isira.com

First of all I would like to acknowledge all of the people who read the blogs. It is wonderful to hear of your own experiences and the passion with which you are all seeking to understand truth in your self. Please feel free to continue sharing and asking questions by sending an email. Although I may not get to all of them – you might find your own question appearing in a blog.

Daniel from Germany asked:

What exactly is Awakening?

Firstly, Awakening has no exact definition. This is because Awakening is about a process of shifting from the unconscious states of the ego driven identity to a conscious and experiencing state of Self as the eternal awareness and Oneness of all life. It is also because it is a state in which we transcend definition and become pure being.
In the ego driven state a person experiences life dominantly through the constructed identity and perception of being separate from others, life and God (the ALL – source and creator being of life). The individual believes in themselves as an actual personality – a ‘somebody’ defined by their body and events of their life. In this state it is the logical left brain activity that is dominant. Life is experienced in dualistic terms: up down, right wrong, me you etc. Consequently, life is constantly defined and labeled. It is believed that life really is what the mind has defined. The individual lives under the illusion of the mind, totally unaware that they are directed by a great big load of stories! This plays out through subconscious and unconscious feedback loops  Hence a person’s life feels like a constant swing between good and bad moments of pleasure and pain. Life is very conditional on circumstances. A person’s happiness is dependent on the circumstances and events of their life. And the person lives in the fog of the mind’s illusion, disconnected from the centred state of the NOW.
Awakening occurs through an ongoing process that integrates over many stages. During this process a person begins to experience direct states of awareness in which there is a remembering – a reconnection with knowing the true Self as eternal awareness and being. Through various direct activities and experiences (such as meditation) the right brain becomes more active. A gradual state of entrainment between the right and left hemispheres results in deeper and higher conscious activity. The mind becomes very still. There is a deep centredness in the moment of the NOW and the individual enters a state free of the mind’s stories and projections. In this it is directly experienced and realized that this Self is vastly beyond the body-mind of the ‘individual’. This Self is infinite and at One with all things. This Self is both the One which is undifferentiated and the manifestation of every unique expression in the universe. It is like a veil is lifted and life is seen in its full glory. All questions fall away, and along with it, the belief in a constructed identity: a ‘somebody’. In this state a profound sense of liberation occurs – there is a realization of the perfection of all things in all moments as being the One Self. Happiness becomes a constant – a realization that the Self is always freedom, peace and love. The person is free of conditional attachments or aversions.

Awakening occurs in so many varying degrees. It is most common that people experience ‘Satoris’. These are moments that can last a second or a few minutes, hours, days or weeks (sometimes even months)– before the person subsides again into the thinking mind of duality. This ‘rise and fall’ in and out of awareness can repeat itself many times – even over lifetimes before there is a sustained integration in which there is no longer a shift from the state of ever present awareness.
When we reach a saturated state of integration we become the living, radiant, constant state of Oneness, awareness and LOVE. We simply enter the beingness of life itself – the play and process of consciousness in the ever-present NOW.

May your journey of awakening continue with innocent delight and wonder.

Love and Blessings,

Isira.

For more details about Isira Click here

Well with Christmas coming around again it’s that time of year when everyone starts wondering what gifts to buy – or what gifts they want.

Perhaps it is worth asking then – what is not a gift?

It is as if most people live their life with blinkers on. And, those blinkers seem to be very conditional.

The first condition of those blinkers is the belief that we are all separate, that the self is separate from God; from life.

The second condition is that (given everything is separate) life is seen as a struggle between good and bad; the desirable and the detested.

But if we take off those blinkers we come to see the truth. There IS ONE existence – of which we are all individuated aspects. And instead of a dualistic reaction we see that (as everything is a part of our ONE Self) everything we experience IS our creation. EVERY THING.

We also see how profoundly perfect and intelligent every single thing is: that the universe is an entire intelligent collaboration and that every single thing, every event, every moment is integral to this collaboration.

This means that everything is of purpose. AND that EVERYTHING is actually a GIFT. Every moment is placed before us, by us in order to fulfill our self through life as a process, expression and experience. In this way, everything we encounter is part of this field of context. And, it is up to us as to how we respond (or more commonly react!) to this.

If we continue meeting it with blinkers on we approach it with a prejudiced mind. We judge some things as good (a gift) and some things as bad (a punishment). We spend a lot of time rejecting a lot of things. This creates a life full of resentments. And, it makes it impossible for us to gain anything from whatever was placed before us.
When we push something away we are pushing away a part of our self. Consequently, we continue to feel as if we are somehow less than whole.

When the blinkers are removed we begin to embrace everything as it is. We begin to embrace EVERY aspect of our self. We yield with our self through each moment. As we do we are able to receive the true purpose of each moment. And, through this, we are able to know and discover our true self. Then we are able to express and give our true self to life – we fulfill our very purpose of existing!

So how do we begin to take off the blinkers?

Say THANK YOU. Yes. Thank you!

Start saying thank you to every moment, to everything. Try saying thank you to the person you see as your enemy, or as your grit in life. Of course, start saying this quietly inside your heart first and you will definitely transform your self and the energy through which you are able to meet this person. You will begin to see the gift they really are!
Try saying thank you for the circumstances and events of your life that you resent. As you say thank you, you may begin to see why YOU created the situation. You will come to see that it is a gift to your self – to experience, to discover, to grow and to express… LOVE.
Try saying thank you to every single moment. Not only will it connect you with everything, it will open your eyes to the perfection of everything… and keep you engaged in the moment. You will feel truly, deeply present, connected with life. You will feel whole. You will feel LOVE. And that is the gift of life, in everything.

That means you don’t need to wait for one day out of the year to feel like all of your Christmas’s have come at once!

Blessings,

And enjoy the ever present delivery of life’s gifts,

LOVE,
Isira.

For more details about Isira Click here

The ‘fullness’ we seek in life is not found in the business and fullness of our world. The resource for our true fullness is found in the gift of emptiness. This emptiness that the sages have spoken of for eons is really not something so mystical and unattainable. However it does require us to go to a different place to meet it. It requires us to go to the cave: the cave of consciousness. It requires us to withdraw from the ‘fullness’ of our life’s activities and retreat into stillness.

Although I am blessed to live in a deeply centred state I still understand the importance of sustaining this practice in my own life. I just had 2 months of Self retreat. Naturally many people feel that is something impossible to create in their busy world. Even so, life already models itself around many cycles of retreat. All we need to do is re-align with these for our life to take a change for the better. It is only due to the fact that we ignore these cycles (which are imperative in sustaining balance) that most people’s lives are so out of balance.

Starting with small retreats into the cave is simple. All we need to do is take the time each day to withdraw from all outer activity and self-reflect, for us to gain a deeper sense of self-awareness, insight, new understanding and inspiration. Even this one small retreat each day can renew us and bring back a sense of balance and fresh energy that we can bring to life.

And oddly enough, if we don’t create this right state of withdrawal we tend to create its negative symptom – the desire to avoid life. Without regular withdrawal from the business of our mind and world we lose contact with a deeper awareness. Without that, life is full of confusion, doubt, fear and frustrations. Life loses its glow. The strange paradox is that most people are so addicted to all the glam and drama of life’s activities that they don’t want to withdraw for fear of losing control or missing out on something. Actually it’s the opposite. The less we honour the time to withdraw; the more we lose control of our life. The more we honour the balance to withdraw the more awake, renewed and vital we become. We gain a state of mastery with our life. We connect more deeply with our unique purpose. We approach life with a deeper understanding and bring who we truly are to the world. Ultimately the practice of withdrawal is not really for the experience of being in the cave itself – but really for us to be renewed in a way that we can relate to the world through truth, love, harmony and our true power.

For more details about Isira Click here

Someone said to me this morning that the experience of love for them was a feeling like falling—that as their heart is moved, it is like falling from a towering building.

My response to this was not what one might expect. In our new age environment we might think this old story of falling in love only represents the ego’s encounter of love rather than the liberation of rising in love.

Yet as I really listened and felt into what this man was saying I became aware of the experiential dimension. In the experience of love we move to a place of no boundaries—where we leave our so called fixed footings and encounter a dimension of our self and reality that departs from any static or definable point. This could indeed be described as a sensation of falling.

For me it is a state of endless expansion within the wholeness of a unified state and being an interactive continuum all in the same instant.

However, for most of humanity, love is a sentiment, an act, an event, a relationship or a series of these. And it is a story that requires certain conditions. This is understandable considering that the way we encounter love is in the direct play of events. This dependence on conditions is a limitation, a misplaced perception—like seeing a well as the ocean, simply because we may draw water from it . And if we mistakenly think the well is the source of our water then of course we will get attached to that well! And if the well falls apart and caves in, we will cry and say we have lost our water.

In the same way, humanity mistakenly identifies the act, the body, the marriage as the source of love. It is why people think they are in love one day and they are not the next. Love is considered to be mostly an elusive thing that we can never capture or rely on. And that is because of our belief in a fundamental illusion—that love comes and goes, and that when we finally have it, it will only depart again.

 People are afraid to feel love because they are confusing it with the impermanent events of life. And ironically, without the impermanence of the play of life’s events, we would not experience the expressions of love—we would not delight in our lover’s touch, in our beloved’s song, in the adoration of life’s beauty. Without impermanence there is no rarity or surprise.

Love itself is not temporal, not impermanent. Love is the constant quality of the deep conscious Self. It is the vital power, the moving energy and the stillness behind the moving fabric of life. It is the essence and quality of the unified field—the all intelligent source from which and in which all of life moves. It is the deep peace, the calm, the state of the whole conscious Self. It is the embraced as it is the embracing of the Self in and as life.

And it is when we are open enough to see and feel from this state within us that we feel love. In this state we are not divided from our object of affection and we encounter the profound fullness of knowing that oneness in its endless nature whilst encountering it through the state of the witness: Self meeting Self. Self feeling Self. It is because of the play of the appearance of a duality (two ‘separate’ bodies) that the One Self—the unified field—can actually experience it Self, the love that it is.

When we awaken again to what love truly is—the deeper state and reality of our true conscious Self, the constant eternal essence of life; we also awaken to the freedom and beauty of the ephemeral dance of the world. We no longer see endings, but constant renewals. We see the endless rhythm, the coming and going of life’s form. Its affections and events reflect the mystery that transmits life’s profound beauty. We see that all of this is occurring in the constant endless field of life which is love. We know that all these fluctuations are never outside of love—they are all held in love. Love itself never ceases.

And it is because a rose blooms in the morning and fades at night that we can celebrate its beauty. It is because a child is born and a man dies that we feel the endless rhythm of life’s eternal symphony. Without the appearance of objects and events coming and going we do not experience the wonder, the newness, the discovery of life’s endless possibilities. And that is what we are in love with—not the fixed object. We are in love with life’s continuous transient play. If it remained the same we would die of boredom. In fact, if life did remain the same it would cease. And, if love were the actual event then love would die. Yet every poet has cried with the beauty of love’s endless power. Even my friend, who described feeling love as falling, was pointing to the same thing. In the state of falling there is no landing—there is no end!

And yet we can fear that the falling will never end. We fear something our mind cannot measure or hold onto. We no longer have a secure reference. And ironically we also fear that when we do land, it is going to really hurt! Yet when we actually let go, and surrender our fixed ideas and cease clutching to a secure reference or identity we encounter a state of wholeness in that endlessness. We encounter true love as the open state it is; a state in which we embrace our infinite being, that which cannot be measured. It is the state of letting in, where we allow our self to fully experience our Self as being. And in that being is the vast overflowing of indescribable bliss…

We usually spend so much time and energy protecting our fears because we think we are going to lose something, when actually we are being given endless opportunities to regain our true state of love: the wholeness, liberation and dance of life that we are.

So maybe you could ask yourself what could be the worst possible thing to happen to you if you were to fully let go and surrender to the falling – let into the opening? And what could be the best possible thing to happen to you if you were to fully let go and surrender to the falling ? let into the opening?
For it is only a false idea that can keep the story of fear alive. When we realign with the source —the state of our Self as love, we realise we never left it. We realise that it can never be taken away from and that it is so complete it needs no other thing to be added unto it. We then realise that the ephemeral world is the rhythm of love—life’s very own heart beat sending its waves through the eternal ocean of existence. Like the waves that come and go on the ocean, the expressions of love rise and fall yet the source in which they dance remains whole and neverending. Love is eternal.

written by Isira

More details about Isira click here

With the annual event of Wesak – the celebration for Buddha’s birthday, comes the opportunity for us all to reflect on the Buddha nature. Buddha, literally translated, means: awakened one. Buddha remains to this day one of the most historical figures who have been a living example of this potential that abides in us all. We have the opportunity to consider the relationship we have to such iconic figures who serve as a reminder to us all of our higher potential and how to balance that with our own dedication to embracing the awakening source within us.

We may let our celebration remain one of idolization or one of invoking realization. Surely it is the latter that Buddha would like to see us all embracing.

Finding the tender balance of our spiritual quest is a necessary part of taking our own path in a manner that is authentic, empowering and embracing of all of the elements that support the journey of awakening. Naturally, embracing the great teachers and their teachings is a relevant part of our process today. And, the more we can invite such qualities that are alive with us in the here and now, the closer we are going to be to this authentic journey of unveiling. Understanding how to utilize the past examples in a way that points us into awakeful presence in the here and now is vital to our own enlightening. In this way our attention transcends our usual focus on the person or object that represents an attained state of awakening and leads us into the qualities we can learn to cultivate to unveil our own Buddha Within.