Blogs

I have included a list of some of the most helpful and influential spiritual teachers I’ve encountered below.  They aren’t really in any particular order, and it is by all means not inclusive.  There are many more teachers that I have encountered only briefly, but whose words have been helpful.

Byron Katie - What can you say about Katie?  All I can say is read one of her books and see for yourself.  Some may call her a self help guru, but she is just a beacon in the night inviting people to question their beliefs.  “A Thousand Names for Joy” is hands down one of my favorite books, but her other books are great too.

    http://www.thework.com

    http://www.byronkatie.com

Eckhart Tolle - Eckhart is probably one of the most well known spiritual teachers in the Western world.  His teachings have touched tens of thousands of people, and that circle of influence continues to spread.  I think the reason for his popularity is that his pointers are simple and resonate with people on a very basic level.  Just a glimpse of what life in the present moment is like is enough for people to want more presence in their life.

    http://www.eckharttolle.com

Adyashanti - I’ve enjoyed several of Adya’s books (i.e. “Emptiness Dancing,” “The Impact of Awakening,” etc.), but his website has a great deal of free audio and essays as well.  I highly recommend checking him out.

    http://www.adyashanti.org

Gangaji - For me, Gangaji rounds out the top four of the most well renowned Western spiritual teachers.  I enjoyed her books, “A Diamond in Your Pocket” and “You Are That,” as well as many of the writings and videos I found on her website and You Tube.

    http://www.gangaji.org

John Sherman - John was one of Gangaji’s students when he was serving time in prison (her prison outreach program has helped a number of people).  All of his teachings are free through his website in the form of eBooks and webcasts.  His message is as simple as the nose on your face – just look a yourself (figuratively).  He has several websites that I recommend you check out.  I also invite you to join the Just One Look email list to become a part of the inward looking movement.

    http://www.justonelook.org

    http://www.riverganga.org

    http://www.thefearoflife.org

    http://www.lookatyourself.org

    http://www.johnsherman.org

    http://www.silentheart.net

Katie Davis - One of my other favorite books is, “Awake Joy: The Essence of Enlightenment,” by Katie Davis.  Her teaching approach is from the heart and points us back to who we are in our essence.  She makes herself very available to people interested in awakening.  I highly recommend you check out her website and blog, as well as the free videos she has to offer.  Her husband, Sundance Burke, is also a spiritual teacher you might enjoy.

    http://www.katiedavis.org

    http://www.awakebykatie.blogspot.com

Gina Lake - Gina has written numerous wonderful books, and has a great deal of audio, video, and excerpts on her website.  Her teaching is like a combination of Eckhart Tolle and Byron Katie, which is probably why I resonate with it.  She is also very approachable for people with questions.

    http://www.radicalhappiness.com

Nirmala - Gina Lake’s husband, Nirmala, is also a spiritual teacher.  His teachings point us back to the direct experience of Being in a direct, no nonsense way.  I recommend you check out his website as well.

    http://www.endless-satsang.com

Jeannie Zandi - I had my first real heart opening experience during my first satsang with Jeannie.  Her message is one of Love, Beauty and Surrender.  Truly a lovely human being.

    http://www.jeanniezandi.com

Norio Xoximei Kushi - Norio is a truck driver by trade, who experienced an awakening while driving cross country.  He points out beautifully how language is the root of our confusion, and how tangled up in words we’ve become.

    http://www.demystifyenlightenment.org

Scott Kiloby - Scott has a simple approach as well.  He writes about overcoming suffering and addiction, as well as stepping out of the story we have mistaken ourselves to be.

    http://www.kiloby.com

Karen Richards - Karen is a wonderful young woman with a very large heart.  Her invitation to investigate the nature of reality resonates with a vast number of people, and I recommend you check her out on her website and on Facebook.

    http://karen-richards.com

Karen McPhee - I highly recommend you check out the free guided meditations on Karen’s website.  She was one of Eckhart’s students turned teacher, and has a very nice way of pointing people toward the present moment.

    http://www.livingnow.ca

Pamela Wilson - In listening to some audio of Pamela, I realized that loving the ego was actually more important than trying to get rid of it.  She teaches us to embrace all of our so-called negative sides, and get curious about it all.

    http://www.pamelasatsang.com

Catherine Ingram - The thing I remember most about reading Catherine’s book “Passionate Presence” is the quote, “Just this.”  It gave me a new felt understanding of what presences is all about.

    http://www.dharmadialogues.org

Bentinho Massaro - Bentinho is a very young man with a great deal of joy that he exudes in the rapidly growing number of videos he’s putting out there.  Check out his website as well as You Tube.

    http://www.free-awareness.com

Benjamin Smythe - His message is simple, “You’re Perfect.”  He has a great sense of humor about everything and is very reassuring about the fact that you can’t do this life thing wrong.  Check out his quotes and videos.

    http://www.benjamintsmythe.com

Rupert Spira - Rupert uses the direct approach of experiencing what’s here, now.  He has a lot of questions answered on his website, as well as video inteviews.

    http://non-duality.rupertspira.com/page.aspx

Though there are a whole host of teachers out of India, my studies have been with mostly Western teachers and I am only familiar with a few from the East.  I can safely say that the words of the following teachers have been of great use to me.  They are also some of the most well-known sages of the 20th century.  They have all passed away now, but all of them have left behind a legacy that will continue to influence many generations to come.  I’ve included some web sites to use as starting points, which have links to countless other sites out there for each.  I’m sure you will find some powerful quotes that will  resonate with you.

Sri Ramana Maharshi - The Father of Self Inquiry himself.  All paths lead here.  “Who am I?”

    http://www.nonduality.com/ramana.htm

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj - The original stand as Awareness man.  “I Am That.”

    http://www.nonduality.com/nisarga.htm

HWL Poonja (Papaji) - Known for saying, “Call off the search.  Stop.  Be still.”

    http://www.avadhuta.com

David Hawkins - I owe David a big thank you for the guidance I needed when I first started looking for answers to life’s big questions.  His book, “Power vs. Force” was the first book I read on enlightenment, and it really cracked open my mind.  I was hooked, and read all seven of his books (he has written more since then).  I also joined a Hawkins discussion group, met lots of great people, and eventually found all of these other great teachers.  I drifted away from his teachings after discovering Tolle, and never really looked back.  One of the faults I found in David’s teaching was that he made it seem as if obtaining enlightenment was damn near impossible (and very painful).  It also seemed to me like David’s writing was becoming more unnecessarily political, which is when I knew I had gotten all I could get out of his teachings.

    http://www.veritaspub.com

There are several other websites that serve as reliable resources for people wanting to find out more about different teachers.  Though this isn’t an all inclusive list, I am familiar enough with these sites to recommend them.  Just like any other search, one page leads to another, and another, and you always find just what you need at just the right time.

Satsang Teachers - I have to recommend this website because it led me to discover several lesser known teachers that I probably never would have found otherwise.  There are a rapidly growing number of teachers out there, and this site is designed to be a calendar listing for all of the ones that are currently active.  I can’t vouch for all of the ones listed, but I know at least a dozen of them from personal experience and am reassured that they are doing some sort of screening before listing them.

    http://www.satsangteachers.com

Here are a few other sites of interest.  If you have more teachers to recommend or resources you would like to share with others, feel free to write a reply comment to this blog post.

    http://www.nonduality.com

    http://www.stillnessspeaks.com

    http://www.nevernothere.com

© 2011 Howard McQueen

REPEATING PATTERNS

© 2011 Howard McQueen

My behavior is disrespectful to myself when I:

- contribute to and sustain a relationship where mutual respect

  is out-of-balance, and is not recognized consciously by all parties, as the

  most important thing to strive for.

- believe that I can nuture a loving relationship with anything less than

  honesty.

- attempt to control someone else's behavior believing they or their behavior will make    

  me whole.

- believe I can actually grow by sedating and manipulating myself

Repeating Patterns

Until we recognize them,

we will remain under-the-spell

of patterns that we perpetuate.

Perceive these patterns.

Invite into your awareness as expanding through your perception,

Put forth an willingness to not become micro-focused with any specific character (such as a key perpetrator, or yourself or another as a primary victim)

or any recurring symptom (such as an ever-declining amount of money, I’m being evicted again, I’ve crashed and burned again)

Open your awareness to gain a bit of distance from the epicenter of your anxiety.

Allow yourself to consider the possibility for a shift in your relationship with your circumstances.

Imagine how this would contribute to a lightening-up of your burden, a lightness returning to your being.

Believe it or not, you are the ONLY Experiencer, the ONLY Witness to your own personal and unique experiences with the external world.

It is YOU, what you perceive, the judgments you make, the choices you make, that make you the Gatekeeper to everything you experience with the outside world,

The ever-changing, constantly in flux,

sometimes beautiful, sometimes calm,

sometimes frightening,

never stable-for-long external world.

Everything you experience in this outside world

lands inside your inner world.

You are the Steward of this inner world.

It is in this inner world that you, and me, and everyone else is invited to

ultimately face up to - the challenge to forge our intentions and responses to the external world.

We’ve tried withdrawing

We’ve tried hiding.

We’ve tried becoming angry and mad.

We’ve enjoyed brief islands of peace, calm and the deep affection of others.

Our pattern we are each familiar with is that

We are disturbed that our experience is always interrupted,

  those we love fall into confusion

  and are distracted and fade away from us

  or yanked away

  some (and way too many these days)

  never returning

  :-(

This is the external world experience we all, in unique and common ways, share.

We all live among the great suffering in the external world.

We need not suffocate in this suffering or embrace the patterns leading to victimhood and our disempowerment.

This inner world is our deepest dreaming.

You and I, we are the Keepers of our Dream.

It is this inner dream that you have complete stewardship of.

Put your energy, your nourishing, your love on the steward of your inner dream,

and allow the external world to be however it is going to be.

Draft Version 1.1 | December 22, 2011

© 2011 Howard McQueen

I’ve struggled with three bouts of anxiety this past week, after having a relatively anxiety free three months.

When I speak of bouts-of-anxiety, I mean that I feel dramatically depressed. 

I withdraw.

I want to go hide.

I don’t want to be bothered.

I don’t feel like I have any confidence to face the world.

I am learning that the prelude to anxiety, feeling anxious, is a recognizable early warning sign.  When I recognize it, I become alert to how easy it is for me to loose my ability to remain anchored in the present moment and centered in my body.

Anxiety, for me, is a numbing-down of my body and my mind.  My rational mind is distracted out of the present moment and drawn into an old, well played out pattern.

This pattern has physical, emotional and mental components, making it a “believable” substitute for what is really going on.  Here is the enticement each component offers to seduce me away from what is real:

Physical: The gut of my stomach feels tense and my stomach churns and becomes painfully sore.

Emotional: I becomes confused and stop feeling my real emotions and just seem to become stuck in numbing uneasiness.  There is a sense of dread, a sort of paranoia that everything has become and will continue to become very unsafe.

Mental: I inwardly focus on the pain in my stomach (which is real) and the numbness damps down my senses and my perspectives on the outside world.  I begin to think (and believe) that I am incapable of responding to whatever challenges will be presented, especially if (and when) they become increasingly risky and threatening.

As a result of buying into this alternative reality of anxiousness, I will withdraw into myself and not want anyone to bother me.  I will begin acting brittle and if my wife asks any questions which disturb me, I will eventually snap at her like a petulant, rebellious and disrespectful fourteen year old.

My behavior makes others feel unsafe and not want to be around me.  I hold as important goals in my life’s work to become increasingly intimate with myself and others and to bring into the world an expanding and deepening sense of community and sharing and a sense of gusto and celebration.

With some hard love and compassion from my wife and my men’s group, I’ve learned more about what goes on inside me to allow this anxiety to bloom and create separation within me and with those I love.

Anxiousness (pre-anxiety) is an early warning sign.  More in this shortly.

Anxiety (the numbness) is a result of some inner tapes running within me, reminding me of prior experiences when I was overwhelmed.  When I translate the messages into words these are powerful blame and shame statements, which repeat, over and over

            You are Overwhelmed!

            You won’t be able to measure up!

            You can’t finish anything!

            You’re stupid!

            You’ll fuck it up!

My numbness stems from being confused and therefore unaware that these messages have been actively running (perhaps for a few minutes, or less) and are being seriously believed by my lower-level awareness.  My rational mind had yet to arrive on the scene and begin to dispel these beliefs.

My return to health (and my current secure reality) is to first confront these messages and recover my presence.  I as I do this, I can quickly challenge these lower-level beliefs and dispel them as untrue in my current external reality.   I do this by making conscious acknowledgements inwardly, sometimes outwardly to my wife and friends.

            I am not dumb or stupid

            I am capable

            I do finish things

            I’ve created a wonderful existence, where nothing in my life is threatening

I then am freed of the numbness and can feel my real emotions, which are shame, fear and a sense of being powerless (to the point of feeling paralyzed).  By reconnecting to my real emotions, it is like they come out of an anesthetic fog and back into the warmth of sunshine.  My emotions fill up with confidence and my anxiety dissolves.

By the way, while I am in the state of anxiety, I have used the words “my anxiety” in a way that feels like I am on a first name kind-of-friendship with Mr. Anxiety.  Hmmmm.

I am remembering the movie “A Beautiful Mind”, in which the main character’s mind invents then invests in several fictional characters that keep him company in college.  He then believes them to be completely real and follows them into a fictional world, leaving his wife and real world without any of his presence.  He becomes obsessed to the point of being hospitalized.  His path back toward’s health and relationship is to confront his mind-made characters with compassion and conviction and advise them that he will henceforth no longer be conversing with them and will be ignoring them.

Like the main character in the movie, I need only bring my awareness to my anxiousness (before it blooms into anxiety), so that when the tapes first begin to play, I can say “Hello old acquaintance, I won’t be buying into your fiction any longer.  I’ll be ignoring you now and every time you start playing your tapes.  You no longer hold any fascination or power over me.”

Acknowledging our past pain and trauma

Once upon a time

  and on several other times

  In my childhood and youth

  I was caught in the web of surprise

  and overwhelmed

  and felt so very vulnerable and scared.

Not knowing what to do,

  I stored my pain and fear into my stomach

  then escaped into my mind.

As I grew past puberty

  I learned new strategies to try to cover over my fear:

     I could be invisible and hide

     I could be proactively angry and try to intimidate

     I could just be any combination of passive-aggressive

      reactivity to externalize my anxiety.

Until I begin to realize that the wounds of my past, are like the experiences we’ve all had.  These wounds I’ve been incubating and harboring will keep returning,

Not to haunt me in a malicious way,

  but to give me the opportunity

  to call upon my awareness

  and shine the spotlight

  on the inner machinery manufacturing all the judgments and lies.

It is the healing, not haunting

  that keeps calling for my loving attention.

Ahhh. 

To be kind and compassionate under stress

  is to see our stress for what it is:

  - Sometimes an opportunity to grow-up

  - Sometimes an opportunity to man-up

  - And sometimes an opportunity to just stand up and

    dispel the inner lying machinery

    we’ve spent so many years powering up.

In preparing for the holidays, we’ve been putting up decorations, lights, a tree, etc.  We didn’t do much of this last year because of my wife’s health and the pregnancy related complications leading up to Christmas, so it was important for us to get some of this done early this year.  Shelby decided she wanted some outdoor ornaments (some lighted balls), which proved to be hard to find.  We went to half a dozen stores looking for just the right thing, but we never found what she wanted and ended up buying the materials at a craft store that would come close to replicating it.

During this shopping excursion, which seemed to last many hours stretched over two days, I found myself being negative and feeling a bit put out by having to drive around town and browse stores during a busy holiday weekend.  I was trying not to complain, but I felt like I had been taken over by this entity of unhappiness and couldn’t snap out of it (often referred to by Eckhart Tolle as the pain body).  I would periodically become aware of my unconsciousness, but it didn’t do any good.  In fact, noticing my unconscious behavior seemed to frustrate me even more.  I was negatively judging myself for being negative, and the vicious cycle of judgment had begun.

There I was, the guy who likes to write about how perfect things are, and how all suffering is self-induced, etc., and yet I seemed stuck in a stereotypical male role of following my wife around a store with my hands in my pockets, feigning interest in things she pointed out, hoping that it would be over soon.  The underlying dis-ease came from a desire to be somewhere else, and the desire not to spend too much money on this project (a good example of how desire is at the root of all evil ;-).  I could periodically see myself in that disgruntled role, implying that there was at least a glimmer of consciousness shining through, but not enough to break free of the spell.

When I checked in with my body, I noticed I was feeling fatigued and wondered if my physical state was contributing to my psychological state.  Which came first?  The physical dis-ease or the psychological manifestation of negativity?  While I was looking for something to blame for my bad mood, I remembered a quote from A Course in Miracles, “I could be seeing Peace instead of this.”  I knew from past experience that this was true, but I couldn’t see it in this particular circumstance.

I finally had a moment of clarity and remembered that acceptance of one’s own resistance is necessary when you find yourself in a situation that seems unacceptable.  I would usually associate this measure (of accepting one’s inability to accept something) with a much more serous life situation, such as great suffering, illness, etc., rather than a trip to a busy shopping center, but to each his or her own.  

Upon this re-realization, I reassured myself that it was completely okay for me to feel stressed, bitchy, etc.  In effect, I forgave myself for my own non-acceptance (and for being a bit of a jerk).  After that it felt like a weight had been lifted.  I was able to relax a bit simply by being okay with my own resistance, and, interestingly enough, when you’re okay with not being okay, everything feels okay :-)

This re-discovery of the power of acceptance didn’t occur until near the end of our shopping excursion, and a nice scenic drive home helped round out what was an enlightening day of doing things that I didn’t want to do, but had to be done.  I share this with you, knowing that it may damage your opinion of me, in hopes that it may help you get through the holiday season in One Peace.

(c) 2011 Howard McQueen

May you be blessed with the ability to breathe it all in: