Anxiety and the fear of failure is a pervasive suffering around the world. It is also increasing—along with the pace of life, over-consuming, addiction, noise, polarization and fears for our planet. How do we calm ourselves in a way that brings inner freedom and serves the healing of our larger world? These two talks explore the power of awareness in evolving ourselves beyond the anxiety that grips and confines our lives.

“Be empty of worrying.
Think of who created thought!
Why do you stay in prison
when the door is so wide open?
Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking.
Live in silence.
Flow down and down in always
widening rings of being.”

Excerpt From: Coleman Barks. “The Essential Rumi – reissue.”

I kept hoping to get esoteric teachings from Maharaji, but when I asked, “How can I become enlightened?” he said things like, “Love everybody, serve everybody, and remember God,” or “Feed people.”

When I asked, “How can I know God?” Maharaji said, “The best form to worship God is in all forms. God is in everything.” These simple teachings, to love, serve, and remember, became the guideposts for my life.

Maharaji read people’s thoughts, but beyond that, he knew their hearts. That blew my mind. In my own case, he opened my heart because I saw that he knew everything there was to know about me, even my darkest and most shameful faults, and he still loved me unconditionally. From that moment, all I wanted was to share that love.

Just play with the silence for a moment.

Instead of using it as expectancy, waiting for something to happen, flip it just slightly and just be in it. Are you really here or are you just waiting for the next thing? It’s interesting to see where we are in relation to times; whether we’re always just between what just happened and what happened next, or whether we can just be here now.

So, let’s just find our way here to be together. If you’re feeling agitated, just notice the agitation. If you’re warm, be warm. If you’re cold, be cold. If you’re overly full, be overly full. Be it, whatever it is, but put it all in the context of a quiet space, because there’s a secret in that, and it’s worth playing with it.

That there’s a place that we can be inside of ourselves, inside of the universe, in which and from which we can appreciate the delight in life. Where we can still have equanimity, and quality of presence, and the quietness of peace.

It’s something I’ve been cultivating for 45 years now. Just imagine a mandala or a flower and think about the center of the flower and then all the petals that come out from the center and think of the center of the flower as absolutely still, and think of all of the petals as moving, and energy, and change, but the center is still.

When we are lost in the trance of doing, our lives are on automatic, and contracted by sense that something’s wrong or missing. This talk explores the challenges of learning to pause, and the blessings that arise when step out of our incessant mental and physical activity and reconnect with the being-qualities of presence, wisdom and love (a favorite from the archives).

“The deepest expression of love is this non-doing presence because that’s when we are inhabiting who we really are.”

“The Fire” by Judy Brown

“… A fire
grows
simply because the space is there,
with openings
in which the flame
that knows just how it wants to burn
can find its way.”

Imagine sitting inside a sound bath of vibrating crystal bowls, resounding with a never-ending harmony that causes every molecule in your body to buzz and sing with delight. This is meditation on steroids. The result is nothing less than magical.

At this year’s OraclePalooza® we had our special guest sound healer Mark David on stage beside me with some of his extraordinary crystal bowls ringing throughout the room. I’ve sampled many different sound healers and can admit to once having a library of over 100 specific CDs by artists who use crystal singing bowls as a means to stimulate a deeper more profound meditation experience. Mark David is my favorite.

I love to introduce amazing interesting people, and new ways to meditate and work with oracle cards to my audience and so this week I thought I’d talk about this form of crystal bowl meditation and a bit about Mark.

There was a great moment when I asked Trungpa Rinpoche for some meditation instruction.

He was sitting there with this saki bottle and he said, “What you should be doing now is this form of yoga called Ati yoga.” And he says, “You just will expand out, let’s do it.” So we sat there looking at each other and started to meditate.

Then after about 20 seconds he says, “Ram Dass?” I said, “Yes?” He said, “Are you trying?” I said, “Yes I’m trying!” He said, “No Ram Dass, don’t try, just do it.” I realized that in my zeal towards enlightenment, I’d turned it into another Jewish middle-class achievement task.

I'm sure that we can all agree that no intelligent, conscious man or woman would ever intentionally hurt him or herself. It is important that we are in agreement about this precept. No one would choose to ache. Yet the fact remains that all of us do hurt ourselves every day with bursts of anger or fits of depression or anxiety. Even at the simplest level there can be no doubt: fear and worry take an immeasurable toll on our health and well-being.

However, there is real intelligence. An inwardly awake person would never intentionally hurt himself. Self-observation is the key to developing this higher order of awareness; it is how we learn to become inwardly vigilant to our own thoughts and feelings, even as they pass through us. When we can observe ourselves in this new way our higher nature naturally prevails over any troubling thoughts or feelings that want to drag us down into their lower world.

Our habitual ways of avoiding unpleasant experience keep us from intimacy with our inner life and with each other. This talk helps us recognize these often unconscious patterns that keep us identified with a separate, threatened self, and offers guidance in saying “yes” to the life we encounter. As we release resistance, we discover the creativity, wisdom and love that express our unbound, true, nature.

Listen to the accompanying meditation: Saying “Yes” to Life.

Sometimes your viewpoint can cause unnecessary suffering. When you see the past as experiences that were done to you, then you become the victim. When you take the stance that that person did this to you, he said that to you, she thought that about you, you view life in a false way. No one is ever doing anything to you. No one has that power. Everyone is showing up exactly, yes exactly as they must show up FOR you; for your evolution and expansion and realization.

This is quite difficult for some to believe, especially if you experienced abuse and trauma at the hands of another. Everything in life is happening for your awakening. It is you that places a limited judgment upon it and by doing so you set limitations upon yourself. These limited judgments disempower you. No one can disempower you except yourself. It is a choice stemming from the viewpoint you attach to your past.

The punchline from a joke has gotten embedded in popular language: You can't get there from here. The original joke has a lost traveler stopping his car to ask a farmer how to get to a certain town. The farmer scratches his head and says, "You can't get there from here." the humor, of course, is rooted in the fact that you can get anywhere on the map from anywhere else.

One place where the punchline isn't funny refers to our minds. Everything the mind does is active. It takes the fluctuations of air molecules to create sound, which travels from the vibrating eardrum until the impulse is converted into electrical and chemical signals in the brain. All other information about the world "out there" depends on variations of the same model. Sight is possible through the interaction of photons with specialized cells in the retina. These in turn send electrical and chemical signals to the visual cortex. Without this activity, nothing in the universe is visible; photons by their nature are invisible.

Mahasati hand meditation is a practice that can be particularly useful during times of excessive stress or emotional upheaval, or when our minds just won’t shut the f__k up no matter how much yogic breathing or how many rounds of mantras we’ve done. And yeah, I speak from experience.

I learned this practice at my most rock bottom of rock bottoms. I was at a rehab facility, three days into a seven-day stay in detox from alcohol. My body was still squeamish, my brain still racing, my hope nonexistent, and my self-loathing at an all-time high. As I lay in bed aware of the physical battle going on between withdrawal and the benzodiazepines I’d been given to help relax me and keep me from having a seizure, my thoughts raced—I’d just lost my job, my car was about to be repossessed, I had a court date and jail time awaiting me, and last but (definitely) not least, I was going to miss my brother’s wedding, the one where I was supposed to be his best man. Yeah, I was in rough shape.

The American way of meditation is now firmly a part of our lifestyle, and millions of people who have taken up yoga and learned about mindfulness feel quite comfortable meditating. I’m saying “the American way,” because it took scientific research and the promise of improved health to convince the average person that meditation wasn’t mystical, in a society where mystical implies religion, or in this case Hinduism.

The acceptance of meditation has been a good thing, but I wonder if its true meaning has taken hold. The situation today feels much like it was thirty years ago, when being serious about meditation meant you were a committed Buddhist or otherwise found the time to devote hours a day to sitting in lotus position. Meditation still has a split personality, one side promising nice benefits like relaxation and lower stress levels, the other side requiring you to get serious about renouncing everyday life and its demands.

Successful people maintain a positive focus in life no matter what is going on around them. They stay focused on their past successes rather than their past failures, and on the next action steps that will get them closer to the fulfillment of their goals rather than on all the other distractions that life presents to them. They think about their successes in the morning and practice day and night meditation as well.

Successful people are constantly proactive in the pursuit of their chosen objectives.

An important part of any focusing regimen is to set aside time at the end of the day—just before going to sleep—to meditate on your successes, review your goals, focus on your desired ideal future successes, and make specific plans for what you want to accomplish the next day.

I’m so truly delighted that winter is finally over, and Spring is trying to emerge! To see the spring bulbs pushing their way up and the profusion of spring colors starting to change the landscape from the grey blanket of winter snow to the fresh vibrant colors of Spring.

Every year, I remind myself that when I witness the re-birth of nature, it’s important to stop and tell myself how important it is to reconnect with the divine source and spend some much-needed time with nature. Fortunately for me, I have a little dog who insists I do that every day … but there’s more to connecting with nature than just walking my dog.

It’s essential that you don’t forget that we’re all part of nature, yet regardless of whether you live in the country or the city, it’s easy to lose touch and for nature to become almost alien to your daily routine. Being indoors for all these winter months, it easy to forget nature, but next time it rains, stop and look at the rain drops! Experience the breeze of the warm winds on your face or go and walk bare foot in the new grass, so that you start to reconnect with nature again.

Darshan means “to see” or “to reveal.” What is seen and revealed? Your divinity, your oneness, your essential Self. In Darshan, Panache Desai shares a state of oneness – the highest vibrational frequency and the most powerful force for transformation.

When you get up every morning and look in the mirror, how do you feel? Do you like who you see, or do you cringe at your own image? The way you feel about yourself deep inside defines your outer experience each day throughout your life.

In this meditation, allow Panache to take you on an inner journey to self-love, that hidden aspect of yourself that you didn't even know you had. Feel the energy awaken within you, your own unique "rock star" specialness. Listen and remember who you really are. Then live it, full-out. "Self-love is contagious."

This short talk and guided meditation offers an overview of what many people find is a natural unfolding within a meditation sitting. It includes the process of arriving in an embodied presence, learning how to come back from thoughts, and then opening the attention mindfully to the changing flow of experience. The meditation provides generous space between prompts for practice.

This is a recording from the morning instructions and sit at the 2017 IMCW New Year retreat.

In Unified Physics we are a part of a grand and Infinite Continuum from the very tiny to the extremely large with everything connected, indeed a Connected Universe proven now in the equations of Nassim Haramein. As human beings, we fall right in the middle of this Continuum as the center point of connection able to imprint and influence the entirety, yes entirety of the Universe. This above perhaps all other "superpowers" within us is the most mystical ,magical and auspicious with much responsibility.

How will we see, use and ultimately harness this beautiful grace and influence?

In this sonic infusion Kennedy gently traverses the footprints we and all of Creation make in the Space Memory Network.