just be it Just Be It is a practice of presence that recognizes the limits of language. When aware of silence there is a state of inner still alertness. You are wholeheartedly present.

Being in the present is the opposite of trying to be in control.

The mystery of life deepens as the ordinary experience is extraordinary and the extraordinary increases in frequency from more vivid awareness.

Seek and do not find.

Do you want to be right or at peace?

Embrace your restlessness. Look at it and still in silence to your ‘inner knowing’. Then let go your desire to have things other than they are. This is hard work, this letting go, but it’s how we learn.

The poisons:

Greed: If I only have enough, then I’ll be happy.

Fear: If only things were different from what they are now (either from past…victim, or fear about things not turning out as hoped for). My expectations were not met somehow and I’m locked into negative feelings, or my hope for the future is gone, faith lost.

Ignoring: This moment is so uncomfortable that I’ll just ignore it and I’ll not take the opportunity to participate in it. (get drunk or drugged, TV, spectator sports, gambling and other activities aimed to numb our restlessness)

Good food, bad food. If it results in sustained joy, probably good food. If it results in short term pleasure and consequent pain, perhaps bad food.

Sukka…the Sanskrit word for ‘to be at peace’
Dukka..the Sanskrit word for un-ease, lack of peace.

Our advertising and news feed our lack of peace. In advertising, the message has transformed from, “Buy this and you’ll be happy.” to “You can’t be happy without this”. Our news focuses almost completely on what’s gone wrong rather than celebrating all that’s gone right. Advertising and conflict news breed un-ease, dukka. Compassion, gratitude, and embracing the gift of the present moment feed lasting joy.

Where’s the pull come from, love or fear? The heart only knows love and requires the practice of stilling the restless mind. In silence/awareness practice we deepen to hear the divine truth the heart knows. Fear pulls from the reasoning mind, creating more suffering and seldom helps us. We become our fullest expression when we’re forever pulled to the edge from deep heart listening. The challenge is to forever remove the obstacles created from a restless mind so that we may go deeper in our life journey. It’s about cleaning ourselves from the ‘mind junk’ so we can be more effective through deeper felt interconnection, often referred to as compassion (meeting one another’s dis-ease in love and felt connection).

What drives you? Are your actions fueled from a sense of push or pull? Push fuels from greed or fear? Pull fuels from deep knowing resulting from deep heart listening. When we make space for the practice of gratitude and listening, curiosity opens us to hear the Divine within. This fire that needs no wood, passion, forever feeds. the courage to take action on the pull. You’re not ‘doing’ to please others, from fear or to fix others. Your ‘doing’ is completely tuned to your ‘being’ as you become the fullest expression of yourself. In gratitude you experience lasting joy for seizing the opportunity to participate in 100% attention to the present moment. Finding the gift in the given (this arising moment) comes from a non-obstructed mind. An non-obstructed mind comes from a practice of deep listening, stilling the myriad of aimless thoughts rushing through the mind, touching the core of heart knowing.

Allow heaven’s arrival, here and now.

Pray for conversation, removal of obstacles, the curious mind, and the lasting joy the comes from the courage to drill deeper.

Joy…just be it. Curious…just be it. Open…just be it. Grateful…just be it. Here and now…just be it. Heart…just be it. Divine…just be it.

Just Be It, Inc.

9597 North Shore Trail

Forest Lake, MN 55025

Phone: 612-590-0970

Principal: Randy Johnson

Email: randy@just-be-it.com

The temptation of feeling loved is to blame another for the loss of that feeling.  When suffering happens, when things fall apart, and when change happens in such painful ways, maybe then I’m tempted to question my faith.  In her book, Speaking of Faith, Krista Tippett references the authentic words of Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel.  She references his questioning of faith in a passage from Wiesel’s Night. He spoke to a loss of desire to live and horrific moments when brutal human acts seemed to murder his God.  Yet, he went on praying, and presented her with the following prayer:

I no longer ask You for either happiness or paradise; all I ask You is to listen

and let me be aware of Your listening.

I no longer ask You to resolve my questions, only to receive them and make them part of You.

I no longer ask You for either rest or wisdom, I only ask You not to close me to gratitude, be it of the most trivial kind, or to surprise and friendship.  Love?  Love is not Yours to give.

As for my enemies, I do not ask You to punish them or even to enlighten them; I only ask You not to lend them Your mask and Your powers.  If You must relinquish one or the other, give them Your powers.  But not Your countenance.

They are modest, my requests, and humble.  I ask You what I might ask a stranger met by chance at twilight in a barren land.

I ask You, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to enable me to pronounce these words without betraying the child that transmitted them to me:  God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, enable me to forgive You and enable the child I once was to forgive me too.

I no longer ask You for the life of that child, nor even for his faith.  I only beg You to listen to him and act in such a way that You and I can listen to him together.

Wiesel’s words highlight the tremendous power of gratitude and forgiveness practice.  This practice is founded in deep, open listening.  It’s grounded in the ‘felt’ sense of never being alone.  Can it be that lasting joy is cultivated through our awareness to and relationship with the present moment as we forever drill deeper in gratitude and forgiveness?

So what do I want?  Short term limited pleasure or long term unlimited joy?

How has my quest for short term pleasure impacted my quest for long term joy?

Unlimited lasting joy sources from gratitude and the ‘feeling’ of never Being alone, always being listened to.

Meeting the arising moment in felt sense of belonging

It seems that two of our most important questions are:

1. What’s my relationship with this present moment?
2. Do I feel loved?

Most of our restlessness and stress revolves around a bad relationship to the present moment.  We’re either wishing we were someplace we were or anticipating a place we’re going to, missing the surprise of the moment.

The next question is perhaps more tricky.  If I ‘feel’ loved, then by whom?  If it’s a feeling from another being, am I preoccupied with what it was or fear about it’s possible loss?  Or is it a bigger feeling?  Perhaps it’s more a feeling of Big Hope and a bigger belonging.  As the surface events of the day encounter a variety of rapids and eddies, can I hold a ‘feeling’ of being loved, with one foot on the ocean floor, grounded in the joined response, not taken by life’s surface disturbances?

This may be the big pull for theistic religions.  It’s something that works me deeply.  I feel great joy and comfort in a personal divine Being who has my best interests at heart.  The arms of sacred love can never betray me if I dedicate to cultivating my relationship and my gratitude for the gift of the arising moment.  Yet, a feeling of  ‘being loved’ from a smaller group will always run the course of entropy, tied to the realm of form and the material.

So, here I am in deep loving relationship to Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, and the other great divine Beings who’ve blessed me.  My physical response to this love seems to resonate most with Jesus, yet my most intimate spiritual experiences have had a distinct feminine feel to them.  So I pray and give thanks for this gift of opportunity to participate, to curiously explore the realm of spirit, mind and body, forever drilling deeper in this journey.

I see the poison in greed, ignorance and fear and how they play one another.  In greed, I’ve lost my relation to the present, forever thirsting for ‘more’.  Poof, another moment lost, another unintended harmful action.  In ignorance, I’ve locked into a static notion of an answer.  This is different from living faith.  This is fixation on thinking I know, holding to my notion of being ‘right’.  Ignorance is overcome by a curios mind, forever willing to actively listen for a deeper question.  And fear is expression of my lack of ‘feeling’ love.  It’s a response of feeling separate, unjoined from the Divine.

So, if I can embrace the present moment in surprise, in felt sense of being loved, my only response is that of full gratitude for the gift of opportunity.  Now, this breath.  Again, this breath…knowing I’m loved…knowing these breaths are limited…knowing it’s a rare gift to experience consciousness…this moment…knowing I’m in you and you’re in me and all is in all, forever bathed in the feeling of ‘being loved within the divinity of the moment’s arising’.

Cultivating the ‘Feeling of Being Loved’

When I can reflect on the ‘presence’ of ancestors who came before and upon future ancestors I’ll never meet while in this body, I’m warmed.  Friends who’ve loved me beyond conditions, parents, grandparents I may never have met, someone I touched who may never had a chance to say what it meant…this ‘feeling’ comes up.  And it’s my fuel for ‘Big Hope’, for knowing nothing disappears, I’m never separated, forever, each moment, filled with a deeper sense of belonging, of mattering.  This ‘feeling’ of the Divine within all comes and goes.  But I can grow it by taking pause, reflecting on the felt response of being loved…of Being…filled with gratitude for the opportunity of this breath, of this consciousness.

As energy dissipates, it’s easy to slip into depression.  There’s great pain in feeling things will never be the same.  The Law of Impermanence seems to be what fuels our drive to ‘wake up’.  Wherever we look, the Second Law of Thermodynamics is at work, energy dissipating and the apparent felt separation from what was.  We hit the bell and perceptually notice the disappearance of sound.  And yet, we now know the sound never disappears.  We now know that nothing disappears, it just dissipates its energy of vibration.  No doubt, we can grow a louder vibration when conditions are right, yet we know it will entropy naturally as conditions become ‘not right’, the inevitable.  It’s why we have a multibillion dollar plastic surgery industry, why some try to freeze their bodies, and why we spend fifty billion dollars of our health care budget with valiant efforts to stop this process, trying to save people during the last two months of their lives.

So what to do?  We can hide behind myth that’s clearly out of step with our contemporary ‘knowing’.  We can numb ourselves with media consciousness shaping, glued to the TV for hours.  We can immerse ourselves into the spectator sports world.  We can join an organization dedicated to the belief that change can be stopped and we can become very angry as a result.  We can numb ourselves with various addictions that temporarily comfort us only to bring us further from our life vibrancy.  We can pursue increasing amounts of pleasure and consumption, only to realize the happiness is fleeting and the collateral damage very painful.  We can try to escape our awareness to the demise of heath care and education at the expense of morally exempt capitalism and militarism.   In effect, we can retreat from participation in stewarding the unified vibration because it hurts too much.

With courage, we can hold the curious mind.  We can ask the deeper, heart driven questions.  We can study those who’ve gone before with a sense of deep stewardship to those who will follow, knowing that we can never be ‘disconnected’.  We strike the bell.  We can all sense it, but some of us don’t hear it.  We’re too busy or too distracted.  Yet, the bell sounds and the vibration dissipates.  Yet, our deeper awareness takes great care in slowing our perception of the dissipated energy.  The music is alive.  Time and occasion, outside the realm of our known three dimensions, outside notions of beginning and ending.

The vibration is here and always will be here, penetrating all things.  Awareness is our security. Participating in the art of taking care is our action.  Home. Free. Free at last.  Vibration…Just Be it.

Perfect balance requires proper form.

It’s been said our attachments to a sense of ‘correctness’ grow our suffering and diminish our happiness.  It also seems that what we put attention to grows stronger.  So how does this play when learning a new skill set?  With proper attention to correct form our growth accelerates and we more easily remove obstacles to deepening our practice of a particular field of study.  Without proper initial instruction we may ignore correct form and place more and more attention to doing something that becomes an obstacle to deepening our practice.  We may develop a limiting habit obstructing our growth, simply because we’re placing more and more attention to incorrect form.  This has become a problem in our more liberated society where almost anything goes in the name of freedom.  Yet, we can see that real talent deepens with a resolve to disciplined practice under the guidance of a teacher well versed in proper form.  The illusion is that great talent just happens.  For sure, some have greater aptitude to develop skills in certain areas.  Yet, anyone who’s achieved greatness has a long history of associating with masters of form dedicated to precision on the road to style and liberation.

We’re born in harmony and rhythm, with a deep felt connection to all that’s around us.  And then we’re exposed to form.  There’s a correct way to do things.  We put attention to movement, we study how others move, we learn the structure of language, and we deepen our sense of connection with those in our presence.  Much of this is “pre-wired” and at some point we wish to explore a specialized skill. Anyone watching American Idol tryouts can see how we’ve lost our attention to discipline and form.  Contestants show up for audition with no previous discipline and instruction to singing.  Correct form is missing as they fail to find the harmony and rhythm of the song.  Correct form is necessary to find that felt sense of connection in the rhythm and harmony of life.  A lack of regard to form results in dissonance, a separation from harmony and rhythm, and suffering to those in its presence.

I once had a teacher working with me on proper form for meditation.  After years, the instruction became more and more subtle, forever directing me to correct bad habits, improper form.  Slight adjustments were made and when, after long sittings, my shoulders rose, he’d wake me to proper form with a loud crack of a stick on my shoulder.  Proper form is good because it requires our full attention.  With deepening practice, dedicated to proper form and one hundred per cent attention, we find our ‘best’.  Put another way, our dedicated practice allows us to face our tendency to separate from awareness to form and eventual ‘flow’.  This ‘flow’, ‘in the zone’ experience is once again touching the depth of nature’s harmony and rhythm.  It is the deep felt experience of connection, of our interdependence with all things.  Eventually we reach a level of performance where we disappear, no longer separated from our instrument, teammates, audience, environment, etc.   This place, achieved through deep attention to correct form, is a place of distinctive quality recognizable to all in it’s presence.  The individual’s vowed attention to deepening inspires us all to a felt sense of interconnection, touching Big Hope.  It’s a ‘feeling’ that relieves us from our suffering, from our sense of separation.  The creative artist’s deep work has given us a taste of the joined response.  This brief taste is the core of Just Be it and recognized as quality.  Good teachers recognize bad form as an obstacle to learning and know how to break the obstacles created from bad habit.  Good teachers know how to nurture the student’s passion, once again igniting the fire that needs no wood.  And good teachers know it may not be helpful to waste time on those students who refuse to dedicate to a deepening practice of proper form.  Learning correct form is difficult and uncomfortable.  However, once learned, it’s the foundation to finding comfort in the uncomfortable, the ingredient necessary to wrap around the uncertainty inevitable in the next level of performance.

Breaking Obstacles to the 'Felt' Sense of Joining

A basic premise of ancient spiritual teachings and contemporary physics is that “everything changes and everything is connected”.  Some have called this the tension between the law of impermanence (The Second Law of Thermodynamics) and the Law of Interdependence (Everything affects everything).  The joy we find in our lives can be directly related to our capacity to face the uncertainty of change and our cultivation of the ‘feeling’ of being joined.  While greed, ignorance and fear continually work us to feelings of separation, we’re repeatedly challenged to move past the temptation to separate.  In what seems to be accelerated change, the illusions of things not changing has been shattered.  A few conservative talk/TV hosts and politicians receive popularity by playing to people’s desires to ‘the way things were’.  In the face of a rapidly changing economy, facing challenges to meet change in globalization, immigration and stewardship to the planet, their responses to facing the uncertainty of the future are simply a child’s scream of “No, I don’t want to go there”.  Yet, the train’s moving and it’s moving faster than ever before.  And so we tend to polarize on our willingness to meet change and uncertainty, creating the unproductive stalemate in our mind’s separation from one another.

So where do we get our ‘feeling’ of connection?  How big or small is it?  My childhood focused on family, church and the community.  There was a sense that the authority within my circles of belonging had the answers to change and uncertainty.  It was simply a matter of belief.  I carried a peace in thinking we didn’t need to drill deeper in our curiosity about impermanence and interdependence.  This was not helpful when facing the rapidly changing social climate of the late ’60’s and early ’70’s.  My ‘feeling’ of separation grew as the foundation of most authoritative beliefs was shattered by observation.  The lack of congruity of action to belief was too big and I temporarily separated from my history, simply denying my beliefs rather that taking it as challenge to dig deeper.  My sense of security had been replaced by the realities of uncertainty.  My sense of connection had been replaced by an angered sense of separation.

It’s been a long road back, forever challenging my mind’s temptation to stop, to hold out on the surface, deflecting the depths of life.  Yet, life happens.  People die, suffering doesn’t go away, and conditions present us directly in the midst of uncertainty and our total interdependence.  It becomes a continual battle between willingness to explore or sliding back to the obstacles I grow in preventing a spiritual deepening.  Some of us try to grow our sense of belonging through technological advancements, working every social network we can.  Others define a sense of belonging by number of returned text messages.  Our media seems to push our sense of success and belonging in definitions from dollar worth.  And all the way we seem to be losing our real capacity to connect with one another as ourselves.

The real litmus test for one’s ‘felt’ sense of interconnection can be seen in the level of curiosity.  The love carried forward is evidenced by one’s genuine desire to go deeper through skilled listening.  It seems more and more rare to find those willing to break beyond the veils and obstacles of ‘busyness’ and ‘fear’.  While it seems safer and easier to lock into our safe routine and fixed beliefs, eventually life presents the challenge to drill deeper.  Whether in sickness, injury, job loss, natural disaster or any other upset that pulls the rug from our sense of security, we eventually meet the choice of digging deeper, burying our head in the sand, or swimming upstream against the laws of nature.  At some point we come to see our health is dependent on other’s health.  Our depth of being is dependent upon others’ depth of being.  Our spiritual security is dependent upon other’s spiritual security.  Our capacity to show up, pay attention and be our best is  dependent upon others showing up, paying attention and being their best.  In short, our best is found in breaking the barrier between you and me, us and them, as we arrive to a bigger belonging.  We come home to the ‘felt’ sense of our connection through Big Hope, not pollyanna wishes for things to be different than they are.  They just are and can we meet the very ‘is-ness’ of this moment in loving gratitude for one another?  Can we openly explore our differences in search of our similarities, touching the essence of our interdependence?  Can we connect with our perceived enemies through the simple courage of asking, “Can you tell me more as I try to stand in your shoes for a moment?”.  Can we acknowledge that perception is deception, that the problem is never what we think it is?  Can we breath in “yes” to the rare opportunity to meet in this moment, breathing out “thank you” for our courage to participate?  In review of the day, can we be specific about actions, thoughts and speech taken to move to deeper joining?  Can we honestly review those areas where we’ve contributed to harm, feeding feelings of separation?  Can we humble our selves, pledging to aim away from thoughts of judgment and opinion?  Can we raise ourselves to be the mountain in the face of uncertainty, forever willing, ready and able to show up in full attention, aiming to be our best?  Can we cultivate gratitude and big sense of belonging, standing in the consequent feeling of joy?s

A life well-lived is about removing obstacles and going deeper.  Simply put, it’s about ‘doing our best by being our best’.  Lasting quality and happiness come from the ground of our being, not from acquiring the good approval of others.  Yet, our culture seems to place great value to ‘best’ in relation to the defeat of others.  To the extent we can overcome another, defeat another, or somehow win at another’s expense, we place our values of excellence.  Yet, when we look deeper, it’s really a matter of ‘full presence’.  It’s about removing obstacles to meeting the present moment in full attention to the arising moment and our interconnection with it.  Within this realm of experience, we must first ‘show up’, ‘pay attention’, ‘do/be our best, and let go our expectations of outcome without abandoning our confidence and gratitude for the opportunity to participate.

Showing up means deep listening to what our heart draws us to.  It’s waking up from the cultural sleep induced from TV, spectator sports, drugs, alcohol, and other addictions that remove us from ‘presence’.  It’s about quieting the mental chatter to deepen that to which we’re drawn.  It’s about aiming to maintain attention in our actions and non-actions.  It’s about touching just past the edge of performance, deepening to our ‘best’ rather than regressing or settling for a plateau.

Our ‘best’ is not an ego driven action.  It’s entry into the field of universal energy where we fully embrace the moment’s continuous arising moment, 100% here and now, obstacles of thought and emotion removed, entering the realm of Big Hope.  Doing our best requires full attention, no multitasking, no mind wandering, and tremendous dedication of mindfulness practice.

A dedicated meditation practice is generally requisite to consistent ‘best’ performance.  It’s the training we need to fully arrive to the arising moment.  The mind wants to put us in thoughts of comparative performance, of past and future, of better or worse, beginning and ending, enough and not enough, etc.  Yet, the quality of ‘best’ transcends this to the unknown, beyond thought and the verbal.