Dear Mary:

“Why do I feel so ugly inside?”, you asked.

Maybe you feel ugly inside because you were taught at an early age that you were that. Young children believe the parent, no matter what it is the parent says. A child is not able to evaluate what a parent says, to determine whether it is true or not. A child believes.

When what we believe is not true in reality, we suffer. We live in conflict, knowing on some level one thing, believing the other. “Wherever you go… there you stay”- wherever you go, whether you have a job or not, rich or poor, what you believe stays.

I hope you post again. I would like to communicate with you further.

anita

Dear Mary:

I can relate to “stolen moments of true inner peace snatched up when they occur” within “a youth of shame, guilt, and abuse”- shame, guilt, and abuse has been my experience and those stolen moments as well. Those stolen moments I spent daydreaming about a different kind of life.

You wrote, “Even when you know it’s abuse… you keep bailing them out of jail”- you mean bailing your parents out of jail literally, figuratively.. can you explain?

I didn’t understand “I have grown that zip code”. I hope you can explain it to me.

anita

Hi Mary

Came across the following and thought about your posts.  I’m of two minds myself, I understand the advice of being in moment and I know its a truth, but sometimes I want to scream when I hear it.. Perhaps your in a similar space as the reference “wherever you go there your stay/are” – its the solution and the problem

It is one of life’s greatest ironies that, no matter how much we want to be different, wherever we go, there we are. There’s just no getting away from ourselves. Go on holiday — there we are. Win the lottery — there we are. Move overseas — there we are. Wherever we look, we are looking out of the same pair of eyes; whatever we do, it’s still the same body doing it.

In the attempt to get away from being with ourselves, we search for something or someone to make us happy; the grass constantly appears greener someplace else. But in every relationship and every situation, there we are again.

Meanwhile, our mind is like a drunken monkey doing its best to distract us by jumping from thought to fear to drama to anything that will keep us trapped in an endless round of worries and concerns… “What if this happens… what if I fail… if only it could be like it was in the past… what will the future be like… I have to to get to a psychic for help…”

We are like a musk deer that has a wonderful smell in its belly yet searches the forest for that smell. Wherever it goes, there’s the smell — but the deer can’t see it, so it has no idea where the smell is to be found. In the same way, we believe happiness is somewhere — anywhere —other than here, and spend all our time looking for it, without realizing it is already with us.

“If you aren’t in the moment, 
you are either looking forward to uncertainty, or back to pain and regret. —Jim Carrey

All we have to do is stop. Just stop. For right now, this very moment, is all there is. Nothing else is going on. Nothing else is happening. There’s nowhere to go. And being right here with ourselves is exactly where we want to be, because when we are fully here, this moment becomes the most precious, delightful, enjoyable and outrageous moment there is.

It is immensely liberating to realize that nothing more is required of us than to just be fully here now. What a relief! Finally, we can really experience this reality just as it is, without expectation, prejudice or longing. Someone once asked Ed if he had ever experienced another dimension. He replied, “Have you experienced this one?” Have you noticed the dew on a spider’s web, the taste of honey or your own heartbeat?

“Life is now. There was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be.” —Eckhart Tolle

When we are fully present, the world in which we live becomes extraordinary, as if being seen and heard and touched for the first time, for we are without preconceived ideas or desires. There is just the experience. Like a child making the unknown known, we are simply with what is, while also impelled to know it more intimately, to explore and understand, even to become it.

Such presence defies our limited understanding of the world; it takes us out of the logical, rational mind and into a place of just being, without judgment or idea of what should be. Stepping out of the thinking and conceptual mind, however, doesn’t mean stepping into nowhere or nothing; it doesn’t mean that there is no connection to a worldly reality. We do not become disconnected or cast adrift. Rather, it is stepping into sanity and, more importantly, into even greater connectedness.

As evolution does not go backwards, so life can never be the way it was. Being in the moment means having the courage to know we will never be someone other than who we are and that who we are is absolutely wonderful, just as we are. Simply being still in this moment, without attachment to or thought of before or after, invites a deep sense of completion, that there really is nowhere else we need to go. It is impossible to think of somewhere else as being better — the grass is vividly green exactly where we are. – Ed and Deb Shapiro