Be The Space

A Loving Guide to Creating Inner Space Through Present Moment Awareness

~The Wisdom to Overcome Suffering~

Matt Landsiedel

Copyright © 2020 by Matt Landsiedel

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
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information in this book is distributed on an “as is” basis, without warranty.
Although every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this work, neither
the author nor the publisher shall have any liability to any person or entity with
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by the information contained in this book.

Copyright © 2020 by Matt Landsiedel

Introduction

Chapter 1: What is Present Moment Awareness?

Chapter 2: Life Without Present Moment Awareness?

Chapter 3: Life With Present Moment Awareness?

Chapter 4: Space Consciousness vs Form Consciousness

Chapter 5: The Presence of Suffering

The Identity of Pain

Healing Trauma and Reliving Memories of Pain

Wearing Your Busyness Like a Badge of Honour

Your Relationship With Time

Chapter 6: Letting Go of Attachment to Outcome

The Experiencers Experience

The Journey From Doing to Being

A Few Words on Acceptance

Chapter 7: Becoming the Master of Your Mind

Mind Over Matters of the Heart

Surrendering My Mind to My Body

Chapter 8: Befriending Your Body

Conscious Doing

Aging and the Inner Body

Protecting Your Outer Body From Disease

Chapter 9: The Power of Surrender

My Surrender Experiment
The Essence of Forgiveness

Chapter 10: The Art of Effortless Effort

The Space Between

Chapter 11: Allowing Presence to Guide You

Acceptance is the Only Way to Presence

Self-Acceptance

A Lesson in Self-Acceptance: How You Treat Others is a Reflection of How You’re

Treating Yourself

A Lesson in Self-Compassion: It’s Okay to Fall Apart

Grown Men Don't Cry

Chapter 12: Affirming Your Practice

Mastering the Mind: One Pointed Concentration

Counting 1-10 10-1

Flickering of a Candle Flame

Becoming One With a Song

Mantras

Befriending Your Body

Observing Your Breath

Breathing Into Your Pelvis

Observing Your Body Sensations

Lift Your Cheekbones: A Smiling Meditation

Slow Walking Meditation

Playing With Your 5 Senses

Body Scanning

Energizing Your Hands

Contemplative Meditation

Die Before You Die

Conscious Doing

The Being in Your Doing

Stream of Consciousness Journaling/Writing

Affirmations

Affirmation
Epilogue

About the Author

Introduction

Wherever you are on your spiritual journey, I am honoured that you have chosen this
book as a reference to deepen your connection to self and spirit through the
present moment. Whether you chose this book because you're currently suffering and
looking for a way out, or you have experienced suffering in the past and have found
your way out and would like to keep it that way, I am honoured to be a part of your
path.

The wisdom to overcome suffering is the tagline for this book but I don't want to
misconstrue how I feel about suffering and the role it has played in becoming the
person I am today. Suffering is our greatest challenge and our greatest gift as
human beings. We are offered a challenge to help us evolve into who we are meant to
become in this lifetime and it is up to us how we will perceive each challenge.

The more we resist the challenge, the more suffering we cause ourselves. The more
suffering we cause ourselves, the more we learn and grow from it. However, there
comes a point in our lives when we realize our suffering is our greatest gift, but
it is not necessary in order to learn the lessons life has in store for you. This
is the point where you liberate yourself from having to learn from suffering, and
you learn from love instead. This is the point I want to help you reach and the
reason why I chose to write this book.

I want to take you on a journey through realization of suffering as a necessary

part of life. To see that it can crack you open to a realization of life for what
it is and experience inner peace. I want you to see the power in your suffering and
how it can be used to evolve you into the person you are meant to become. Once we
experience this we can stop unconsciously attracting suffering into our lives
because we are awake enough to know it isn't a necessary part of our growth.
Rather, appreciate it as a tool we can use to bring us from unconsciousness to
consciousness.

I want to share my story of how I transformed my suffering into the joyful life I
am blessed to live today, and how I owe it all to the present moment.

Growing up for me was not easy. I had a challenging upbringing that although was
joyful, was overshadowed by suffering. As a child I was very emotional and felt my
feelings, as well as the feelings of others, very intensely. I didn't know there
was a term for this until I was about 25 years old. I spent 25 years as an empath
and had no clue what it was. For those of you who don’t know what an empath is,
it's someone who has the ability to tune into others feelings and feel them just as
if they were their own. As a 5 year old boy, this was a real challenge and left me
feeling anxious and confused for most of my childhood. I remember walking by
homeless or handicap people and having intense feelings to cry. I grew up with an
emotional mother as well, and while this has been a blessing later in my life to
help me develop my emotional self, it presented its own challenges growing up. I
always felt her feelings and mine at the same time and it was challenging to know
which feelings were hers and which were mine. As a teenager, I remember walking
into parties or social situations feeling confident and peaceful and suddenly I
would feel anxious because I was picking up on someone's energy at the party. It
wasn't until later in life that I learned how to manage this and create separation
between what was mine, and what was others. My empathy is now my greatest gift as
it allows me to connect deeply with people in an authentic way. People feel safe to
be seen by me because they know I can feel into them and it allows them to
emotionally surrender to me quite easily.

Being an anxious child and having an anxious mother was not an easy combination for
me. I remember for the first two years of school I was caught in a pattern of
separation anxiety. I spent every morning going through this intense anxiety where
my mom would drop me off at school and I would panic. I could feel her energy of
not wanting to let me go, coupled with my anxiety of not wanting to let her go,
leaving me feeling torn. I would leave the car and start to walk to the school
door, panic would set in and I would run back to her car crying. This happened
almost every morning for two years and it took a major toll on both her and I. This
was the first time I can recall intense fear of the future becoming a part of my
experience. Everyday before school I would be terrified to go because I knew what
the future had in store for me. My anticipation of the future began to create my
future for me as this is what I was focusing my attention on each morning. I didn't
have the coping skills to deal with this at such a young age and my mother wasn't
sure how to support me either. Eventually I would grow out of this as I learned to
develop attachments with teachers and students. These relationships helped me find
the present moment where I could let go of my fear.

When I was 8 years old, my parents called me and my sister upstairs to talk around
the dinner table. I knew exactly what they were going to say because I could feel
the sadness in them. They told us they were getting separated and for me this was
very painful because it suddenly made me fear what the future would look like for
myself and my family. Once again the fear of the unknown was rearing its ugly head.
This time I felt a strong sense of losing control and I made a deal with myself
that I would never let anyone have control over me and how I felt ever again. I am
convinced this is when I started to repress my feelings and learn to shut them off
by spending all of my time in my mind where I felt I had the most control. In
hindsight, this was a pivotal time in my life where I learned to avoid the present
moment because it felt too painful to sit with.

Around this time in my life I started to develop anxious tics. I would grind my
teeth, clench my fists, lick my lips, blink my eyes repeatedly, curl my toes, and
many other compulsive behaviors. People at school would tease me and call me
“Tourettes”. Soon these physical manifestations of unprocessed energy would turn
into obsessive thinking. I would think so deeply and repetitively about things that
I couldn’t control to try and find ways to not feel disappointment. I would lay up
at night worrying about my parents dying and feeling scared of being alone. At this
point in my life, I felt unsafe in my own thoughts and feelings and didn't really
see a way out of it except to shut off my ability to feel by repressing my
feelings.

Around this same time, I started to have feelings of being different than everyone
else. I was starting to have sexual feelings towards other boys and wasn't sure if
this was normal so I just didn't say anything and kept it to myself. As I went
through school, I began to realize that I was different than the other boys and
from what I collected it wasn't okay to be gay. I would then spend the next 12
years hiding myself from the world in fear of being exposed as a “fag”. Middle and
high school for me were some of the hardest years of my life because I was always
on guard and never really allowed myself to truly connect with anyone because I was
afraid of being seen for who I really was. I saw myself as defective and broken so
I wore a mask, or many masks, to cover up the parts of myself that I didn’t want
others to see. I would later learn that this was shame I was experiencing around
feeling unacceptable and unloveable. It was the pain of having to betray myself by
hiding who I was to fit in that led to me numbing out of life in the only way I
knew how. By the age of 13 I started smoking cigarettes, pot and experimenting with
mushrooms and ecstasy. By the age of 16 I was dabbling with cocaine, and by the age
of 17 I was at the start of a full blown crack addiction that would last until I
was 24 years old.

My whole life was built around numbing the past and controlling the future, all so
I didn’t have to show up in life for who I really was. I was terrified of the
present moment because it meant I had to sit with who I actually was and let go of
all the stories I created about who I wanted to be seen as so the world around me
would accept me. I yearned so badly for acceptance and connection because I didn't
accept myself and felt disconnected from who I really was. I spent most of my late
20’s and early 30’s figuring out which parts of me were actually me and which parts
of me I created to be accepted by others. This was an excruciating task because I
not only felt the anger of betraying myself for so many years, but I felt the loss
of this sense of self that I created to protect me from the world. It ultimately
masked me from my authenticity and sharing meaningful connection with others.

When I was 26 years old I was introduced to a network marketing essential oil
company through my uncle Rich and it was during this experience that I was
connected to a lady named Gloria. She was instrumental in connecting me to the
spiritual community in Calgary, Alberta where I met so many amazing people who
became the angels that walked me back home to myself. I attended sound healing
ceremonies that began to open up the chakra energy centres that were dormant for so
many years of repressing my feelings and not speaking my truth. I began to work
with peruvian shamans, and through this work I developed my own spiritual path that
was pivotal in my healing.

I was introduced to the work of Eckhart Tolle when I was 28 years old and his work
had such a profound impact on my life and is one of the many inspirations behind
why I chose to write this book. The present moment has taught me everything I know
that matters and holds itself in truth, light, and love. It's the only place I feel
100% safe from worry, fear, shame, hatred, jealousy and every other emotion I chose
to run from most of my life.

My story is one of moving from shame to love. Letting go of control and allowing
acceptance to be my guiding light to a life where I can surrender what no longer
serves me to the only thing that does - love. I am really excited for you to read
this book because I know how much present moment awareness has changed my life and
I am confident it will open your eyes and heart to a whole new way of living life.
Life is not lived when it is lived in the mind. While I don't regret any part of my
life, I am saddened by the many years I didn’t know the present moment because the
illusion of the past and future appeared more important. I fall back on my faith
that everything happens for a reason and I know I wouldn't be writing this book if
my life didn't play out exactly as it did, so for that I am grateful.

Chapter 1: What is Present Moment Awareness?

Present moment awareness is the Here and Now. It is the experience of being in the
moment without interference from past or future. Which is to say interference from
the mind, because the mind feeds on the past and future and then uses them to
define itself. You cannot think about the present moment because it can only be
experienced by being in it. Therefore the mind is not involved in present moment
awareness. It is asked to take a backseat to the experience so the body can take
the wheel.

Can you think of one thought that doesn't dwell itself in the past or future? It's
impossible because all thoughts originate in the past or future. This is called
thought form. It requires there to be something formed already such as an
experience so a thought can be brought into form about the experience that was just
experienced in the present moment. Once we have an experience, we can then have a
formed thought about it. The experience which informs the thought is the present
moment.

The experience which precursors thought is also known as space. The space between
the thoughts is the present moment. As you get better at practicing present moment
awareness, you widen the gaps of space between your thoughts where you experience
less time in your mind and more time to Be The Space to which you are.

The present moment is all about experiencing life through the body. The body speaks
a special language to us, the language of sensation. Sensations like pain and
pleasure allow us to navigate our way towards things that bring us joy, and away
from things that cause us suffering. The mind on the other hand takes it one step
further by taking these sensory perceptions and creating stories about them. It
judges the experiences and puts them in a category of desirable or undesirable. We
then develop resistance towards certain thoughts, feelings, experiences or people.
This resistance pulls us out of the present moment because we are judging it and
saying we cannot be happy unless there is an absence of what we deem as
undesirable.

The past is where life happened, the present is where life is happening, and the
future is where life will happen, where do you want to bring your attention? This
is such an important question in the cultivation of present moment awareness
because without awareness of attention, we can’t bring ourselves to the place of
stillness to allow the present moment to be experienced. The present moment is all
about paying attention on purpose. Without purpose, we are just allowing our
attention to be drawn to the most interesting thing in our mental or physical
environment. Sometimes the most interesting thing is not the thing we need to be
focusing our attention on. This is how we become addicted to the drama of the mind
because it appears interesting to the purposelessness of our attention.

Being in the here and now doesn’t just happen in meditation. This is just one
effective way to be present in your life without incessant mental chatter. If you
aren’t a big fan of meditation that’s fine, you can actually bring present moment
awareness into anything you do. Sometimes it can be more challenging when mental
stimuli are present because the mind really wants to engage with its environment.
This is why most people recommend meditation to develop the practice.

The key is to allow the body sensations to speak louder than the mental chatter.
How do we do this? With attention. We focus our attention on what we want to. We
have this control, but when we don’t practice, we get in the habit of focusing our
attention on what is making the most noise - the mind. The mind sets up its home in
the past and future of your attention, whereas the body sets up its home in the
present moment. You need to make your body more interesting than your mind, and
typically we draw our attention to things that bring us pleasure. When you stop
bypassing the body and learn to sit with it, you will realize that the body
sensations are quite interesting and pleasurable. After all, one of the most
pleasurable experiences a human being can enjoy is an orgasm and that happens
totally in the body as a sensation.
The present moment can enrich your life in so many ways. For example, many people
have a hard time being fully present in one of the most pleasurable of human
activities - sex. Many people who are overly engaged with the mind will find they
have to indulge in mental imagery to enjoy sex. This is living in the past or
future and taking yourself out of the present moment. As you learn to let go of the
mind and allow the body to take over, you will find sex to take on a whole new
dimension that you never even knew it could. Apply this principle to any area of
your life and just imagine how you can have a whole new experience of life by
allowing the present moment to create your experiences for you.

Chapter 2: Life Without Present Moment Awareness?

Anxiety is a condition of the mind that deeply impacts our body. It's a rumination
of thoughts focusing on the past or future and it can lead to great suffering.
Anxiety cannot exist in the present moment, so we want to learn how to become the
master of our mind so we can spend more time in the present moment and enjoy life
the way it’s meant to be enjoyed.

What I want to teach you is the wisdom needed to begin the journey of mastering
your mind, so you can access the present moment which will set you free of
suffering caused by an anxious mind. The mind is made up of 2 entities:

The thinker - this is the part of you that you catch thinking automatically and it
usually feels like it has a mind of its own.

The watcher - the person that catches the mind thinking (the seat of consciousness
within you).

Have you ever had the experience where you are reading something and make it to the
end of the page only to realize you didn't even pay attention to what you were
reading? Yeah, me too! Oh the irony if that just happened to you reading this
page :)

The thinker and watcher need to be clearly distinguished because one isn’t actually
your mind, it's your consciousness. The thinker is your mind as it carries out
mental tasks like reading, problem solving, talking, etc. The watcher isn’t your
mind, it is the consciousness that drives your whole being, and is the seat you sit
in when you are in the present moment. This knowledge can be enough to set you free
because this means you aren’t your mind, you are something much greater. Just as
our consciousness can tell our arm to move or stay still, it can do the same with
our mind. We have the conscious capacity to set our mind aside when we don’t need
to use it. This is what meditation is. The setting aside of your mind to make room
for stillness where you can connect to your heart and soul.

When we become the master of our mind, it becomes our servant. The mind being your
master is how most people experience their existence. This can cause great
suffering for us as human beings because the mind can only experience happiness in
the absence of its polarity (sadness). The mind is beautiful and we need it, but
when we aren’t mastering it, it will lead to great misery. We can have negative and
positive misery. When we are a slave to the mind, it is misery regardless because
there is no consistency in any state of being as your mind can be disturbed so
easily by its environment. Positive misery is the undisturbed mind and this is what
lures us back into staying a slave to the mind because we remain hopeful that the
next pleasurable state will be achieved by the mind. It’s only when we feel
absolute misery and lose all hope of positive misery that we can embark on a path
of learning to master the mind. This is how our suffering becomes our greatest gift
because it is the motivation we use to liberate ourselves from our minds.

After reaching this point in my life from suffering severe anxiety, depression, and
suicidal ideation, I chose to focus on how I could master my mind rather than it
master me. The path I am on is called One Pointed Concentration. Every day I sit
with myself and I master where my attention goes from moment to moment as my
consciousness flows. I pay attention on purpose to when my mind wants to stop the
flow and insert itself into my experience. When this happens, I draw it back to the
one thing I choose to make the center of my attention. I point my concentration
toward things like my breath, counting, candle flame, song, etc. It can really be
anything of your choosing. The idea is to experience the moment without the mind,
and when the mind tries to interject, you gently and compassionately draw your
attention back to the object of concentration. This process isn’t about rejection
of the mind or achieving a state of no mind, it’s about mastering your mind and
making it your slave, no different then when you tell your feet to walk. If you
want to master something you have to respect it and understand the capacity it has
and doesn’t have. Start small and work your way up to sitting with yourself
everyday. This is not an activity with a destination because when you focus on
arriving you have already lost the point of meditation. The destination is the
journey in meditation; allow the stillness to find you, rather than you searching
for it.

One of the biggest distractions human beings have from being in the present moment
is one another. When we don't want to be in the present moment, which is to be one
with ourselves, we seek distraction from that by focusing our attention on other
people.

Why am I so distracted by other people and have a hard time focusing my energy on
myself?

The simple answer is, you’re not in the present moment. You’re caught up in the
stories in your head rather than the sensations in your body. The mind always wants
to focus its attention on anything other than you. It wants to create more stories
and drama so it doesn’t have to sit in stillness. If you want to stop leaking your
energy onto others, you need to make yourself the reference point, not them. If
you’re used to focusing your attention on others, it will be hard to find the
present moment until you learn how to make yourself your own reference point, and
more specifically your body.

Why do I leak my attention outward onto others rather than focusing it on myself?

Typically, people do this because they can’t tolerate their inner process because
they confuse their inner process with their mental chatter. The noise of your mind
isn’t you, the sensations of your body are. This is the inner process I speak of.
Sitting with the mental chatter is painful if you don’t have the ability to
distance yourself from it by becoming the witness to it. When we are one with our
mental chatter we suffer, and then we seek distraction from it. This is when we use
other people to distract ourselves from having to sit with ourselves. It’s no
different than a drug addict using drugs to distract them from having to sit with
themselves. It's a form of codependency which is an addiction to people or
relationships.

Start to let go of your identification with the stories in your mind. These stories
are what cause you suffering and increase mental chatter. The mental chatter won’t
stop, what needs to stop is the attention you’re giving it and how you incessantly
engage with it. When you have an urge to distract yourself from yourself, do the
opposite and go within. Stop engaging with the mental chatter and just observe it.
Become the presence needed to leave the mind and enter the body. Then listen and
feel into your body and notice how it’s always there radiating beautiful sensations
of joy to you and all you need to do is just stop, take a moment and feel them.

Chapter 3: Life With Present Moment Awareness?

Life with present moment awareness is a life that is free of the suffering of the
mind. Creating drama in our lives comes from our obsession with the past and
future. The things that we wish had different outcomes, regrets, past hurts,
betrayals, trauma, etc. If all these things are to stop controlling your life
experience, then you must learn to become one with the present moment and stop
over-identifying with the mind to create your sense of self (ego).

Eckhart Tolle describes the ego as “the unobserved mind that runs your life when
you are not present as the witnessing consciousness, the watcher”. He also states
“the basic ego patterns are designed to combat its own deep-seated fear and sense
of lack. They are resistance, control, power, greed, defence and attack. Some of
the ego’s strategies are extremely clever, yet they never truly solve any of its
problems, simply because the ego itself is the problem”.

It is important to note that the ego is not your mind in totality. It is a

structure within your mind that is created during years of domestication when we
experience undesirable aspects of ourselves. We may have thought these aspects of
ourselves need to be hidden from others by developing a false sense of self, which
then becomes the ego.

The thoughts in your mind are like a circus that will never end. Trying to still
your mind is like trying to pin down a wild animal, it will fight to its death to
survive. This is why we don't try to stop the mind, we just choose to draw our
attention away from it and it becomes still. Where your attention goes energy
follows. Focusing your attention on thoughts creates more thoughts, and focusing
your attention on body sensations creates more body sensations which is a great
portal to the present moment.

How will my life improve if I start to develop a stronger relationship with the
present moment?

First off, I just want to point out the importance of viewing it as a relationship.
You don't own it, you have to practice it, respect it, give it time and space, and
nurture it. It’s a lot like being in an intimate relationship, an intimate
relationship with YOU!

When you put in the time and energy to Be The Space, you will find life suddenly
begins to take on a whole new meaning. It is a cultivation of space that requires
nothing outside of yourself to create your experience. Through inner space you are
now your experience because your attention is on you, not your things,
relationships, thoughts, feelings, etc.

When you free up all the energy that you expend on worrying about the past and
future, all that energy gets deposited back into you. You will notice that you no
longer buy into the drama that is around you because all drama exists in the past.
You begin to see yourself in a new light as you no longer require the past or the
future as a reference point to who you are. You no longer derive your sense of self
from who you once were in the past and who you could become in the future. You just
know that you are that you are, and that feels so right to you. This is the first
taste of coming home to yourself and something we’ll revisit in later chapters.

My perfectionism melted away when I started to practice present moment awareness.

For most of my life I was trying to solve my past inadequacy with the hope of
future accomplishment. The distance between those two places always felt so far
because as I accomplished, my focus was always on my next accomplishment. This
reinforced my feelings of inadequacy and became the “hustle for my worth” I define
as perfectionism.

When I started to practice more presence in my life, I began to find my need to

rely on the hope of future success decreasing. I was spending less time
recollecting past experiences because I wasn't daydreaming as much and I was more
mindful of where I was drawing my attention. Within this practice, I learned how
letting go of needing to control everything with the thinker entity of my mind and
I freed up space for my watcher to grace me with his divine intelligence. This is a
beautiful place to live from because you are stepping out of your own way to make
room for the advocate of your soul to take the reins and guide your life. Your soul
will always guide you to what you need, whereas the ego will always guide you to
what you want. Where the inner conflict arises, and the origin of 99% of our
suffering comes from, is the ego holding onto control thinking it knows what's best
for the soul.

Sometimes what the ego needs can feel like our truth because we are being guided by
fear, and the egos job is to preserve us from repeating painful past experiences.
So we listen to it thinking it knows what's best for us. We may find ourselves
stuck between these two worlds in a full on tug-o-war while our soul tries to guide
us to our truth and our ego tries to guide us away from what we fear. On the other
side of fear is courage and confidence. So if we always listen to the ego, we may
not experience true courage and confidence in our lives. The best way to face fear
is to practice present moment awareness because it can’t exist in the present
moment. Fear lives in the past and future and dissolves in the present moment.
Let's say you have a public speaking gig and you're nervous. Public speaking is the
world's greatest fear and it can cause a great deal of anxiety for people. What
trips people up is being caught up in their head and playing out "what if"
scenarios. "What if I get up there and forget what I'm talking about?" or " what if
I get up there and mess up my words and everyone laughs at me?". We create
unnecessary suffering for ourselves by future surfing and this is eliminated when
you allow yourself to be in the present moment, especially during times of stress
or anxiety.

One of the greatest gifts you can give yourself while practicing present moment
awareness is sacred space. I love this term and use it in my own life and my
coaching practice. Sacred space is the space you access between something happening
and your response to it. It’s that split second where you get to choose from what
place in your being you would like to respond from. Are you going to react
impulsively based on emotion? or will you respond from a place within you that is
more conscious and understanding? Sacred space has changed my life because as an
anxious person, I have a tendency to make my decisions from pure emotion. When I
started to Be The Space, I recognized the depth of my empathy, patience and
compassion for myself and others.

The golden rule of the practice of sacred space is it cannot be applied to others
if it's not being applied to yourself. How can you offer someone compassion if you
cannot offer it to yourself? So the practice of sacred space has to be offered to
yourself first before it can be practiced with others. When the practice is only
outward and not inward, you will notice a stronger reaction to other people and may
find it hard to be compassionate because the sacred space gap is smaller when it's
not cultivated from within. The bedrock of growing the gap of your sacred space
practice comes from self-compassion. The more kindness you offer yourself, the more
kindness you can offer others, thus widening the gap of time to respond with
compassion. This starts with the language you use with yourself. When you make a
mistake, how large is the gap you create to choose how you will respond to
yourself? If the gap is small then you need to be more gentle with yourself. Give
yourself space to make mistakes and be kinder to yourself. 99% of the time when we
are impatient or unkind to others, whether that's in our inner or outer dialogue,
it's the same way we are speaking to ourselves. We may even be subconsciously
rationalizing our mistreatment of others with the belief that if I talk to myself
this way, why wouldn't I talk to others this way. This brings light to the famous
quote "hurt people, hurt people.

Chapter 4: Space Consciousness vs Form Consciousness

Now that you are aware of your thinker and watcher entities, we want to take it one
step further and explore how they work together and how we can use this awareness
to spend more time in the present moment. Through understanding how our
consciousness works, we will make this transformation happen. Let's take a look at
both space and form consciousness and how they each play an important role in the
human experience.

Space consciousness is the seat of awareness that we tune in to watch everything

play out. It's the birds eye view of our experience. Regardless of what is
happening in your life, the space consciousness will take you out of the intensity
of perception, thought and emotion, and bring you into the present moment. It is
being conscious of your thinking. The same energy that feeds the watcher, it is the
seat of consciousness to which you sit, observe, and experience life.

Form consciousness is when we identify with something beyond the inner space to
which we are. Form consciousness contributes to your false sense of self - the ego.
It places emphasis on everything and anything other than the inner space of who you
are. Think about anything you can identify with that isn't the space within you -
your perceptions, thoughts, emotions, money, relationships, cars, houses, etc.
These are external things we use to form consciousness about who we are. Masks,
facades, personas are all built from form consciousness.

Isn't what we perceive, think, feel and experience the space within us?

I understand why you may think that because it feels as though our thoughts and
feelings are our innermost part of who we are, but the answer is no. When we
perceive, think, feel or experience, consciousness is born into form because
something that occurred in your inner experience is now relative to something that
is formed. For example, your thinking has reincarnated into a thought and is now
something that is being interpreted rather than experienced, which pulls you out of
the now and into analyzing the memory of what just was. It requires form
consciousness (something outside the space within) to be fully aware of when we are
having a perception, thought or feeling. If you can be aware of it in the moment,
it is form consciousness. Just like when you are in the present moment and then you
become aware that you were just in the present moment, you are now out of the
present moment because you are now in the memory of just being in the present
moment. You moved from space consciousness to form consciousness.

The struggle with form consciousness is there are so many variables that can occur
which lead to reactivity. There is no permanence in form consciousness and this
impermanence can lead to great suffering by the part of you that is attached to
certainty, control, desirable outcomes, expectations, etc. Reactivity is the
symptom of being too identified with form consciousness. This is the place of
unhappiness that is formed by being addicted to reacting to things that are not
congruent with your expectations of how you desire the world around you to be.

When you perceive, think, feel, or experience, consciousness is born into form.
Therefore it is inevitable to interact with form consciousness in the human
experience. I don't want the take-home message to be that form consciousness is
somehow evil because it isn't. The take-home is that we need to be aware of how our
identification to form is playing out in our lives. If we are just form conscious
and not space conscious, we have no awareness of being conscious of our
consciousness. That is to say that we are only identified with the thinker and not
the watcher. If this is the case, your tape will be playing all day long and you
will be unaware of the thoughts you're thinking that are greatly impacting your
mood and quality of life.

The joy of Being The Space, which is the only true form of joy, cannot come alive
in form consciousness. The things you may be using to cultivate pleasure or a
“sense” of happiness such as possessions, achievements, relationships, substances
etc. are only temporary states where happiness becomes fleeting. It can leave you
as easily as it came to you. This is when we become addicted to the chase of form
consciousness and the only way to surrender, is to enter a spiritual path towards
finding the present moment.

What is the difference between joy and happiness?

Joy is an interesting state of being because it is not like happiness or pleasure

where it is an emotional state that can be achieved through form. Joy happens only
in the present moment because it is the purest expression of your soul. Your mind
can only create happiness or pleasure through form consciousness, whereas your
heart can only create joy through space consciousness. The same can be said for
love. Love and joy vibrate at similar frequencies and they both share space
consciousness as their home.

Have you ever tried loving someone from your mind? It tends to be a fragile and
shallow way to love someone, including yourself. The ego confuses love for
possession because it fears losing control, and creates stories and scenarios where
the love you try to offer has a self-serving agenda to preserve what it is you're
form consciousness desires. The only way to truly love someone is to find that
inner space within you and cultivate love for yourself, then you can show up and
offer that same love to someone else. Love cultivated in the mind isn't love, it is
a story of infatuation motivated by getting your needs met. We often love others
from the place inside of us that needs love. We love in the way we need to be loved
and most of the time that isn't how the other person wants to be loved. It isn't
until we learn to love ourselves that we can offer a love that will meet the needs
of our partner, rather than projecting what you need instead. This is why they say
“you can only love someone as deep as you love yourself”, and you can only love
yourself this deep when you learn how to become space conscious.
Chapter 5: The Presence of Suffering

Until we reach a place in our lives where the present moment becomes our
predominant experience, suffering is inevitable. This is because we are using
suffering as our motivator to a more conscious existence where suffering doesn’t
take us hostage. As we move from over-identification with form consciousness
towards space consciousness, we will find the suffering in our lives subsides.
However, this is a journey and one that takes consistency and reverent devotion to
achieve. It's about breaking habits of the mind and learning to move down towards
the body to experience life, rather than grasping for identity through our minds.
As we do this work, we will still experience suffering through the unhelpful mental
habits we still have, but are trying to break. Be patient and compassionate with
yourself as you develop this practice, otherwise you end up reinforcing the habits
you're trying to break.

So how can we begin to shift our view on pain and suffering to reduce the
resistance we have to experiencing it?

When we put up a wall of resistance to experiencing something, that thing tends to

persist in our life until we resolve our distaste for it through acceptance. When I
was in my 20's, I had a co-worker that I didn't get along with. She irritated the
heck out of me and because I wasn't at a place in my life to take self-
responsibility for my triggers, I made it all about her and how terrible she was. I
had so much resistance to this woman and the universe must have been giving me what
I needed, not what I wanted, because I was put on the same shift as her and she
became my team-lead for almost a year. Turns out this woman was a lot like me and
we shared similar core wounds. I was picking up in her, what I had yet to resolve
within myself. When we resist something it definitely persists and that was one of
my first tastes of this spiritual law. Since then I began to work with what made me
uncomfortable as a way to heal some of my core wounds.

The mind doesn't like pain because it goes against what it's always trying to
achieve - pleasure. As soon as pain enters our experience, we resist it. Then it
persists and we become unaligned to our hearts by trying to figure out a way to
make it different, and we create more suffering. Suffering is caused by wishing the
moment you're in were somehow different. This happens in the mind because the mind
finds the Now unacceptable, whereas the heart lives in radical acceptance of the
Now. The key to eliminating suffering is to let go of attachment to the Now being
anything other than what it is. Can you have a preference of how you want it to
turn out?, yes of course, but the difference between an attachment and a preference
is the acceptance of the outcome and not allowing it to impact your happiness.
Attachments leave no room for the outcome to be anything other than what you’re
attached to. Preferences carry a tone of flexibility and therefore they don't cause
suffering, perhaps just mild disappointment, but that can easily be overcome with a
single breath of presence.

I live by the motto that my suffering is my power. We are forced to grow and evolve
during times of adversity. Our resilience is tested and we dig deep to find new
depths to our being. Have you ever realized that some of the most amazing people
you know are the people who have been wounded so deeply but have come back from it
to tell their story of courage and redemption? I love this, and whenever I am going
through a painful period in my life, I feel conflicted. My ego feels the suffering
but my soul is excited with how I will feel on the other side of the suffering
through cultivating an even deeper understanding of who I am and what I am capable
of.

The key to having a pleasant form consciousness experience, as you shift towards
creating more inner space, is to be grateful for the suffering that enters your
experience as it is a powerful tool for transformation. Any other way to look at
your suffering will just create more suffering and this is how people get stuck in
years of suffering.

One of the biggest hurdles to finding the present moment is fear. Fear that is
fueled by unresolved pain that hasn't been processed or turned into power. People
experience suffering and they will do anything to avoid that experience in the
future, so they try to control. When we control, we are in the mind and the mind
can only exist in the past or future - this is also the birthplace of fear. This is
how the cycle begins and we find ourselves trapped in our minds with little
connection to the present moment. We live in regret of the past and anticipation of
the future with control being the vehicle we use to move us between the two states.

Let's break down fear so we can have a fresh perspective on what it actually is.

Fear is the gateway to courage. Fear is a signal telling you that a door is ready
to be opened to a more confident and empowered version of you. Fear is an
opportunity to create another layer of depth to your being. On the other side of
your fears is this beautiful energy of everything you’ve ever wanted, but fear
doesn't resolve without present moment awareness. I want you to take a moment and
ask yourself these questions:

What is the one fear above all fears that you are most afraid of facing?

What is holding you back from facing this fear?

Fear of looking stupid?

Fear of rejection?

Fear of failure?

Fear of abandonment?

Fear of not being good enough?

Sit with that fear and honour it as part of your experience. Stop running from it
or distracting yourself from it because it will keep coming up in your life as an
opportunity for you to work through it. If you run from your fear, your fear stays
trapped inside you and keeps you stuck in the person you don’t want to be. When we
practice facing our fears they leave our being and are replaced with courage and
confidence.

Spiritually, fears represent hurdles we must overcome to peel back the layers of
our being so we can radiate all that we are into this world. Fears are given to us
by our experiences as a contrast to courage. We can only know courage or be
courageous in the presence of fear. One must be present to conquer the other, so if
we run from fear, it means we are
well. The word courage comes from
earliest definition of courage is
This is precisely fitting as this
journey from head down into heart
running from opportunities to be courageous as
the latin word cor which means heart. The
“to speak one's mind by telling all one's heart.”
book is meant to teach you how to take the
with courage.

So next time you are given an opportunity to face your fears, I encourage you to
focus on what is on the other side of your fear, rather than the fear itself. What
do you want so badly that fear is standing in your way? Honour the fear but always
focus your attention on what is on the other side of the fear. Then you must return
to the present moment and take action from that place. The fear is just an
opportunity to step into something you never have before and when you do that, you
begin living life in its fullest expression.

This full expression of you is found in the present moment when you stop trying to
control having to experience the things in your imagination that you feel would be
unbearable to experience in reality. Get out of your head where there is so much
apprehension to show up just as you are, and enter the present moment where you are
accepted in the nature of who you are.

The Identity of Pain

When we spend so much of our lives in pain from living in and being attached to the
past, we may develop an identity of pain. We may find ourselves wearing our badge
of pain with pride and using it to fulfill needs of the ego such as sympathy,
martyrdom, acceptance, belonging, validation, or as a currency to get your
emotional needs met. When this is the case, you will find yourself stuck in cycles
of pain and self-sabotage and unable to grow or evolve into present moment
awareness. This is due to the mere fact that the identity you have created for
yourself is built and fed by the past. The mind is keeping this identity alive, and
as long as you form an identity out of your pain, you will never be able to free
yourself from it. The ego will preserve you from healing it because it derives a
sense of self from it and wants to keep it intact as it is self-serving to meeting
egoic needs.

If you dissolve the pain identity, the ego feels threatened and will do anything to
preserve itself from annihilation. This is an unconscious pattern that the ego
plays out and the only way out of it is through bringing it to consciousness; we do
that through self-responsibility within the present moment. The ego when the pain
identity is intact and active is placing more importance on the past than the
present. As soon as you start to draw your attention to the present, that awareness
alone will be enough to see how your mind is trying to pull you back into the past
to keep the pain identity alive. It's like the past is the food that keeps your
pain identity alive. When you make this realization it will be such a huge game
changer for you.

Healing Trauma and Reliving Memories of Pain

We need to let go of thinking the mind will heal the pain of the past through
revisiting it. It is becoming more known in mainstream psychology that revisiting
traumatic memories is not effective for healing. In fact, in some people it has
shown to cause more trauma and regression in the state of their mental and
emotional wellbeing.

I think emotional discharge can be therapeutic and necessary for healing but the
emotion can be accessed without having to relive or rehash the traumatic event.
Emotion is energy and energy are tiny particles that can move and flow with
acceptance, and get stuck with resistance. When we have something traumatic that
occurs in our lives it can feel easy to just sweep it under the rug. This form of
psychological defence is called repression. We find something intolerable in the
moment and we push it away from being part of our experience. What many people
don't realize is that it's still a part of your experience, just in the background
within your subconscious mind. The subconscious mind will always have input on what
your life will look and feel like because it is running programs in the background
based on what you have experienced in your past. This subconscious programming can
be destructive and it will feed off the unprocessed emotional energy that gets
stored in the body. We don't need to relive any of the trauma to heal it. We need
to draw our attention downward to the body where the energy is stuck and be present
with the body so it can release the energy that you once repressed.

In my coaching practice, I will guide a client from talking about a current trigger
in their life, to drawing a link to something that occurred in the past to which
the current trigger is related. This alone is enough to start to feel the emotions
that need to move. I then ask the client to close their eyes and feel into the body
where the emotion is being experienced. This draws them out of their mind, where
they will try to rationalize their way through the emotion, to the body where they
can transmute the energy with acceptance and present moment awareness. I find this
effective and it is also a skill the client can use outside of sessions because it
is teaching them to stop repressing and start accepting their emotions.

Negative emotions are much less painful when you leave the mind out of the
equation. The mind wants to over-analyze, interpret, and make sense of triggers,
and emotions don't, they just allow the trigger to be as it is. Emotions just need
to be acknowledged and then they move on. They require 100% presence and then the
energy of emotion will dissolve. When we are using our minds to deal with our
emotions, we will always default to distraction, repression, and avoidance of the
Now and this takes us down a rabbit hole of endless suffering.

Wearing Your Busyness Like a Badge of Honour

Many people talk about how busy they are and how they have no time for anything.
Let’s break down busyness and how people can use the term busy to create suffering
for themselves. People take pride in our culture in how busy they are. For some
it’s a status symbol, for others it’s an excuse to get out of social obligations,
and for many it’s a form of repression from sitting with themselves in stillness.
Whatever your relationship with busyness is, it’s always worthwhile to explore it
in more detail.

Busyness can be broken down into two categories: mental and physical. Mental being
how busy your mind is, and physical being how busy your schedule is. Of course they
are related because as your physical schedule becomes busier, your mind may become
more occupied as well. But in a lot of cases, people use mental busyness as a
deterrent from their physical busyness and in-turn lack achievement and fulfilment
in their lives.

Busyness of the mind is the one we have more control over because our schedules are
usually predetermined by things we tend to have less control over. However, we
still can make choices around efficiency that make our schedules more manageable as
well. Busyness of the mind is often determined by your emotional state. When you’re
in a positive emotional state, your mind is usually compliant and less chatty. When
you’re in turmoil, your mind tends to act out and becomes excessively chatty. This
means it’s time to tend to some emotional needs you may be neglecting by being more
present and allowing the things that are bothering you to fall away back to where
they originated, the past and future.

Productivity can increase when you start to tend to your needs and practice self-
care. You may actually get more done in a shorter period of time when you're
feeling fresh rather than burnt out. Self-care requires planning time away from
your busyness to do things that feed your soul. When your soul is feeling fed, your
mind tends to calm and suddenly your life seems more manageable as a result.

Your Relationship With Time

We all have 24 hours in one day, correct? We all get the choice on how we spend
that time, correct? I want you to ask yourself how you spend your time. How much
time do you spend on your phone or social media? Most people make that a priority
over achieving their goals because it’s a mind-numbing activity they can use to
escape from the busyness of their mind. What people may not realize is that it’s
only contributing to the busyness of their mind and taking time away from things
that can make your life less stressful.

Ask yourself what your top 10 priorities are and make a list. Then beside that
list, make a list of 10 activities you do with your time. Now draw a line over from
the activity to which priority it falls under. This exercise can give you some
insight into how much time you are allocating to things that are not feeding your
purpose and might be a habit you want to change.

You can create time in your life by breaking unhelpful habits and allocating that
time to things that make you feel more fulfilled and accomplished. Instead of
wearing the badge of busyness, try using the term abundant for how much is going on
in your life and use that abundance to create more of what you want in your life.
It doesn’t carry the same negative connotation as busy and it intends for enriching
your life with more of what you want, rather than less of what you don't.

Set down your busyness badge, take some time to connect with nature and feel the
beautiful energy inside and around you. You may just realize that what you’re
trying to run from isn’t actually that bad and all you need to do is just slow down
and sit with it for a moment. How much of the suffering you're causing yourself is
coming from running from yourself?

Chapter 6: Letting Go of Attachment to Outcome

There is one sure way to create suffering in your life and that is to attach to
outcome. Attachment to outcome means to have an expectation of how you want
something to unfold. The rigidity in the expectation will determine the intensity
of the suffering.

Let's use the example of bridezilla. A bride who is flexible, will likely have a
much more enjoyable and stress-free wedding than one who is attached to the
outcome. A bride that is attached to the idea of how her day needs to unfold, will
likely spend most of her day controlling her present moment. This is an attempt for
her to match her past vision of how she wants her day to look, with the future
outcome she needs to feel satisfied. When we are attached to outcome we are a slave
to the desires of the ego, and the ego is like a blood thirsty vampire with an
endless appetite for blood. A person who attaches to outcome will never feel
satiated because they are using the mind to satiate matters of the heart. We want
to experience joy, but we are trying to find it in our minds, when it resides in
the heart.

How do we make this shift so we can learn to let go of attachment to outcome?

It starts with turning our attachments into preferences. The difference is the
intensity of the desire and being okay with the outcome taking the shape it's meant
to. Attachment to outcome is a strong desire where you will be unhappy if the
outcome doesn't fulfill what you want. A preference is wanting what you desire but
being at peace with the idea that it might not happen and it won't cause you
unhappiness if it doesn't.

As we discussed previously, sometimes the universe is giving us what we need, not

what we want. The ego is clouding our judgement but we cant see that right now so
the universe intervenes and gives us what we’re meant to have to fulfill our higher
purpose. This mentality is a great way to release control because when we do, we
fall back on the fluffy pillow of faith and it feels less disappointing. This is
big picture thinking where we practice delaying gratification and being more open
to things playing out the way they're meant to, not how we think they should.

The Experiencers Experience

The two ways of creating an experience are being and doing. Growing up, I was
always taught that my success was built into how much I did. I got worth, and
ultimately a sense of self, through accomplishment. This is a common mentality for
many people on this planet. In school, we get rewarded by producing grades. At
work, we get rewarded for producing outcomes. It is ingrained in us from a young
age that checking off our "to do" lists gives us a barometer for how well we can
feel about ourselves. We have built our lives around "to do" lists. We work so hard
during the week at our jobs and get our professional "to do" lists completed, to
then enter the weekend to try and cram in all our personal "to do" list stuff. Then
once we have completed that, we can finally "relax" on Sunday. When Sunday comes,
we don't know how to relax because 90% of our lives are spent doing. This imbalance
is causing so much stress and unhappiness that the quality of our lives is greatly
impacted. While doing is important to the human experience, it is only half of what
the human experience is meant to be. The other half is being.

Being is the opposite as doing in the sense that doing is focused on the outcome
and being is focused on the experience. It is 100% possible to be involved in an
activity and practice beingness. You don't have to be sitting in stillness humming
a mantra to be in a state of beingness. The difference is that you are 100% present
with the experience while you're doing it, rather than focusing on the outcome or
living the moment as the narrator within your mind. Many people when they are
fixated on the outcome will place all the emphasis on the destination and none on
the journey.

The Journey From Doing to Being

I want to share a story of how I began to let go of my addiction to doing and how I
invited more beingness into my life.

I have always been a high-strung type A personality and even still to this day I
am. I have days where I just cannot sit still or slow myself down. Being an
entrepreneur, this can be a requirement to be successful to some degree. But let me
explain how I managed to find balance in this belief and have still found success
in my entrepreneurial career.

Growing up a perfectionist, I thought I always needed to be doing to prove myself

as successful. As a result, I ended up burning out early in my career. I was guided
to Brene Brown's work on shame which gave me strong insight into how I was using
perfectionism to compensate for feelings of shame or not feeling good enough. This
insight was huge for me and took me down a path of learning the practice of self-
compassion. Through this practice, I started to learn about doingness and beingness
and how each one serves a purpose in my business.

In beingness there is no outcome, it's about the experience. The only time outcome
is measured is when you're doing, and present moment awareness is not about doing,
it's about being. I started to understand the spiritual law of attraction and how
to use this to vibrationally align myself to all that I desired in order to have a
successful business. I realized that I don't have to constantly be working or
grinding in order to be successful. This is an unhelpful doers belief built into
our brains by a ‘doing’ culture that hasn't learned how to use beingness to attract
success alongside their doingness. I also realized that rest, recovery, and
reflection are all essential parts of my progression because they give me balance.
Balance is the key to long-term success where you have money, health and happiness
all at the same time. The 3 R's - rest, recovery and reflection are all acts of
being and without them I might have a financially successful business, but I would
feel stressed all the time and exhausted from hustling to try and accomplish all
that I needed to. In reality, sometimes all you need to do is pause and align to
what you need, rather than chase it.

Doing has the mental image of the outcome you desire attached to it and this is
typically what motivates people to keep doing. This is attachment to outcome and
when you get caught up in doing and the outcome doesn't match your mental image, it
can cause a great deal of suffering. Beingness on the other hand is not built in
the past or future to determine its outcome because it doesn't have an outcome and
happens in the present moment. I use beingness to pull me away from the mental
image of what I want and connect to myself on a deeper level to find a connection
to what I need. This strategy alone has brought more job satisfaction, less stress,
less pressure into my work and allowed me to find more joy in the value of what I
do, rather than being so attached to the hope of results.
A Few Words on Acceptance

In order to fully let go of attachment to outcome there must be full acceptance to

what is. Full presence means full acceptance because it's only in the Now that we
can be present enough to accept the moment for what it is. When we learn this
skill, we learn how to remove resistance in our lives. Resistance is the energy the
ego creates to try and avoid being in the Now if it perceives the Now as less
desirable than what it thinks the Now could be. This is the ego future surfing for
something that it deems as more desirable. The art of letting go of resistance
happens when we understand that it's not about accepting the content of the moment,
but rather the moment itself. Let go of the story you’ve created about how you need
things to be in order to be happy and return back to the moment which is free of
story. The attachment to outcome is the attachment to the story the mind has
created. The stories we attach to are the reason why we suffer. Stories are us
holding up our past to our present and saying the past holds more value than the
present. This is just simply not true because the past has been lived in already
and the present is waiting for you to live in it Now. As long as you keep creating
stories of expectation, you will keep finding things to be unhappy about. It's like
walking down the street and someone walks by who is really beautiful. You can
compare yourself to them and create stories of not feeling good enough (attachment
to past), or you can appreciate their beauty in isolation of it having to be about
you at all (present moment awareness). One relies on attachment to past stories and
one is being in the moment, focusing on what is before the eyes, not after.

Chapter 7: Becoming the Master of Your Mind

The mind's greatest threat is the present moment because the present moment does
not require it and the mind is trying to preserve itself from annihilation. The
reason why it is so important to develop a relationship with your body on this
journey is so you have an ally to turn to when your mind plays tricks on you that
cause suffering. You need a refuge from the madness of the mind, especially during
times where suffering is due to your life situation where things are out of your
control.

Are you tired of your mind having more control over you than you do?

This hyper activity of the mind is a habit that can be broken with the practice of
presence. If you only have a relationship with your mind and not with your body,
you are setting yourself up for the mind controlling you, rather than you
controlling your mind. Your mind has to be on overdrive to try and compensate for
all the experiences that you are not having in the present moment that bring you
joy, so you chase the pleasure the mind is trying to create for you, mistaking it
for joy.

The mind is the biggest creature of habit. The mind finds safety and solitude in
habits and when we are strongly attached to the mind, it can become a self-imposed
prison for unhelpful habitual thinking patterns. Habitual thinking patterns are
essentially tapes of thought we play on repeat. We often don’t possess a ton of
awareness of these patterns and how they impact our lives. When we are stuck in
periods of unhappiness in our lives, it is important to be able to step back and
look at the relationship we have with our mind and how our thoughts are
contributing to our unhappiness. The only way to step back from our mind is to
become the watcher within the present moment.

A great exercise for this is to write out your thoughts (stream of consciousness
journaling) so you can be aware of them instead of playing out the tapes
unconsciously because they will begin to infiltrate your life without your
awareness. This exercise will help you thicken your narrative so you can begin to
see how repetitive your thoughts are and what they may be rooted in. Often times
the mind can take us on a journey of fear and distort our reality, so it is
important to find detachment from the mind and enter times of total presence to
find our authenticity. Presence is spending time in the Here and Now without the
mind having to narrate your experience. It is experienced in the body, not the
mind. If the mind feeds on the past and future, the heart feasts on the present
moment. When trying to enjoy the grace of the present moment, we don’t search for
it we allow it to come to us. The harder we search for it the further away it
feels. It’s surrendering rather than grasping. It’s doing less, experiencing more.
The only way to break free of the mental habits that are holding you back is to
stop engaging with them.

That is one approach to mastering the mind but more so the content within the mind.
It will give you a great deal of awareness of the content within your thinking
tapes, but it won't set you free from the mind. I want to teach you how to master
the mind so you can treat it no differently than you treat your arm; you get to
tell it when you will use it and it will listen. This is why we meditate and learn
ways to master our minds so we can decide when and how the mind will be used,
rather than it using us.

In order to master the mind, we have to stop identifying with everything that it
thinks. It's one thing to get lost in the tapes, but it's another to get lost in
the tapes and buy into the messages by making them who we are. If you solve getting
lost in the tapes, you solve identifying with the content of the tapes because you
will then understand there is something beyond the thought form of who you are and
you wont need to buy into the tapes to give you a sense of self.

So let's focus on how to not get lost in the tapes. The first thing we need to be
mindful of is our attachment to outcome when trying to let go of this habit of
getting lost in thoughts. We often think there is a destination to this work and
there most definitely isn't. I speak of it as if there is, but I do that to create
a reference point of the direction we need to head to get closer to our beingness.
It's hard to truly describe beingness in the same way as it's hard to describe
love. It's much easier experienced then it is to talk about. So let go of this idea
that there is an outcome with your practice and treat it as an experience. Do not
try and create the experience either because then we fall into doing, and the
present moment isn't about doing, it’s about being. Instead, let the experience
create you by surrendering to the moment and allow whatever needs to arise to
arise. We just sit back and observe the experience that is forming within us
without judging it or having to narrate it as it's happening.

One strategy I use to move from thinker into watcher, when I catch myself lost in
thought, is to think of my mind like a conveyor belt at the airport. The luggage is
coming down and each time a suitcase is on the belt it's a thought. Watch the
thought enter your mind just as you would watch the suitcases drop onto the
conveyor belt. You will notice that when you are present to the tunnel where the
luggage comes out, no luggage comes out. You can watch your thoughts from the seat
of the past, even one second past, but its past nonetheless, until you consciously
try to watch your thoughts enter and then no thoughts come. This is the pure
present moment awareness - the gap in your thinking. You have left the past to
enter the present and you can no longer observe your thoughts because you are now
occupying the space to which the thoughts once were. As you get better at this, the
gaps become larger and you create more space in your consciousness to just Be The
Space.

Mind Over Matters of the Heart

If you have been feeling crazy lately and just cannot seem to get a grip of your
mind, maybe it’s time to stop gripping. This gripping will leave you in a state of
madness questioning your sanity. The mind serves many purposes for us, but one of
them isn’t to guide us to our truth. This is the job of the heart and when you try
to use the mind to solve matters of the heart, you are being pulled further away
from your truth. This inner conflict can lead to great suffering because you are
trying to be spoken to by the heart but are only listening to the madness of the
mind.

If you are always in the head you are unable to use the power of your intuition
because it occupies space in your body. The remedy to this is to find yourself in
stillness and listen to what is being spoken to you. Everyday you are being spoken
to, but if you don’t know how to listen, you will continue to suffer. Your mind
wants to take you on this adventure of grandiosity where it seeks to fulfill its
own desires. The heart doesn’t know such trickery and thus when you're in fear, it
is a lot easier to listen to the part of you that is playing off the fear. The
heart speaks the language of love and until you let go of the past and future to
enter the Now, love cannot speak louder than fear. It is not up to love to make
itself heard over fear as it does not know such contrast. You only know this
contrast in your human condition and therefore it is up to you to draw your
attention towards the experience you want to create.

If you don’t allow yourself to experience the present moment you are deaf to the
voice of your soul. The soul can only speak to you through the present moment. If
you want to learn to listen, you must honour this voice by finding separation from
mind and enter the present moment so you can join in the flow of your consciousness
and feel all that is being spoken to you.

Everyday we must partake in this ritual of bringing ourselves back from mental
chatter and into the present moment. I call it a ritual because we have to do it
everyday over and over and over again, until we get so good at it that it becomes
our automatic state of being. This is how we master the mind and allow the heart
the time and space to deal with matters only it can resolve. Be gentle with
yourself because frustration will only aggravate the mind and make it noisier. Try
not to take this process too seriously and just have fun with it. Laugh at how
ridiculous the mind can sound when it tries to wrap itself up in the drama and
story of your life situations. I like to use the mantra “funness to oneness” as a
reminder to not take my process so seriously and just have fun on the journey.

How does one surrender their mind to their body?

This is the path of mindfulness meditation. The path where your only goal is to be
the experiencer without telling the story of your experience or trying to make
sense of it with your mind. The practice of surrendering the mind to the body
happens in the moments where we don’t have to identify with a story to understand
our experience. We get out of our own way and allow the experiences to form us,
rather than us trying to form the experience.

One of the best places to experience this is in yoga. This is the place where I
listen to the voice of my body and become still to the voice of my mind. I follow
the sensations in my body because this is the language to which the body speaks to
me. The breath is the voice of the body. It is always there for you to return to
and listen to when the mind gets noisy.

Use your five senses as much as possible as these are the vehicles you will use to
surrender your mind to your body. Having a relationship with your body is the only
way to enlightenment and inner peace. Without it you’re over-identified with mind
and the mind is where all the stories exist about what you are, but none of these
stories even remotely touch the truth of who you are.

Surrendering My Mind to My Body

After spending almost 2 decades bullying my body to do what I wanted it to do for

reasons of vanity, I found myself in the middle of a full on war between my mind
and my body. My body was trying to speak to my mind to tell it to stop bullying it
into this mental image of what my mind wanted it to become, but I didn’t listen. My
mind had this idea that it needed my body to be a certain image to feel desirable
and worthy. Avoidance of shame was the tactic my mind used to motivate my body to
keep pushing, but eventually my body had enough and it started to push back. Being
in this inner conflict was like being a parent and having two of your kids in
conflict with one another.

As I began to practice present moment awareness, I realized that my body had an

intelligence similar to the universe, similar to Mother Nature. My body knew what
it needed and it wasn’t aligned to this mental image my mind created of how my body
should be.

This was the state I was in when I found yoga. I was literally in the middle of a
yoga class and I started to cry. My body was speaking to me all the pain it has
endured over the years of abusing it to do what I thought I needed it to do to feel
worthy. This moment changed my life forever. I started to put my body first and
allow it to make decisions for how it needed to be. I began changing my eating
habits, my fitness routine was totally overhauled, and yoga became a central focus
in my life.

I still have days where the mental image puts pressure on me to be fit so I can
look good, but I now see the fragility in that mentality because it doesn’t serve
my purpose of authentic happiness. What I’ve learned is that it only takes me
closer to shame as I try to compensate for my feelings of unworthiness by over-
identifying with my body image. Over identifying with body image is very common in
the gay community and something I have been consumed with most of my life. As I
learn to let go of this cheap attempt of finding self-worth, I tap into an
overwhelming love and respect for myself and it all started with learning to listen
to, respect, and love my body.
Chapter 8: Befriending Your Body

The mind has an entitlement problem, it thinks it’s more important than the body.
Think about being a parent and having a well behaved child and a misbehaved child.
Where does your attention and effort typically go? The misbehaved child uses
misbehaviour to get attention because somewhere along the way it learned that when
it throws a temper tantrum it will get tended to. The mind is no different and when
it’s making all the noise, why wouldn’t you give it all the attention over the
body?

The body has a more subtle approach and not one that without attuned awareness, you
wouldn’t even know it requires your attention. The body speaks to you in the
language of energy or sensation. It tells you it feels safe, happy, joyful, sad,
tired, etc. We sometimes listen or we sometimes don’t. Some of us numb out from the
language of our body because it has spoken too much pain to us in the past.
Instead, we choose to eat, work, or scroll social media as a way to distract
ourselves. On the flip side, the body also has the ability to speak to you in a
much less subtle way through pain, injury, and disease. Most people don't associate
those things with mental, emotional or spiritual concerns. Although it is becoming
more common knowledge that our physical body is the byproduct of the state of our
minds, it's not quite there yet where our medical systems are able to work with
these matters holistically. It is crucial for optimal health to have a relationship
with your body and listen to the language it speaks to you in.

If you want to get more in touch with the present moment and calm the mental
chatter of the mind, you need to start listening to the language of the body. The
key is to find time each day settling the mind from its chatter so you can listen
to the subtle sensations of the body. When you have this relationship with
sensation you can indulge more easily in the present moment.

There is a common misconception about emotions that I want to clear up. Just like
thoughts are not who we are, neither are our emotions. People often think we are
the emotions we feel, but this is not the case. Your emotions are your body’s
response to the activity in your mind. When you spend less time in the mind and
more time in the present moment, you will experience less emotional reactivity to
life.

The states we all desire in life such as joy and love, these are not emotions, they
are states of being. They are not emotions because they do not originate in the
mind, they originate in the body and are cultivated in the present moment. Think
about an emotion such as jealousy. In order for jealousy to originate in the mind
and manifest in the body as an experienced emotion, is by being in the past or
future with our attention. Jealousy is the emotion triggered by insecurity,
inferiority, or inadequacy. All three of these emotions are experienced by focusing
our attention on the past and how we’ve told ourselves stories of how we don't
measure up. When we are in stories, we are in the mind and when we are in the mind,
we are in the past or future.

If our goal is to be less emotionally reactive, then we need to focus our attention
away from the mind and towards the body. If we were always in the present moment,
we would only experience states, not emotions. We wouldn't suffer because suffering
is caused by comparing your present moment to something in the past and future. We
are either running from or trying to heal from our past, or living in the hope that
the future will bring us all that we desire.

This isn't always the case however, as most of us spend more time lost in thought
than we do in the present moment. Until you learn to stop using the past and future
as a measuring stick for the now, you will continue to cycle through periods of
misery. As long as we are over-identified with the mind, we are in a state of
misery. We can have positive misery or negative misery when identified with the
mind for our happiness. Positive misery is when things are going well but you are
still a slave to the mind and your happiness can be taken away from you at the drop
of an outcome that doesn't favour your expectations. Negative misery is when your
outcome isn't working in your favour and you are unhappy with your life situation
because of it. The misery comes from the lack of security you have in your ability
to control your happiness. I use the term misery because identification with the
mind is subject to conditional happiness that will eventually lead to suffering. If
things are going well, you're happy, and if things are not going well, you're
unhappy. It's a fragile place to be where your outer world dictates what your inner
world experiences, when it actuality it needs to be the other way around.

How can we make our inner world the actual experience that dictates our happiness?

The answer is simple, we spend more time in the present moment where we cultivate a
relationship to our inner world. The inner world has two objectives; to experience
more joy and bring us closer to love. I don't want to make this sound easy because
trust me, it takes effort. It requires consistency and practice to master this
discipline of the mind so you can still the mind and enter the body. Since the mind
is about doing and the body is about being, we need to have a balance of the two.
We are human beings and need to have the being aspect of our existence.

Conscious Doing

If you aren't quite at a place where fully entering your body is an option while
you try to move towards the present moment, that's okay. We can start with
conscious doing as a way to work towards moving into states that we feel in the
body by being, but can also have positive experience while being present in our
doing.

Conscious doing is about finding ways to invite acceptance, enjoyment and

enthusiasm into everything you do. Without one of these three present in your
doing, you will fall into the trap of hustling to the expectations of your mind and
this will eventually lead to suffering. The body is the entity that is on the
spiritual path. It is the vessel that possesses the truth of your experience
because it is undisturbed, whereas the mind disturbs everything with stories,
preferences, attachments, and expectations. The body doesn't have this dysfunction
so it is the only part of us that is having the true spiritual experience.

Think about where you draw your attention everyday; is it more in the head region
or the body region?

People who spend a lot of time in their mind tend to draw their attention upwards
into thought. People who are great at being present in the body draw their
attention downwards into the body. Where attention goes energy follows and where
energy goes our experience is shaped there. If you want to befriend your body, you
need to spend time within it. You need to make a concerted effort to draw your
attention downwards to your body. Focus on your breath, focus on the wiggling of
your toes, bring awareness to the beating of your heart and how this is pumping
blood throughout your whole body. It is so easy to become desensitized to the
miraculous processes of our bodies to the point that we stop tuning into it because
it just happens without needing us to do anything. The mind on the other hand is
like a 5 year old toddler that needs our attention all the time. This isn't how it
has to be and it's only this way because this is where you draw your attention.
It's a habit that took you time to form and it will take you time to break. Set
some time aside each day to scan your body and check in with how it is feeling. Use
these sensations to tune into the present moment and give yourself some space from
the activity of the mind.

“The eyes are the windows to your soul.” You may have heard this quote but perhaps
only ever understood it through the lens of someone looking into your eyes or you
looking into the eyes of another. This a beautiful experience of vulnerability and
feeling seen, but I want to explore how you can use your eyes to move you closer to
the present moment and deep down into your soul.

When you open your eyes and look around, you see objects, people, and many sights
that ignite responses in you. Your attention will be directed outside yourself to
create the thoughts and feelings that cultivate the experience you have. What
happens when you close your eyes? What stimulates the thoughts and feelings you
have? How is the experience created then? You have two realities you can create for
yourself when your eyes are closed: imagination or presence within your body. The
imagination is activated as it draws on past stimuli that once created an
experience for you. If you are an imaginative person, you may visualize stimuli
that has never been brought into your reality in physical form but you can
cultivate it in your mental reality. The other option when you close your eyes is
focusing your attention on the presence within your body. This is a direct doorway
to the present moment and becoming one with your inner body.

The key to befriending your body is no different than developing any other
friendship. You must spend quality time getting to know your body. We must first
learn how to spend time in the body if we have any chance of befriending it. The
area to focus on is being attentive to where you draw your attention. I like to
refer to this as your gaze. We have an internal and external gaze. We can look
outside ourselves and inside ourselves. If we want to strengthen our relationship
with our body, then we must develop a stronger internal gaze so we can be mindful
of spending more time and attention in the body.

It is important to note that the body is made up of three chambers and we need to
understand what all three are. We will explore barriers to entry, how we access
them, and the outcome of spending time in each chamber.

Believe it or not, the first body chamber is our mind. Most people believe the mind
and body are separate, but they're not. The mind is easily accessible and is where
people spend most of their attention so there isn't really a barrier to entry. They
draw their attention upward into thinking and this is where a majority of their
experiences are created. To get out of mind identification, we must first get fed
up enough with it to be motivated to find an alternative way of existing - being.
The outcome of spending too much time in the mind is pretty obvious and I don't
think you would be reading this book if you didn't have the answer to this question
already.

That takes us to chamber two which is the outer body. The outer body is the
physical shell of our body. The physical matter that makes up our anatomy. The
outer body is the first bridge you cross on the journey toward liberation from
mind. This is because the gaze will be drawn from external in the mind, to internal
which is the body. The gaze will focus on the wiggling of the toes, the beating of
the heart, or most commonly the breath as it travels in and out of your nostrils.
This is the process of entering the present moment and is a great tool to use when
starting out with present moment awareness. The Most common barrier to entry is the
uncomfortable emotions that arise in the stillness of the body and absence of the
mind to distract us from that stillness. Just past the bridge of the outer body and
right before the next bridge, are layers of repressed emotions. This tends to be
the discomfort we sense when we don't want to be still. The outcome of spending
more time in your outer body is being connected to your truth. Your intuition
occupies space in your outer body as we feel and sense our way through life using
the sensations of our body. This internal compass is the guidance that you will
need to bring with you enroute your journey to the next bridge.

The third chamber is the inner body. This is the direct link between you and your
creator. Whatever that is for you. The energy that beams inside your being, beams
from your inner body. It's not easy to describe the inner body experience because
it is like trying to describe in words the feeling of being in love. I'll give it
my best shot. The inner body experience is almost like experiencing a complete
stillness of your mind and allowing your outer body and inner body to unite in the
presence of the moment. In my experience, the more I try, the further away I find
myself because the act of doing is designated by the mind, and the state of being
is one designated by the body. When we bring doingness into acts of beingness, we
find ourselves frustrated and further from where we desire to be.

You might be thinking, the body is designated to do because it moves and carries us
through life. You would be right, but the body can still do but its not doing from
a place of past or future. It is 100% present in the movement of the moment
therefore it would be classified as conscious doing. This is something I would
strongly encourage because your body loves your attention and the more attention
you can give it, the easier it will be to cross the bridge from your outer body to
your inner body. This will lead you to achieving a higher frequency of time spent
in inner peace.

I want to come back to these layers of emotions that lay at the foot of the bridge
to your inner body. I wish I could say that you can hop over them and keep crossing
the bridge, but unfortunately they need to be dealt with before you can enter the
inner body. Attention is the key to transmuting these emotions. Up to this point
you have swept them under the rug and they lay at the access point to your truth.
They are waiting to be honoured and released so you can step into all that you are.
Remember that emotions are just energy that need to be given permission to be
released. When we sweep things under the rug, we bring resistance into our
experience and we cannot resist and surrender at the same time. We first must bring
acceptance to the resistance of these emotions and then they will resolve on their
own. You do not have to relive the past that caused these emotions because this
causes more pain and suffering and just reinforces the repressive behaviors that we
are trying to resolve. Acceptance is the only way to clear the emotions that are
holding you back from your inner body experience. Ask yourself each day “what do I
need to accept in this moment?”, not in the past because that can only be accepted
by accepting the present. The continuum of time you have been identifying with for
so long is an illusion and has tricked you into thinking there is something to
resolve in the past before you can create a better future. The illusion is that
nothing about that involves the present and that is the only place that healing and
transformation can occur.

I want to clarify what I mean about acceptance because this term can be triggering
for people who have endured terrible traumas. Acceptance does not mean accepting
what was done to you and being okay with that. It's not giving approval to the
other person for what they did. It is about accepting the resistance you have
around what happened to you, so you can liberate yourself from the stories of the
past and enter the presence of the Now.
Aging and the Inner Body

One of the greatest motivators to accessing inner body awareness is the impact it
can have on your aging process. When we are only identified with our outer body, we
are only identified with mind and physical body. Have you ever met someone who is
older but they look or feel much younger? They have a vibrancy about them and they
radiate youthfulness. When someone is deeply connected to their inner body they
transcend the continuum of time and the impact it has on their energetic field. If
you are a 60 year old woman who is tired and run down because she spends her time
worrying about the past and the future, then you will reflect that. If you are a 60
year old woman who spends a majority of her time in presence and lives a
predominantly stress free life, then you will reflect that too. Entering the inner
body is a reprieve from mental identification which only exacerbates the aging
process. Now if that isn't enough motivation to develop a present moment awareness
practice, I don't know what is :)

Protecting Your Outer Body From Disease

One of the many benefits of spending more time in the present moment, and even more
so the inner body presence, is to free your body of becoming a host for diseases
and physical ailments. When the mind is creating stress in our lives through its
resistance to everything, our unhappiness is not the only byproduct. The other
factor is the impact this mental conditioning has on our physical body. The body
when weakened by the stress of the mind becomes susceptible to diseases such as
cancer and autoimmune disorders. The immune system is the protector of our outer
body and by being so disconnected from it we are putting ourselves at risk of
disease. The immune system can only take so much accumulated negativity and stress
before it becomes weakened and even potentially begins to work against the body,
which is referred to as autoimmune diseases.

When we liberate ourselves from constant identification to the mind, we allow time
to be freed up so we can enter the state of beingness where our body can regenerate
itself through rest and relaxation. When we are so wrapped up in doing, we are not
giving our body the respect it deserves so it can disintegrate the negative energy
caused by the negativity of the mind.

Chapter 9: The Power of Surrender

The ultimate surrender is to surrender the mind to the body. There will be times in
your life when you are stripped of control and the more you grasp for control, the
more you will suffer. The only way out of this is to surrender.
The concept of surrender seems so daunting to most people. The idea of giving up
control, although appears daunting, is actually the most freeing thing you can do.
Surrender is about trusting that when you give up the illusion of having control,
you get out of your own way and universal intelligence can step in to align you to
what you’ve been trying to align to all along - joy and love. You can’t be aligned
to something that you aren’t vibrationally aligned with. You will just keep feeling
that frustrating feeling of trying to shove a square peg into a round hole. It
becomes desperate as we search outside ourselves for happiness and we employ
control as the main strategy to try and find it.

How does one become vibrationally aligned to something they desire?

They let go of the idea that listening to their mind will lead them to their truth.
The mind doesn’t lead you to your truth, it actually distorts it with stories of
what you think your truth is, so you can meet the demands of your ego. The body
leads you to your truth because it is directly connected to universal intelligence
without being distorted by story. Your body is nature and nature is your body.
Nature is universal intelligence in action; it does what it needs to do without you
needing to control it. Every cell in your body has a purpose and it’s fulfilling
its purpose without you needing to do anything. It doesn’t require your input, and
it most definitely doesn’t require your control. This same principal must be
applied when your goal is to stop the mental chatter that is causing all your
suffering. Once that chatter stops, you find inner peace, but it can’t stop until
you surrender your mind to your body.

The ego has one idea of how your life should play out and this is usually driven by
things like power, status, control, material asset, money, etc. Basically things
that provide us with certainty and a sense of being superior in comparison to the
existence of others. On the other hand, the body doesn't base it's existence in
relativity to anything other than what it is. This is why the body is your truth,
it is undisturbed by comparison and it just is what it is. The most beautiful
aspect of surrender is breaking the cycle of fragility of happiness. You get to be
happy because you are in a state of joy that lives within the body. Manufactured
happiness (pleasure) is what we seek in lieu of not being able to surrender to the
Now and tune into joy. When we seek pleasure, we are basing the quality of our
experience on what we can obtain outside ourselves rather than tuning into and
cultivating joy from within.

Surrendering control is the first step to learning to cultivate your joy from
within. As long as you are controlling your world, you are trapped in the ego mind.
This trap tells you that if you let go and surrender, your whole world will crumble
before your eyes. This is because your world is being held together by the illusion
of having control and thinking you are creating your experiences, but in actuality
you are just experiencing your experiences, not creating them. When you think you
have control, it is just you placing emphasis on things that you feel like you have
the ability to shape the outcome of. People in this fixed mindset will only put
themselves in situations where the outcome is highly likely to favour their
desires, thus they are fooled by the illusion of control.

There is way too much in life that can be out of our control and the more we try to
control, the more suffering we cause for ourselves and others. The reason we
control is because we desire to feel safe and secure. The idea of losing control
means we feel unsafe and insecure and this is also a painful experience that leads
to suffering. So when you think of it this way, it makes sense why people employ
control to try and shape their experiences and try to escape disappointment. The
difference is when we surrender control, we are actually employing flexibility as
our secret weapon not control. The difference being attachment to outcome.
Flexibility employs preference with a tone of indifference, whereas control employs
attachment with a tone of rigidity. In life, things will always be unpredictable,
so why hold on so tightly and create the type of experience that makes you feel
like the world is a place we need to be guarded from by using control in the first
place? Why not open up to the limitless potential life has in store to shape you by
the experiences it has up its sleeve for you? The mystery of life can be such a
beautiful thing. It is full of synchronicity, spontaneity and adventure, but many
of us relate mystery with our own fear of the unknown.

The mind can only comprehend so much and usually only things or extensions of
things that it has experienced in the past. The inner body has a limitless
potential to transform you beyond anything you could ever imagine. When I started
to learn to let go and surrender is when my life really began to blossom. Before
surrendering, I felt like a rose with an elastic on its pedals. I was trying so
hard to blossom, but I just couldn't. As soon as I took off the elastic and
surrendered control, I opened up. The elastic was my control and taking it off was
my surrender. Who knew rose pedals enjoyed the space to breathe? :)

I want to share a piece I wrote about surrendering control and how letting go has
made my life so much more fulfilling. I wrote this piece when I was one week into
my "adventure of a lifetime". I packed up all my stuff, put it in storage, and
moved from Calgary, Canada to Chaing Mai, Thailand to live abroad. I had never done
anything like this before and was ready to start practicing impermanence, non-
attachment, and surrender in my life.

My Surrender Experiment

As I look up in awe at this temple, I feel this overwhelming sense of rightness

that I have always wanted to feel within myself but never was able to get close
enough to it. I would almost get there then I would sabotage it. I played out this
cycle for 2 decades not knowing why I was doing this to myself. I had no idea the
feeling I was seeking was freedom. Freedom from the shackles I was placing on
myself of not being good enough. I would punish myself into doing certain things
all so I could avoid the feeling of inadequacy or shame. It is this sense of
freedom that once tasted, I will never go back to how things were before.

My story of surrender is about moving from perfectionism towards embracing all that
I am. If I would have known how surrender would change my life, I would have done
it a long time ago. Instead, I held on for dear life and controlled every aspect of
my life until I was 34 years old. Surrender is all about letting go of control or
“perceived” control in my life and making room for life to play a role in creating
my experiences for me. It’s all about faith and without faith, surrender can feel
extremely uncomfortable. Faith is the soft cushion I land on when I renounce
control. It tells me that “everything happens for a reason and it’s okay to allow
it to happen”.

My story of surrender goes a little something like this…

Most of my life I have been inhibited by shame. Shame has been a major motivator in
my life to achieve, and is the driving force behind my perfectionism. I learned
from a young age to hide myself because I was afraid of being judged and ridiculed
for being gay. Since shame isn’t selective and doesn’t just say “only be shameful
of being gay” it inundated my being with shame for who I was as a human being, not
just a gay man. It was this habit of hiding who I really was that ended up becoming
my nemesis in life and what I eventually had to surrender to. It was a journey from
inauthenticity to authenticity, from shame to love, from perfectionism to embracing
all that I am, shortcomings and all.

People ask why I’m so publicly vulnerable and this is why. I have used healthy
vulnerability to challenge my shame and teach myself that it’s okay to be seen, and
not just for my light, but my shadow as well.

My perfectionism expresses itself through fitness and nutrition as I became

obsessed with presenting a perfect image of who I was because internally I didn’t
feel good enough. I felt defective and flawed and this was the pit of shame I
carried around with me most of my life. I used perfectionism to avoid experiencing
shame. When we try to compensate in our life to avoid the experience of something
uncomfortable, we are just deluding ourselves from opportunities to heal what it is
that is keeping us stuck. For me it was shaming myself to be perfect so I didn’t
have to feel shame. How does that even make sense in any way, shape, or form?
“Shame myself to not experience shame”... wow, when I read that back it makes me so
angry and sad that this is how I treated myself for so long. I guess it felt safer
to shame myself than it did to have someone else shame me because they saw my
defectiveness. I was minimizing the harm I would have to experience because I
didn’t know there was another way.

Through years of self-development and learning to love myself, I have reached a

point where I have control over my perfectionism and I don’t let it control me. The
opposite of shame is love, and as I learn to heal my shame wounds, I find myself
being more gentle and compassionate with myself and others. I am now more motivated
by love than I am shame, but the old messages of “I’m not good enough” or “I’m
defective” can still creep back in. It’s so important for me to have a self-love
practice to fall back on when the old tapes start to play.

Surrendering my mind to my body has been a huge part of this shift for me. For many
years my mind was a dictator to my body, bossing it around and telling it what to
do and when to do it. My mind was using the fear of shame to motivate my body to
perform so it didn’t have to experience the shame. As I began to be more in tune to
the language of my body, I began to experience more love for myself. I realized
within one week of my adventure that I simply cannot invite adventure into my life
without surrendering control. Adventure is all about letting go of control and
allowing the spontaneity of life to guide you with your sense of wonder leading the
way. In the first few weeks of my adventure, I shed my fair share of tears and I
realized it was me grieving the time I lost living such a rigid and controlled
life. I treated myself like a slave to the avoidance of shame through
perfectionism. I was and still can be really mean to myself. The difference now is
I see the trap for what it is and I know how to avoid falling into it. If I catch
myself being mean to myself, I gently ask myself “how can I be more gentle with
myself right now?” Am I putting too much on my plate? Do I need to take a nap? Do I
need to call a friend and have them provide me some objectivity? Do I need to go to
a yoga class and move from my head into my heart? Do I need to be held by someone
who gets me?

There are so many ways to practice surrendering but it will always start with
asking your mind to take a back seat to allow your body to take the wheel. The
allowance of what is, is the act of surrendering. The mind may not like it but the
body will surely appreciate it because the mind isn’t the one on the spiritual
path, the body is. It’s our job to learn to teach the mind to hold space for the
body to have its own experience, and we find this in the present moment.

Surrender is about dissolving resistance through accepting each moment for what it
is and letting go of what you wish it was or could be. This practice will put an
end to the mind being your master and allow you to become the master of your mind.
Surrender is the first step towards living a life free of the madness of the mind.
Until this becomes your number one priority, you will continue to identify with the
mind and it will masquerade as you, causing great suffering. When you liberate
yourself from mind identification, you have the realization of oneness within
yourself; there is no longer duality in oneself. You are no longer the mind
pretending to be you because you fall into the essence underneath the mind which is
your inner body.

When this transformation occurs you will no longer refer to yourself as someone
separate. The “I” “we” “me” “our” “us” will all merge into one and this is the
essence of who you are. This separateness prior to the oneness is the position your
ego has been occupying in your mental reality. It has required a separate sense of
self (false self) to relate to the world because it lives in fear. The ego when not
being fed fear becomes one with your true self. You no longer need a false sense of
self to protect you from the world around you because you are at peace with
yourself. This is the birthplace of authenticity and vulnerability. When we take
off this false mask we allow the world to see us just as we are, and we begin to
attract all that we desire by being aligned to our truth. When you own who you are,
you will attract what you need.

When we surrender, we are surrendering fear because it can only live in the past
and future. The present moment renders the ego useless and this is why the ego has
so much resistance to presence - it fears its own annihilation. When we surrender,
the ego does not just suddenly evaporate, it merges with the soul because it no
longer has resistance to the Now to keep it alive. It is no longer being fed
worries from the past or anticipation of the future so it can preserve all that
wasted energy and put it towards fulfilling your truth rather than protecting your
falsehood from fear of being exposed.

This is why surrender is so powerful. It allows us to fully feast on the present

moment and let go of the mental conditioning and attachment to time as a means to
form an identity. In order for surrender to take place, we need to spend more
“time” in a state of presence rather than in time itself. One of the greatest
inhibitors to living presently is our attachment to the past. We spend our time
dwelling on what could have been. Letting the mistakes of our past draw us out of
the present moment in fear of making the mistake again and causing more suffering
in our future. The ego was assigned the job of preventing you from recreating more
fear in your life, but liberation will teach you that using fear to try and prevent
fear, will always lead to more fear. This is where 90% of this world is stuck - the
fear cycle, and they don't know how to get out. When we have this over-attachment
to not recreating our past, we are essentially living in the past by trying to
control our present and future through avoidance. Whenever we are avoiding or
controlling our lives, we are not present at all. This mere anticipation of the
future, through avoidance of your past pain, may be the very thing that is causing
the most suffering in your life and keeping you stuck in the fear cycle.

The Essence of Forgiveness

I can't talk about surrender without talking about forgiveness. They go hand in
hand because in order to surrender we must stop living in the past. A lack of
resolve is why we tend to want to keep drawing our attention to the past. We want
to either avoid situations where we will have to experience disappointment again,
we are finding ways to recreate the situation with a different outcome, or lastly,
we are looking for a way to dispel the energy of resentment through revenge or
getting even.
Forgiveness is all about working with resistance. When it comes to overcoming the
resistance required for forgiveness, we need to ask ourselves, do I want to resist
my past or do I want to let it flow? Being stuck in a continuum of time is one sure
way to suffer in this life. The concept of forgiveness itself is also stuck in a
continuum of time. Forgiveness requires us to make peace with something from the
past. We can only do this in the present moment through acceptance of the
resistance we have to the past now. So in actuality, we are not really accepting
the past event but rather the present moment resistance we have about it.
Forgiveness without surrender is merely denial. You just tell yourself the mental
story of forgiveness until your next shitty mood arises and then you're mad at them
again, am I right? You cannot forgive if you don’t surrender to the Now. When you
surrender to the Now you are giving yourself permission to let go of your
attachment to the past and therefore it resolves itself. The Now is where we
cultivate the joy within ourselves, the compassion for others, and the loving
essence of God. When we are emanating joy, compassion and love, we simply cannot
hold grudges against those who have hurt us. We are too conscious in this state to
make it about us and we see the betrayal for what it actually is - a lack of
consciousness in the other person to which they acted from. The same place we acted
from when we hurt someone from our past. This is the greatest lesson in humility
and empathy we can experience as human beings. We are not perfect and neither are
the people who acted from their pain to cause us pain.

Chapter 10: The Art of Effortless Effort

There is a Taoist term called Wu Wei which when translated means "effortless
action". I learned this term in a yin yoga class and started to apply it to my life
as a way to support my transition in learning to surrender. During the same week
this term was introduced to me, I remember seeing a random Instagram post show up
on my feed that had the word "hustle" crossed out and replaced with the word
"align". The quote below said: "You don't have to be constantly working or grinding
in order to be successful. Rest, recovery, and reflection are all essential parts
of your progression". You know when you receive a message you have received before,
but this time it hits home hard? This was my hit home hard moment for this message.
It was like this short little quote gave me permission to stop putting so much
pressure on myself.

I knew I needed to bring more beingness into my pursuit of success because the
doingness was burning me out. As soon as I did this, I started to align and this
attracted new clients and opportunities, where before I felt like I was chasing.
Chasing and attracting are two different experiences of finding success and I much
prefer to attract. This was the birthplace of an inner movement towards working
smarter, not harder. As I got better at surrendering control, I made space for life
to come in and teach me lessons in aligning to what I desire. Using the principle
of effortless effort, I was able to find value in my stillness and this gave me
motivation to find more stillness. I knew it would lead me to the same place as my
doingness would but with much less resistance.

The principle of Wu Wei is used to understand the value in being to the experience
of mindfulness meditation. Do less, experience more is the art of being when it
comes to meditation or being in the Here and Now of the present moment. It is
important to approach meditation from a “do less, experience more” type of
mentality. We live in a doer culture and this is why meditation is so uncomfortable
for most of us. We try to apply all the skills and knowledge we learned from school
and work that made us successful, but these doing-based skills do not make us more
successful in an activity that requires us to be rather than do.

Meditation is the opposite of doing, which is being. When we do in mediation, we

become frustrated because we chase and grasp the present moment with our minds and
it puts the present moment further out of reach. My perfectionism led to me
bringing doing into my meditations and I would become so frustrated because I would
always feel like I was doing it wrong. As soon as you think there is a destination
in mediation, such as finding the present moment, you have lost sight of what
mediation is about. Mediation is about the present moment coming to you, not you
coming to the present moment. It is about experiencing what comes to you, not
trying to control what comes to you. The experience creates us, we don’t create it.
We create time and space for stillness in our lives, then we surrender the rest to
nature.

I learned quickly in my present moment awareness practice to not try and create the
experience because I would chase it away. Instead, I let the experience create me
and this is how I surrender to the present moment. We don’t use effort in the
process of meditation, we use surrender because this clears our ego out of the way
so we can align to the present moment. As soon as you try to create the experience,
you are no longer the experience, you are the thought about the experience (the
ego). The ego defines the present moment as something that gets in its way because
it doesn’t require its control. When the ego is rendered useless in a process it
will become resistant to the process. When this happens you have left the present
moment and entered the space behind the present moment - the past moment, where the
ego feels a sense of certainty. Return to the present moment by surrendering the
need for the moment to be anything other than what it is. Gently and
compassionately ask your mind to take a back seat so you can experience all that
you are through the present moment.

One of the reasons people become so obsessed with doing is because they want to
control the outcome in their favour. This is to say they desire success so badly
that they won't settle for any other way. The attachment to the fruit of your
action will misguide your action and take the experience away from you. There is a
famous quote that says "don't be concerned with the fruit of your action, just give
attention to the action itself.” When we get so caught up in the hope of results,
we lose sight of the purpose of why we’re doing what we’re doing. Our pursuit
becomes one that feels stressful and based in fear of not achieving. When something
is motivated by fear it will attract more of that same vibration. In this case, it
attracts the vibration of scarcity and it makes it next to impossible to attract
abundance when you are vibrating this way.

One of the hardest things I found when learning present moment awareness is the
space between the ego and the presence that is you. The ego lives in the past and
the future and validates itself externally. The presence that is me, lives in the
present and validates itself internally or better yet, does not require validation
at all. When I was making my transformation, this was the hardest part for me. I
was so accustomed to external validation that I didn't know how to validate or
motivate myself from within. I call this stage of the transformation “the space
between”.

For me it was like I was addicted to external validation. Being validated by others
for my work, my looks, my body, my social media following, etc. Like most addicts
when you take away their vice, there will be a withdrawal period. For me it was
excruciating because I had been dependent on external validation my whole life.
When I consciously chose to stop getting my validation externally, I went through a
dark period of feeling unmotivated, purposeless, hopeless and my feelings of low
self-worth were brought to the surface.

Through this work, I realized the root of it all was my low self-worth and how I
used others to validate me to help me boost my worth. When that was taken away, it
found myself having to really dig deep to find worth within myself. This was the
birthplace of my self-love practice and it has taken me many years to learn how to
love myself in a deep and authentic way where it comes from within me.

I use the term “space between” to conceptualize this phenomenon that occurs when
detaching from ego and finding present moment awareness. As someone who craves
certainty, the space between was loaded with unknowns and this caused me a great
deal of anxiety as I navigated my way through. To be completely honest, I am still
navigating my way between this space as it's easy to fall back into old habits of
leaning on external validation to provide worth.

I wrote a poem one day when I was suffering in this space between my mind and my
heart and would like to share it with you. This poem came from such a raw place
within and I was feeling so exhausted because I felt trapped in this vicious cycle
between the madness of my ego and the taste of my liberation. The poem is about the
desperation I felt living day after day feeling like nothing was changing and I was
stuck in the same cycle of misery.

The Space Between

I wake up, close my eyes and try to find the peace inside

The harder I try the further away I find myself

The feeling of something needing to be fixed takes me over

I begin to chase this idea of how I think my life needs to be

Finding that delicate space between what I think makes me happy and what I feel
makes me happy, seems impossible to me

Can I just allow myself to be happy?

Can I pause the pursuit and just be the space of happiness I am trying to find?

Will I live my whole life trying to create something that is meant to be

experienced?

As I try to control the space between, I find myself carried further away from me

Where along the way did I learn that I need to hustle for my happiness?

The fleeting moments of presence that calm my storm are glimmers of hope

Far and few between, these moments just aren’t enough anymore

I long for the day where I don’t need to live for these moments because I am these
moments

I go to bed and close my eyes and try to calm the madness of my mind
I dream of the life I want so bad

I wake up, close my eyes and try to find the peace inside

It was shortly after I wrote this poem that things began to shift big time for me.
For many years I grappled with how to get my sense of worth from being rather than
doing. Being never felt like enough, so therefore I never felt like enough. I have
experienced a nicotine addiction and a crack addiction and they don't even come
close to the addiction to external validation I experienced. This dependency on
others to reflect back to me my worth became so pervasive in my life that I would
become triggered by others who got more adoration than me. I was easily left
feeling worthless at the drop of someone's attention. It was the fragility in this
way of being that snapped me out of this because I realized how much power other
people had over me. This realization allowed me to go within and find the void I
was trying to fill with others, and learn how to start to meet those needs for
myself. Meeting my own needs was such a foreign concept for me and I would soon
learn why and how much of an important role this would play in my healing.

As I mentioned before, my parents divorced when I was 8 years old and it was a very
hard time for me and my family. My parents struggled and I watched them suffer
emotionally for many years after the divorce. I quickly learned how to focus on
others and make them my world because it was a distraction from my own pain. I made
my feelings not matter and made others feelings the focal point of my experience.
This made me a great counselor and coach for many years, but it also made me
develop codependent traits in my relationships due to avoiding myself by being
overly focused on others. I carried this unconscious pattern into my past intimate
relationships as well. I became fixated on my partner and this inhibited me from
enjoying the experience of myself and I would lose my sense of self in the
relationship quite easily. This pattern of seeking worth from doing was directly
related to me not valuing myself as much as I valued others. This prevented me from
learning to go within for validation because I made my feelings less valuable than
others - classic codependency. Digging a little deeper, I realized how codependency
expresses itself in my life. It tells me I need other people as a reference point
to who I am because somewhere along the way I wasn’t enough for myself. This began
the journey of needing to look outside of myself for my worth and using that
external reflection of who I am to tell me I am adequate. Mix that with the shame
of being gay and feeling like I needed to hide who I was, and its quite the recipe
for perfectionism.

Codependency gives me a faux sense of self that I thought was providing me safety
but it was actually pulling me further away from learning how to derive my worth
from being and not from doing. When I made this realization, I started to do some
really cool transformative personal growth work in this area. I was guided to plant
medicine where I participated in an Ayahuasca ceremony led by a Peruvian shaman. It
was this experience that helped me realize the root of my habit to look outside
myself for worth rather than cultivating it from within. I realized I had a strong
need for belonging that has long gone unmet in my life. I have confused belonging
with fitting in and this led me down a dark road of inauthenticity, disconnection,
wearing masks, and betraying myself for the approval of others. Brene Brown
describes the difference between belonging and fitting in as this: “fitting in is
about assessing a situation and becoming who you need to be to be accepted.
Belonging, on the other hand, doesn’t require us to change who we are; it requires
us to be who we are.” This quote helped me understand my reliance on external
validation as a byproduct of trying to fit in. People who feel they belong, belong
to themselves first and therefore don't betray themselves to belong. This leaves
space for internal validation to flourish because you aren't so heavily reliant on
others to accept you because you accept yourself already.

I had to share that story with you so you could understand the psychological and
sociological aspects behind why we seek a sense of worth from doing rather than
being. A lot of it stems from an inherent need to belong. We are social creatures
and it is hardwired in our DNA to need attachment and belonging from other humans.
It becomes instinctual to try and meet this need, but with the wrong intention, it
can become a dysfunctional way to do it.

The other aspect of developing a sense of worth from being requires surrendering.
It is to drop out of the mind and allow the body to teach you a course in nature.
You are enough just as you are because nature created you in the form you are
exactly in this moment. If you stopped all your doing that was unnecessary other
than to maintain life, the only thing that would die is the dysfunction of your
ego. It is the reason you do so much to feel worthy. Return to the present moment,
allow yourself to feel into the natural responses that are occurring in your being
without you doing anything, take a big deep breath and just appreciate life as it
is, not as you're trying to create it to be.

Chapter 11: Allowing Presence to Guide You

As discussed in previous chapters, the body is made up of two body's - the outer
and inner body. The outer body is comprised of the physical shell that houses our
inner body. It is what we refer to as the physical body that allows us to perform
all the physical tasks in life. We use the outer physical body to experience life
through our sense perceptions such as taste, smell, sight, sound and touch. When I
refer to surrendering your mind to your body, this is usually the first step in the
process but not the only. This first step is used to slow down the mind and engage
with your senses so you can feel a depth to life that the mind cannot bring to you.
However, sense perception can only take you so far in your journey toward
enlightenment because it requires the mind to interpret what is being experienced.

When we perceive, think, feel, or experience, consciousness is born into form

because something that occurred in your inner experience is now relative to
something that is formed. The same is true when something that is formed in your
outer experience, creates something in your inner experience. That is to say when
you perceive through your senses, you require something that is formed outside
yourself to stimulate the experience inside yourself. This being food, objects,
people, music, pictures, smells, etc. They are used to create the experience;
therefore, if it begins in form it remains in form.

The inner body is different in that it draws its own experience from within. It is
a flowing consciousness that requires nothing outside itself to stimulate it. It is
not a sense, it is an essence energy that radiates throughout your whole being. It
is the life force of creation within you.

The journey for most people is that we are born into this world 100% connected to
our inner body and as we go through domestication, we develop a separate mind-based
self (ego) to relate to the world around us. We lose connection with our inner body
and we learn to relate to the world through our outer body and our mind (ego).

The first step in the journey back home to oneself is to drop down from mind back
into outer body connection. This is where you can begin to cultivate present moment
awareness which will be the access point to reconnect you to your inner body. When
coaching people back home to themselves, I always use the outer body as a bridge
between the mind and the inner body. This is because the inner body seems so far
away when you have been addicted to the compulsion of the mind for so long. The
outer body connection is the training wheels to riding the bike of your inner body
consciousness.

The second step is to remove all identification with form so you can bring forth
all your experiences from within. Nothing will create suffering for you, and
nothing will create happiness for you because the joy cultivated from within will
bring forth a more intense vibrational experience than the one created by the mind.

You may be reading this and thinking this seems too idealistic or far fetched for
where you are at currently. The idea is to not compare where you are now to where
you want to be because that pulls you back into the illusion of time created by the
mind. This exploits the present for the hope of success or fear of failure in the
future.

The cool thing about this work is that there is nothing to be done so you can put
your "to-do" lists away and just practice radical acceptance for what each moment
presents within itself. Often times when we are so wrapped up in doing our guide is
lists, comparisons, money, mental images of success, others opinions, and any other
ego driven thing we use to motivate us to keep doing what we think needs to be done
before we can finally feel good about ourselves.

The purpose of this chapter is to teach you how you can use presence to guide you.
The guidance of presence comes in the form of your intuition. Your intuition is the
mechanism bridging your outer and inner body and it speaks your truth to you. It
tells you whether something feels right or not for you. When you are in touch with
this aspect of your being, you are more likely to have more joy in your life
because the intuition is the compass that leads you to joy. One sure way to know if
something is congruent to your inner body is to see if it gives you a sense of
enjoyment. All too often people are doing things in their life because they think
they have to. If you're misaligned with your intuition you may feel as if things
like work, relationships, or even hobbies can become joy suckers. They suck the joy
out of your experiences because perhaps you have chosen a career, relationship or
hobby for ego reasons such as status, power, image, money, etc. If you find this to
be true for your life situation, you have 3 options: remove yourself from the
situation, change the situation, or accept the situation. If you choose to do
nothing about it then you are risking being misaligned to your purpose and this is
when people become unhappy and develop depression and anxiety. This can lead to
addiction or other repressive behaviours as a way to escape the unfulfilling life
we have created for ourselves.

The best way to get in tune with the inner body, so you can start to communicate
with it, is to feel the life inside the body. To get in tune with the outer body,
we focus on the wiggling of the toes, the sound of our heart beat, the blood
rushing through our veins, etc. To get in touch with the inner body, we take it one
step further and get in tune with the force that is allowing these body responses
to occur. I call this feeling the life inside the body. The only way I can think to
describe it would be when we get the chills from experiencing something profound.
It's literally a full rush of beautiful energy coursing through the body to the
point that it raises the hair on your arms or makes you cry tears of joy and
inspiration.

This is what we need to tune into if we want presence to be our guide. It's the
life force energy that is beyond the beating of your heart. It is the same energy
radiating through everyone's being. This is the oneness we connect to when we
connect to it within ourselves. When we have that experience, we know that this
essence is much greater than just us, it is a collective essence of energy. An
energy that connects us all and allows us to feel the humanity between each one of
us. The ego finds differences through separation from self and other, while the
essence energy knows we are all born out of, and will die back into this
magnificent pool of energy.

Acceptance is the Only Way to Presence

If we try to enter the present moment without complete acceptance of what that
moment is, we will end up returning to mind because we will create resistance to
the moment. Acceptance is the most powerful tool we can use on the spiritual
journey because it allows us to get out of our own way and let nature's
intelligence guide us to our destiny.

There is a beautiful quote by Marcus Aurelius that spoke to me so clearly when I

was learning how to surrender through acceptance and I would like to share it with
you. “Accept whatever comes to you woven in the patterns of your destiny, for what
could more aptly fit your needs”. This quote is saying that when you let go of
control and allow the moment to be accepted for what it is, an intelligence much
wiser than your own can come to play and create all that you need to feel
fulfilled. It is crazy to think that billions of galaxies can be created and work
harmoniously in divine perfection for the greater good of the universe, but yet we
think we are the only one who knows what will make us happy. How much of what you
think will bring you happiness is driven by ego, and how much by your heart? Step
aside and see what life can bring you when you are open to accepting it just as it
comes to you. You may be surprised that what you wanted might not actually make you
happy, and what you needed will. Perhaps what you receive now as disappointing, may
actually be disguised as a gift preparing you for what the future has in store for
you. This is the big picture intelligence the ego does not have. The ego desires
instant gratification, and the universe delays gratification to prepare you for
what you want by first giving you what you need.

Acceptance of the past seems to be one of the hardest things for the human mind to
wrap itself around. It is impossible for the mind to accept anything, especially
something from the past that it doesn't have control over. True acceptance, that
isn't riddled with denial, happens in the heart. The place where compassion and
love exist is the only place that acceptance can take place. As we leave the mind
and enter the body, we let go of the resistance that is keeping us stuck. Eckhart
Tolle wisely states “only presence can undo the past in you and transform your
consciousness.” When we are in mind and trying to resolve matters of the past, we
are just reliving them and creating more fear and attachment to mind. It's like a
dog chasing its tail; it will cause insanity bringing nothing but exhaustion. When
we stop chasing a solution to acceptance, we finally are able to accept because
acceptance is about being with what is, not chasing what we think could be better.

Self-Acceptance

A lack of self-acceptance is no different than the resistance I spoke of

previously. You can tell yourself you love yourself and accept yourself all you
want, but until you allow yourself to feel your true nature in the present moment,
you're not allowing the space for self-love and acceptance to embody. If we accept
ourselves in thought, it remains in thought and we keep having to tell ourselves or
think thoughts of self-acceptance. If we allow the space to feel this state, we
remember it by returning to it as it is already imprinted on every cell of our
being.

Self-acceptance is less about accepting the things you don't like about yourself,
and more about accepting the resistance you have to what is, by wishing it were
different. As long as you keep wishing to be different, you will stay stuck in a
cycle of low self-worth by rejecting things you don’t want to accept. You don't
have to suddenly love those things, as that may be too far of a jump for you. We
must first accept that there is resistance to who we are, as we are. Otherwise, we
spend our time in the mind where things cannot be accepted. Full presence means
full acceptance; the more time you spend in presence, the less time you can spend
worrying about the things you don’t like about yourself. The human mind has this
unhelpful habit of thinking that the more it ruminates about something, the closer
it will come to a solution on how to fix it. You cannot fix yourself because there
is nothing to be fixed, only things to be accepted and then you can feel the
wholeness to which you are.

Self-acceptance happens in the present moment because you tune into all that you
are, not all that your mind tells you you aren't. The present moment is void of
story. Story is what creates opportunity for judgement because it's through story
where we get to choose whether we like or dislike, agree or disagree, etc. The less
opportunity for story, the less opportunity for us to identify with something that
isn't actually us. We are not our stories. Our stories are our experiences and we
are also not our experiences. Our experiences are an aspect of what forms what we
are, not who we are. The who we are would exist regardless of the presence of
experience because it is the life force that enables you to engage in experiences
in the first place. What we are is the role we play in life - the personas, masks,
identities,etc. I am a son, coach, brother, cat dad, friend, yoga student, fitness
enthusiast, food lover, etc. These things do not make up who I am, they make up
what I am and how I choose to participate in this world. They provide others a
glimpse of who I may be based on how I choose to participate in this world. They
offer insight into my interests, or tribes to which I belong, but they are not who
I am. Who I am is a much deeper aspect of my being. It is the energy that radiates
from the inner body of my being. The soul is the closest way for us to
conceptualize the who of our being. I am that I am. I am nothing more and nothing
less than the I amness of the energy that radiates from my inner being.

When I do self-acceptance and self-love work with clients in my coaching practice,

I am allowing the client to feel into my inner body so they can realize the energy
to which they are through recognizing it within me. I walk you back home to
yourself by giving you a reminder of what it feels like and that will be your
compass to take you there. I didn't learn how to coach effectively until I mastered
the art of taking off my mask and connecting with my inner body - two essentials to
effective coaching. Coaching is an energy exchange where I teach you how to access
the present moment where you can tune into the love that is already there for
yourself. The mind says “I will love myself when….”, the heart says “welcome home”.
This is why Ram Dass says “we are all just walking each other home” - it is through
my eyes that you see my light, and my eyes show you the way back home by seeing
through me what you forgot within yourself. Just because you forgot doesn't mean
that it is gone, it just needs to be tuned back into and that can only happen in
the stillness of the present moment.

How do I cultivate true self-acceptance?

Self-acceptance is found when you stop looking at yourself through a lens of
polarity of acceptable and unacceptable. Stop wondering if you should be more of
this or less of that and just embrace who you already are. These polarities exist
because they need to be experienced in contrast to one another so you can realize
the fullness of an experience comes from allowing in all that is, not just what you
want to allow in. When it comes to self-acceptance, it is not cultivated by picking
and choosing what you like about yourself. This single act of self-preference is
the reason why you’re in need of a self-acceptance practice in the first place.
Self-preference is driven by the mind where all preferences originate. The mind
will tell you you're not good enough because it is holding the current you hostage
to the future you which is a mental image created that appears to be more
desirable. The only way out of this misery of self-animosity is to become present
to the makings of the mind and how it is always self-seeking to feel good enough or
better than its surroundings. This is the ego structure of the mind that is in
place to make you appear adequate to your surroundings, but really all it is doing
is creating separation between you, yourself, and others.

When we begin to disidentify with ego and drop down into the isness of who we are,
we find a self-worth waiting for us. This self-worth is the missing piece to self-
acceptance. When in this state of self-worth, you find yourself accepting the Now
and letting go of this idea that there is a right or wrong way to do or be in this
life. The mind will never be able to wrap its head around this concept because it
is a matter of the heart. This is why all the affirmations you have been using in
isolation of the present moment, have not been effective long term. The mind cannot
do this for you because it is there to protect you, not liberate you. Let your mind
embrace the contrast of you being undesirable or desirable because it will need to
because this is how our minds have been conditioned in our culture. The key to
liberation is to become the underlying presence that can watch the mind try and
make sense of something it has no business making sense of. This presence alone
will be enough to transmute the emotional energy you feel about yourself from years
of self-animosity.

When you surrender the mind's knowingness to the body’s beingness, you tune into an
energy that is like a big comfy blanket of rightness in who you are. All that you
deem as unacceptable about yourself will melt away and be replaced with an inner
knowing that you are created in the form you are meant to, in this lifetime, to
fulfill your unique purpose. This is the true experience of self-acceptance we’re
all being walked home to. Who is walking you home? Give thanks in this moment to
those who see you for exactly who you are, and still choose to stand beside you
while you walk home to yourself. These people are your angels here on earth and the
people that when they look at you see already in you what you’re trying to see in
yourself. Pause, take a breath, look into their eyes and feel the feelings they
have for you and use those feelings to help guide your journey back home.

A Lesson in Self-Acceptance: How You Treat Others is a Reflection of How You’re

Treating Yourself

This treatment may be in action or in thought. Sometimes we come off as nice but
the way we speak about others in our thoughts is abusive. The more self-acceptance
you develop, the less triggered you are by people. What triggers us in others is
merely a reflection of something we have split off from and reject about ourselves.
As you learn to accept these splits, you will find them easier to accept in others.
If we want more love on earth, it will start with loving and accepting ourselves as
we are.
How do I love these splits that I have rejected about myself for so long?

We do it in the present moment by giving the mind a break from the habitual
thinking that reinforces the energy of the split. Think of all the negative
thoughts you have thought about yourself and continue to think about yourself.
These thoughts have formed a giant snowball rolling down a hill. With each passing
thought the snowball gets bigger and carries more momentum. After years of thinking
these thoughts they have so much control over you because they have momentum and
mental energy behind them. Mental energy is fuelled by thought, thoughts are
fuelled by stories, stories are fuelled by experiences, and experiences are from
the past. What is the only way to get out of the past? Be in the present. When
you're in the present moment the snowball stops dead in its tracks. It literally
loses all momentum and cannot move forward. The less energetic momentum it has the
smaller the snowball becomes. This is why present moment awareness is so powerful
in transmuting negative emotions we feel about ourselves. This is how we cultivate
self-acceptance. We let go of identification with the mind, enter the present
moment where the energy of habitual and repetitive thought is creating self-
animosity. If you have tried many strategies to develop self-love and acceptance
with little to no results, then it may be because they lack present moment
awareness. Affirmations, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, Journalling, talk therapy,
etc, will not be nearly as effective in the absence of the present moment because
that is the only mechanism proven to 100% stop feeding the snowball. The other
strategies, without present moment awareness, are attempting to put a positive up
against a negative that has been reinforced for years. What may take years to heal
in time, with present moment awareness, can be transmuted Now.

The mind cannot solve matters that were created by itself. This is why we drop down
into the heart and allow the present moment to return us back to the truth of who
we are. This world is living in the mentality of “hurt people, hurt people” and as
we become more collectively conscious this will shift to “loved people, love
people.” Which mentality do want to contribute to? And what do you need to do to
ensure you can show up in love for yourself and others?

A Lesson in Self-Compassion: It’s Okay to Fall Apart

One of the greatest gifts you can give yourself is the space to fall apart and not
need to have it together all the time. No one feels good when pressure is always
applied and you feel like you’re trying to perfect your way through life. So why
are we applying all this pressure on ourselves to always have it together all the
time?

In my experience, and the experiences of many of my clients, it’s a compensation

for shame and not feeling good enough that keeps us stuck in cycles of putting
pressure on ourselves. Shame says “not having it together means you’re a failure”
and being a failure means more shame. The only way out of this vicious cycle is to
surrender and stop playing the shame game with yourself. The concept of surrender
is about learning to let go of control and allowing yourself to fall apart
sometimes. Surrendering to self-compassion is all about giving yourself permission
to not be okay sometimes. If we are feeling a certain way and we are always in the
mindset of having to fix it or change it, then we are applying resistance to
something that requires acceptance. The number one ingredient for self-compassion
to be effective is to practice accepting life for what it is in the moment. Even if
life isnt working for you right now, accept it and watch it start to shift for you.
If we have it “together” all the time it means we are so full of resistance to life
being any other way than how we think it needs to be. We aren’t allowing organic
experiences to shape us into who were spiritually meant to evolve into. When it
comes to surrender, I live by the mantra “sometimes when it feels like things are
crumbling, they’re actually crumbling into place”. This mantra tells my mind it’s
okay to let go because something even more awesome is trying to come at me and it’s
my job to allow it through accepting life as it is.

Try this activity if you want to develop a stronger sense of self-compassion: Write
these questions on sticky notes and place them around your house.

What do I need to accept in this moment?

What do I need to be grateful for in this moment?

How can I be more gentle with myself in this moment?

Strategically place them around your house in an area that is conducive to

reminding you to be more kind to yourself. This may be near the mirror, scale,
fridge, first thing when you get home from work, anywhere that you feel you could
benefit from more acceptance, gratitude and gentleness. These are the three most
important ingredients to self-compassion. Being gentle with yourself is less about
the action of doing something gentle, and more about giving yourself permission to
do it. Without permission, an act of self-care can easily leave us feeling guilty.
Permission is the key to an effective practice of self-compassion.

This path is a gradual one. It doesn't all have to be done today. Never forget
these two sentiments because it's easy when practicing present moment awareness to
pull out your measuring stick to see how far you've come. This will not help you
because it’s immeasurable. This can be frustrating for some people, but that's the
feeling we practice surrendering to. Let go of yesterday’s sensations to make room
for today’s. These are just ego expectations based on how you experienced something
in the past and trying to recreate it in the present. It’s using your sense of
familiarity as a place to rest your fear of the unknown.

Grown Men Don't Cry

The human body is designed with many miraculous physiological responses at our
disposal. We use these body responses to release energy caused by the activity of
the mind and the experiences of the body. We yawn when we're tired, we sneeze when
we have a tickle, we laugh when we feel joy, we fart when we have gas, and we cry
when we need an emotional release. Where along the way did we learn to make crying
such a shameful experience, especially amongst men?

On the journey of coming home to yourself, you will make many pit stops along the
way. One of the most pivotal will be when you approach the entrance to your inner
body. Many people find this to be the most profound experience on the journey
because they are encountered with all the repressed emotional residue that they
have chosen to neglect throughout their life. Releasing this emotional residue can
be a cathartic and life changing experience that feels as if the weight of the
world releases off your shoulders. If you haven't learned how to release these
emotions through crying, you may find it challenging to release them because this
is the primary way we are meant to release energetically dense emotions.

Men tend to use anger as a way to “release” these emotions. Men have been socially
conditioned to only feel safe to experience anger and happiness. When life is going
well, we experience happiness. When life is not going well, we express anger about
it. Anger is a secondary emotion. Meaning it always has something primary
underlying it. It could be shame, sadness, grief, loss, fear, confusion, guilt,
etc. If men don't feel safe to express these primary feelings underneath their
anger, it can lead to only expressing anger while the other emotions accumulate and
cause further emotional distress. Anger is also an emotion loaded with resistance
through wishing the moment were not as it were. This is the opposite of being
present. For this reason, many men tend to live most of their lives in their minds
where pain and suffering are inevitable. Suicide rates among men are 3.5 times
higher than they are in women. Is this because women tend to have a stronger
ability to connect with and release these painful emotions? In my experience, women
tend to feel more safe to express their emotions, while men feel shame for
expressing those same emotions so they keep them inside. This can go a long way in
developing emotional resilience during times of depression and anxiety that tend to
be precursors that lead to completing suicide.

I remember like it was yesterday when I was relearning how to allow myself to cry.
After many years of repressing my emotions and being diluted by the “I'm tough,
nothing bothers me” motto. I finally began to realize the damage I was causing
myself through repressing my feelings and the negative impact it had on my
relationships. As I learned to open myself back up to emotional release, I was able
to heal some core wounds that were deeply impacting the quality of my life.

During the years I was emotionally shut down, I would still feel the need to cry.
It would wash over me like a hot tide starting from my pelvis all the way up to my
throat. That is as far as it would go because I learned to swallow it back down.
Literally, my physiological shutdown response to crying was to swallow. When I
would swallow, it would take me out of allowing the energy to keep moving and I
would send it back down to my pelvis. It was this area of my body where I had most
of my issues. I developed kidney stones in this area. This led to pelvic pain and
tension, incontinence, and eventually erectile dysfunction issues by the ripe age
of 28. This was all because I wasn't allowing my energy to flow and I was creating
blockages in my body that were causing physical ailments. This is common for people
to experience and the area in the body where tension is held will differ for each
person. Some people experience it in their chest, stomach, shoulders, pelvis, or
anywhere tension tends to accumulate in our body.

As I continued to learn skills to help me reconnect to my emotional body, I found

one that worked extremely well for me. When I would feel like crying, I would have
two responses that would pull me out of the present moment. One was physiological,
which was to swallow. The other was mental, where the mind wanted to insert itself
by reminding me of all the messages it has internalized to avoid experiencing
shame. So here is what I did with these responses to reprogram myself to be able to
release my emotions again: I became the presence to all these internal processes as
they took place. When the urge to cry would arise, my goal was to move from my head
down into my body. It wasn't easy to make this transformation because I had been
listening to my shame for so many years and my automatic response was to direct my
attention to my mind where it would pull me out of the emotion. I first had to be
present to my physiological urge to “swallow” my feelings because that was the
first step to get my body out of the habit it was taught by my mind. Secondly, I
needed a strategy to get out of the mind and into the body where the tears can be
released free of judgment and shame.

When I have the urge to cry now, I do two things: first, I breathe into it and
practice allowing my breath to flow the emotions out of me. If you notice when you
cry, your breathing will become constricted and short. It is important to allow
your breath to become expansive so it can be the vessel to which your emotions can
leave your body. So when you feel the warm wash of a good cry coming on,
deliberately focus on your breath and allow it to deepen. Secondly, I distract my
mind from inserting itself by placing my hands on my body. I return my attention to
where it is needed to experience the emotions. It is not only returning me to my
body, but it is distracting me from my mind. If I am sitting down, I will place my
hands on the outsides of my thighs and rub as hard or gentle as I feel I need to in
order to stay grounded in the moment to allow the emotion to pass. I would strongly
recommend placing your hands on the area in your body where you feel the emotion.
The stomach is a common area for people to experience emotions, so perhaps start
there if you're less body aware. I find this really deepens the catharsis for me as
it allows me to remain present with my body while it releases the emotions.

Crying is an essential human experience. Without it we can become calloused to life

and this can lead to feeling like we cannot connect in meaningful ways to others
because we lack that meaningful connection to ourselves. If these strategies seem
too far fetched for you, I would recommend starting out watching sad or
inspirational YouTube videos. When the urge to experience emotion arises, start by
practicing non-judgement for those emotions and work with the resistance of shame
before diving in too deep to the acceptance of the underlying emotions. It will
start with learning to give yourself permission to have these experiences.

Chapter 12: Affirming Your Practice

One of the leading causes of suffering for humans is to have an imbalance between
living too much of our time in our minds versus our hearts. The mind serves a great
purpose but when we don’t know how to master it and take breaks from it, it can
lead to great suffering. If we want to end the suffering in our lives, we need to
learn to leave our minds and enter our hearts where the present moment can be a
refuge from worry and anxiety.

When it comes to making this transformation, we need to be mindful of the law of

energy. Where our attention goes, energy will follow. If you are spending too much
time in your mind, then it is because you are focusing your gaze upward to your
mind. To spend more time in the present moment, we need to draw our gaze downwards
to the body and focus on sensation. Set time aside to draw your energy downward and
give yourself a break from the busyness of the mind. In this chapter, I want to
teach you how to do this and give you all the skills and strategies I have
developed in 15 years of doing this work.
One of the most important things to be aware of when developing this practice is
how to be gentle with your mind and patient with this process. It is so easy to
become angry and frustrated with the mind while doing this work. Always remember
the mind has one task and it is to protect you from what it perceives as a threat,
but it's going about it backwards. It is causing you more pain and suffering but
this is not the mind's fault, it is how we are conditioned. It is up to us to
liberate ourselves from this by taking responsibility for our minds and finding
inner peace through developing a present moment awareness practice.

As you go through this transformation, you are going to come up against resistance
from the mind. As you make your way towards the present moment, the mind begins to
feel threatened that it won't be needed anymore. In an attempt to preserve itself,
it becomes more active to make you feel as if you need to rely on it more. Just
trust that whenever something is about to shift energetically it will always
intensify before shifting. Don't give up and definitely don't lose hope that inner
peace will be found. It is through our greatest suffering that our greatest
transformation occurs. I've yet to meet someone who does this work, with
consistency and devotion, and doesn't find inner peace from it. Stick to it and
remain patient and positive along the way.

For me, one of the most frustrating things about developing present moment
awareness is the constant tug-o-war between the mind and body. I would draw my
attention downward and then my mind would start tugging my attention back upward to
thoughts. Then I would realize I lost the present moment and I would tug my
attention back down. Remember what I said about resistance throughout this whole
book? If you bring resistance into something it will persist. This is how I learned
the art of Wu Wei which is the effortless effort I spoke about in a previous
chapter. If you go at this with too much force it blows up in your face. Remember
this work is about being not doing. Through bringing too much doing into my
practice, I quickly realized that this process cannot be a tug-o-war. It needed to
be more gentle than that or else I would become even more frustrated and feel like
giving up. From this realization, I shifted my beliefs around this. When I first
started to get frustrated with the tug-o-war, I realized I was approaching it with
the inner thought of “I have to pull my attention back”. I made it out to be like a
chore or obligation when really it was a privilege that I was awake enough to even
realize that my attention had drifted. Do you know how many people occupy this
planet who don't have the consciousness to even notice there is an inner tug-o-war
happening? I quickly changed my attitude to “I am privileged to be conscious enough
to notice my inner process” That was enough for me to transform my frustration into
gratitude.

Meditation can be so challenging for people and this is why people stay away from
it. It can be overwhelming to do something that feels so uncomfortable. I have
created a potent present moment awareness practice that works like a charm to help
you Be The Space so you can begin to tame your mind and take back control.

Meditation and mindfulness are both about being in the present moment and paying
attention on purpose. We find a task and we give it our 100% attention. It’s called
One Pointed Concentration. This is the modality I use to awaken my present moment
practice and the one I prescribe to most to my clients. The exercise I find most
effective is a counting exercise. Start by setting an alarm for a determined amount
of time. I would suggest starting with 5 mins and work up from there. You will
simply count from 1-10 and 10-1 and keep doing that for the whole 5 mins. When your
mind wanders you gently bring it back to the counting. You may be thinking “how is
counting going to help me find what I’m looking for from meditation?” Most people
meditate because they are looking for happiness or inner peace, and what takes us
away from these two things is the suffering we cause ourselves by lacking
discipline of our minds. If we can learn to master our minds, we can ask our minds
to take a seat while we enjoy the present moment. This is done in the body, so we
must be able to find stillness of mind so we can enjoy our body sensations which
are our beingness. The counting teaches you how to become the master of your mind,
rather than your mind remaining the master of you.

You will start to notice this one exercise will have a profound impact on so many
areas of your life. You will become a better listener, to yourself and others. You
will be more concentrated when reading and won’t have to read pages over again
because you weren’t paying attention. You will have more body awareness. You will
find it easier to feel love, joy and peace because these states of being don’t
happen in the mind, they happen in the present moment. You will experience less
stress because your mind will wander less into undisciplined thoughts that create
drama and stress in your life. The list is endless of ways your life will improve.
The key is consistency and doing it daily. Even when you start to feel great from
doing it, you must keep doing it or the mind will begin to take back control. One
other tip to successful mediation practice is to reduce sugar or other stimulants
that excite the mind and make it harder to tame. This might be the hardest thing
for most people. Meditation can still be effective while eating sugar but it will
definitely make it harder to take control when the mind is all over the place from
being intoxicated by the effects of sugar or caffeine. My recommendation would be
to do these practices first thing in the morning before consuming coffee and sugar.

The next section is all the skills, strategies and practices I have learned over
the 15 years of learning to tame my mind. I find them to be most effective for me
but that doesn't necessarily mean they will be for you. Please note there is no
right or wrong way to do this work and there are 8 billion paths on this planet to
do so. When doing this work I live by the mantra “take what's good and leave the
rest”. If it works for you, great, if it doesn't, don't use it. As long as you find
you're getting the result of spending less time in your mind and feeling inner
peace from this, then that's all that matters.

It is important to note that the following exercises can be broken down into two
major categories: mastering the mind and befriending the body. I recommend choosing
one from each category to practice each day because you need to still the mind
before you can enter the body. They work in tandem to be effective.

My recommendation would be to start with 5 minutes of mastering the mind, and 5

minutes of befriending the body. This is a total of 10 minutes everyday to
completely change your life. As you develop more tolerance to this work, I would
recommend increasing the time by one minute increments in each category. I cannot
stress enough the importance of consistency in this work. The greatest temptation
is to do it until your life improves, then discontinue doing it. This is life work
that requires devotion on your part to truly reap the lifelong rewards of this
practice. As a testimony, I have been doing this work daily for many years and if I
happen to miss a day, I notice it as an increase in the activity of my mind.

I have also included some other exercises to play around with such as,
contemplative meditations, conscious doing, affirmations, and mantras. Please
understand that there is no right or wrong way to do this work and adding your own
flavour is strongly encouraged. Be creative and make it fun because if you cannot
adhere to it because you feel disengaged, then you won't be consistent and be able
to devote yourself to the practice.

Please enjoy these potent exercises that have completely transformed my life. I
know they have the potential to do the same for you. Enjoy the journey and have fun
along the way.
Mastering the Mind: One Pointed Concentration

One pointed concentration: point your concentration toward things like your breath,
counting, candle flame, song, etc. It can be anything of your choosing. The idea is
to experience the moment without the mind and when the mind tries to interject, you
gently and compassionately draw your attention back to the object of concentration.
This process isn’t about rejection of mind or achieving a state of no-mind, it’s
about mastering your mind and making it your slave, no different than when you tell
your feet to walk. If you want to master something you have to respect it and
understand the capacity it has and doesn’t have. Start small and work your way up
to sitting with yourself every day.

Counting 1-10 10-1

Objective:

One pointed concentration technique. Count from 1 to 10 then back down from 10 to 1
while limiting the amount of times your mind wanders.

Tips:

Close your eyes but sit up so you don't fall asleep.

When your mind wanders, gently draw it back to the counting.

Say the numbers aloud if you find it too hard to stay focused.

Mentally envision yourself taking 10 steps forward and 10 steps backwards if you
find counting alone is too challenging.

Flickering of a Candle Flame

Objective:

One pointed concentration technique. Light a candle and watch the flickering of the
flame while limiting the amount of times your mind wanders. This one can be more
challenging because it's harder to still the mind with your vision than it is with
the counting of numbers in the head.

Tips:

When your mind wanders, gently draw it back to the flame.

The mind will become irritated and want to steal your attention by causing your
eyes to want to look at something other than the flame, just observe the resistance
and let it go.

Becoming One With a Song

Objective:

One pointed concentration technique. Listen to a song with 100% presence without
your mind wandering or fantasizing about anything. I prefer songs without words
because I find words make me think of things and my mind wanders. My favorite song
to do this to is Salento by Rene Aubry (his whole album Plaisirs d’amour is amazing
for this work). I focus on the instrumentals and just allow the music to create an
experience for me, rather than me trying to create the experience for myself. Feel
into the song and let your body listen. You will notice all the cells in your body
start to dance to the song while you lay in stillness. Such a cool experience.

Tips:

When your mind wanders, gently draw it back to the song.

Observe what the music wants to make your body do, but don't do it just observe it
and play with that resistance.

Feel into the resistance of your mind wanting to take part in the experience by
making a story of it.

Mantras
Objective:

One pointed concentration technique. Mantras are helpful to keep your mind focused
on one thing. Mantras are the repetitive use of a phrase to remain concentrated.

I am that I am

I am full of light

Love is all there is

I feel. I exist

I change my thoughts, I change my world

Sat Nam - “Truth is my identity”

Aham-prema - “I am divine love”

Om - “It is, will be, or to become”

Ho’Oponopono - “I love you, I’m sorry, please forgive me, thank you”
Maranatha - “Come lord”

El Shaddai - “God almighty”

Tips:

It can be any word or phrase you want, just be sure it resonates with you.

Search a mantra on YouTube and play it. Chant along with the audio and when you
find your mind wandering, come back and join the audio.

Befriending Your Body

This is the most important section when it comes to cultivating present moment
awareness as we make the journey from head into heart. Befriending the body is all
about giving the body space to be exactly as it is. We offer our undivided
attention combined with unconditional love and acceptance for the state to which we
find our body. The element of surrender must be present for you to befriend your
body because you can only befriend your body if you are able to accept it in the
state to which you find it. Any resistance that arises is coming from the mind and
you have left the body and entered the mind. When this happens to me, I use the
phrase “everything is fine just the way it is”, and this allows me to let go of the
mind trying to create perfection in something that needs to be imperfect.
Befriending the body is about ebbing and flowing with the resistance that you find
within and meeting it with acceptance. Always remember there is no destination with
this work because it is all about being present with the journey.

Observing Your Breath

Objective:

Observe your natural breath as it travels in and out of your nostrils. Don't change
your breath and force it because it's an involuntary action your body does on its
own. It doesn't require your control. Your body has its own intelligence where your
mind is not required. This is a microcosm of how you can learn to let go of control
as well. This is nature's way of teaching you how to surrender.

Tips:

Breath through your nose not your mouth.

Let your mind take a rest and let mother nature hold you in this experience.

Let go of control by observing your own body doing the breathing for you.

Breathing Into Your Pelvis

Objective:

Control your breath by drawing it into your pelvis. The pelvis is a common area in
the body that stores dense emotional energy. This tends to be an area in the body
many people are disconnected from due to fear and shame. Drawing the energy there
is a great step towards clearing some of the emotional energy that lays dormant at
the gate of your inner body. This must be cleared for full access to the inner
body.

Tips:

Draw the air slowly in through the nostrils and follow it with your inner gaze to
the pelvis.

Allow whatever arises to be part of your experience.

The old repressed energy may surface and your initial instinct may be to push it
away but try to sit with it and allow it to release.

Observing Your Body Sensations

Objective:

Draw your attention downward to your body and observe the sensations you feel. This
is not the full body scan, it is just sitting as the presence that you are and
watching for any sensations that arise. It's a beautiful way to just give attention
to your body without any agenda.

Tips:

Focus on the involuntary body sensations like heart beat, breath, pulse,
temperature of skin, etc. These don't require you to do anything and are easier to
practice without the desire to feel like doing anything.

When your attention wanders back upwards to your mind, gently draw it back
downwards into your body.

Lift Your Cheekbones: A Smiling Meditation

Objective:

Put a smile on your face and send that positive energy inward to the organs of your
body. It’s a great way to change a bad mood or send gratitude to the body that is
taking you through this journey of life.

Tips:

Combine this with the ‘breathing into your pelvis’ exercise and it works even more
effectively.

Play with smiling and no smiling and see how that impacts the sensations in the
body.

Slow Walking Meditation

Objective:

Walk as slow as you possibly can and focus on the body mechanics moving as you
walk.

Tips:
Each foot could be in the air for at least 3 seconds while walking - this is a very
slow pace.

Pay attention to all the sensations of the movement. Feel the feet as they gently
touch the floor.

Feel the core tighten as it has to stabilize the body for one foot to move ahead of
the other

Pay attention to the mind's resistance to such slow movement. The body wants to
take its time but the mind is rushing you. What does that discrepancy feel like for
you?

Playing With Your 5 Senses

Objective:

Use your 5 senses to draw you out of the mind and into the body. Choose a sense and
use it with 100% presence.

Tips:

Try not to narrate the experience by bringing presence into it. Just try to be one
with the sense.

Focus on the smell of the room.

Focus on the taste of your breath or use a candy and just be one with the taste.

Focus on what you see around you without having to narrate the story of what those
things bring up for you.

Listen to the sounds around you and practice total acceptance for every sound to be
just as it is without wanting to change it.

Feel your skin and the difference in temperature your hands have to the rest of
your body. Run your tongue along your teeth and just feel what that feels like.

Body Scanning

Objective:

Draw your internal gaze downward into your body and move from body part to body
part with focused attention. The key is to scan your whole body bringing awareness
to each part of your body. This is a great practice in self-love for the body
because when we love something, we give it our time and attention. There is no
greater gift you can give your body than the gift of your undivided attention.

Tips:

Lay down flat on your back and close your eyes.

Work with the left side of your body first then move to the right.

Start from the feet and move up from there covering all major parts of your body.

Don't forget to cover some internal ground as well such as your organs, they need
some loving too.

Energizing Your Hands

Objective:

Rub your hands together fast to cause friction and warmth. This kinetic energy can
then be distributed to other areas of the body and felt as sensation. This is a
great exercise to draw your attention to your body by focusing on subtle sensations
that otherwise may go unnoticed.

Tips:

Use this energy to activate chakra energy in the body.

Place your hands on areas that feel less active to you and bring more flow to these
parts of your body.

You can move your hands along parts of your body with or without touching the
surface of the skin.

Contemplative Meditation

Contemplative meditation is a style of meditation that involves the mind. You

deliberately take the mind on a journey towards creating a specific experience for
yourself. A contemplative meditation has intention behind it, unlike habitual
thinking that is random in nature. With contemplative meditation you are using a
specific intention, paired with your watcher consciousness, to take the mind on a
journey to some form of experience you would like to internally create for
yourself.

Die Before You Die

Objective:

Some may find this morbid and that's okay, but to some this can be a liberating
experience. The objective here is to contemplate your death and begin to cultivate
acceptance around the impermanence of your life.

Tips:
Try not to think about the impact it will have on others as this can wrap you up in
story quite easily.

Have the experience within your body of what it would feel like to not have the
outer body experience as your inner body merges back to the collective pool of
consciousness.

Conscious Doing

Throughout this book you may have got the sense that doing is unhelpful or somehow
ineffective to happiness, and this is not the case. Doing is an essential part of
accomplishment and success on many levels. However, it is essential to be present
while you’re doing and not allow the destination to be the only form of joy on the
journey. Conscious doing is all about being present to your inner body experience
while creating an outer experience for yourself. This is where we get to allow the
inner body’s creative force to shine through. This is the place to which people
bring into this world some of the most spectacular ideas, talents, and creations.
The key to conscious doing is to not become overly-fixated on the destination and
enjoy the journey. We do this by staying grounded in the Now. We focus on the task
at hand without having to incessantly narrate the experience with our minds or our
minds being somewhere else while we tediously perform a task. Through conscious
doing you realize that you can cultivate joy in any activity you are performing
because it is not the activity that brings you joy, but the presence you bring into
the activity. Remember joy isn't felt in the mind, it’s felt in the body.

The Being in Your Doing

Objective:

To do any activity with present moment awareness with as little interference from
the mind as possible. This is why we do this work right? We want to bring more
inner peace and joy into our day to day lives. We don't want our time in meditation
to be our only time we feel inner peace and joy.

Tips:

When you catch yourself lost in thought kindly bring yourself back to the activity
at hand.

When you’re listening to others, try to listen with your whole awareness. Mind,
outer body, and inner body. Give them your undivided attention. This is one of the
greatest gifts we can offer someone.
Focus on how the body is experiencing the activity. When I ride my motorbike, I
feel the wind on my face and how my body is moving through space so quickly. If I
tune in well enough I can give myself butterflies.

Stream of Consciousness Journaling/Writing

Objective:

To write with present moment awareness with as little input from the mind. Let
whatever arises makes its way onto the paper without trying to shape it into
anything specific. Get into the flow of letting your hand take control and write
from the place inside you that feels most connected to the pen.

Tips:

Don't hold back.

Let the body speak through the pen.

When you catch yourself lost in thought, kindly bring yourself back to the activity
at hand.

You are not trying to create anything, rather let the writing create you.

Don't try to interpret your writing just allow it to be as it is without judgment.

Affirmations

Affirmation

Objective:

Affirmations are helpful to shift how you feel about something by affirming the
state you want to achieve by speaking the words that match that vibration.

There is no effort required here

I choose to surrender to nature

I choose to listen to my body

There is nowhere to be and nothing to do - just enjoy the present moment

I am flexible and I am free

I am perfect, whole and complete just the way I am

Do less, experience more

I have the courage to give up control

I can trust in my purpose

I am confident in my ability
Try not to take this process so seriously and just have fun with it

The ultimate surrender is to surrender my mind to your body

I am doing amazing because I am doing the best I can

I am that I am

I accept ____________ as a part of my experience (any emotion/state you are

resistant to experiencing)

I am willing to be held by the present moment

I am more than enough

Tips:

Say your affirmations like you believe them already. Allow the power of your voice
to transform the energy of the moment.

Practice presence with each affirmation. Feel into the body before and after the
affirmation. This is how we integrate the affirmation into our cellular makeup and
allow the present moment to transform us.

I like to use affirmations before and after my meditation practice.

Epilogue

We are living in times where there is so much negativity for our minds to get
wrapped up in. Between social issues and politics alone, it is challenging to keep
our minds free of stress and drama. The simple act of turning on the news can
suddenly make you feel overwhelmed to be living on a planet that feels as if it’s
gone mad. The truth is, we do live on a planet that has gone mad because there is
too much identification with mind and not enough present moment awareness. People
are fighting with one another out of fear of powerlessness, while ignorantly
dismissing the power of love and unity.

If we want less war, destruction, greed, corruption, and fear of powerlessness on

this planet, it's going to start with each individual mind surrendering its need
for control, power, and certainty. Think about what this world would be like if all
the global leaders practiced present moment awareness and tuned into the highest
aspect of their consciousness before making decisions that impacted billions of
people. Think about how different this world would be if we were loyal to love
rather than nations? And on an individual scale, think about how different this
world would be if we were loyal to love rather than the self-serving nature of our
egos?

The ego tells the story of separation, and the heart tells the story of
togetherness. Do we want to continue to see the differences between one another, or
do we want to see the similarities? If we want inner peace, and peace on this
planet, we need to drop down away from our egos and into our hearts where
connection, collaboration, and community come naturally to us. This isn't a
collective movement until it becomes an individual movement. You can do your part
by bringing more consciousness into the world, by bringing more self-consciousness
into your world.

Present moment awareness doesn't just have the answers to you, it has the answers
to the world as well. If we all just spent a little less time in our heads and a
little more time in our hearts, we could access sacred space before acting in our
lives. This would support us in making decisions from a place that is guided by
consciousness. The more awakened people become, the less pain and suffering we will
cause each other because we will respond from consciousness, rather than react from
ego.

People are so wrapped up in giving back by doing. We work hard to be able to donate
money to causes we support. We volunteer our time to organizations that embody what
we value in life. While this is all great and I support this type of doing-based
giving as it is rooted in the virtues of generosity and selflessness. However in my
opinion, there is an even greater gift we can give ourselves and others, and that
is the gift of being present.
This world is imbalanced because we have too much mind identification and not
enough heart presence. When we are over-identified with mind, we are causing the
very things we are working so hard to donate our time and money to “fixing”. This
misalignment, both individually and collectively, is what is causing most of the
suffering on this planet. We then do all these things to try and “fix” the symptoms
but not actually deal with the root - a deep sense of suffering caused by over-
identification with the mind.

It's rare in my work that I speak to the collective issues happening in the world,
because I am more of an individualist by nature. I work with individuals or small
systems, and have my whole career. One of my firm beliefs is that all change starts
with individuals making changes to how they think, feel and behave before it can
become collective change. The quote “change how you see the world and the world you
see changes” has stuck with me since I read it in my early teens and has greatly
influenced how I approach my work.

I am excited about this book and the peace it's going to provide you in your life.
I am confident you reading it will permeate this knowledge into the lives of others
and this is how we make effective social change. As you find your way through this
life, my wish for you is that you can find joy and inner peace in all that you do.
That the suffering you endure can subside as you learn to let go of your need for
power, control, and certainty, while surrendering that resistance to the freedom
and flexibility within the heart.

Sending love and light to you as you walk home to yourself.

About the Author

Matt Landsiedel is a transformation coach and author from Calgary, Canada. He

specializes in working with gay men to unmask shame and teach them how to develop
self-acceptance and authenticity. He also has extensive experience teaching men and
women how to lose weight through healing the shame that binds them to emotional
eating and food addiction.

Present moment awareness dramatically changed his life and he is now enthusiastic
about teaching others how to Be The Space so they can live with more inner peace in
a world that can cause so much suffering. His wish for everyone is to find their
presence and feel more confident and authentic in who they are so meaningful
connections and healthy relationships can flourish.

Matt's holistic approach to coaching incorporates mind, body, and soul into each
transformation he is a part of. He has spent the last 15 years working in the
fields of addiction, fitness, nutrition, and transformation coaching.

In his spare time, you can find Matt traveling the world, writing, reading, working
out or doing yoga, hanging out with his cat Darryl, spending quality time with
family and friends, meditating and contemplating life, watching hockey, and
spending time building his coaching business.
www.MattLandsiedel.com

@inspiredtobeauthentic

@liftyourcheekbones

Copyright © 2020 Matt Landsiedel

All rights reserved

*If you found this book helpful, I would greatly appreciate a review on amazon or
the platform to which you purchased the book. Reviews are the best way to get this
book into the hands of readers so we can spread more consciousness on this planet
and bring forth social change that will create more inner and global peace.