I just returned from a week of sitting in silence in a beautiful lakeside home with a view of snow-capped mountains.  For the first few days, my storyteller was fairly quiet.  I was fully open to life, right here, right now. We are all homesick for this: actually experiencing life as it is happening (rather than thinking about it!) In this spacious state, when my storyteller would start telling stories, it was easy to see that they were just stories and I could let them go.

On the third day, however, when I woke up, the deep fear I took on being raised in a very unhealthy environment came to the surface.  A part of me knew that my fear wanted to be included in this spacious healing place I was in, but a very young part of me was afraid of the fear and resisted it.  At the same time, I could see that resistance was amplifying it.  So I turned toward it, bringing it my accepting attention.  As I was willing to directly experience the fear in my body, it moved right on through me, leaving a deep sense of joy in its wake.  This is what Rumi means when he says:  “Don’t turn away. Keep your gaze on the bandaged places. That’s where the light enters you.”

The fear came again four more times during the week, and each time there was initial resistance, but then a willingness arose to actually befriend this fear. Such joy! At some level, for most of my life, I have been afraid of my own fear so, in a sense, it was running my life. But when I was willing to directly experience it – to honestly look at what was going on inside of me – it lost its power over me.  I came out of this retreat with this statement:  “In every closing there is an opening.  Stay open to the closing.”  And, “Fear is nothing to be afraid of!”

You can’t be this open to life by trying to be open.  That is just more struggle.  How we come back to life is to first understand that most of the time we experience stories about life, rather than being in life.  In other words we think about life rather than actually experiencing it.  It is such a wondrously nourishing experience to actually be open to life again like we were when we were very young!   This is what Eckhart Tolle means when he talks about being in the now.

We don’t need to stop this storyteller in our heads that is always trying to do life and do it right.  All that is needed is to discover how to see it and touch it with our hearts.  The more we do this, the more its stories dissolve like the morning fog does when touched by the sun.  This is why I offer semi-silent retreats – so we can see our storytellers and see how afraid they are and discover that we don’t have to identify with them, whether they are stories of fear, shame, anger, or even despair.

I leave you with a few lines from a poem called “Dancing,” from Steve Deverel’s new book of poetry called Whispers from the Awakening Heart.  It is a very rich little book of nourishing, heart-inspiring poems that remind us how to stay open to ourselves no matter what is happening, so we can stay open to life!

How does one enter this dance?
Only one thing is needed:
Watch in stillness with beginner’s mind,
Let thoughts float in open heart space
Like butterflies in the meadow
And fireflies flickering and fading into nothingness.

Openly receive each moment and you will know freedom.
Not easy.
Easier than you think
hold not to freeze-dried mental models
that imprison the soul and obscure the Dance of Life Now.

Let heart flow to what it needs.
Feel life directly
You already know.

Be light, Mary

“What stays with me the most is 16 amazing people opening their hearts to themselves and to each other more and more each day.  Such joy!  At the end of the retreat, the Hui’s resident artist and manager of the gallery said to me, “I want whatever you all shared together.  All of these people came here in their ordinary, everyday selves, and are leaving just glowing.”

What was it that allowed us all to open into the joy and aliveness that is our deepest longing and our birthright?  We first explored the idea that we all have a storyteller in our heads that is based on fear and glued together with judgment.  We recognized that we hardly notice most of the fear and judgment that moves through our heads all day long because we have become used to looking at ourselves and Life through these lenses.  But the more we looked, the more evident it was that we didn’t have to be run by fear, guilt and shame.

For many of the participants, there was a radical shift in perception when they discovered that they didn’t have to believe the stories in their heads!  It was also very freeing to find out that everybody had similar stories about fear, self judgment and despair. Then, step by step, we learned how to unhook from these stories so that we could simply open to Life.

The theme of the retreat was All Is Welcome Here!  When the stories in our heads are met with curiosity and compassion, they let go of their hold on us, and what is left is Life in all of its magical mystery, right here, right now.  What is left is the re-membering that all of the joy, peace and love we long for is to be found here and now. The more we individually and collectively unhooked from the storyteller in our heads, the more we discovered that it is safe to open to Life – not an idea of it, but the living experience.  And this is what we are all homesick for – the experience of truly being alive!

I believe that this book offers, not only the keys to our own healing, but also the healing of our world.  As we begin to recognize that we don’t have to be run anymore by the storyteller in our heads that is focused on doing life rather than being life, we will rediscover the joy and the healing of being here for life.  And a person who is fully here for life is a healing presence in the world.

When Diane Sawyer interviewed Robin Roberts after her bone marrow transplant (that is where they take you to the edge of death to destroy your immune system so you can get a new one), she asked Robin what she had learned.  Robin responded, “Now, now now!”  Everything we long for and everything we truly are is found right here, right now, and it is the storyteller that puts a veil between us and the direct experience of life we long for!

I would like to invite you to become a modern-day Johnny Appleseed in planting these truths all over your world.  Be willing to do one thing for a few minutes every day where you unhook from all of your stories and be fully present with what you are experiencing – like your morning cup of coffee or tea, your shower, or washing your hands.  Then take it out into the world and be fully present for the grocery store clerk, your loved ones as they speak to you, children that you see, people you encounter when you walk down the street or ride in an elevator.

And if it calls to you, there are three ways you can help get this message out into the world:

1)      By writing a review of my book on Amazon to help in its placement.

2)      By “liking” my Facebook page.  You can access it by going to my website and clicking on the Facebook icon in the lower left-hand corner of the screen and then clicking on the thumbs-up icon on the Facebook page.

3)      By subscribing to my You Tube videos so you will be notified about the latest videos I am posting (see below for instructions).  There are now nine videos on the book plus some others from speaking engagements.  You can also send people links to the videos.

Thank you for being a part of the healing of our planet!

After your next in-breath, allow yourself a long, slow out-breath.  Melt into your out-breath, letting any tension in your body melt with it. Now, on the next in-breath, tighten your muscles.  Exaggerate the tension in your body and then say “ahh” as you melt again into your out-breath.  Revel in the deliciousness of a deep out-breath coupled with the powerful healing sound of “ahh.”  (You can also say this sound silently if you are in a public place.)  Do as many of these breaths as calls to you and then notice the shift in your experience.

Now, from this calmer place, contemplate the possibility that this moment is enough.  For just this moment, let go of your chronic addiction to seeking something better and instead be with life.  Know that there is nothing you need to fix, change or resist.  See the space you are sitting in; hear the sounds; feel the sensations of your body.  Discover the truth that this is not only enough, it is more than enough, for it is what you most deeply long for – a direct experience of life.  Feel the peace of allowing life to be exactly as it is.

Now ask yourself, did you pause for a moment and truly open into this living moment of your life or did you just think about it?  This is our suffering.  We think about life rather than directly experiencing it! Stuck in our heads, we have all spent our life trying to get to a better place, totally missing that everything we long for is right here, right now.

In order to open to life again, it is also important to contemplate that you are enough.  This is alien to most of us.  Usually we are an ongoing project to ourselves because we believe we have to be better or different than what we are to know the peace and joy we long for.  Try to imagine what your life would be like if you opened into the truth that it is okay to be exactly as you are?  What would it be like for just this moment to know that you are a unique creation of life and your perfection includes your imperfection!   Can you feel the peace of that?  Can you feel how deeply you long for this?

As you settle into enoughness, your mind will probably come up with all sorts of things that need to be fixed or changed about yourself and your life.  Initially it can be scary to relax back into life, so the mind believes that if we are not always busy fixing and managing everything that nothing will happen or something bad will happen.  But what if that is not true?  What if, as we let go into the enoughness of this moment, we enter the great river of creativity that is life and recognize that life is smarter than us.  It is giving us exactly what we need in order to come out of the problem factory of our minds and back into a direct experience of life.

So for just this moment, relax back into life and watch the subtle letting go of the chronic tightness in your body and your mind.  Allow fingerlings of joy to begin to arise inside of you – the pure joy of being alive!

Everything that shows up in your mandala is a vehicle for your awakening. From this point of view,
awakening is right at your fingertips continually. There’s not a drop of rain or a pile of dog poop that appears in your life that isn’t the manifestation of enlightened energy, that isn’t a doorway to sacred world. But it’s up to you whether your life is a mandala of neurosis or a mandala of sanity.”

(From Pema Chodron’s newest book, Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change)

When they left their bodies, both of them had very similar experiences that are in alignment with many other documented stories of people from all ages, all religions and all walks of life who also experienced an NDE:  they found themselves in a place that was more beautiful than anything they had ever known; the light was incredibly nourishing; and they experienced the most intense love they had ever known.  Most people didn’t want to come back when they were told it wasn’t their time.

Eben Alexander was a neurosurgeon, a highly trained scientist and a self-described skeptic until his NDE.  Describing what unfolded while he was in a coma, he takes it one step further than most accounts.  He says that most people think of heaven as being someplace else.  Instead, he says that heaven is right here right now.  Even science supports this when it says that everything is energy (Einstein) and everything is made out of light (David Bohm, grandfather of Quantum Physics)!   Eben suggests that most of us don’t experience this energetic world of light that is everything  because our senses are not advanced enough. I thought about that for a while and realized that, for me, this isn’t true.

Our main sensing ability for that which Eben is calling “heaven” is our hearts.  When we were very young, our hearts were completely open, so we experienced the magic and beauty that he is calling “heaven.” If you spend any amount of time around a very young child you will see this.  But for most of us our hearts were bruised and abandoned in our early life, so they closed down.  That doesn’t mean that “heaven” went away or that we lost the ability to see it.  It means that the truth of what is and always has been right here right now is obscured by our mental conditioning.  I describe this in my new book, What’s in the Way IS the Way, using the metaphor of a meadow.  The spaciousness and wonder you lived in when you were very young was like a beautiful meadow.  Then, slowly but surely, the thoughts in your mind began to lower and swirl around your head like clouds until all you could see were the clouds of your own mind.  The truth is, you never left the meadow!  You just can’t see it through the thought-clouds in your mind!

Eben goes onto say that the core thing he recognized during his coma was:  “Love is the reality of realities, the incomprehensibly glorious truth of truths that lives and breathes at the core of everything that exists or that ever will exist, and no remotely accurate understanding of who and what we are can be achieved by anyone who does not know it and embody it in all of their actions.”

How do we recognize and live from this place (the meadow} again?  How do we release the walls around our hearts so that we can recognize the truth of Love?  It is not by trying to get back to the meadow.  That is only more of the clouds of our mind.  We rediscover the meadow again by learning how to see and LOVE all of the stories, judgments, and struggles in our minds – the cloud bank that causes us to not recognize the meadow of Love that is here right now.  And that is what What’s in the Way IS the Way is all about!

*Dr. Alexander will be interviewed by Oprah on her Super Soul Sunday on December 2.

To give you a sense of what the book offers, this is the Forward that my friend and colleague Neale Donald Walsch, author of Conversations with God, wrote for the book.  I hope it moves you to explore the concepts in the book and their practical application because I truly believe, as Neale says, “this book will show you the way to a better life, without needing a single thing to be different for you to reclaim your inner peace, your outer joy, and your overall well-being.”  Here is Neale’s Forward:

“When I was a boy, I used to go around saying, ‘Life is so simple. Why does everyone keep making it so complicated?’  I couldn’t understand why all the kids in school would get so kerfuffled when a big test was coming up, or when the end-of-year grades were due. I couldn’t figure out (even when I was 7, 8, and 9) why Mom and Dad “got into it” so often at home, or why my Mom worried so much about stuff.

I was never clear about why anyone would be so concerned or worried about anything that they’d let themselves shift from cheerfulness to snippiness, from happiness to grouchiness, from inner peace to inward anxiety.

For some reason, I always knew things would work out—and they always did. Maybe they didn’t always work out the way I thought they would, or exactly the way I wanted them to, but they always worked out in a way that brought me to my next highest good—and it didn’t take me long to catch on to what was happening, and to begin to depend on this being simply ‘The Way Life Is.’

Now wonderful spiritual teacher Mary O’Malley has written a whole book about this—explaining it clearly, and in wonderfully accessible terms.

I’m so excited about this book! I consider it to be one of the most important pieces of writing to come our way in a very long time, and it absolutely will be—of this I am sure—one of the most beneficial books you have ever read.

This book talks about how to deal with life exactly as it is occurring, not just when it’s easy to do so, but when it’s the most difficult—which, irony of ironies, makes it easy to do so.

And as much as I thought I knew about all this, boy, could I have used this book when I was moving through the worst days of my personal journey. As with all of us, there have been some pretty tough ones. And in those moments we can easily forget—or, at least, I did—whatever we thought we knew about how to navigate the rocky shoals of life.

If in those moments I could have had something that I could turn to, something that could have helped me understand what was going on and how to get through it, I would have given anything. And if I had had something that I could refer to ahead of time so that I might have a specific approach to dealing with challenging moments, I would have considered it the biggest blessing of my life.

I can promise you that you will never find life more clearly explained than it is here, nor will you have placed in your hands more useful or powerful tools with which to negotiate its most difficult experiences.

It is true for me that as a child I seemed to know, intuitively, that life need not be as utterly discombobulating as I was observing people experiencing it, but I could not have told you why that was so—much less how to make it so. Mary O’Malley has done both here, and thus produced one of the greatest gifts one human being could offer to another.

If this is a challenging time in your life (or if someone you know and love is moving through a challenging moment in theirs), you could not have been led to a more perfect resource than this book—nor a more compassionate, understanding, spiritually aware, emotionally articulate, psychologically brilliant, and wonderfully able and capable messenger and teacher than its author.

Put simply, this book will show you the way to a better life, without needing a single thing to be different for you to retain your inner peace, your outer joy, and your overall well-being. Yet it is far from a theory book, or a concept document. It is a Practitioner’s Guide. It is an easy-to-follow Instruction Book. It could easy have been titled Life’s Operating Manual.

Your soul knew exactly what it was doing when it brought you here. (You know, of course, that you did not “stumble upon” this book by chance.) Absorb it, then. Inhale it. Drink it in as the nectar of the gods. For it is surely from Divinity Itself that flows such wisdom as is here.

Thank you Mary O’Malley, for our days and nights are enriched by you, and our wounded places healed.

Be light, Mary

P.S. – If you want an autographed copy, you will be able to purchase it at my website www.maryomalley.com by November 9^th.  You can also order the book from Amazon, Barnes and Nobel, and local bookstores, after that date.

“I have felt the Presence of God my whole Life, even when I didn’t have a name for it. I could feel the voice bigger than myself speaking to me, and all of us have that same voice. Be still and know it. It’s always there speaking to you and waiting for you to hear it. In every move, every decision, I wait and I listen. I am still. I wait and listen for the guidance that is greater than my meager mind. So what I know is God is Love and God is Life, and your life is always speaking to you.”

Most of us, however, feel alone with no sense of inner support as we make our way down the path of our lives.  But even though we may feel alone, we aren’t. There truly is a Presence bigger than us that is speaking to us all of the time. To discover this truth is like two fish that jumped out of the water at the same time, and one said to the other, “Now I know what they mean by water!” The fish were so immersed in water their whole lives that they didn’t recognize it.  We are so immersed in the storytellers in our minds that we don’t see that loving support has always been with us.

From my new book due out November 15th, “What’s In the Way IS the Way”

Now notice what you are experiencing as you use your imagination to open up to the joy of everything being okay. In your mind there is probably a sense that nothing needs to be any different than it is. In your body, there is an experience of deep relaxation that allows for the glow of joy. And your heart is open, spacious and light. Ahh.

What would it be like if you knew that everything was always okay? That doesn’t mean there wouldn’t be challenges. It just means that you wouldn’t turn them into problems so then you would be able to respond to them from a clear place. What would it be like to live from this open, relaxed, engaged and spacious place? Isn’t this what you deeply long for – to no longer struggle with Life and instead be available to the experience of Life as it is right here, right now? This is possible! In fact everything in your Life is a part of the journey into recognizing and living from a place that is beyond struggle.

~From my new book, What’s in the Way IS the Way, due out in October

Finally on my way to yes
I bump into
all the places
where I said no
to my life
all the untended wounds
the red and purple scars
those hieroglyphs of pain
carved into my skin,
my bones,
those coded messages
that send me down
the wrong street
again and again
where I find them
the old wounds
the old misdirections
and I lift them
one by one
close to my heart
and I say holy
holy

Pesha Joyce Gertler