Stakes of the Game

What is it that opens the heart and illumines the mind?

Everything.

After 54 years on the planet and if you believe in it who knows how many lifetimes, this is my conclusion.
We don't have to go looking for the road to enlightenment. We're on it- we can't miss it.
We can however, ignore it.

Ignoring it looks like getting by, going numb, playing small. It looks like a perpetual game of blame, shame and regret.

Just to be clear, I've never met anyone enlightened or otherwise who doesn't have many examples of what was less than skillfully lived. We get scars. We grieve, we're angry and afraid sometimes and we hurt.

Great people go through heartaches and they botch things all the time.
They just don't stop there.

Best of all, really awake people stay committed to joy.

Sounds so cliche I know. But joy isn't pollyanna and it's not distraction or denial.

It is plunging deeply into now....cultivating a taste for what Byron Katie calls "becoming a lover of what it is".

The discovery that we can love all of it, even our suffering means you now hold the only keys
to personal transformation that ever existed.

What we love we transform. You get the same house, family members, body type and life situation you had before-
Only now you get it.


There are consequences.


Getting it can lead to:
 a cessation of moaning and complaining
 a perhaps new tendency to be a pleasure to be with
things delighting you that you didn't previously see or appreciate
meditation
taking better care of yourself and by extension others
opportunities born of a grateful mind

and a whole host of other things too terrible to contemplate when we've been convinced that suffering
was a necessity or a sign of intelligence.

So there. I've just saved you the price of doing est , psychotherapy, spiritual paths and colonics.

You're welcome.