Freedom of choice.

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could choose how you felt? Wouldn’t it be great if instead of reacting and firing off that you could choose to be all zen, and just flow through? Or if you did react to something, if you got angry or mad or sad, then you could just choose to drop it when you wanted to?

Actually it is cool to live like that.

It makes life so much easier. Instead of carrying anything, you are able to just let it go and get on with what is in front of you.

It’s much more fun. Being overwhelmed by your emotions or being pulled this way and that by what life brings you, holding grudges and maintaining arguments - that isn’t much fun. But living with complete choice is very very fun.

Living a life of constant free choice is possible for you, if you want it. It is also simple. All it takes is practice, the right kind of practice. That is all.

The right practice is one simply of being as present as you are able. Be alive to now. Absorb yourself in now.

When you fall into the habit of going into the past or future, choose to gently bring yourself back.

The only reason you carry anything is because of a habit. The only reason you react to anything is a habit.

Why not create a new habit?

Aristotle said something wise about this:

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

It doesn’t require hard work. It does require commitment, but then so does anything. Getting to the shops requires a certain maintenance of focus long enough to reach the store and purchase what you want.

Same here with this experience of being free of being yanked by the chain of the mind.

Life is your choice. Exercise your freedom of choice. Do it until it becomes second nature.

Well, actually its your first nature, as in it is the way you were meant to live so there is nothing second about it, but you know what I mean.

As I sit here eating cheesecake, I realise all of this is an easy thing to say. I get that.

Cheesecake is good, and easy, though not often plentiful, at least in my house. Life is different sometimes. I know.

But here’s the thing - start now. Practice when life is easy, when the going is good. Then when you need it most, you won’t need to work at it. It’ll be as simple as I say it is. You'll become like human teflon, laughing all the way to experiencing heaven on earth.

If you want it, and do what is necessary, you’ll become it.

Let me know how you get on.

Let me know too if you are interested in learning the Bright Path Ishayas' Ascension. This one guy I taught last week described it as "sneaky", in that it comes and gets you. He's right. Choice comes and gets you. Can't make it any easy that that.

Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans

“Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.” - John Lennon It’s a funny old thing, life. It’s happening here and now and more often than not, most people aren’t aware of it. They miss out on life itself, thinking and planning about some other moment, some moment in which they believe life will happen.

Do you do that? Is your life going on right under your nose while you are elsewhere?

Unless you are present and alive to life, to this moment, you will miss out. And no one has an infinite amount of time to get to the task of really, truly living. It’s something you need to get onto very very soon.

If I may be so bold, I would ask:

What do you think it’s going to take for you to wake up to this?

What is it going to take for you to realise that your life is ending one moment at a time, and you are somewhere else, lost in your head?

When are you going to stop wasting a single moment adrift in the past or future or some other location, wishing, dreaming that you were anywhere but here?

When are you going to make the most of each and every moment?

Please do. Please wake up to your own life, take it and go. Live it fully. It requires so little, just your attention applied now. Such a small, simple sacrifice, and you get so much.

If you don’t, who will? If not now, when?

ps. if you don't know how - just ask. It really is a simple thing.

Just pretend that this moment is the only moment that exists

A friend of mine - an Ishaya teacher of meditation - loves to tell his students to pretend that this moment is the only moment that exists. It simply means to be completely alive and present here, now, assuming that no other moment in time exists.

How about that? How about just letting go now, and being present to this, what is here, what is now.

To do it means to assume that everything else is beyond your control. It means you assume you only have what is in front of you.

The thing is we spend so much time trying to change the past or control the future. Life gets extraordinarily simple, not to mention easy, when you take it one moment at a time. Just now. And now. And now.

Here you are. Really be here. Don’t worry about anything else.

When you do that you can meet the need of the moment, free of the burden of the past and the future.

Really, honestly, if I could give you one thing it would be to realise that a peaceful, happy, enjoyable and efficient life is right here.

Bring yourself back and you will find it easier and easier to stay.