On the other hand, how many people have you met who seem to be living a charmed life; who make their own good luck as they go; and who always seem to turn difficulties to their advantage

Not so many, right? But wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could actually learn to live a ‘charmed life’?

The truth is, you can. It’s a lot easier than you think. Anyone can do it. It begins with one single, simple skill: the ability to FOCUS.

How you focus, and where you direct your focus, determines just about everything in your life. And the best kept secret has always been that it really is much easy to change everything (by changing your focus in very specific ways) than you think.

You may have been taught that it’s difficult or impossible to change, that meditation is hard, that it takes years. But when you learn to change both how you focus, and what you focus on, you change everything. New attitudes, like new growth in springtime, change how you think, live, feel, and respond to the events of your life. Positive change becomes so easy you’ll wonder why you were so stuck before. Things start to go round and round again, but this time in a whole new direction.

I am not talking about having superhuman concentration. This is not about accepting someone else’s belief system, or putting your life on hold, or joining or subscribing to anything other than your own ability to change. It’s about learning to live by choice; it’s about mastering negative emotional habits so that you are no longer fighting a battle inside.

Now Live on Purpose, at Manzanita Village, is an immersion in simple essential skills for mindfulness and focus; exquisite tools that transform everything about how you can now move from feeling stuck, to knowing you can live a life of genuine celebration, internal wellbeing, and freedom.

Whether or not you think you know something about meditation, join us for this silent retreat to learn tools for mindfulness and change. Begin to use meditation not just as a way of passively observing, but to actively heal self-limiting beliefs, and persistent negative emotions. In these three days we will guide you through skills that you can easily incorporate into your life.

How is it that the simplest things are often made to seem like they are complex? Are you ready to unravel the tangle of the limitations from your past that tell you what you can and cannot accomplish? Click Here

If you don’t have a destination or a goal how will you ever arrive there? And, if you are so focused on your goals that you forget where you are, how will you know where to begin? To pursue your dreams, and to live fully in the present, that is the key. Caitriona Reed

The words ‘choiceless awareness’ describe a natural state of mindfulness. Choiceless awareness means being fully present to your life. It does not mean making NO choices. Obvious? .. You’d think! ..

If you have ever imagined that ‘spiritual’ practice or mindfulness was a way to avoid embodying ALL the possibilities that life offers you, or if you’ve confused awareness with inactivity or resignation … then we have something that might be perfect for you .. BIG PICTURE MINDFULNESS .. Now Live on Purpose! This work provides you with tools for a fully integrated and engaged spiritual practice.

Choiceless awareness simply means that whatever happens is the best thing that could have happened. Whatever it is, you CAN deal with it. You can even respond by saying so: “This is the best thing that could have happened!” not because you understand why … YET!

The attitude you embody by saying those words allows you to make the best possible choices as you move forward and to embody the power inside that allows to live fully ‘at choice’ and to move to ever greater clarity through having clearly defined outcomes..

Check for upcoming retreats and workshops click here

I once imagined that if I found the right teacher, the right path, and that if I tried really, really hard to get ‘it’ ‘right’ .. and that if I could understand what apparently I did not yet fully understand .. then everything would be okay, and I would magically wake up to be someone else, not my ‘self’ – which I didn’t like very  much, and which I had been told was an illusion anyway. I would wake up to be an entirely different person!

And so I undertook a fool’s journey to enlightenment.

Then I learned that life is both easier and harder.. which is something, it turns out, I had known all along. I learned (remembered) that no singular set of beliefs or behaviors can provide an absolute solution to the puzzle and miracle of living. I learned that ultimately it’s up to each of us to discover the truth of our lives.

I also learned some really, really cool tools from the ever-evolving field of NLP .. well, NLP is not a field exactly, and they weren’t tools exactly  .. more a way of thinking outside the conventional Aristotelian mindset box .. which is more of a tyranny of NOT thinking than a mindset.

Also, I had been teaching with Michele for many years already, so I decided to stop teaching the fool’s way, to stop helping people get comfortable with their limitations, and instead to start to help them feel un-comfortable enough, so that, like me, they might step outside the Aristotelian box .. and discover that just about any pattern of thought, belief, perception, feeling can change, and more importantly, can BE changed!

More on “Aristotelian boxes” coming soon ..

• “I don’t like to set goals because it limits the possibilities of what may happen.”
• “I don’t like to set goals because I am usually disappointed.”
• “I don’t like to think about the future because it’s not real.”

Mindfulness is not about avoiding disappointment, complexity, and unresolved emotions. When used for such purposes it is not mindfulness at all, but a trance of dis-empowerment and disassociation. There is nothing spiritual about masking our fears with concepts and practices that dull us to the limitless possibilities of our lives.

We map time inside ourselves in our own unique way. Your experience of the present is as subjective and fluid as your experience of past and future.  Your mind makes meanings in its own way. Whether you consciously fulfill your goals and expectations or not, your unconscious agenda is invariably fulfilled. We navigate with the aid of the imaginary maps, returning to the same self-created destination, time after time. UNLESS we learn to redraw our map.

Redrawing the map means removing unconscious perceptions, old decisions, beliefs, and self-created limitations that you may have believed to be true for your entire life.

• Unless you remove the unconscious blocks that prevent you from creating a new reality,
• Unless you set clearly defined outcomes and KNOW that you CAN navigate towards them,
• Unless you are prepared to learn from (rather than be a victim of) disappointment and change,
• Unless you stop using mindfulness to avoid the past and the future,

you will NEVER get the results you would like!

It is not possible to resolve internal conflicts by imagining that only the present is real. Awareness is an indispensable ingredient to living creatively. Without it nothing is possible. But it only comes to fruition as you allow yourself to dream of what is truly possible, and to revise your imagined limitations of the past.

Let  go of any fear you may have for creating a bold vision for yourself. Resignation has nothing to do with humility, simplicity, or faith.

Were you  using mindfulness to mask your deep resignation, or to cover up  and avoid resolving your sense of personal limitation? What will happen when you allow yourself to use your ability for focus and clarity, and to link it to a vision for what is possible. What will happen when you commit to resolving those inner conflicts, set clear intentions, and KNOW that by doing so you create a new map, and more possibilities for having a powerful positive influence in the world that you ever dreamed was possible?

What can you begin to REALLY like about the future now?

“If you don’t have a destination or a goal how will you ever arrive there? And, if you are so focused on your goals that you forget where you are, how will you know where to begin? To pursue your dreams, and to live fully in the present, that is the key.”

Do you fear (as many people do) that true creativity is rare and special,  something only for a lucky few, a gift from the muse, or a fortunate accident?

The truth is that everyone is blessed with a greater ability for creative innovation and solution-based inspiration than they could ever use up in a lifetime.

It is a lot simpler than most people think to get in step with yourself, to become congruent, to have your head meet your heart and your body and to tap into that inexhaustible source inside at will, whenever you need to, or want to.

How often do you really allow yourself focused quiet time,  inner time, away from the daily habitual clutter?

And do you know that there are specific tools that shift habitual patterns of your self-limiting thoughts, beliefs, and emotions PERMANENTLY! Great spiritual teachers use them, some of the greatest world leaders have used them.

This is not just meditation by numers!

This is exactly why a meditation retreat can be powerfully life-changing. because It gives you enough time to really GET some of this.

We provide you with accomodation, food, and a structure that will help you accomplish more in 3 days of ‘not doing’  than you usually accomplish in three months of ‘working’ on yourself.

PS This has nothing to do with having you take on some extra new belief system or convert to some new ‘religious’ way of thinking … this is entirely about the timeless wisdom and awakening that evolves from within YOU

Just as we put up walls and a roof in which to take shelter and live, just as we put up fences to delineate ownership, make maps, make distinctions between categories we invent, and then forget that the source of our life is in the primordial crucible or mud, volcanic ash, oceans, and intergalactic dust, and completely without boundaries .. so too do we make self-limiting distinctions within our minds that lead us to completely miss all that we truly are, and can be.

You could write a book to unpack the idea of the wild. In fact there have been several. I am thinking in particular of Gary Snyder’s Practice of the Wild.

Join us for a retreat to learn ways to open to the simplicity of living from the innate and naturally wild capacity of mind.

A three day silent retreat with Caitriona Reed and Michele Benzamin-Miki at Manzanita Village.

http://www.manzanitavillage.org/meditation-retreats-california-information/2010/#Quick_Links_7

I listened to someone speak about a simple skill, a specific meditation, one that I have been teaching for many years. They spoke of its power, and how it has been used to transform lives, to save lives. They spoke of it as a rare and valuable commodity, a tool that is capable of bringing profound quality and precision to your life. They presented it as if it was something new, fresh, recently discovered – and indeed it was, in the way that they presented it, even though it is probably as old as human language itself.

What was it? More to the point, what do you know, what can you offer, that is as obvious to you as the air you breathe, embedded in your neurology, the Dharma of your life, yet which remains invisible to others? What is it that you embody and are not even aware of; which, when you become aware of it, when you show it and speak it will transform the lives of those around you?