I would love my thoughts, feelings, and conversations with others to come and go as if they are ripples on a surface of a serene lake. They start, reach out, hopefully, resonate with myself or others, and disappear without a trace. The vast lake of my spacious inner awareness would remain still and calm and blissful as always.
Could my thoughts, feelings, and emotions dissolve like a cloud passing through the big open sky without leaving any mark?
Can I unlock unbridled potential, ingenuity, and imagination to effortlessly float in the space of innovative creativity, dropping off the weight of worries, fear, and negativity? How do I release my inner core’s boundless love and nurture to dissolve negativity, depression, friction, or lasting disturbance?
How can I make my footprints lighter and softer?
The answer is to identify with and tap into the abundance of joy, peace, happiness, healing, nurturing love, and spaciousness at my core. There is enough of everything there for everybody; there is no need to harbor scarcity that causes worries, fears, or feelings of being threatened by something. There is no zero-sum game in that spacious awareness where my gain has to be from someone else’s loss or the other way around.
All I need is to tap into that abundance. It can help me replace heaviness in my steps with lightness, buoyancy, love, and warmth.
FROM THE PLACE OF ABUNDANCE
How do I stay in the place of abundance at my core to make my footprints lighter and softer?
One, Compassion and Love
Let the spacious awareness infuse my mind, body, and ego with love and compassion.
Imagine a blue, bright, open sky with a big smile spanning the horizon. Focus on my breathing, and be aware of sensations in my body; that brings me to the present moment. Visualize the larger-than-life smile infusing joy and warmth to different parts – brain, forehead, eyes, my cheeks, inside of my mouth, my neck, and finally my heart. It can help soften the grip of fight or flight response.
Think of fond memories, positive experiences. They can open up space and loosen the emotional grip or bind of my thoughts, feelings and fears.
Bring back to the surface loving relationships I have over the years. In my inner realm, in that collective space that I hold with them, send my positive thoughts, synergies, wishes, love, and compassion to them; visualize receiving love and warmth from them.
Two, Trust or Shraddha
Have trust or shraddha that things will work out just fine. There is a reason for everything that is happening.
I am part of collective consciousness, and there is potential for creativity and problem solving beyond my reckoning. It is taking care of so many things in my life, keeping me alive and vibrant.
Use meditations and mindfulness visualizations to slow down and connect with the stillness and vast, spacious awareness from inside. Tune in, listen to the voice from inside, follow through on it. The universal intelligence emerges from inside and enlightens me with new insights and answers.
Jon Kabat-Zinn: Somewhere deep within us resides a profoundly healthy and trustworthy core, and that our intuitions, as deep resonances of the actuality of the present moment, are worthy of our trust.
Eckhart Tolle: Faith is trust. Faith is a deep sense of connectedness with being.
Have the faith, belief, and trust that I have all that I would need, and some, there is no reason to fear or worry about anything.
Three, Surrender
Can I surrender to something greater and more expansive than the ego-centered self? It allows me to share the fullness of my being, my enthusiasm, vitality, spirit, trust, openness, and presence.
Can I cultivate a mindset to give unconditionally? It lightens my mood. I feel connected. When I give, I am unblocking the limitless abundance and happiness inside me; it emerges from inside, showering love not only on me but also on others around me and the entire universe.
Belief in pursuing something larger than life helps me dissolve and be one with all, blessing me with security and assurance, and strength from inside. It allows me to detach myself from emotions, desires, and cravings for external things.
How do I keep my footprints lighter and softer in the middle of my day and work, in the heat of the moments?
IN THE HEAT OF THE MOMENTS
How can I carry the inner peace and stay close to it while dealing with the stress of daily grind, or not so pleasant emotional experiences with others, or fear or discomfort, or grip of energy field from the memories, or worry about something in the future?
ONE: Use breathing techniques to remind me that I am separate from my mind, body, and ego. Even if momentary, detachment helps me connect with that peace, joy, and healing from inside.
TWO: When something hurts me, or worries me, or makes me angry, frustrated, or depressed, it did that to my mind and not to me (my real inner core the consciousness.) My ego makes me attached to it and is feeling threatened in some ways. It is not the external circumstance, but how my mind and ego are reacting to it. How can I deal with it?
- Be a witness to my thoughts, feelings, and body sensations at the moment. It helps me separate myself from the mind and ego, connecting me with that stillness and peace that is always there all along. Use three conscious breaths or other meditations to switch to the witness-mode.
- Accept and allow the current moment as it is rather than deny or change it somehow.
- Embrace and go towards the pain, challenge, anxiety, and suffering: Relax. Be open to the fragile vulnerability of loneliness, sorrow, uncertainty, and the shakiness of fear. Smile at it, touch and feel it, accept it, breathe through it, love it, let it be.
- My mind can make me cling to what I want or push away what I don’t want. Allow my fears and insecurities to play themselves out in the field of conscious awareness. Let go of the urge to coerce, resist, or struggle with the way things are.
- Ask questions to yourself, look for answers. “What can I do? How can I solve it? Can you help me? I don’t know what to do?” Have freshness of a beginner’s mindset to see and embrace new possibilities. Be humble, be curious.
- Be grateful for the positives at the moment. Many things are working in my body. My gratitude for so much help I have all around.
OTHER THOUGHTS AND NUGGETS
Always a good idea to lose myself in an activity, a task, or a hobby that I enjoy doing. It rejuvenates my spirits.
Use one of these three lenses to approach everything that I do:
- Accept the current situation.
- Enjoy, lose myself in the activity on hand.
- Having an enthusiasm that helps me channel my energies and innate abilities.
See more on it, in the post on “A New Earth”.
While thinking about it all, can I cultivate even more compassion, empathy, and forgiveness for, first thing first, all-around in my immediate vicinity, and then to ever-expanding circle reaching out to every living being? It can help me nurturing vibes and healing synergies that can keep me connected to my inner abundance and richness.
Slowing down can be so refreshing and helpful. It can help me clarify my thinking. When I can figure what carries meaning for me from the inside and follow through on it, it permeates everything I do with lightness and joy.
LAO-TZU, Tao-te-Ching
Do you have the patience to wait
till your mud settles and the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving
till the right action arises by itself?
There is power in the feeling of contentment. Chasing material things or external recognition can be a mirage that can exhaust me without a reprieve.
WALT WHITMAN, Leaves of Grass
I exist as I am, that is enough,
If no other in the world be aware I sit content,
And if each and all be aware I sit content.One world is aware, and by far the largest to me, and that is myself,
And whether I come to my own today or in ten thousand or ten million years,
I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness, I can wait.
Lighter and Softer Footprints are well within my reach – my deep sense of gratitude for that.
Ralph Waldo Emerson: Life is a journey and not a destination.
One Response
Nilesh Bhoot
Love to be with you; who is already has discovered inner beauty.