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On each page of What About Now?Reminders
for Being in the Moment by Gina Lake (just
released) is a quote from one of Gina Lake’s
many books that will inspire you and help you
remember to be in the moment. These quotes
are intended to wake you up out of your ordinary
consciousness and bring you in touch with your
true nature and help you live from there. Here
are some samples:
You think you need your thoughts and feelings
to function. You think they are you. But you
don’t need them, and they aren’t
you. They are part of the conditioned, false
self that you think of yourself as,
but they aren’t what is alive in you and
living this life and experiencing this moment.
What is experiencing this moment, including what
is aware of contraction over identification with
thought, is who you are. It is very silent, though,
unlike the egoic mind, which chatters away constantly.
The real you is the Silent Experiencer who is
alive and having the experience the false self
is creating.
Your attention is important. It determines
your experience of reality. You have a choice
about what you give your attention to once you
realize you have a choice. Life is transformed
by this realization. It’s really very simple:
Choosing to listen to the egoic mind takes you
out of the moment and misleads and misguides
you, while ignoring it brings you into the moment,
where life is happening and wisdom and guidance
are available.
Who you really are can only be experienced
in this moment, not through thought. When we
move our attention away from thought onto anything
else, we land in the present moment, and the
experience of being present is the experience
of our true Self. This experience is one of love,
compassion, acceptance, joy, and contentment.
When you feel these, you know you are identified
with your true Self rather than the ego. When
you feel the opposite—discontentment and
unhappiness—you know you are identified
with the ego, with your thoughts.
Surrendering to life happens simply and naturally
when we stop paying attention to our mind’s
version of life and start paying attention to
life itself as it is coming out of the now. There’s
something else to do besides think! And that
is to notice—to be aware of what is happening
now. Look, feel, listen, sense, and you will
drop into the now.
The more accustom we become to being present,
the more we begin to live as Essence, which is
a free and joyful experience. So, it turns out
that the now isn’t just a place of sensory
experience, although that is sufficiently rich,
but it’s also where life comes out of,
and if you aren’t paying attention to the
now, you might miss what life is trying to bring
about through you. You can follow the egoic mind’s
plans and ideas for your life if you want, but
something else right here and now has a plan,
and that plan will be much more satisfying than
anything the ego has to offer.
Experiencing what you are experiencing and
experiencing your thoughts are very different
realities—very different experiences. When
you are experiencing what you are experiencing,
you are at peace, relaxed, content, absorbed,
with no thoughts about “me,” how “I” am
doing, or any other stories, which are the ego’s
version of reality. Instead of experiencing reality,
the ego tells a story about it, and that becomes
its reality.
Love is not an emotion but comes from jumping
into experience fully and being willing to really
have the experience you are having. Every moment
is an opportunity to jump in with both feet,
without holding back by evaluating the experience.
The egoic mind inserts itself in every moment,
or tries to, by evaluating it, worrying about
it, or telling a story about it. This commentary
doesn’t enhance life or keep us safe; it
simply distracts us from the experience and prevents
us from being fully involved with it. Most people
have one foot in their minds, so to speak, and
one foot in their experience. This doesn’t
feel the same at all as having both feet in the
experience.
Freedom is truly a state of mind—or,
rather, a state of no mind, or ignoring the mind’s
complaints about life. We are already free and
always have been. We have been given this great
gift of choice—the freedom to choose how
we see life and respond to it. Happiness is under
our control more than we may realize. We have
more power than we may think—we have the
power to not think (i.e., ignore our
thoughts) and to experience the gift that this
life is.
Because thinking is our default position as
humans, we have to learn to notice what else
is present besides thought. We have to learn
to notice what is Real and true in this moment.
We have to train ourselves to pay attention to
the subtle joy, expansion, relaxation and yes
of Essence as it enjoys life through us. This
subtle experience becomes less subtle and easier
to notice the more we put our attention on it
rather than on thought, and then the mind becomes
quieter, softer, and more in the background.
Gina Lake has a Masters degree in Counseling
Psychology and over twenty years experience supporting
people in their spiritual growth. She is also
the author of Radical Happiness, Embracing
the Now, Return to Essence, Choosing Love, Anatomy
of Desire, Living in the Now, and Getting
Free. Visit Gina's website at http://www.radicalhappiness.com for
blog posts, free book excerpts and chapters,
audio and video recordings, and a free newsletter.
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