begin with, they keep coming  up by themselves, and that alone causessuffering. To avoid this, you have to commit a major part of your life to
creating situations that make it comfortable to live inside yourself. You end
up relying on your brilliant analytical mind to figure out how to be okay . Your mind does this by imagin ing what would work for you. It just starts
making up things, playing make -believe. As these imagined thoughts arise,
you can feel how they affect your blockages. You’re trying to see how the
world needs to be to fit you the best. “What if this person was a certain
way?” “What if that person hadn’t said what they said to me?” “What if I
change jobs to become the boss so people would have to listen to me instead
of me listening to them?” Everything going on in your personal mind is
because you’re either trying to match the stored patterns that will make you
feel better or avoid the patterns  that will make you feel worse. Both ways,
the store d patter ns are running your life. Don’ t feel bad about it; it’s that
way for pretty much everyone and always has been. You now have a deeper understanding of what we’ll call the
predicament: you’r e in there, you’r e not okay in there, and you have
developed concepts of how everything needs to be for you to be okay in
there. If you are not careful, you will struggle to satisfy these needs  for the
rest of your life. A perfect example of this burden is the all-too-common
practice of worrying. Why do you worry? There are only two reasons for
worrying: you either worry that you’re not going to get what you want, or
you worry that you’re going to get what you don’t want. This drives you to
work outside in the world to satisfy your needs. But the root of discomfort is
your stored patterns from the past. You are deciding you need to do things
outside in order to appease these patterns that are inside. This does not get
rid of the stored patterns—it actually reinforces your commitment to them. Over time, they will continue to bother you. Let’s say you feel lonely becau se you don’t have someone special in
your life. This sounds perfectly normal, but the truth is having someone
special in your life is your attempt to solve your loneliness. It does not
address the cause of it. It’s just like if you eat poorly and have a
stomachache; you may start looking for the Pepto Bismol. If someone then
asks you why you have a stomachache, please don’t say it’s because you
can’t find the Pepto Bismol. Finding the Pepto Bismol is an attempt to
compensate for your stomachache—it is not related to the cause of it. The
Pepto Bismol may make you feel better temporarily , but unless  you changeyour eating habits, the stomacha che will return. You will find this is true for
many things you do to compensate for your discomforts. Eventually , we wake up and realize that compensating for what’ s
wrong is not good enough—we must solve the root cause of why we are not
okay . There is a state within you that is always filled with love and a sense
of happiness. Yogananda called  it ever-new joy. It’s not a joy you get tired
of; it’s a constan tly upward-flowing, new experience of beauty . This is the
solution to every problem you’re having inside—make it beautiful in there. Instead of thinking that the new job will do it, the new relationship will do
it, or more money and popularity will do it, do the necessary inner work to
make it beautifu l inside. Notice that your problems all start with, “I’m not
okay in here.” If you were  okay , you wouldn’ t be worrying and
complaining. You’d be in there enjoying the beauty of the experience you’re
having. Enjoying your inner state doesn’ t mean nothing will happen outside. Nobody is saying you don’t interact with the world. You just don’t interact
with the world in an attempt to solve your inner problems. The outside
cannot solve your inner blockages. All the outside world can do is
temporarily allow the energy to go around a blockage or not hit it as much. This creates some relief, but it’ s not going to get rid of the blockage. Working on releasing inner blockages, instead of struggling with life to
get what  you want, can seem like something is being taken away from you. But if what is being taken away from you is causing suffering , this should
not be a proble m. If you’re eating something that makes you sick, and
someone wants to give you food that makes you healthy , you must first stop
eating what makes you sick. This is not an act of renunciation; it’s simple
wisdom. Taking on this inner work does not mean you don’t get married,
have a job, or fully put your heart into whatever you’re doing. You can do
all of that, but not for the purpos e of solving your inner problems. If you are
letting the avoidance of your inner problems define what you’r e doing, all
you’r e doing is expressing your inner problems outside. Say a psychologist
held up a Rorschach inkblot and you got upset about what you saw in it. Is
the solution to tell them to stop holding up that piece of paper? That would
be ridiculous. You would not solve anything. Yet trying to solve inner
problems by rearranging the outside is exactly what everybody is doing.Chapter 27. The Paradigm Shift
Everyone wants to improve  their experience of life. People are always
looking for more joy , love, inspiration, and meaning—the question is how to
achieve this. Let’s do an expe riment. Imagine an all-powerful force has
asked you to write down some things that need to happen for you to totally
enjoy your life. If you’re like most people, you will write down things like a
new house, a special relationship, a higher paying job, and perhaps a
yearlong vacation to your favorite spots around the world. When you’re
done, you will be so excited to turn in that list and get your wishes granted. Unfortunately , you’ll have to wait a moment because we’re going to go
deeper with this experiment. If you examine your list more closely , you will see that it’s not what
you really want. Let’s say you wrote down that you want to get married to
the person you love, and you want a wedding in Maui with birds-of-paradise
surrounding the ceremony . After the wedding, you want to live in a
beautiful, mortgage-free house overlooking the ocean with two fancy cars in
the driveway . It’s the dream you’ve had since childhood. The problem is
that’s not what you really want. Your mind has played a trick on you. Say
you have the wedding, the house, and the cars, just like you wanted them,
but your new spouse turns out to be a real jerk. You are treated terribly , and
it’s obvious right from the start that this is going to be the worst marriage in
human history . On top of that, you’re Catholic, so you can’t get divorced. Do you still want that wedding? Unlikely . So, it wasn’ t really the marriage
you wanted. You wanted the beautiful experience that you thought the
marriage was going to give you. So why didn’ t you ask for that? The same thing holds true for the new job, the million dollars in the
bank, and the respect of other people. Fine, you can have it all. But what if it
creates so much stress and worry that you’re miserable? You’d wish youcould have your old job back. You didn’ t really want the job, the money , or
the acceptance—you wanted what you thought they would give you. You
wanted happiness, joy , and a sense of total well-being. How about a constant
inner state of love, beauty , and inspiration at the highest level you’ve ever
experienced? Why didn’ t you ask for that? What you did was allow your strongest past experiences to define what
you think will make you feel happy . It doesn’ t work that way. There are
plenty of people who have what you wrote down on your list, and they’re
not always happy . There’ s nothing you ever experienced that left you totally
fulfilled for any length of time. You have always needed more. Your entire
life you’ve been saying, “If I get this thing I want, I’ll be okay , and if I don’t
have to get what I don’t want, I’ll be fine.” For your whole life, there’ s been
a list. When will you realize that doesn’ t work? If you’ve been doing
something every minute of your entire life, and you’re still doing it,
obviously it doesn’ t work. Why not go directly to the root and say, “What I
want is to feel love and joy. What I want is every moment of every day to
feel complete well-being as high as I’ve ever felt before, and to be inspired
by everything I do.” Now there’ s a list. Let’ s turn that one in. The interesting result of our experiment is that it has led us away from
worldliness and into the essence of spirituality . Not that worldliness is a
negative term— it just means you think the answer is in the world. You think
the answer lies in what’ s unfolding in front of you. It isn’t wrong to go to
the world for what you think you want—it simply doesn’ t work. You’re
trying to find something outside that matches your “samskara of the day.”
Once you get what you want, or avoid what you don’t want, that will no
longer be your major desire or greatest fear. Once that one’s out of the way,
there will always be the next issue coming to the surface. Eventually , you wake up. You realize that you want to feel love. Not
that you want to love someone or have someone love you—you just want to
feel love all the time. If your love is not dependent on anything or anyone, it
can last forever . We call that unconditional love. The great yoga master ,
Meher Baba, taught that love must spring spontaneously from within. It
cannot be coerced, and it cannot be dependent upon anything. That’ s what
pure love is. Otherwise, you have a temporary situation that just happens to
match your stored patterns. Unfortunately , this will not last. You’ve got lots
of samskaras in there. In addition, if you’re in a relationship, the other
person has lots of patterns of their own, quite different from yours. This iswhy relationshi ps are so complicated. Not only are each person’ s past
samskaras different, but both people have different experiences every day to
add to the collection. If somebody yelled at your partner at work, they’re
different when they come home than if somebody was nice to them. You, of
course, had your daily experiences. If your feeling of love is dependent
upon your partner behaving a certain way when they come home, you’re in
trouble and so are they. You have enough difficulty dealing with your own
samskaras; now you have to deal with theirs also. Don’ t get scared. This doesn’ t mean you don’t have meaningful
relationships. There are beautiful relationships, and they can last forever . In
fact, they can get more and more beautiful all the time. But they are not
samskara relationships—they are not based on the world outside matching
your inner patterns. They are based on unconditional love. Once love is
always flowing freely inside of you, you will be pleased to share it with
another person. Such love is not based on needs or expectations—it’ s based
on pure love wishing to express itself, unconditionally . How do you reach such a state of unconditional love and well-being? Instead of trying to get the world to match your blockages, you work on
letting go of the blockages. That’ s the secret of real spiritual growth. That is
the real paradig m shift. If you don’t have the samskaras, nothing will be
blocking your inner energy flow. You will feel love, joy, and inspiration all
the time. If you are willing to experience the moment unfolding in front of
you, you will have the opportunity to be inspired by everything. The simple
fact that things exist will be suf ficient to move you. You only have two choices: either you devot e your life to getting the
world to match your samskaras,  or you devote your life to letting go of your
samskaras . If you choose the latter , you don’t end up with both a worldly
life and a spiritual life—you end up with one life. Work, meditation retreats,
taking out the garbage, sweeping the floor , driving, showering , they’re all
the same . The same thing is going on in all your activities—you are letting
go of your blockages. It’s equally beneficial to be letting go of your
blockages at work, when you’re  driving the kids to soccer , picking up the
groceries, or doing whatever you’re doing. Every single moment of your
life, you are either naturally enjoying what is or letting go of what’ s keeping
you from  enjoying what is. If you let go of the wants and fears that are
limiting you, you’ll always be okay . Letting go of yourself, instead of
serving yourself, is the real paradigm shift.Chapter 28. Working with the Heart
We interact with life every wakin g moment of our time on Earth. If we are
committed to growing spiritually , we must learn to use that interaction to
clear out our blockages. This inevitably returns us to the heart since we store
blockages there. As we’ve discussed, your heart experiences myriad
different emotions and feelin gs based on the sam skaras you have
accumulated. Your inability to handle the breadth of these emotions keeps
you locked in the human predicament of controlling life in order to be okay . If you wish to break free and live unconditionally , you must learn to clear
out your heart. The purification  of your heart begins with being grateful that you have
one. Your heart is like an orches tra. Have you ever watched a movie without
the score? It’ s dead. It doesn’ t have any juice to it. When something happens
in your life, the orchestra of your heart begins to play. It adds richness to
your life by playing high notes and low notes that are generally  appropriate
to the events unfolding before you. Your heart is not an obstacle or a
punishment. Your heart is a beautiful gift. Would you rather not have one
and live your life without feelings? Just as the human mind is something extraordinary that can take you
beyond the limit of your senses, so the human heart is even more
extraordinary . It can play notes  from one end of the spectrum to another . Your heart can go from absolute  ecstasy to deep pain and sorrow in a matter
of secon ds. It can raise you to heights where you feel like angel wings are
carrying you to heaven, and it can bring you down to your darkest hour. Your heart is capable of doing all of that, without any effort of your own. What an amazin g instrument you carry inside of you. The trouble is you’re
not okay with the full range of your heart. You want to control your heart so
it only plays the notes you can handle.Spirituality is about learning to thank your heart for the beautiful
expressions it is creating within you. Unfortunately , you’re going to find out
that you can’t do that all the time. There are vibrations your heart is capable
of making that you’re not willin g to experience. It’s as though you are not
evolved enough to handle the fullness of your heart, so you resist it. Just like
you resist the world when it is not how you want, you resist your heart when
you’re not comfortable with its expressions. As you expand and grow spirit ually , your range of comfort with the
outside world will become wider and wider , allowing you to handle more of
the moments passing before you. The same is true with your heart. As you
grow spiritually , through honoring your day-to-day experiences, you will
learn to become more comfortab le with your heart. As a child, the first time
you experienced fear or jealousy you might have been overwhelmed and
had difficulty holding yourself together . Over time, you became more
accustomed to these emotions and at least tried to deal with them. Perhaps
the best you could do at first was control your emotions and put on the
outward appeara nce of being okay . Though that’s not necessarily so healthy ,
it is better than losing yourself completely and letting emotions overcome
you. If you let an unbridled emotion act out externally , it has the power to
change the course of your life—not usually for the better . Little by little, as you learn to accept that emotions are a reality  of life,
they will come and go if you let them. This is spiritual evolution. Just as our
bodies have evolved through eons of challenging outer experiences, so our
souls evolve through the fires of inner experiences. It is not that a great
being does not have emotions; it is that they are at peace  with their
emotions. They can handle the various changes their heart goes through. If
somebody you know dies, it’s natural to feel a sense of loss. You’re going to
feel a certain amount of sadness if you cared about the person. That is your
heart expressing itself in harmony with what’ s happenin g. Like an
instrument playing something beautiful, your heart is composing a song of
sadness for you. The trouble is you’re not okay with that. Eventually you
will realize that the emotion itself is not the problem—the problem is you’re
not able to hand le the emotion. We come back to the same place again and
again: Do you want to devote your life to controlling the world so your heart
never feels emotions you can’t handle? Or do you want to devote yourself to
the evolutionary work of becoming comfortable with your heart?Just as we found  with the mind , if you want to work with your heart,
understand why it is the way it is. You may have noticed it can be sensitive,
volatile, and difficult to live with. The heart is this way because you didn’ t
handle the natur al emotions it created, you resisted them, which stored their
energy inside you. Now you’re in trouble. It’s bad enough that you pushed
away thought patterns, but you’ve also pushed away the vibrat ions of your
heart. These blocked energy patterns are making a complete mess of your
heart. The heart has become out of balance, and it has stopped opening
when it needs to express healthy emotions. Let’s say someone does
something that makes you feel fear. There are times when fear is a normal,
healthy reaction to outer events. But you aren’ t able to handle the emotion,
so you suppress it to get it out of your consciousness. Later , you hear
something bad happened to that person. Instead of feeling comp assion, you
feel relieved. Your emotions are no longer in harmony with outer situations,
instead they are releasing the blocked ener gies from your past experiences. Spiritual growth is about fixing the heart and returning it to a state of
well-being. It should be clear by now that the problem is not outside in the
world; the probl em is your inabi lity to handle your heart’ s full expression of
the world. Learning to handle these expressions is the solution, and it is the
essence of spiritual growth. Feelings of loss or fear or anger in your heart
are just objects of consciousness that Self is experiencing. They cannot
harm you, unless you resist them. They actually make you richer because
you experienced them . Every experien ce makes you a greater person if you
don’t resist it. Come to peace with the expressions of your heart. It may seem
impossible to be comfortable with emotions that are uncomfortable, but the
truth is you already have experience doing that. Take Shakespeare’ s play
Romeo and Juliet . As a tragedy , it certainly is not fun. Let’s say a
Shakespeare troupe comes through town and performs Romeo and Juliet . They do such a good job that you cry with a level of relief you’ve hardly
ever felt before. The performance was completely heart-wrenching. What do
you do? You tell all your friends to go see it. You say, “I cried for three days
afterwards. It was unbelievable . It touched my heart so deeply . I’ve never
felt such pure sadness. I want to see it again, and you all should come with
me.” Well, if a tragedy even close to that happened in real life, you would
not be praising the depth of emotion—you would be scarred for life. That’ sthe difference between acceptin g the expression of your heart  rather than
resisting it. Creation has put a full orchestra inside you, free of charge. This makes
life so much more interesting and vibrant. Learn to enjoy your heart by
ceasing to resist it. It’s not about losing yourself in your emotion s. It’s about
being willing to experience them in the same way you experience a
beautiful sunset. You simply let the sunset come in. You’re  not doing
anything. You are simply allowing awareness to be aware of what is in front
of it. Sometimes it’s a beautiful sunset, sometimes it’s a sense of loss. The
process is exactly the same: consciousness is experiencing an object of
consciousness. You are not clinging to it or suppressing it. You are simply
experiencing it. If you cling to the object, it stays. If you suppress it, it stays. If it stays,
it will distort reality. You are no longer open to life—you have a bias for or
against certain things. These samskaras are powerful packets  of energy. They distort your perception of life, and you constantly pay the price. When
thoughts and emotions are suppressed, they rot down there. They will pop
up at different times and cause serious problems in your life. This is what
Freud taught, and it was also taught thousands of years earlier in the
Upanishads. Learning to make peace with your heart is a major step toward
extricating yourself from the very human predicament we all find ourselves
in.Chapter 29. Neither Suppression nor Expression
Though it is true that you don’t want to suppress emotions, you also don’t
want them running your life. There is a sacred place between suppression
and expression—pure experience. In this state, you are neither  suppressing
the energy internally nor expres sing it externally . You are simply willing to
experience the energy coming from your heart and mind. The sorrow of
death and the joy of birth are both coming up inside and feedin g your soul. They are touchi ng you all the way to the core of your being. You are not
touching them— they are touching you. There’ s nothing to do about it. It is
all simply a gift God is giving you. The mind is free to think; the heart is
free to feel. All of this leaves you at peace, in a state of gratitude . This is the
way life is meant to be. Yet you can’t handle certain thoughts and emotions. You resist them,
and then you build a mental world around what you have stored in there. In
this state, you can only feel gratitude if you get what you want or avoid
what you don’t want. Eventual ly you wake up and realize that you have
work to do, real work. That work is not outside; it is inside. That work
becomes your spiritual practice . To get what you really want—joy , love,
enthusiasm, and passion for every moment of your life—you need to get
these stored patterns out. The problem is that while you might see this
intellectually , in a very short period of time your mind is going to fight
back. This is because the inner path doesn’ t fit the mind’ s habitual patterns
for how to be okay . The only data the mind currently has is based upon its past
experiences, so the mind always thinks it’s right. This is part of the
predicament. Please understand that your mind will always think it’s right. The mind is not dumb; it knows what it experienced. But it doesn’ t know
what it didn’ t experience—which is an infinitely larger body of knowledge.This is why the wise sage Lao Tzu reflected that a wise man does not argue
—for what purpose? You have your mindset, and another person has their
mindset. All their lifelong data says one thing, and your totally different
lifelong data sees it differently . There’ s nothing you’re going to do about
that, except be humble enough to realize that at any given moment the data
you are taking in is less than .00001 percent of what’ s going on everywhere. It’s meaningless ; it rounds to zero. In essence, you’ve had a whole bunch of
zero-breadth experiences that add up to zero. The personal mind is so caught
up in itself, it will never want to look at that truth. Deep spiritual teachings embrac e that truth. They ask you to look at the
world in front of you and realize it took billions of years for that exact
moment to manifest before you. Accept that. Honor that. Surrender to that. This begins by first accepting reality, not resisting it. It’s not about doing or
not doing anyth ing—it’ s about surrendering your initial resista nce to what
is. You see what ’s there, and then let go of all the stuff that comes up due to
your stored samskaras. Inevitably , your mind is going to start talking about
likes and dislike s. Just don’t listen. Why would you listen to that? It’s just
your personal blockages superimposed on reality . You can now understand what you are accepting and surrendering to:
reality . What else is there? Reality is truth, at least for the moment. It is
what’ s real versus past mental impressions that are simply leftover thoughts. The way to deal with these mental impressions is to realize they are
perfectly natura l. Reality is going to come in, it’s going to hit your
blockages, and your mind is going to talk about it. Fine, be that as it may—
you don’t have to listen. It’s that simple. If you know your mind doesn’ t
know what it’s talking about, why listen? As we’ve seen, the personal mind
can’t know anything except for the data it has collected. That data is nothing
compared to the universal set of data it has missed every moment. The data
the mind has in there is what we call statistically insignificant . That’ s why
the mind changes its mind so often. Give it one more experience, and it will
view things dif ferently . Interesting that we keep listening to it anyway . A wise person doesn’ t renounce the world; they honor the reality that’s
unfolding in front of them. Likewise, a wise person doesn’ t renounce the
use of their mind ; they just don’t listen to the personal mind because it’s lost
in thoughts about itself. The personal mind is not going to solve your
problems. It’s doing the best it can with the limited data it has, but its efforts
don’t generally work out so well.Regarding the heart, a wise person allows the heart to freely express
itself inwardly but does not get lost in it. Some people say, “Follow your
heart.” They must not be referri ng to the personal heart because it’s all over
the place on a day-to-day basis. Fortunately , there is a higher heart to follow . Once energy flows past the middle of the fourth chakra, it enters a deeper
heart that doesn’ t change, ever. There’ s a constant upward flow of beautiful
energy. It brings waves of bliss so powerful you can hardly focus outwardly . It wafts over you, and you settle  back into this beautiful peace that surpasses
all unde rstanding. The peace you have because you got what you wanted—
that’s understandable. This peace comes over you and stays for no reason,
completely unconditionally—that’ s what your higher heart has to offer you. This is the gift of your spiritual heart. To expe rience your spiritual heart, you must learn to rise above your
personal heart. The personal heart is very strong and very emotional. It’s not
easy to pierce through the personal heart, but it is possible. First, check to
see if your heart’ s expressions are based on current reality or the thoughts in
your mind. Thoughts of what went wrong in the past, and what might go
wrong in the future, create emotions that are out of tune with reality . There
is no end to the mess this can create in your heart. Since the energies that
build up in the heart must have a channel for release, these emotions will
spill over into your external life and can create quite a disturbance. If your emotions are in harmony  with the reality unfolding before you,
they are generally healthy and support the quality of your life. When both
your heart and mind are in harmony with reality , energies don’t release
outwardly because nothing is blocking them. The power of these unblocked
energies passing through the lower heart can then be utilized to rise into the
higher parts of the heart. Because you are neither suppressing nor
expressing, the deeper spiritu al states begin to unfold. You can still
contribute to what’ s happening outside, but your actions are not personal in
nature. They are simply beautiful moment-to-moment interactions with
reality that are serving the flow of life. Reaching this state requires clearing out the samskaras that are
blocking the energy flow and not putting any more in there. To do this, learn
to handle your heart. This takes practice, just like you practice the piano, a
sport, or anything else. We will explore this process in great depth in the
following chapters. What it requires is a change in attitude: You begin to
accept that things are going to happen, they’re going to hit your heart, andyour mind is going to create thoughts to release the built-up energies. You
commit to being okay with this process. This attitude of acceptance is very
different from suppressing the emotions and thoughts or letting yourself get
lost in them. Just honor what the heart is doing and learn to sit back and
relax behind it. Emotions can become like a breeze blowing across your face
—nothing to do except experience the experience. Appreciate the work your heart is doing to push out the samskaras you
have collected over the years. Your heart will do the work—all  you need to
do is allow the purification to take place. At first, it’s not easy to relax in the
face of what you’ve spent your life avoiding. But it is certainly worth it
because the reward is love, freedom, and constant inspiration. After all,
you’ve already been through so much pain for so little gain. The bottom line is that you’re a beautiful being. You’re a being of great
love, light, and inspiration. You are made in the image of God. The god who
created the whole universe exists inside of you, but you don’t realize that. You’re lost thinking that the world outside has to be a certain way for you to
be okay . This is the human  predicament, and nothing is going to
meaningfully change until you learn to live from a deeper place. To get out
of this predicam ent, you’ve got some work to do, and the work is on
yourself. To quote Rumi, the great thirteenth-century Persian poet,
“Yesterday I was clever , so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise,
so I am changing myself.”PART VII: 
Learning to Let GoChapter 30. Techniques for Freeing Yourself
Logically , it doesn’ t make sense  to store inside of you the experiences that
bothered you the most. If you do that, you will build your own internal
house of horrors and will struggle to be comfortable inside. This is the root
cause of all anxiety, tension, and psychological disturbances. This cannot be
fixed until you deal with it at its root. As long as you are holding inside of
you that which bothered you ten or twenty years ago, you are going to
suffer. Once your intent is to use every moment of your life to free yourself,
the question becomes how to do that. Believe it or not, your sincere intent to
be free is more important than any technique you can use. You’re in there,
and if you understand these teachings, you realize you don’t want blockages
in there. They make life extremely difficult. So you commit to letting them
go. Traditionally , there are some powerful techniques for freeing yourself
during your everyday life, and we will discuss three of them in very broad
terms. The first technique is called positive thinking . Yogananda used to teach
that every time you have a negative thought, replace it with a positive one. This is a very basic and useful technique for bringing about change. It is
based on the two types of thoughts we discussed earlier: those created
willfully and those that happen automatically . If you notice your mind
giving you a hard time while you’re driving—those are automatically
generated thoug hts. You are not purposely creating them. Now try purposely
creating positive  thoughts about the situation. If the person in front of you is
driving much slower than the speed limit, you might say inside your mind,
“Wow. What an opportunity to relax. I can’t be in a rush becaus e the person
in front of me won’ t let me. I guess it’s time to watch my breath, calm
down, and learn to enjoy the experience.” You’re welcome to do that ineveryday life. You’re not fighting with your mind or pushin g away the
negative thoughts. You’re simply replacing the automatically generated
thoughts with willfully created  ones. Don’ t fight, just replace . It doesn’ t
matter if the negative thoughts continue in the background; just focus on the
positive though ts you are willfully creating. Over time, your willfully
created thoughts will replace the automatically generated ones. This is a
very healthy thing to do. Simply apply your will to offset or neutralize the
effect of your samskaras. Over time, this will develop a more positive mind,
which is a much nicer environment to live in. The next technique is very traditional and is broadly referre d to as
mantra. In the most general sense, “mantra” means training your mind to
repeat a simple word or phrase  over and over until it gets stuck in your
mind. Just like a song can get stuck in your mind, a mantra can get stuck in
your mind. We all experience that our minds can work in layers. You can be
paying attention to someone speaking, and there can still be thoughts going
on “in the back of your mind.” Your mind is so brilliant it can multitask. It
can create thoughts at multiple levels, and you can be aware of these layers
simultaneously . Mantra is offering you a layer of mind that is always there
—balanced, pleasant, a safe place to rest. As the mantra effortlessly goes on
in the backgroun d, it gives you the choice of which layer of mind you want
to focus on. When the habitual thoughts come up from your samskaras, you
don’t have to fight with them or even replace them. You just shift your
consciousness onto the mantra. With positive thinking, you are continually
using your will to neutralize negative thoughts with positive  ones. With
mantra, you are simply using your will to shift the focus of your
consciousness from the samskara-generated thoughts to the mantra. Mantra is a gift. It’s like a built-in vacation. If you do the work
necessary to instill the mantra in a layer of your mind, it will change your
life. First off, the mantra does not have to be a traditional Sanskrit mantra
like Om Namah Shivaya or Om Mani Padme Hum. It can be a name or word
for God, like Jesus, Adonai, or Allah. In fact, a very powerful mantra is
simply God, God, God. If all these seem too religious for you, a great thing
to have going in your mind is: I’m alwa ys fine, I’m always fine, I’m always
fine. How nice woul d it be to be reminded of any of these throughout your
day? It is not difficult to instill the mantra in your mind—all it takes is
repetition. You can start practicing mantra during the time you put asideeach morning and evening for your spiritual practices. Even just fifteen
minutes will go a long way. A good technique is to tie the mantra to your
breath going in and out. Then during the day, come back to it whenever
certain events occur . For example, you could say a few repetitions of the
mantra before you pick up the phone and after you put it down. It just takes
a mome nt, and you are making a major investment in becoming a more
conscious, cente red being. Do it whenever you get into or out of your car, as
well as when you enter or leave your house or office. No one will even
notice. It is just a moment’ s pause that will change everything over time. Before you eat, say the mantra. If you are eating by yourself, you can have
fun inwardly repeating the mantra while you chew your food. Make it a
game—how many recurring events in your everyday life can you set up to
remind you to practice the mantra? Here’ s a good use of your smartphone:
set up a repeatin g reminder to do the mantra. Over time, you will train your
mind to always have the mantra going on in the background during your
daily life. Even if you have done this work on yourself, a fateful day will
inevitably arrive . Something will happen and your emotions or thoughts will
start to get upset. You’ll be on the verge of losing it, but the mantra will
catch your attention just enough to give you the choice—go down or go up. You immediately shift your awareness off the mess and onto the mantra, and
your life changes. The mantra does not stop you from having constructive
thoughts; it just sits there as a safety net to catch you if you start to fall. When you have some time to actually rest back into the mantra, you will
become filled with peace and well-being. It’s like a vacation from the
personal mind. How would you like it if the moment you sat down, tension
and stress melted away as you fell back into the lap of the mantra? All this
is available to you—free of charge. Just be willing to make the investment
in yourself. Notice that with mantra you are learning to surrender the hold
that the personal mind has on you. The final technique we will discuss for freeing yourself from yourself
is generally termed witness consciousness,  and it includes the powerful
practice of relaxing and releasin g. Witness consciousness is deeper than the
other techniques because, in the end, it doesn’ t require working with the
mind. Positive thinking involve s creating positive thoughts to replace the
negative ones. Mantra involves creating a layer of mind that provides a
peaceful and steady environmen t for rising above the lower layers. Witnessconsciousness is simply noticing that you are noticing what the mind is
doing. You don’t need to interact with the mind. You don’t need to do
anything. Just be the one who notices that the mind is creating thoughts, and
you are aware of them. In order to do that, you can’t be disturbed by the
thoughts that are being created. If the thoughts bother you, you will leave
the seat of objective observati on and try to change the mind. To truly
achieve witness consciousness, you must be willing to let the thoughts be as
they may and simply be aware that you are aware of them. If you want to experience true witness consciousness, just look in front
of you. Do you see what’ s there? Don’ t think about it, just see it. That’ s
witness conscio usness. It’s just seeing . You are simpl y witnessing what’ s
there. Now, turn your head and look around. Practice the imme diacy of just
seeing. Notice that your thoughts often have something to say about what
you see. Can you simply notice these thoughts like you noticed what was
outside, or do you have to do something about them? Thoughts,  emotions—
they come up by themselves. Good, now simply notice them. When you reach the state wher e you can observe what is going on in
the mind and heart, you’ll notic e that you’re not always comf ortable with
what’ s happening inside. What is more, there is the tendency to want to
willfully do something about it. That’ s very natural. If you want to willfully
do something, here’ s what you do—relax. This is certainly not the intuitive
thing to do. You want to prote ct yourself from the inner disturbance by
getting rid of it. That struggle just makes it worse. You are capable of
simply relaxing and not engagi ng with the disturbed energies. At first this
seems impossibl e because you’re trying to get the disturbance itself to relax. Don’ t do that; You relax. You who notices the disturbance are not the
disturbance. You are witnessing the disturbance, and you are welcome to
relax in the face of it. You are in the seat of awareness, way back inside, watching the dance
of mind and heart. It’s a very natural place, this place back inside. If you
don’t get pulled into the thoughts and emotions, you can just relax and
notice. Don’ t think about it. The moment you see what’ s going on—just
relax. Relax your shoulders, relax your tummy , relax your buttocks, and
most importantly , relax your heart. Even if the heart itself won’ t relax, the
area around your heart will. You have willpower in there, use it. Here’ s what
you do with your will: relax and release. First relax through your initial
resistance, then release the disturbed energy that comes up. When you dothis, you are actually providing space for the release of the samskaras
causing the disturbance. You are giving them more room to release because
you’re not struggling with the thoughts and emotions they are creating. Eventually there  is no struggle,  as you have created distance between the
seat of Self and the noisy mind. To be free, you need distance between those
two—subject and object. Spirituality is not about changing the objects you’re looking at. Spirituality is about accepting the objects but not getting sucke d into them. It’s about being detached and feeling at peace with whatever your mind and
heart are doing. When you are totally comfortable with everything that can
come from your mind and heart, they will stop creating inner disturbance. You don’t know that yet, but it’s true. People often ask whether the mind
will keep talking once you are at peace with it. The mind is talking because
you’re not okay , and it’s trying  to figure out how to be okay  by getting
things the way you want. Once you’re okay in there, there’ s much less to
talk about. Whe n you’re in the presence of someone you love, you’re not
thinking about how to find love. You’re just experiencing the beauty of the
love. Likewise, when you are okay in there, you will not be thinking about
how to be okay . You will just be relaxing into the quiet state of peaceful
well-being. This requires that you be okay with your thoughts and emotions. Relaxing in their presence is a good start to being okay with them. If you
can’t willfully relax in the face of thoughts and emotions, you will have to
do something about them. You will get pulled down into them and attempt
to do something  to fix what is bothering you. Better to simply relax and
allow the samsk aras the room they need to release. When you relax back
into witness consciousness, you are surrendering to the reality of what’ s
happening. First relax, then lean away . You who notices are at a distance from
what you are noticing. You don’t have to think about it. Just notice that what
you are seeing in there, thoughts and emotions, are all distinct and at a
distance from you. Now , lean away from their noise. The mind and
emotions make noise. That is not a problem. Just relax and lean away from
the noise. When you lean away from the noise, you are creating distance
between You (the consciousn ess) and the objects of consciousness (the
thoughts and emotions). In that distance, the samskaras have room to release
their energy. It’s going to get uncomfortable, and that’s natural. The
discomfort you are experienci ng is the discomfort of samskaras beingreleased. They were stored with pain; they are going to release with pain—if
you let them. This is the pain that ends all pain.Chapter 31. Low-Hanging Fruit
The best way to let go of stored pocke ts of pain is to practice. Just as you
practice scales to learn the piano or practice a sport to get good at it, so you
practice letting go to learn how to do it. You start with simple things. We
call these the low-hanging fruit. There are many situations each day when
you create inner disturbance for absolutely no good reason. Bothering
yourself about the car in front of you does no good at all. It only makes you
tense and uptigh t. The cost-benefit analysis is one-hundred-perc ent cost and
zero benefit. Letting go of that tendency should be easy, but it’s not. You
will find that you’re in the habit of insisting and demanding that things
should be the way you want, even if it’s irrational. Things are the way they
are because of all the influences that made them that way. You are not going
to change the weather by complaining about it. If you are wise, you will
start to change your reactions to reality instead of fighting with reality . By
doing so, you will change your relationship with yoursel f and with
everything else. Start with the small things to prove to yourself that you are capable of
doing this. Working with yourself at this level is practicing letting go. Once
you are able to relax and release through the relatively easy stuff, you will
find you are better able to deal with the bigger situations. You are training
yourself to deal with yourself. Lots of differen t experiences in life fall into the low-hanging fruit
category . A good practice for letting go can be found in your relationship
with the weather . Believe it or not, you can use the weather for tremendous
spiritual growth. There’ s alway s weather out there: hot, cold, windy , dry,
humid, and everything in between. The weather has nothing to do with you. It has to do with the forces that are causing it to be the way it is. If you can’t
handle the weat her without getting disturbed, how are you going to handleanything else? Complaining about the weather is a perfect example of
something that has a one-hundred-percent cost and zero benefit. What do
you gain by complaining about the weather? Nothing, except to get upset. “I
couldn’ t handle the heat today . It was terrible. I was sweating. I hated it.”
Congratulations, you didn’ t have a nice day, and it didn’ t change the
weather one bit. Eventually , you start to work with yourself. When your mind
complains about the weather , don’t fight with it. If you want, you can use
positive thinking. For example, when the mind starts up with, “It’s hot; I’m
so hot,” instead of getting into that, ask yourself, “How did it get hot? What
does that mean ‘it’s hot’?” Use your mind to remind you that there’ s a star
ninety-three million miles away that is so hot you can actually feel its heat. That’ s amazing. Use your higher mind to appreciate and respect reality
instead of complaining about it. When you do this, you are willfully using
your mind for something positive and constructive. Y ou are raising yourself. Though this practice of positive  thinking is beneficial, ultimately , what
you need to do is relax and release past the disturbance. If you bother to
relax and release, you won’ t be so hot. After all, You in there can’t get hot—
you can only experience that the body is hot. You are way back inside,
witnessing the experience of heat. If you relax and release back into your
seat of consciou sness, you are relaxing away from the part of you that’s
complaining. There is definitely complaining going on in the mind, no
reason to deny that. But if you relax and lean away from where the noise is
coming from, you will be leaning back into the seat of Self. Two things happen when you relax and release. One, you stop fighting
with the causes of your disturbe d mind, and that gives them room to release. Two, you are actually relaxing back into the seat of Self, and you will grow
spiritually . If you will do that with the weather , if you will do that with the
car in front of you, if you will do that with all these low-hanging fruit
situations, you’l l grow every single day. The way to know that you are
working with low-hanging fruit is that the situation is resolved simply by
letting go inside . There is nothing else to do about it. You were the only
problem, and once you let go of creating the problem, the problem is solved. If you accept the weather , there’ s nothing else to do about it. If you accept
the myri ad meaningless things you have decided to bother yourself about,
there’ s nothing else to do about them. That’ s how you identify the low-
hanging fruit.In contrast, if you let go of your reactions to a situation and there is still
something in front of you to deal with, then you have some work to do
outside. If you lose your job and work with letting go of your negative
reaction, that’s good, but you still need to go out and look for a new job. Letting go does not absolve you of your responsibilities in life. You are not
letting go of life, you are letting  go of your personal reactions to life. Your
personal reactio ns do not help you deal with situations in a constructive
manner—they actually cloud your ability to make good decisions. When all is said and done, you’re going to find the majority of your
inner disturbance falls into the category of low-hanging fruit. The only
reason there’ s a problem is because you defined it that way. You are the
problem, and that can’ t be solved outside. It can only be solved inside.Chapter 32. The Past
You’re driving down the street and a billboard reminds you of something
that troubled you in the past. Perhaps it was an event that happened eight
years ago. What is the benefit of getting disturbed by that? You just ruined
your day for no good reason. Just because something bothered  you in the
past doesn’ t mean it should still be bothering you. After all, it’s no longer
happening. You think that since you don’t want to go through it again, you
need to remember how bad it was. That’ s like saying you need a doggy bag
for the food that made you sick so you can take it home, taste it each
morning, and remember how sick it made you. You would never do that
with bad food, so why do you do it with bad experiences? We are now ready to pay attenti on to another area that is very ripe for
spiritual growth , your past. You probably won’ t agree at first, but it also
falls under one-hundred-percent cost and zero benefit. Of what possible
benefit could it be to still be bothered by something that happened before
that isn’t happen ing now? It’s already over. There is zero benefit to being
bothered by something that is not even happening. On the other hand, there
is certai nly an amazing cost: your entire mental, emotional, and even
physical health. Instead, if you let experiences pass completely through you when they
are actually happening, they will touch you to the core of your being and
become part of you without leaving any scars. You will simply be able to
learn from the experience and grow. Once you fully digest an experience,
you will natural ly know how to deal with it should it happen again. If you
touched a hot stove when you were a child, you don’t have to keep the
painful experience in the forefront of your mind. You don’t need to always
remind yourself that stoves are hot and can hurt you. If you do that, you willhave made a samskara out of the experience instead of simply learning from
it. Don’ t worry , you will know darn well not to touch a hot stove again. Similarly , once you have learne d a sport or a musical instrument, you
don’t have to keep thinking about how to play—it becomes second nature. That means it has integrated into your whole being. It becomes totally
natural, and you never need to think about it again as you do it. That is how
all your past learning experiences should be, effortlessly there when you
actually need them, never bothering you when you don’t. If you process
your experiences properly , they will always be there to serve you, never to
haunt you. Perhaps this exercise will help you understand what it means to fully
process somethi ng instead of having to pass it through your thinking mind. Just for a moment, glance at the scene in front of you. How hard was it for
you to see it? Obviously , it took no effort at all; you just instantly saw it. What if the finest artist in the world called you on the phone  wanting to
paint what you saw, right then. How long would it take you to describe
everything to them? We’re talking about every color shade, reflection of
light, grain variation in the wood, every single detail. That would be a very
long phone call. Yet you saw it all in a billionth of a second. That is the
difference betw een consciousn ess just seeing versus the mind trying to
process what is seen. This difference holds true for all life’s experiences. When you have an
experience, it can simply come in and touch consciousness directly . It
doesn’ t need the mind to judge it as desirable or undesirable and then store
it accordingly . Just as you were able to see the scene in front of you in full
detail without “thinking” about it, so you can integrate the fullness of your
experiences into your being without having to block them in your mind. There’s nothing richer than a fully processed experience integrated into
your whole being. How many incid ences from your past would you like to truly be done
with rather than having to deal with them mentally and emotionally , long
after they are ancient history? In fact, to achieve deep spirituality , your
unfinished past cannot be inside of you. It must be gone—not suppressed,
but gone. You will see over time that when those blocked patter ns are gone,
all that is left is the flow of spirit. What is left is the most beautiful thing
that could ever exist.How do you let go of the past? It’s very straightforward. The past
blockages will come up on their own on a daily basis, and when they do—
let them go. There is no game here. It’s quite simple. Outside events cause
stored patterns to come up. Good, let them come up. Things are going to
happen in your life that hit your samskaras. If samskaras are in there, they
are going to get hit. The world is perfect for each person’ s growth, but not
for the reason you think. The world is a perfect fit for everyone’ s growth
because everyon e is looking at the world through their own blockages. It’s
the same as with the Rorschach inkblot test. It’s not that the inkblot is
perfectly tailored to bring up your issues. It’s that you are looking at the
inkblot through the veil of your issues and projecting your issues onto it. That’ s why the same inkblot works fine for diagnosing all patients, just as
the same  world works perfectly  for everyone’ s growth. If you want to see
what is really out there, you need to get rid of your inner issues. Our scientists tell us there’ s really nothing out there—just a bunch of
atoms made up of electrons, neutrons, and protons. Our quantum physicists
go even further . They tell us that there’ s really just a quantum field of pure
energy that has both wave and particle characteristics. The subatomic
particles emanating from this energy field (quarks, leptons, and bosons) are
what make up our entire universe. Though you couldn’ t care less about
these particles, the structures they create come in through your senses, hit
your stored blockages, and it gets uncomfortable in there. You are doing
this; the subatomic particles can’t be doing this. To free yourself, the
moment you notice disturban ce, let go. Don’ t wait until that initial
disturbance takes over your mind. You are perfectly aware that you’re
beginning to get upset before you actually get upset. You feel it. You feel
when something starts to bother you. If you want to grow spiritually , that’s
the moment when you do the work. This is the essence of spiritual growth. If you work on yourself,  you’re
going to create a beautiful place  inside to live. This is more important than
your marriage or your family . It’s more important than your job or your
career . You’re working on yourself directly instead of indirectly . If you
create a beautifu l inner environment, you can have a wonderful  marriage, a
wonderful family life, and a wonderful job. But if you have a mess inside,
you’ll just be trying to use these outer situations to make yourself okay . This
can work for short periods of time, but you don’t want to build your house
on sand. The alternative is when  the stuff starts to come up, the second youfeel that change , relax. Don’ t even wait until you know what it’s about; just
relax and let go. You can work with samskaras at the energetic  level rather
than the mental level. This is much deeper . There are blockages in there, but
they don’t want to be in there. They want to come up and be released. Surrender is the act of letting go instead of resisting by pushing the
blockages away . You will see it’s not always comfortable when these
disturbances from your past come up. The events weren’ t comfo rtable when
they happened— that’s why you pushed them away . Now that they’re trying
to release, are you going to push them back down for another ten years? If
you are not serious about working on yourself, that is what’ s going to
happen. Eventually , you will take it seriously that the purpose of your life is
letting go of these stored patterns. Your blocked past is keeping you from
God, and it’s keeping you from having a beautiful life. The same sincere
effort you put into a relationship  or into earning money , you learn to put into
freeing yourself of these blockages. Remember this: It’s not about
renunciation—it’ s about purification. It’s about cleaning out the inside so
you can have a beautiful life, both outside and in. At some point in your
growth you will recognize that freeing yourself is worth the discomfort of
letting go of past disturbances. Look at what athletes go through for the
Olympics. For years they put themselves through hell to win a gold medal. They feel proud for a while, then what? It becomes a wall ornament. We’re
talking about putting out a fraction of that effort to win everything, and the
fruits of your effort will keep giving over time. Imagine not having those
sensitive blocka ges in there. Imagine being able to enjoy the world as it
unfolds around you. You can begin to appreciate life and wholeheartedly
participate in it. What’ s that worth? This is what happens when you are willing to let go of your past. This
is a very import ant spiritual practice. You should be able to look back on
your past and say, “Thank you.” It doesn’ t matter what happened. Remember , every moment there are trillions and trillions of things going on
in the universe,  but you only get to experience one. How can you not
appreciate the one you got to see? You came down to Earth, and this was the
experience you had. That’ s what your life is: the sequence of experiences
you got to experience. Learn to love and appreciate your past. Fully
embrace it, thank it for teaching you, and let go of any judgment that there
was something wrong with it. Your past is uniquely yours. It happened. It’ssacred. It’s beautiful. Nobody else ever had it, and nobody else ever will. Embrace your past, hug it, kiss it—love it to death.Chapter 33. Meditation
Many practices can help you on your spiritual journey . As you do them,
always remember that your intent is to cease storing blockages. If weekend
retreats help you with the process of letting go, then do them. If a form of
therapy helps you open up and release, then do it. A time-honore d technique
for spiritual growth is meditation. In order to meditate, you have to let go of
your traditional relationship with your mind and emotions. There are many
forms of meditation, but the bottom line of all of them is letting go of your
addiction to focusing on your thoughts. Focus on your breath, count, do
mantra, feel the energy—in other words, focus on anything except the
thoughts arising  in your mind. As you practice meditation you will find that
your ability to let go during daily life is greatly enhanced. Relaxing and
releasing on the meditation cushion is the same process as relaxing and
releasing during  daily activity . Eventually , you will find that you remain
clearer throughout the day—you  are always aware of what is going on both
inside and outside. This clarity of presence is one of the gifts of meditation. There are many meditation techniques. If you don’t have a technique,
you can try this simple practice. Commit to sitting down for a short period
twice a day, preferably at the same times each day. This requires the
discipline to give this inner work priority over everything else. Most people
manage to eat and sleep at certain times each day; they also manage to find
time for their jobs and their relationships. This inner work on yourself is
more important than everything  else you do. In the end, it will affect the
quality of your life more than all the other things you do each day. Many of
today’ s teachers  say that to sit in meditation for fifteen minutes in the
morning and fifteen minutes in the evening is a good starting point. That
alone will create great benefits. Just put aside the time to sit down in a quiet
place.What do you do during that time? What you don’t want to do is expect
to have a spiritual experience. If you expect that, you’re going to get
disappointed and you will stop meditating. You are sitting down for the
same reason you sit down to play your scales on the piano, to learn. If you
sit down  to practice the piano and expect to be playing Beethoven when you
get up, you’re going to quit the piano. The same is true of meditation. The
reason you sit down to meditate  is to learn how to remain conscious inside
while your mind creates thoughts and your heart creates emotions. Whatever
is going on in there is fine—as long as you can objectively observe it. This
is called mindful meditation . Suppose someone says, “I can’t meditate. I sit down, and my mind
doesn’ t shut up. It just keeps talking and talking.” That’ s actually a pretty
good state—you know you’re not your mind. You actually watched your
mind talk for fifteen minutes and noticed that it didn’ t shut up. You don’t
normally notice that. You norma lly get all involved in the thoughts the mind
is creati ng. This time you notic ed them, and you noticed that they did not
stop. That, in and of itself, is a form of witness consciousness. You were
witnessing the thoughts instead of getting lost in them. Don’ t call that a bad
meditation. If you practice the piano and make mistakes, that’s not a bad
practice session. Every practice session is about learning. Likewise, there is
no such thing as a bad meditation—there is just practicing being aware of
what is going on in there.
Living-Untethered-by-Michael-Singer.txt
Summarize the following text section accurately and concisely. Maintain specific details and numerical information, and use anti-repetition mechanisms:

        It is no longer love for somebody; it is just the force of love feeding you
from inside. Once you open your heart to that level, it will always be
beautiful inside, as long as you choose to focus your awareness on the love
instead of what is left of your lower self. We now know what it means to open your heart. At every level, it
means to stop closing it. Your heart’s natural state is open. It’s just like the
water in a stream; its natural state is to flow freely. If somethin g’s blocking
the strea m, don’t waste your time trying to make the water flow around the
blockage—just remove it. The same is true of the flow of shakti through the
heart—just remove the blockages and love will be your natural state. Removing block ages is spiritual purification. That is what life is all
about. As you remove your blockages, the energy will start to flow freely
and love will no longer be something you need or something you look for. At this stage, love has nothing to do with another person or what job you
happen to be doing. You feel love and inspiration all the time. You find that
the natural state of your being is to love everything you do and everyoneyou see. You actually have to hold yourself back to contain your passion for
life because there is such a powerful flow of energy feeding you from
within. This is the state Christ was describing when he said, “Man shall not
live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of
God” (Matt. 4:4). You no longer live solely off what is coming in from
outside. Y our ener gy is coming from within, ef fortlessly, from its source. Your heart is one of the most beautiful things in creation. In time, if
you work on yourself, you will come to appreciate what you’ve been given. Not only can your heart feed you with unconditional love, but it is the
gateway to the higher centers. PART VI: 
The Human Predicament and BeyondChapter 26. The Human Predicament
The most meaningful questions  regarding quality of life are not about what
you own, or what you do, they are about how you’re doing inside. Most
people can relate to a response similar to: “There are moments that are so
beautiful I wouldn’ t trade them  for anything. But there are also moments I
don’t want to last for another second. In general, I work hard to keep it okay
in here. ” Such is the human predicament. For most, that is a fair description of what it’s like to live in there. So
far our discussions have laid the groundwork for understanding why it is
that way. Throughout our lives we’ve stored patterns inside ourselves,
samskaras, based upon past experiences we resisted. We then used these
stored patterns to build a self-co ncept consisting of what we like and don’t
like and how to get events in the world to unfold accordingly. If we succeed
in our ef forts, it’ s generally nice inside; if we don’ t, it’s not. It is important to understand that every external event is the expression
of all the energies that have come together to create that event. When this
flow of the event’ s energy comes into you, it must make its way through
your mind and heart, and then ultimately merge into your consciousness. When you use your will to block an experience from passing through, the
flow of energy has to find a way to keep moving. Energy can’t stand still. Energy is power, and when it hits the resistance of your will it is forced to
circle around itself. That’ s the only way energy can stay in one place. The
circle is such a powerful form in creation. It allows something to keep
moving yet stay stationary. This is how samskaras are formed. These stored
patterns from the past keep trying to release, but you keep pushing them
back down, either consciously or subconsciously. By now, you can see how these samskaras are running your life. To
begin with, they keep coming  up by themselves, and that alone causessuffering. To avoid this, you have to commit a major part of your life to
creating situations that make it comfortable to live inside yourself. You end
up relying on your brilliant analytical mind to figure out how to be okay. Your mind does this by imagin ing what would work for you. It just starts
making up things, playing make -believe. As these imagined thoughts arise,
you can feel how they affect your blockages. You’re trying to see how the
world needs to be to fit you the best. “What if this person was a certain
way. ” “What if that person hadn’t said what they said to me. ” “What if I
change jobs to become the boss so people would have to listen to me instead
of me listening to them. ” Everything going on in your personal mind is
because you’re either trying to match the stored patterns that will make you
feel better or avoid the patterns  that will make you feel worse. Both ways,
the store d patter ns are running your life. Don’ t feel bad about it; it’s that
way for pretty much everyone and always has been. You now have a deeper understanding of what we’ll call the
predicament: you’r e in there, you’r e not okay in there, and you have
developed concepts of how everything needs to be for you to be okay in
there. If you are not careful, you will struggle to satisfy these needs  for the
rest of your life. A perfect example of this burden is the all-too-common
practice of worrying. Why do you worry. There are only two reasons for
worrying: you either worry that you’re not going to get what you want, or
you worry that you’re going to get what you don’t want. This drives you to
work outside in the world to satisfy your needs. But the root of discomfort is
your stored patterns from the past. You are deciding you need to do things
outside in order to appease these patterns that are inside. This does not get
rid of the stored patterns—it actually reinforces your commitment to them. Over time, they will continue to bother you. Let’s say you feel lonely becau se you don’t have someone special in
your life. This sounds perfectly normal, but the truth is having someone
special in your life is your attempt to solve your loneliness. It does not
address the cause of it. It’s just like if you eat poorly and have a
stomachache; you may start looking for the Pepto Bismol. If someone then
asks you why you have a stomachache, please don’t say it’s because you
can’t find the Pepto Bismol. Finding the Pepto Bismol is an attempt to
compensate for your stomachache—it is not related to the cause of it. The
Pepto Bismol may make you feel better temporarily, but unless  you changeyour eating habits, the stomacha che will return. You will find this is true for
many things you do to compensate for your discomforts. Eventually, we wake up and realize that compensating for what’ s
wrong is not good enough—we must solve the root cause of why we are not
okay. There is a state within you that is always filled with love and a sense
of happiness. Yogananda called  it ever-new joy. It’s not a joy you get tired
of; it’s a constan tly upward-flowing, new experience of beauty. This is the
solution to every problem you’re having inside—make it beautiful in there. Instead of thinking that the new job will do it, the new relationship will do
it, or more money and popularity will do it, do the necessary inner work to
make it beautifu l inside. Notice that your problems all start with, “I’m not
okay in here. ” If you were  okay, you wouldn’ t be worrying and
complaining. You’d be in there enjoying the beauty of the experience you’re
having. Enjoying your inner state doesn’ t mean nothing will happen outside. Nobody is saying you don’t interact with the world. You just don’t interact
with the world in an attempt to solve your inner problems. The outside
cannot solve your inner blockages. All the outside world can do is
temporarily allow the energy to go around a blockage or not hit it as much. This creates some relief, but it’ s not going to get rid of the blockage. Working on releasing inner blockages, instead of struggling with life to
get what  you want, can seem like something is being taken away from you. But if what is being taken away from you is causing suffering, this should
not be a proble m. If you’re eating something that makes you sick, and
someone wants to give you food that makes you healthy, you must first stop
eating what makes you sick. This is not an act of renunciation; it’s simple
wisdom. Taking on this inner work does not mean you don’t get married,
have a job, or fully put your heart into whatever you’re doing. You can do
all of that, but not for the purpos e of solving your inner problems. If you are
letting the avoidance of your inner problems define what you’r e doing, all
you’r e doing is expressing your inner problems outside. Say a psychologist
held up a Rorschach inkblot and you got upset about what you saw in it. Is
the solution to tell them to stop holding up that piece of paper. That would
be ridiculous. You would not solve anything. Yet trying to solve inner
problems by rearranging the outside is exactly what everybody is doing. Chapter 27. The Paradigm Shift
Everyone wants to improve  their experience of life. People are always
looking for more joy, love, inspiration, and meaning—the question is how to
achieve this. Let’s do an expe riment. Imagine an all-powerful force has
asked you to write down some things that need to happen for you to totally
enjoy your life. If you’re like most people, you will write down things like a
new house, a special relationship, a higher paying job, and perhaps a
yearlong vacation to your favorite spots around the world. When you’re
done, you will be so excited to turn in that list and get your wishes granted. Unfortunately, you’ll have to wait a moment because we’re going to go
deeper with this experiment. If you examine your list more closely, you will see that it’s not what
you really want. Let’s say you wrote down that you want to get married to
the person you love, and you want a wedding in Maui with birds-of-paradise
surrounding the ceremony. After the wedding, you want to live in a
beautiful, mortgage-free house overlooking the ocean with two fancy cars in
the driveway. It’s the dream you’ve had since childhood. The problem is
that’s not what you really want. Your mind has played a trick on you. Say
you have the wedding, the house, and the cars, just like you wanted them,
but your new spouse turns out to be a real jerk. You are treated terribly, and
it’s obvious right from the start that this is going to be the worst marriage in
human history. On top of that, you’re Catholic, so you can’t get divorced. Do you still want that wedding. Unlikely. So, it wasn’ t really the marriage
you wanted. You wanted the beautiful experience that you thought the
marriage was going to give you. So why didn’ t you ask for that. The same thing holds true for the new job, the million dollars in the
bank, and the respect of other people. Fine, you can have it all. But what if it
creates so much stress and worry that you’re miserable. You’d wish youcould have your old job back. You didn’ t really want the job, the money, or
the acceptance—you wanted what you thought they would give you. You
wanted happiness, joy, and a sense of total well-being. How about a constant
inner state of love, beauty, and inspiration at the highest level you’ve ever
experienced. Why didn’ t you ask for that. What you did was allow your strongest past experiences to define what
you think will make you feel happy. It doesn’ t work that way. There are
plenty of people who have what you wrote down on your list, and they’re
not always happy. There’ s nothing you ever experienced that left you totally
fulfilled for any length of time. You have always needed more. Your entire
life you’ve been saying, “If I get this thing I want, I’ll be okay, and if I don’t
have to get what I don’t want, I’ll be fine. ” For your whole life, there’ s been
a list. When will you realize that doesn’ t work. If you’ve been doing
something every minute of your entire life, and you’re still doing it,
obviously it doesn’ t work. Why not go directly to the root and say, “What I
want is to feel love and joy. What I want is every moment of every day to
feel complete well-being as high as I’ve ever felt before, and to be inspired
by everything I do. ” Now there’ s a list. Let’ s turn that one in. The interesting result of our experiment is that it has led us away from
worldliness and into the essence of spirituality. Not that worldliness is a
negative term— it just means you think the answer is in the world. You think
the answer lies in what’ s unfolding in front of you. It isn’t wrong to go to
the world for what you think you want—it simply doesn’ t work. You’re
trying to find something outside that matches your “samskara of the day. ”
Once you get what you want, or avoid what you don’t want, that will no
longer be your major desire or greatest fear. Once that one’s out of the way,
there will always be the next issue coming to the surface. Eventually, you wake up. You realize that you want to feel love. Not
that you want to love someone or have someone love you—you just want to
feel love all the time. If your love is not dependent on anything or anyone, it
can last forever. We call that unconditional love. The great yoga master,
Meher Baba, taught that love must spring spontaneously from within. It
cannot be coerced, and it cannot be dependent upon anything. That’ s what
pure love is. Otherwise, you have a temporary situation that just happens to
match your stored patterns. Unfortunately, this will not last. You’ve got lots
of samskaras in there. In addition, if you’re in a relationship, the other
person has lots of patterns of their own, quite different from yours. This iswhy relationshi ps are so complicated. Not only are each person’ s past
samskaras different, but both people have different experiences every day to
add to the collection. If somebody yelled at your partner at work, they’re
different when they come home than if somebody was nice to them. You, of
course, had your daily experiences. If your feeling of love is dependent
upon your partner behaving a certain way when they come home, you’re in
trouble and so are they. You have enough difficulty dealing with your own
samskaras; now you have to deal with theirs also. Don’ t get scared. This doesn’ t mean you don’t have meaningful
relationships. There are beautiful relationships, and they can last forever. In
fact, they can get more and more beautiful all the time. But they are not
samskara relationships—they are not based on the world outside matching
your inner patterns. They are based on unconditional love. Once love is
always flowing freely inside of you, you will be pleased to share it with
another person. Such love is not based on needs or expectations—it’ s based
on pure love wishing to express itself, unconditionally. How do you reach such a state of unconditional love and well-being. Instead of trying to get the world to match your blockages, you work on
letting go of the blockages. That’ s the secret of real spiritual growth. That is
the real paradig m shift. If you don’t have the samskaras, nothing will be
blocking your inner energy flow. You will feel love, joy, and inspiration all
the time. If you are willing to experience the moment unfolding in front of
you, you will have the opportunity to be inspired by everything. The simple
fact that things exist will be suf ficient to move you. You only have two choices: either you devot e your life to getting the
world to match your samskaras,  or you devote your life to letting go of your
samskaras. If you choose the latter, you don’t end up with both a worldly
life and a spiritual life—you end up with one life. Work, meditation retreats,
taking out the garbage, sweeping the floor, driving, showering, they’re all
the same. The same thing is going on in all your activities—you are letting
go of your blockages. It’s equally beneficial to be letting go of your
blockages at work, when you’re  driving the kids to soccer, picking up the
groceries, or doing whatever you’re doing. Every single moment of your
life, you are either naturally enjoying what is or letting go of what’ s keeping
you from  enjoying what is. If you let go of the wants and fears that are
limiting you, you’ll always be okay. Letting go of yourself, instead of
serving yourself, is the real paradigm shift. Chapter 28. Working with the Heart
We interact with life every wakin g moment of our time on Earth. If we are
committed to growing spiritually, we must learn to use that interaction to
clear out our blockages. This inevitably returns us to the heart since we store
blockages there. As we’ve discussed, your heart experiences myriad
different emotions and feelin gs based on the sam skaras you have
accumulated. Your inability to handle the breadth of these emotions keeps
you locked in the human predicament of controlling life in order to be okay. If you wish to break free and live unconditionally, you must learn to clear
out your heart. The purification  of your heart begins with being grateful that you have
one. Your heart is like an orches tra. Have you ever watched a movie without
the score. It’ s dead. It doesn’ t have any juice to it. When something happens
in your life, the orchestra of your heart begins to play. It adds richness to
your life by playing high notes and low notes that are generally  appropriate
to the events unfolding before you. Your heart is not an obstacle or a
punishment. Your heart is a beautiful gift. Would you rather not have one
and live your life without feelings. Just as the human mind is something extraordinary that can take you
beyond the limit of your senses, so the human heart is even more
extraordinary. It can play notes  from one end of the spectrum to another. Your heart can go from absolute  ecstasy to deep pain and sorrow in a matter
of secon ds. It can raise you to heights where you feel like angel wings are
carrying you to heaven, and it can bring you down to your darkest hour. Your heart is capable of doing all of that, without any effort of your own. What an amazin g instrument you carry inside of you. The trouble is you’re
not okay with the full range of your heart. You want to control your heart so
it only plays the notes you can handle. Spirituality is about learning to thank your heart for the beautiful
expressions it is creating within you. Unfortunately, you’re going to find out
that you can’t do that all the time. There are vibrations your heart is capable
of making that you’re not willin g to experience. It’s as though you are not
evolved enough to handle the fullness of your heart, so you resist it. Just like
you resist the world when it is not how you want, you resist your heart when
you’re not comfortable with its expressions. As you expand and grow spirit ually, your range of comfort with the
outside world will become wider and wider, allowing you to handle more of
the moments passing before you. The same is true with your heart. As you
grow spiritually, through honoring your day-to-day experiences, you will
learn to become more comfortab le with your heart. As a child, the first time
you experienced fear or jealousy you might have been overwhelmed and
had difficulty holding yourself together. Over time, you became more
accustomed to these emotions and at least tried to deal with them. Perhaps
the best you could do at first was control your emotions and put on the
outward appeara nce of being okay. Though that’s not necessarily so healthy,
it is better than losing yourself completely and letting emotions overcome
you. If you let an unbridled emotion act out externally, it has the power to
change the course of your life—not usually for the better. Little by little, as you learn to accept that emotions are a reality  of life,
they will come and go if you let them. This is spiritual evolution. Just as our
bodies have evolved through eons of challenging outer experiences, so our
souls evolve through the fires of inner experiences. It is not that a great
being does not have emotions; it is that they are at peace  with their
emotions. They can handle the various changes their heart goes through. If
somebody you know dies, it’s natural to feel a sense of loss. You’re going to
feel a certain amount of sadness if you cared about the person. That is your
heart expressing itself in harmony with what’ s happenin g. Like an
instrument playing something beautiful, your heart is composing a song of
sadness for you. The trouble is you’re not okay with that. Eventually you
will realize that the emotion itself is not the problem—the problem is you’re
not able to hand le the emotion. We come back to the same place again and
again: Do you want to devote your life to controlling the world so your heart
never feels emotions you can’t handle. Or do you want to devote yourself to
the evolutionary work of becoming comfortable with your heart. Just as we found  with the mind, if you want to work with your heart,
understand why it is the way it is. You may have noticed it can be sensitive,
volatile, and difficult to live with. The heart is this way because you didn’ t
handle the natur al emotions it created, you resisted them, which stored their
energy inside you. Now you’re in trouble. It’s bad enough that you pushed
away thought patterns, but you’ve also pushed away the vibrat ions of your
heart. These blocked energy patterns are making a complete mess of your
heart. The heart has become out of balance, and it has stopped opening
when it needs to express healthy emotions. Let’s say someone does
something that makes you feel fear. There are times when fear is a normal,
healthy reaction to outer events. But you aren’ t able to handle the emotion,
so you suppress it to get it out of your consciousness. Later, you hear
something bad happened to that person. Instead of feeling comp assion, you
feel relieved. Your emotions are no longer in harmony with outer situations,
instead they are releasing the blocked ener gies from your past experiences. Spiritual growth is about fixing the heart and returning it to a state of
well-being. It should be clear by now that the problem is not outside in the
world; the probl em is your inabi lity to handle your heart’ s full expression of
the world. Learning to handle these expressions is the solution, and it is the
essence of spiritual growth. Feelings of loss or fear or anger in your heart
are just objects of consciousness that Self is experiencing. They cannot
harm you, unless you resist them. They actually make you richer because
you experienced them. Every experien ce makes you a greater person if you
don’t resist it. Come to peace with the expressions of your heart. It may seem
impossible to be comfortable with emotions that are uncomfortable, but the
truth is you already have experience doing that. Take Shakespeare’ s play
Romeo and Juliet. As a tragedy, it certainly is not fun. Let’s say a
Shakespeare troupe comes through town and performs Romeo and Juliet. They do such a good job that you cry with a level of relief you’ve hardly
ever felt before. The performance was completely heart-wrenching. What do
you do. You tell all your friends to go see it. You say, “I cried for three days
afterwards. It was unbelievable. It touched my heart so deeply. I’ve never
felt such pure sadness. I want to see it again, and you all should come with
me. ” Well, if a tragedy even close to that happened in real life, you would
not be praising the depth of emotion—you would be scarred for life. That’ sthe difference between acceptin g the expression of your heart  rather than
resisting it. Creation has put a full orchestra inside you, free of charge. This makes
life so much more interesting and vibrant. Learn to enjoy your heart by
ceasing to resist it. It’s not about losing yourself in your emotion s. It’s about
being willing to experience them in the same way you experience a
beautiful sunset. You simply let the sunset come in. You’re  not doing
anything. You are simply allowing awareness to be aware of what is in front
of it. Sometimes it’s a beautiful sunset, sometimes it’s a sense of loss. The
process is exactly the same: consciousness is experiencing an object of
consciousness. You are not clinging to it or suppressing it. You are simply
experiencing it. If you cling to the object, it stays. If you suppress it, it stays. If it stays,
it will distort reality. You are no longer open to life—you have a bias for or
against certain things. These samskaras are powerful packets  of energy. They distort your perception of life, and you constantly pay the price. When
thoughts and emotions are suppressed, they rot down there. They will pop
up at different times and cause serious problems in your life. This is what
Freud taught, and it was also taught thousands of years earlier in the
Upanishads. Learning to make peace with your heart is a major step toward
extricating yourself from the very human predicament we all find ourselves
in. Chapter 29. Neither Suppression nor Expression
Though it is true that you don’t want to suppress emotions, you also don’t
want them running your life. There is a sacred place between suppression
and expression—pure experience. In this state, you are neither  suppressing
the energy internally nor expres sing it externally. You are simply willing to
experience the energy coming from your heart and mind. The sorrow of
death and the joy of birth are both coming up inside and feedin g your soul. They are touchi ng you all the way to the core of your being. You are not
touching them— they are touching you. There’ s nothing to do about it. It is
all simply a gift God is giving you. The mind is free to think; the heart is
free to feel. All of this leaves you at peace, in a state of gratitude. This is the
way life is meant to be. Yet you can’t handle certain thoughts and emotions. You resist them,
and then you build a mental world around what you have stored in there. In
this state, you can only feel gratitude if you get what you want or avoid
what you don’t want. Eventual ly you wake up and realize that you have
work to do, real work. That work is not outside; it is inside. That work
becomes your spiritual practice. To get what you really want—joy, love,
enthusiasm, and passion for every moment of your life—you need to get
these stored patterns out. The problem is that while you might see this
intellectually, in a very short period of time your mind is going to fight
back. This is because the inner path doesn’ t fit the mind’ s habitual patterns
for how to be okay. The only data the mind currently has is based upon its past
experiences, so the mind always thinks it’s right. This is part of the
predicament. Please understand that your mind will always think it’s right. The mind is not dumb; it knows what it experienced. But it doesn’ t know
what it didn’ t experience—which is an infinitely larger body of knowledge. This is why the wise sage Lao Tzu reflected that a wise man does not argue
—for what purpose. You have your mindset, and another person has their
mindset. All their lifelong data says one thing, and your totally different
lifelong data sees it differently. There’ s nothing you’re going to do about
that, except be humble enough to realize that at any given moment the data
you are taking in is less than. 00001 percent of what’ s going on everywhere. It’s meaningless ; it rounds to zero. In essence, you’ve had a whole bunch of
zero-breadth experiences that add up to zero. The personal mind is so caught
up in itself, it will never want to look at that truth. Deep spiritual teachings embrac e that truth. They ask you to look at the
world in front of you and realize it took billions of years for that exact
moment to manifest before you. Accept that. Honor that. Surrender to that. This begins by first accepting reality, not resisting it. It’s not about doing or
not doing anyth ing—it’ s about surrendering your initial resista nce to what
is. You see what ’s there, and then let go of all the stuff that comes up due to
your stored samskaras. Inevitably, your mind is going to start talking about
likes and dislike s. Just don’t listen. Why would you listen to that. It’s just
your personal blockages superimposed on reality. You can now understand what you are accepting and surrendering to:
reality. What else is there. Reality is truth, at least for the moment. It is
what’ s real versus past mental impressions that are simply leftover thoughts. The way to deal with these mental impressions is to realize they are
perfectly natura l. Reality is going to come in, it’s going to hit your
blockages, and your mind is going to talk about it. Fine, be that as it may—
you don’t have to listen. It’s that simple. If you know your mind doesn’ t
know what it’s talking about, why listen. As we’ve seen, the personal mind
can’t know anything except for the data it has collected. That data is nothing
compared to the universal set of data it has missed every moment. The data
the mind has in there is what we call statistically insignificant. That’ s why
the mind changes its mind so often. Give it one more experience, and it will
view things dif ferently. Interesting that we keep listening to it anyway. A wise person doesn’ t renounce the world; they honor the reality that’s
unfolding in front of them. Likewise, a wise person doesn’ t renounce the
use of their mind ; they just don’t listen to the personal mind because it’s lost
in thoughts about itself. The personal mind is not going to solve your
problems. It’s doing the best it can with the limited data it has, but its efforts
don’t generally work out so well. Regarding the heart, a wise person allows the heart to freely express
itself inwardly but does not get lost in it. Some people say, “Follow your
heart. ” They must not be referri ng to the personal heart because it’s all over
the place on a day-to-day basis. Fortunately, there is a higher heart to follow. Once energy flows past the middle of the fourth chakra, it enters a deeper
heart that doesn’ t change, ever. There’ s a constant upward flow of beautiful
energy. It brings waves of bliss so powerful you can hardly focus outwardly. It wafts over you, and you settle  back into this beautiful peace that surpasses
all unde rstanding. The peace you have because you got what you wanted—
that’s understandable. This peace comes over you and stays for no reason,
completely unconditionally—that’ s what your higher heart has to offer you. This is the gift of your spiritual heart. To expe rience your spiritual heart, you must learn to rise above your
personal heart. The personal heart is very strong and very emotional. It’s not
easy to pierce through the personal heart, but it is possible. First, check to
see if your heart’ s expressions are based on current reality or the thoughts in
your mind. Thoughts of what went wrong in the past, and what might go
wrong in the future, create emotions that are out of tune with reality. There
is no end to the mess this can create in your heart. Since the energies that
build up in the heart must have a channel for release, these emotions will
spill over into your external life and can create quite a disturbance. If your emotions are in harmony  with the reality unfolding before you,
they are generally healthy and support the quality of your life. When both
your heart and mind are in harmony with reality, energies don’t release
outwardly because nothing is blocking them. The power of these unblocked
energies passing through the lower heart can then be utilized to rise into the
higher parts of the heart. Because you are neither suppressing nor
expressing, the deeper spiritu al states begin to unfold. You can still
contribute to what’ s happening outside, but your actions are not personal in
nature. They are simply beautiful moment-to-moment interactions with
reality that are serving the flow of life. Reaching this state requires clearing out the samskaras that are
blocking the energy flow and not putting any more in there. To do this, learn
to handle your heart. This takes practice, just like you practice the piano, a
sport, or anything else. We will explore this process in great depth in the
following chapters. What it requires is a change in attitude: You begin to
accept that things are going to happen, they’re going to hit your heart, andyour mind is going to create thoughts to release the built-up energies. You
commit to being okay with this process. This attitude of acceptance is very
different from suppressing the emotions and thoughts or letting yourself get
lost in them. Just honor what the heart is doing and learn to sit back and
relax behind it. Emotions can become like a breeze blowing across your face
—nothing to do except experience the experience. Appreciate the work your heart is doing to push out the samskaras you
have collected over the years. Your heart will do the work—all  you need to
do is allow the purification to take place. At first, it’s not easy to relax in the
face of what you’ve spent your life avoiding. But it is certainly worth it
because the reward is love, freedom, and constant inspiration. After all,
you’ve already been through so much pain for so little gain. The bottom line is that you’re a beautiful being. You’re a being of great
love, light, and inspiration. You are made in the image of God. The god who
created the whole universe exists inside of you, but you don’t realize that. You’re lost thinking that the world outside has to be a certain way for you to
be okay. This is the human  predicament, and nothing is going to
meaningfully change until you learn to live from a deeper place. To get out
of this predicam ent, you’ve got some work to do, and the work is on
yourself. To quote Rumi, the great thirteenth-century Persian poet,
“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise,
so I am changing myself. ”PART VII: 
Learning to Let GoChapter 30. Techniques for Freeing Yourself
Logically, it doesn’ t make sense  to store inside of you the experiences that
bothered you the most. If you do that, you will build your own internal
house of horrors and will struggle to be comfortable inside. This is the root
cause of all anxiety, tension, and psychological disturbances. This cannot be
fixed until you deal with it at its root. As long as you are holding inside of
you that which bothered you ten or twenty years ago, you are going to
suffer. Once your intent is to use every moment of your life to free yourself,
the question becomes how to do that. Believe it or not, your sincere intent to
be free is more important than any technique you can use. You’re in there,
and if you understand these teachings, you realize you don’t want blockages
in there. They make life extremely difficult. So you commit to letting them
go. Traditionally, there are some powerful techniques for freeing yourself
during your everyday life, and we will discuss three of them in very broad
terms. The first technique is called positive thinking. Yogananda used to teach
that every time you have a negative thought, replace it with a positive one. This is a very basic and useful technique for bringing about change. It is
based on the two types of thoughts we discussed earlier: those created
willfully and those that happen automatically. If you notice your mind
giving you a hard time while you’re driving—those are automatically
generated thoug hts. You are not purposely creating them. Now try purposely
creating positive  thoughts about the situation. If the person in front of you is
driving much slower than the speed limit, you might say inside your mind,
“Wow. What an opportunity to relax. I can’t be in a rush becaus e the person
in front of me won’ t let me. I guess it’s time to watch my breath, calm
down, and learn to enjoy the experience. ” You’re welcome to do that ineveryday life. You’re not fighting with your mind or pushin g away the
negative thoughts. You’re simply replacing the automatically generated
thoughts with willfully created  ones. Don’ t fight, just replace. It doesn’ t
matter if the negative thoughts continue in the background; just focus on the
positive though ts you are willfully creating. Over time, your willfully
created thoughts will replace the automatically generated ones. This is a
very healthy thing to do. Simply apply your will to offset or neutralize the
effect of your samskaras. Over time, this will develop a more positive mind,
which is a much nicer environment to live in. The next technique is very traditional and is broadly referre d to as
mantra. In the most general sense, “mantra” means training your mind to
repeat a simple word or phrase  over and over until it gets stuck in your
mind. Just like a song can get stuck in your mind, a mantra can get stuck in
your mind. We all experience that our minds can work in layers. You can be
paying attention to someone speaking, and there can still be thoughts going
on “in the back of your mind. ” Your mind is so brilliant it can multitask. It
can create thoughts at multiple levels, and you can be aware of these layers
simultaneously. Mantra is offering you a layer of mind that is always there
—balanced, pleasant, a safe place to rest. As the mantra effortlessly goes on
in the backgroun d, it gives you the choice of which layer of mind you want
to focus on. When the habitual thoughts come up from your samskaras, you
don’t have to fight with them or even replace them. You just shift your
consciousness onto the mantra. With positive thinking, you are continually
using your will to neutralize negative thoughts with positive  ones. With
mantra, you are simply using your will to shift the focus of your
consciousness from the samskara-generated thoughts to the mantra. Mantra is a gift. It’s like a built-in vacation. If you do the work
necessary to instill the mantra in a layer of your mind, it will change your
life. First off, the mantra does not have to be a traditional Sanskrit mantra
like Om Namah Shivaya or Om Mani Padme Hum. It can be a name or word
for God, like Jesus, Adonai, or Allah. In fact, a very powerful mantra is
simply God, God, God. If all these seem too religious for you, a great thing
to have going in your mind is: I’m alwa ys fine, I’m always fine, I’m always
fine. How nice woul d it be to be reminded of any of these throughout your
day. It is not difficult to instill the mantra in your mind—all it takes is
repetition. You can start practicing mantra during the time you put asideeach morning and evening for your spiritual practices. Even just fifteen
minutes will go a long way. A good technique is to tie the mantra to your
breath going in and out. Then during the day, come back to it whenever
certain events occur. For example, you could say a few repetitions of the
mantra before you pick up the phone and after you put it down. It just takes
a mome nt, and you are making a major investment in becoming a more
conscious, cente red being. Do it whenever you get into or out of your car, as
well as when you enter or leave your house or office. No one will even
notice. It is just a moment’ s pause that will change everything over time. Before you eat, say the mantra. If you are eating by yourself, you can have
fun inwardly repeating the mantra while you chew your food. Make it a
game—how many recurring events in your everyday life can you set up to
remind you to practice the mantra. Here’ s a good use of your smartphone:
set up a repeatin g reminder to do the mantra. Over time, you will train your
mind to always have the mantra going on in the background during your
daily life. Even if you have done this work on yourself, a fateful day will
inevitably arrive. Something will happen and your emotions or thoughts will
start to get upset. You’ll be on the verge of losing it, but the mantra will
catch your attention just enough to give you the choice—go down or go up. You immediately shift your awareness off the mess and onto the mantra, and
your life changes. The mantra does not stop you from having constructive
thoughts; it just sits there as a safety net to catch you if you start to fall. When you have some time to actually rest back into the mantra, you will
become filled with peace and well-being. It’s like a vacation from the
personal mind. How would you like it if the moment you sat down, tension
and stress melted away as you fell back into the lap of the mantra. All this
is available to you—free of charge. Just be willing to make the investment
in yourself. Notice that with mantra you are learning to surrender the hold
that the personal mind has on you. The final technique we will discuss for freeing yourself from yourself
is generally termed witness consciousness,  and it includes the powerful
practice of relaxing and releasin g. Witness consciousness is deeper than the
other techniques because, in the end, it doesn’ t require working with the
mind. Positive thinking involve s creating positive thoughts to replace the
negative ones. Mantra involves creating a layer of mind that provides a
peaceful and steady environmen t for rising above the lower layers. Witnessconsciousness is simply noticing that you are noticing what the mind is
doing. You don’t need to interact with the mind. You don’t need to do
anything. Just be the one who notices that the mind is creating thoughts, and
you are aware of them. In order to do that, you can’t be disturbed by the
thoughts that are being created. If the thoughts bother you, you will leave
the seat of objective observati on and try to change the mind. To truly
achieve witness consciousness, you must be willing to let the thoughts be as
they may and simply be aware that you are aware of them. If you want to experience true witness consciousness, just look in front
of you. Do you see what’ s there. Don’ t think about it, just see it. That’ s
witness conscio usness. It’s just seeing. You are simpl y witnessing what’ s
there. Now, turn your head and look around. Practice the imme diacy of just
seeing. Notice that your thoughts often have something to say about what
you see. Can you simply notice these thoughts like you noticed what was
outside, or do you have to do something about them. Thoughts,  emotions—
they come up by themselves. Good, now simply notice them. When you reach the state wher e you can observe what is going on in
the mind and heart, you’ll notic e that you’re not always comf ortable with
what’ s happening inside. What is more, there is the tendency to want to
willfully do something about it. That’ s very natural. If you want to willfully
do something, here’ s what you do—relax. This is certainly not the intuitive
thing to do. You want to prote ct yourself from the inner disturbance by
getting rid of it. That struggle just makes it worse. You are capable of
simply relaxing and not engagi ng with the disturbed energies. At first this
seems impossibl e because you’re trying to get the disturbance itself to relax. Don’ t do that; You relax. You who notices the disturbance are not the
disturbance. You are witnessing the disturbance, and you are welcome to
relax in the face of it. You are in the seat of awareness, way back inside, watching the dance
of mind and heart. It’s a very natural place, this place back inside. If you
don’t get pulled into the thoughts and emotions, you can just relax and
notice. Don’ t think about it. The moment you see what’ s going on—just
relax. Relax your shoulders, relax your tummy, relax your buttocks, and
most importantly, relax your heart. Even if the heart itself won’ t relax, the
area around your heart will. You have willpower in there, use it. Here’ s what
you do with your will: relax and release. First relax through your initial
resistance, then release the disturbed energy that comes up. When you dothis, you are actually providing space for the release of the samskaras
causing the disturbance. You are giving them more room to release because
you’re not struggling with the thoughts and emotions they are creating. Eventually there  is no struggle,  as you have created distance between the
seat of Self and the noisy mind. To be free, you need distance between those
two—subject and object. Spirituality is not about changing the objects you’re looking at. Spirituality is about accepting the objects but not getting sucke d into them. It’s about being detached and feeling at peace with whatever your mind and
heart are doing. When you are totally comfortable with everything that can
come from your mind and heart, they will stop creating inner disturbance. You don’t know that yet, but it’s true. People often ask whether the mind
will keep talking once you are at peace with it. The mind is talking because
you’re not okay, and it’s trying  to figure out how to be okay  by getting
things the way you want. Once you’re okay in there, there’ s much less to
talk about. Whe n you’re in the presence of someone you love, you’re not
thinking about how to find love. You’re just experiencing the beauty of the
love. Likewise, when you are okay in there, you will not be thinking about
how to be okay. You will just be relaxing into the quiet state of peaceful
well-being. This requires that you be okay with your thoughts and emotions. Relaxing in their presence is a good start to being okay with them. If you
can’t willfully relax in the face of thoughts and emotions, you will have to
do something about them. You will get pulled down into them and attempt
to do something  to fix what is bothering you. Better to simply relax and
allow the samsk aras the room they need to release. When you relax back
into witness consciousness, you are surrendering to the reality of what’ s
happening. First relax, then lean away. You who notices are at a distance from
what you are noticing. You don’t have to think about it. Just notice that what
you are seeing in there, thoughts and emotions, are all distinct and at a
distance from you. Now, lean away from their noise. The mind and
emotions make noise. That is not a problem. Just relax and lean away from
the noise. When you lean away from the noise, you are creating distance
between You (the consciousn ess) and the objects of consciousness (the
thoughts and emotions). In that distance, the samskaras have room to release
their energy. It’s going to get uncomfortable, and that’s natural. The
discomfort you are experienci ng is the discomfort of samskaras beingreleased. They were stored with pain; they are going to release with pain—if
you let them. This is the pain that ends all pain. Chapter 31. Low-Hanging Fruit
The best way to let go of stored pocke ts of pain is to practice. Just as you
practice scales to learn the piano or practice a sport to get good at it, so you
practice letting go to learn how to do it. You start with simple things. We
call these the low-hanging fruit. There are many situations each day when
you create inner disturbance for absolutely no good reason. Bothering
yourself about the car in front of you does no good at all. It only makes you
tense and uptigh t. The cost-benefit analysis is one-hundred-perc ent cost and
zero benefit. Letting go of that tendency should be easy, but it’s not. You
will find that you’re in the habit of insisting and demanding that things
should be the way you want, even if it’s irrational. Things are the way they
are because of all the influences that made them that way. You are not going
to change the weather by complaining about it. If you are wise, you will
start to change your reactions to reality instead of fighting with reality. By
doing so, you will change your relationship with yoursel f and with
everything else. Start with the small things to prove to yourself that you are capable of
doing this. Working with yourself at this level is practicing letting go. Once
you are able to relax and release through the relatively easy stuff, you will
find you are better able to deal with the bigger situations. You are training
yourself to deal with yourself. Lots of differen t experiences in life fall into the low-hanging fruit
category. A good practice for letting go can be found in your relationship
with the weather. Believe it or not, you can use the weather for tremendous
spiritual growth. There’ s alway s weather out there: hot, cold, windy, dry,
humid, and everything in between. The weather has nothing to do with you. It has to do with the forces that are causing it to be the way it is. If you can’t
handle the weat her without getting disturbed, how are you going to handleanything else. Complaining about the weather is a perfect example of
something that has a one-hundred-percent cost and zero benefit. What do
you gain by complaining about the weather. Nothing, except to get upset. “I
couldn’ t handle the heat today. It was terrible. I was sweating. I hated it. ”
Congratulations, you didn’ t have a nice day, and it didn’ t change the
weather one bit. Eventually, you start to work with yourself. When your mind
complains about the weather, don’t fight with it. If you want, you can use
positive thinking. For example, when the mind starts up with, “It’s hot; I’m
so hot,” instead of getting into that, ask yourself, “How did it get hot. What
does that mean ‘it’s hot’. ” Use your mind to remind you that there’ s a star
ninety-three million miles away that is so hot you can actually feel its heat. That’ s amazing. Use your higher mind to appreciate and respect reality
instead of complaining about it. When you do this, you are willfully using
your mind for something positive and constructive. Y ou are raising yourself. Though this practice of positive  thinking is beneficial, ultimately, what
you need to do is relax and release past the disturbance. If you bother to
relax and release, you won’ t be so hot. After all, You in there can’t get hot—
you can only experience that the body is hot. You are way back inside,
witnessing the experience of heat. If you relax and release back into your
seat of consciou sness, you are relaxing away from the part of you that’s
complaining. There is definitely complaining going on in the mind, no
reason to deny that. But if you relax and lean away from where the noise is
coming from, you will be leaning back into the seat of Self. Two things happen when you relax and release. One, you stop fighting
with the causes of your disturbe d mind, and that gives them room to release. Two, you are actually relaxing back into the seat of Self, and you will grow
spiritually. If you will do that with the weather, if you will do that with the
car in front of you, if you will do that with all these low-hanging fruit
situations, you’l l grow every single day. The way to know that you are
working with low-hanging fruit is that the situation is resolved simply by
letting go inside. There is nothing else to do about it. You were the only
problem, and once you let go of creating the problem, the problem is solved. If you accept the weather, there’ s nothing else to do about it. If you accept
the myri ad meaningless things you have decided to bother yourself about,
there’ s nothing else to do about them. That’ s how you identify the low-
hanging fruit. In contrast, if you let go of your reactions to a situation and there is still
something in front of you to deal with, then you have some work to do
outside. If you lose your job and work with letting go of your negative
reaction, that’s good, but you still need to go out and look for a new job. Letting go does not absolve you of your responsibilities in life. You are not
letting go of life, you are letting  go of your personal reactions to life. Your
personal reactio ns do not help you deal with situations in a constructive
manner—they actually cloud your ability to make good decisions. When all is said and done, you’re going to find the majority of your
inner disturbance falls into the category of low-hanging fruit. The only
reason there’ s a problem is because you defined it that way. You are the
problem, and that can’ t be solved outside. It can only be solved inside. Chapter 32. The Past
You’re driving down the street and a billboard reminds you of something
that troubled you in the past. Perhaps it was an event that happened eight
years ago. What is the benefit of getting disturbed by that. You just ruined
your day for no good reason. Just because something bothered  you in the
past doesn’ t mean it should still be bothering you. After all, it’s no longer
happening. You think that since you don’t want to go through it again, you
need to remember how bad it was. That’ s like saying you need a doggy bag
for the food that made you sick so you can take it home, taste it each
morning, and remember how sick it made you. You would never do that
with bad food, so why do you do it with bad experiences. We are now ready to pay attenti on to another area that is very ripe for
spiritual growth, your past. You probably won’ t agree at first, but it also
falls under one-hundred-percent cost and zero benefit. Of what possible
benefit could it be to still be bothered by something that happened before
that isn’t happen ing now. It’s already over. There is zero benefit to being
bothered by something that is not even happening. On the other hand, there
is certai nly an amazing cost: your entire mental, emotional, and even
physical health. Instead, if you let experiences pass completely through you when they
are actually happening, they will touch you to the core of your being and
become part of you without leaving any scars. You will simply be able to
learn from the experience and grow. Once you fully digest an experience,
you will natural ly know how to deal with it should it happen again. If you
touched a hot stove when you were a child, you don’t have to keep the
painful experience in the forefront of your mind. You don’t need to always
remind yourself that stoves are hot and can hurt you. If you do that, you willhave made a samskara out of the experience instead of simply learning from
it. Don’ t worry, you will know darn well not to touch a hot stove again. Similarly, once you have learne d a sport or a musical instrument, you
don’t have to keep thinking about how to play—it becomes second nature. That means it has integrated into your whole being. It becomes totally
natural, and you never need to think about it again as you do it. That is how
all your past learning experiences should be, effortlessly there when you
actually need them, never bothering you when you don’t. If you process
your experiences properly, they will always be there to serve you, never to
haunt you. Perhaps this exercise will help you understand what it means to fully
process somethi ng instead of having to pass it through your thinking mind. Just for a moment, glance at the scene in front of you. How hard was it for
you to see it. Obviously, it took no effort at all; you just instantly saw it. What if the finest artist in the world called you on the phone  wanting to
paint what you saw, right then. How long would it take you to describe
everything to them. We’re talking about every color shade, reflection of
light, grain variation in the wood, every single detail. That would be a very
long phone call. Yet you saw it all in a billionth of a second. That is the
difference betw een consciousn ess just seeing versus the mind trying to
process what is seen. This difference holds true for all life’s experiences. When you have an
experience, it can simply come in and touch consciousness directly. It
doesn’ t need the mind to judge it as desirable or undesirable and then store
it accordingly. Just as you were able to see the scene in front of you in full
detail without “thinking” about it, so you can integrate the fullness of your
experiences into your being without having to block them in your mind. There’s nothing richer than a fully processed experience integrated into
your whole being. How many incid ences from your past would you like to truly be done
with rather than having to deal with them mentally and emotionally, long
after they are ancient history. In fact, to achieve deep spirituality, your
unfinished past cannot be inside of you. It must be gone—not suppressed,
but gone. You will see over time that when those blocked patter ns are gone,
all that is left is the flow of spirit. What is left is the most beautiful thing
that could ever exist. How do you let go of the past. It’s very straightforward. The past
blockages will come up on their own on a daily basis, and when they do—
let them go. There is no game here. It’s quite simple. Outside events cause
stored patterns to come up. Good, let them come up. Things are going to
happen in your life that hit your samskaras. If samskaras are in there, they
are going to get hit. The world is perfect for each person’ s growth, but not
for the reason you think. The world is a perfect fit for everyone’ s growth
because everyon e is looking at the world through their own blockages. It’s
the same as with the Rorschach inkblot test. It’s not that the inkblot is
perfectly tailored to bring up your issues. It’s that you are looking at the
inkblot through the veil of your issues and projecting your issues onto it. That’ s why the same inkblot works fine for diagnosing all patients, just as
the same  world works perfectly  for everyone’ s growth. If you want to see
what is really out there, you need to get rid of your inner issues. Our scientists tell us there’ s really nothing out there—just a bunch of
atoms made up of electrons, neutrons, and protons. Our quantum physicists
go even further. They tell us that there’ s really just a quantum field of pure
energy that has both wave and particle characteristics. The subatomic
particles emanating from this energy field (quarks, leptons, and bosons) are
what make up our entire universe. Though you couldn’ t care less about
these particles, the structures they create come in through your senses, hit
your stored blockages, and it gets uncomfortable in there. You are doing
this; the subatomic particles can’t be doing this. To free yourself, the
moment you notice disturban ce, let go. Don’ t wait until that initial
disturbance takes over your mind. You are perfectly aware that you’re
beginning to get upset before you actually get upset. You feel it. You feel
when something starts to bother you. If you want to grow spiritually, that’s
the moment when you do the work. This is the essence of spiritual growth. If you work on yourself,  you’re
going to create a beautiful place  inside to live. This is more important than
your marriage or your family. It’s more important than your job or your
career. You’re working on yourself directly instead of indirectly. If you
create a beautifu l inner environment, you can have a wonderful  marriage, a
wonderful family life, and a wonderful job. But if you have a mess inside,
you’ll just be trying to use these outer situations to make yourself okay. This
can work for short periods of time, but you don’t want to build your house
on sand. The alternative is when  the stuff starts to come up, the second youfeel that change, relax. Don’ t even wait until you know what it’s about; just
relax and let go. You can work with samskaras at the energetic  level rather
than the mental level. This is much deeper. There are blockages in there, but
they don’t want to be in there. They want to come up and be released. Surrender is the act of letting go instead of resisting by pushing the
blockages away. You will see it’s not always comfortable when these
disturbances from your past come up. The events weren’ t comfo rtable when
they happened— that’s why you pushed them away. Now that they’re trying
to release, are you going to push them back down for another ten years. If
you are not serious about working on yourself, that is what’ s going to
happen. Eventually, you will take it seriously that the purpose of your life is
letting go of these stored patterns. Your blocked past is keeping you from
God, and it’s keeping you from having a beautiful life. The same sincere
effort you put into a relationship  or into earning money, you learn to put into
freeing yourself of these blockages. Remember this: It’s not about
renunciation—it’ s about purification. It’s about cleaning out the inside so
you can have a beautiful life, both outside and in. At some point in your
growth you will recognize that freeing yourself is worth the discomfort of
letting go of past disturbances. Look at what athletes go through for the
Olympics. For years they put themselves through hell to win a gold medal. They feel proud for a while, then what. It becomes a wall ornament. We’re
talking about putting out a fraction of that effort to win everything, and the
fruits of your effort will keep giving over time. Imagine not having those
sensitive blocka ges in there. Imagine being able to enjoy the world as it
unfolds around you. You can begin to appreciate life and wholeheartedly
participate in it. What’ s that worth. This is what happens when you are willing to let go of your past. This
is a very import ant spiritual practice. You should be able to look back on
your past and say, “Thank you. ” It doesn’ t matter what happened. Remember, every moment there are trillions and trillions of things going on
in the universe,  but you only get to experience one. How can you not
appreciate the one you got to see. You came down to Earth, and this was the
experience you had. That’ s what your life is: the sequence of experiences
you got to experience. Learn to love and appreciate your past. Fully
embrace it, thank it for teaching you, and let go of any judgment that there
was something wrong with it. Your past is uniquely yours. It happened. It’ssacred. It’s beautiful. Nobody else ever had it, and nobody else ever will. Embrace your past, hug it, kiss it—love it to death. Chapter 33. Meditation
Many practices can help you on your spiritual journey. As you do them,
always remember that your intent is to cease storing blockages. If weekend
retreats help you with the process of letting go, then do them. If a form of
therapy helps you open up and release, then do it. A time-honore d technique
for spiritual growth is meditation. In order to meditate, you have to let go of
your traditional relationship with your mind and emotions. There are many
forms of meditation, but the bottom line of all of them is letting go of your
addiction to focusing on your thoughts. Focus on your breath, count, do
mantra, feel the energy—in other words, focus on anything except the
thoughts arising  in your mind. As you practice meditation you will find that
your ability to let go during daily life is greatly enhanced. Relaxing and
releasing on the meditation cushion is the same process as relaxing and
releasing during  daily activity. Eventually, you will find that you remain
clearer throughout the day—you  are always aware of what is going on both
inside and outside. This clarity of presence is one of the gifts of meditation. There are many meditation techniques. If you don’t have a technique,
you can try this simple practice. Commit to sitting down for a short period
twice a day, preferably at the same times each day. This requires the
discipline to give this inner work priority over everything else. Most people
manage to eat and sleep at certain times each day; they also manage to find
time for their jobs and their relationships. This inner work on yourself is
more important than everything  else you do. In the end, it will affect the
quality of your life more than all the other things you do each day. Many of
today’ s teachers  say that to sit in meditation for fifteen minutes in the
morning and fifteen minutes in the evening is a good starting point. That
alone will create great benefits. Just put aside the time to sit down in a quiet
place. What do you do during that time. What you don’t want to do is expect
to have a spiritual experience. If you expect that, you’re going to get
disappointed and you will stop meditating. You are sitting down for the
same reason you sit down to play your scales on the piano, to learn. If you
sit down  to practice the piano and expect to be playing Beethoven when you
get up, you’re going to quit the piano. The same is true of meditation. The
reason you sit down to meditate  is to learn how to remain conscious inside
while your mind creates thoughts and your heart creates emotions. Whatever
is going on in there is fine—as long as you can objectively observe it. This
is called mindful meditation. Suppose someone says, “I can’t meditate. I sit down, and my mind
doesn’ t shut up. It just keeps talking and talking. ” That’ s actually a pretty
good state—you know you’re not your mind. You actually watched your
mind talk for fifteen minutes and noticed that it didn’ t shut up. You don’t
normally notice that. You norma lly get all involved in the thoughts the mind
is creati ng. This time you notic ed them, and you noticed that they did not
stop. That, in and of itself, is a form of witness consciousness. You were
witnessing the thoughts instead of getting lost in them. Don’ t call that a bad
meditation. If you practice the piano and make mistakes, that’s not a bad
practice session. Every practice session is about learning. Likewise, there is
no such thing as a bad meditation—there is just practicing being aware of
what is going on in there. Section summary: 

Please provide a concise summarization of Chapter XXVI-XXXIII sections mentioned below

1-particular points emphasized repeatedly. * Love/Unconditional LOVE/Feeling OKAY/FREEING YOURSELF FROM PAST EXPERIENCE AND BLOCKAGES. 2-Main ideas expressed. * Change perspective & approach towards resolving blocks/patterns/stored memories/
    Clearing Inner Disturbsnces | WAKE UP TO THE REALITY OF LIFE |
3-Words/phrases repeated frequently. **(Your Name)**



Summary:


This chapter series focuses primarily on addressing humanity's inherent "dilemma" – seeking fulfillment via fleeting exterior sources ("outer solutions") whereas neglecting crucial inner transformations (''storage'' pattern accumulation). Key Points reiterated several Times:



Love//Free From Blocks/Past ExperieNCE|Feel Okay /FREE SELF-PROMPTED BY OUTER EVENTS


Main Ideas Presented :

Change Perspective&Approaches Resolving Block Patterns/Storing Memories/ClearIn Internal Disruptions| Wake UpToReality/LIFE |

Repetitive Phrasing Words/Discussed Topics :
•       'Accept',             •      ',          //            :         +++
Some additional key phrases include:

1-'Apprehension'(Fear)
2-"Sorrow"
5- ''. Sources cited include references from Christianity (`Matthew`), Buddhism/Yoga Philosophy. , etc. ) [Note]

Also note that numerous examples/scenarios presented illustrate practical applications/demonstrates potential results/approval/unwavering trust/confidence/respect/fearlessness/free-spirited/safe/spiritually enlightened/beauty/enchantment/magical/elevated/high-priority/relevant/worthless/inadequate/lack/truth/rule/right/tolerance/intuition/harmony/diversification/vibrancy/excellency/empathetic/criticism/personalities/social skills/bold/deep/thought/protection/confrontation/recognition/adaptability/. Thus far,

A profound insight emerges: embracing the concept of loving oneself/loving others/the divine/god/gratitude/prayer/reflection/self-discovery/, recognizing that genuine satisfaction originates NOT OUTSIDE BUT INSIDE THROUGH FLOWERS ENERGY WITHIN YOU. Understanding HOW BEAUTIFUL HEAR TS ARE IN THIS PROCESS IS ESSENTIAL FOR SPIRTUAL GROWTH/Growth/Self-Awareness/Mental Health/Anger/Energy Flow. Source(s): Matthew 4:04–05

**References**
[Insert References].
It is not about finding it in someone or something outside, but rather about cultivating it from within by letting go of blockages and focusing on the love.
What is the true nature of love, according to the text?
It does not address the root cause of the issue and can actually reinforce the blockages, leading to further suffering.
What is the problem with trying to solve inner problems by rearranging the outside world?
The heart is meant to be a beautiful, free-flowing instrument that can create a wide range of emotions and experiences, but it's blocked by stored patterns and past experiences.
What is the purpose of the heart, according to the text?
The author recommends letting go of these patterns and blockages through spiritual practices such as meditation, mantra, and acceptance, rather than trying to change the outside world.
What is the author suggesting as a solution to inner blockages?
The author suggests relaxing and releasing them, rather than resisting or suppressing them, and instead, focus on the present moment and let go of the past.
What is the author's advice on dealing with negative thoughts and emotions?