Living with Awareness
Student: How do we answer the question, “What do I do with my life? What do I do with my job? My wife? My strife?” How do you make life decisions without an explanation or a story for everything?
Barbara: OK. Let’s start with the story that there is something to be done about my life and my job and my wife and my strife. Is that true?
Can I not love my wife? Can I not enjoy my job? Why not appreciate my life? Begin with that. Begin with acceptance and total gratitude that you have what you have. Then, from that perception, you can decide how you can enhance what you have. How can you make your life more enjoyable, job more productive, and your relationship with your wife closer and more intimate.
These things can be done by number one, communicating with yourself. What am I doing, or not doing, to make this experience the best possible experience? What am I thinking and feeling that I am not allowing myself to know?
If I can’t make myself feel productive at this job, what would it take to make myself more productive? Another job? Another way of doing my job? If I can’t fully appreciate my life, maybe I need to focus my attention on life itself, rather than what I am lacking.
Once again, we return to the topic of your attention. Where is it? And, who is directing it? Who is listening to all those thoughts that are going on in your head and stirring up emotions in your physical body? Who is listening? Who is monitoring? Who is in charge? Who is driving this vehicle?
What do I do with my life? I make it the best it possibly can be simply by becoming more and more aware of how I have given it limitations and then, modifying.
Student: As we get freer, break those agreements, begin to get insight, there is a kind of “high” to this journey. It is very common for people to look around and think that, “gosh. My kids, my wife, my boss, they should get a piece of this too.” How do we treat the people in our life, when we are on this journey?
Barbara: We love them. Not because there is a reason to, or there is a reason not to. We just love them. We chose them. They are in our lives, they are perfect reflections of what we are, they are our best and our worst. We need not change them, we need not inform them, we need not give them anything that they are not willing to ask for.
This journey is between you and you. You, as an individual seeker of happiness and freedom, and you as the one willing to receive all the modifications and changes that awareness provides.
In feeling better, you have used the tools of awareness in order to modify all the old patterns and behaviors. In feeling that jubilance, you recognize that you have unburdened yourself of a lot of restrictions, a lot of beliefs that had no part in your simply appreciating life. In feeling joyous and unburdened, of course, you want to look around and see, “well how can I do this for somebody else?”
What you can do for the people you love is to be joyous and unburdened. What you can do for the people you love is to be accepting and compassionate. This is the benefit of having done this work. It need go no further than that, because they will benefit by your expression of yourself as life, as truth, as pure love in action.