Where's Your Space?

Eckhart Tolle offers a wonderful and very easy, convenient and private "tool" to help you recognize and possibly adjust your internal state. He simply says, throughout the day, ask yourself a very simple, basic question:

Where is your space?

By this, Tolle doesn't mean where is your physical space. He means where is your inner space. And with that question, you're compelled to identify whether you, in fact, have any space.

Many times throughout the day, particularly if your life is filled with drama and conflict (whether you are the "cause" of it or not), you'll identify, in answering this question, that you have no space. That the inner you, and the reacting you, are merged; there is no distance between them.

When you identify with an emotion -- which is what violence is -- you lose the space between your real being, and some mind-identified form.

So ask yourself throughout the day:

where is my space?

And if you can't find it, then take an internal step back until you find it.

Re-Live Your Life...

In his remarkable book, "Man's Search for Meaning," Viktor Frankl advises readers to do a little technique that seems very small, but can have enormously positive impacts on your life.

He suggests that, when you approach a situation that may otherwise "cause" you to act in a habitually counter-productive, unaware or simply harmful way, that you simply tell yourself that this is actually not the first time you're encountering this situation (whatever it is), but the second time -- and this is your chance to not make the same mistake you did the first time.

What this little technique does -- with surprising simplicity and effectiveness -- is bring space into your life -- between you and the situations that you face. By pausing to view a situation "as if you were doing it for the second time, but this time, will not make the same mistake again," you bring awareness into what you're doing. You separate yourself from the mood, compulsion or emotion that is driving you towards an unconscious act. And by that separation -- that space that emerges between the REAL you (the one that acts) and UNREAL you (the one that REacts), you can very often --if not always -- choose the action that is in harmony with your true self: the one that is authentic and essentially joyous and inspired.

Try it and let me know how it works for you!

How Seriously Do You Take Yourself?

One of the most...confusing things about spirituality is the belief that it, by definition, must be very very serious. We're talking seeeeeeeeeeeeeriously serious. Trauma ward-serious. Funeral serious. Monday morning oh God please don't make me have to get up and go to work serious.

But...who really says that it has to be serious? Think about it. Who is forcing you to take yourself (and the things that you do with your self) so utterly seriously? Chances are, nobody is forcing you to see life that way. It's probably coming from within.

Now, here's my idea of why people take things so seriously -- especially anything that has to do with spirituality. It's because there's this belief that unless you take something seriously, you aren't taking responsibility for it. It's as if one of the characteristics of responsibility is seriousness; and if you aren't being serious, you MUST be irresponsible, careless, and just plain sloppy in whatever it is that you're doing.

But...like so many things in life: this is a really baseless belief! You can be extremely effective and surprisingly productive when you aren't serious; or, when you "give yourself some inner space." In fact, I'd say that folks who take things so seriously -- and always look at life through serious eyes -- are really quite unproductive when you look at what they actually DO with their time. And what's more, they're not just unproductive, but they're also very unhappy -- and they make other people unhappy, too!

Yes, the task facing you may be one that requires concentration. Perhaps in the relative scheme of things, it's a high priority task. And perhaps the context of the situation or event dictates that you remain quiet or that you clearly direct others -- perhaps you're a surgeon in the emergency room, or a school teacher, or a parent teaching a child how to cross the road...there are millions of situations where "looking and acting" serious are appropriate. But inside there is actually no need to clog up your inner space with serious noise. In fact, what you truly want to do is create INNER SPACE so that you can clearly see what needs to be done -- and see what doesn't need to be done.

So yes, act as the situation requires; respond to it naturally and appropriately and, indeed, effectively.

But seriously? Come now.

Have you ever seen a serious flower?