#Thoughts

"The day you decide that you are more interested in being aware of your thoughts than you are in the thoughts themselves – that is the day you will find your way out.” ~ Michael Singer

Happy To Be.

#Carlin

Tantalizingly Terrrific Tweets

Don’t explain your philosophy. Embody it.
— Epictetus

— Daily Zen (@dailyzen) June 5, 2016

True egoless joy is contagious.

— Daily Zen (@dailyzen) June 6, 2016

"The world does stuff to you, but your life is determined by how you react to this stuff." https://t.co/uaYADZAZEK

— Daily Zen (@dailyzen) June 6, 2016

THE HEI Effect

Balance the Ego. When the anger, defensiveness, jealousy, greed and the like diminish and are utterly erased from your assistance.... Unraveling the facades of the ego will organically create a Healed, Evolved and Integrated Being.
“Knowledge speaks but wisdom listens.” ~ Jimi Hendrix

Wisdomuses love and compassion to motivate and inspire while knowledge uses criticismand insults to demean and humiliate.

B. B^ B*

Wisdom of Non-Discrimination & the Ego

#ThichNhatHanh

Explicacion del Ego
Posted by DJ Pollyfonika on Friday, October 10, 2014

Heart Trumps Mind...#EgoDisintegration

6 Techniques in Quiteing the Mind

1 and 2 are my favorite!

1. Focus On What You See When You Close Your Eyes

If asked to describe what we see when we close our eyes, most of us would describe it as the colour black. However, the truth is that our closed eyes are often telling us a much more interesting story. Close your eyes right now, focus on what you see. Is it actually just the solid colour black? Or is it more of a mixture of colours, some of which are undoubtedly created by the lighting in the room in which you are sitting?

No matter what you see, when you actually pay attention to it, it’s definitely something that can draw quite a bit of your attention, and I’ve often found it to be a great starting point to quieting my mind. At the very least it helps to shift my mind away from scattered thoughts, instead closing in on one focused thought – one that often sparks the creative element of my brain, which starts looking for images amongst the colourful display.

2. Scan Your Body

Our bodies are pretty damn intricate, and when you actually break them down part by part they can be quite interesting to explore. When it comes to quieting your mind, this same intricacy can also be quite a powerful tool. One of my personal favourite ways to bring myself into a quieter state of mind is to scan my body from top to bottom, focusing on how each part feels as I pay attention to it.

Once you can move past the judgemental thoughts of how stupid or silly this seems, you may actually find yourself pleasantly surprised by how much energy you feel. I find that focusing on this energetic flow not only quiets my mind but shifts my focus to the internal elements of who I am, rather than the distractions of the outside world.

3. Stay Connected To Nature

As someone who just moved from a nature-filled suburb into a condo in the heart of downtown Toronto, the difficulty of finding ways to regularly connect with nature has never been higher, but I intend to make it work. I intend to make it work because I know how important it is to my own well-being, and because I know that nature is the perfect surrounding in which to find peace.

Nature is both colourful and happening like a city, but it manages to capture these elements in a way that is much more calming and connective, rather than rampant and distracting. The next time you are looking to quiet your mind, spend some time outdoors. Focus on how naturally a stream flows or how calmly a blade of grass sits and realize that you too can flow and be calm just as naturally.

4. The Power Of Your Breath

There’s a reason why the majority of guided meditations begin by instructing us to focus on our breath. It’s something that we all do, all the time, yet it happens and adapts so naturally that we can often go days without ever actually thinking about it. Giving some attention to your breath can be an incredibly powerful way to quiet your mind and relax your body in general.

A particular breathing pattern I’ll often practise when aiming to quiet my mind is to do 3 cycles of breath where I breath in through my nose for 4 seconds, hold the breath for 3, and then release through my mouth for another 4 seconds. I’ll also ensure that the breath inflates my stomach (rather than my chest), since this type of breathing in particular seems most calming.

5. Go Through What You’re Grateful For

We love inundating our minds with negative thought patterns and basking in reasons why people should feel sorry for us, but we rarely take the time to go through what we are appreciative of in life. This technique may not quiet your mind completely, but it certainly helps to shut up the Negative Nancy we often let run as a part of our auto-pilot.

I’ve found the best way to do this is to sit down with a paper and pen, and jot down – without judgement – everything in life that you are grateful for. It could be something as heartwarming as your loving pet, or as seemingly silly as your easily accessible parking spot at work. The bottom line is we all have things to be grateful for in life, and can gain a lot from taking some time to focus on them rather than on our seemingly insurmountable problems.

6. Drop The Label

So many of us admire people who can effectively meditate or quiet their minds, yet we also love labelling ourselves as incapable of being like them. I don’t mean to sound condescending, but just because you tried meditating once and ended up just thinking about dinner doesn’t mean you are incapable of experiencing a quiet mind.

Meditation, like everything else, is something that you need to work on and be committed to practicing. They say it takes about 21 days to develop a new habit, so why not push yourself to regularly practice something you’d like to experience rather than opt to take the quitter’s mentality? You have a lot more control than you may think!

A Few Things to Remember When Worry Takes Over

1. You are not your worry, thoughts, emotions or even your mind.
- "The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not the possessing entity - the thinker. The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated."

-"Learn to disidentify from your mind. Every time you create a gap in the stream of mind, the light of your consciousness grows stronger." -Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

2. Worry cannot exist in the present.
Worry is fueled by the ego which thrives in the past or future only.

3. Worry can be confined.
Here is an awesome technique to stop or control your worry:

"Want to confine your worry? Try scheduling ten to thirty minutes a day for worry. Use this time to visualize your anxious feelings, write them down, and come up with an action plan for dealing with the root causes of your worry. If the worry reappears outside this scheduled time, postpone it until the next worry period."  - 5 Things to Remember When Worry Takes Over (So You Can Let It Go)

How to manage the emotional Pain-body:
Pain-body = Accumulated pain acting as a negative energy field that occupies your body and mind. It is the dark shadow cast by the ego. The pain-body, like the ego, is afraid of being found out. 
 "It's survival depends on your unconscious fear of facing the pain that lives in you. But if you don't face it, if you don't bring the light of your consciousness into the pain, you will be forced to relive it again and again." - Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

Here is Tolle's formula for dealing with the Pain-body:
1- Focus attention on the feeling inside you.
2- Know that it is the Pain-body.
3- Accept that it is there.
4- Don't think about it - don't let the feeling turn into thinking.
5- Don't judge or analyze.
6- Don't make an identity for yourself oout of it.
7- Stay present, and continue to be the observer of what is happening inside you.
8- Become aware not only of the emotional pain but also of "the one who observes," the silent watcher. This is the Power of Now, the power of your own conscious presence. Then see what happens.

Ego & Thoughts

Here are a collection of valuable quotes from 2 Fractal Enlightenment Articles:

"If we believe every thought that we have that things are bad, or not going well, or life is terrible, then we will start giving our attention and awareness to thoughts of this nature and when a thought comes in that tries to say otherwise, we probably will discard it and not believe it.

Since all thought is energy, and energy will go where the attention is placed, we can assume that all of our energy will be focused on the higher vibration thought patterns (based more in love rather than fear). Also, since like attracts like with energy we see that the more attention we give to these types of thought will attract more of the same type.

It has been said that we don’t attract to us what we think, but we attract to us what we BELIEVE. If we can pick and choose what we believe by bringing awareness to our thought patterns and retraining our minds, then why WOULDN’T we choose to believe that all is well, and that the universe is always supporting us? Wouldn’t these types of beliefs allow for a more enjoyable life experience?"

"The mere desire of wanting to get rid of something stems from the belief that the thing you are trying to get rid of actually exists. So on one hand we have the fact that a certain amount of ego is necessary in order to participate in life. On the other hand we have the issue that the ego causes us suffering. It causes us to buy into beliefs about ourselves or about others that aren’t true and limit our experience of the world.

People spend years believing in all the stories it is creating about reality only to later find out it was all a lie. We could have literally decided to believe or not believe or create even any story we wanted to about our lives. But the ego does not want us to know that.

It masquerades as “us”, causing us to think that we are the ones generating the ideas and beliefs in our minds but in actuality we are the awareness that is behind the thoughts and ideas. This is the most important thing we must realize when becoming master of the ego. Once we come to terms with the fact that it is not us, we can start identifying where our ego is causing suffering in our lives from a place of presence rather than identification. From this level of presence we can observe the ego without judging it and without fighting with it. 

Do not fight with your ego. Do not try to get rid of it or kill it. Surrender to it, make friends with it, observe its nuances and when you begin to recognize a thought pattern that is starting to cause more suffering than you would like, simply, observe it without believing in it. The ego is feeding off of belief, and wherever the belief is placed is exactly the energy that will be amplified."

Eckhart illustrates an eloquent Butterfly analogy regarding the ego: