Introduction

In today’s follow-up blog to Part I, Love More, Care Less, we will explore connection without attachment, the second part of a wisdom pearl that serves our best interests. It is one of my favorite life-game navigation guides that, with practice, will harmonize with who we essentially are.

Here’s the quote from last week, with the addition of today’s focus in bold.

“You can’t love that which you care about, and you can’t connect to that which you are attached.” Lono Ho’ala 

Upon closer examination, it is plain to see the two belong together.

What does connection without attachment mean? 

While connection stands on mutual respect and understanding, attachment is fear and need-driven. It is essential to realize that there are rich benefits to connecting without attaching. For example, when we are attached, and bound to something or someone, we are more likely to feel stuck and stay in a situation that is not healthy for us. 

Why should we even care about this?

It cannot be emphasized enough that connecting without attachment can be a life-changing practice that galvanizes and accelerates awakening. We see and trust ourselves more clearly as we develop this skill, thus accepting ourselves for who we are, not for what we have, expect, or assume. 

What are some of the challenges we might face?

All of us run into problems when we are attached. I cannot count how often I’ve heard someone say, “I always take on too much.” We can all relate, and worse, keep doing so until the stress, suffering, and wasted time wakes us up, and we begin to find out how liberating a simple “no” can be.

It is worth the effort to stop and self-reflect on this pattern long enough to see that it’s deeply toxic to our well-being. It appears like a simple irritation, but this particular attachment triggers frustration, resentment, anger, false assumptions, expectations, and other debilitating influences. It’s a path of misery. The remedy is to find sweet ways to just say “no” when it’s not for you.

Let’s take a quick peek at relationships to take things further. When we are attached, especially in intimate relationships, the attempts at control cause conflict and unhappiness. Furthermore, we feel over-emotional and generally out of balance, giving away our power and judging ourselves while projecting the judgment onto those we love. When we care too much and are attached, we wonder where the love and connection went. We can return to these when we realize that to do so is in our own hands. Practice! Breathe! Practice! Breathe! Practice!

The benefits of  connection without attachment.

We can condition ourselves to relate via our minds and hearts in loving, open, non-judgmental, and non-reactive ways. This means being present in the moment and accepting all of life as it is rather than as we wish. When we are accessible and open, new vistas of experience begin to present themselves. 

A little mirror of connection without attachment.

A dear friend spearheaded a group of wise-women artists to do an art project. The task is to walk about the streets of the Historic District here in Cuenca, Ecuador, in pairs and threesomes. We each have our eyes peeled for spotting suitable three-dimensional designs upon which to place vellum sheets, where we “rub” the design with oil pastels and watch the magic appear on the vellum. Our collective vision is to have a gallery showing to benefit those less fortunate than ourselves – if we can create pieces suitable for framing and a gallery showing. So far. So good.

Some of the group layer their rubbings from iron works, plaques, street tiles, doors, window guards, etc., one on top of another, while others focus on developing a single theme or shape. Each chooses their vellum size for the rubbing, the color oil pastels, and how the paper is placed. No one interferes with a “Why don’t you . . .?” or “This one looks like it might work for you . . .” or “I think you should . . .”

Instead, we connect by holding the vellum firmly into place where the artist wants it. They are patient and quiet while the artist contemplates and creates her piece. Once done, we tuck the supplies into bags and move forward. Our connection remains throughout, but we switch our roles back and forth effortlessly. It’s so much fun for a good cause, and childlike energy abounds. Connection without attachment is pure joy. The project is a moving mediation for me and I am grateful.

So, how do we build connection without attachment?

One way to connect without attaching is to focus on our own needs and feelings. It can be difficult at first, but it is essential to remember that we are responsible for our own happiness.

We can also try to be more present at the moment and focus on our own experience. We can endeavor to be more understanding and compassionate towards ourselves, which in turn helps us to accept and connect with others.

Trusting life causes us to be more open with our feelings. We can share our sentiments with others, even if we are unsure how they will react. (unless in a violent situation. Always use common sense!)

Another practice is to be present with the other person. This means being fully in the moment and not letting our thoughts wander. Additionally, we can take steps to be curious about the other person, which means asking questions and listening to the answers.

“We are born with two ears and one mouth for a reason, to listen twice as much as we talk.” Epictetus (Greek Sage 55 AD)

Lastly, we can try to understand the other person’s point of view. This means putting ourselves in their shoes and seeing things from their perspective. It works to put aside our attachments to things being a certain way. 

Conclusion

Connection is loving and freeing. So is Love. Attachment is fear-driven. So is caring. When we love without caring and connect without attaching, we open ourselves to a world of profound inner freedom and joy. We are more present, compassionate, grateful, forgiving, flexible, and more accepting of how life is. We own the freedom that comes from living a life without those pesky “stickies.”

What is your perspective? We’d love to hear your contributions in the comments. Thank you.

With love and connectivity,
Kaye

How to Love More and Care Less – Part One

“You can’t love that which you care about.” Lono Ho’ala

Introduction

Loving and caring are words that are often used interchangeably, but they have very different meanings. Why should we learn how to love more and care less?

From dictionary.com, care is “a state of mind in which one is troubled, worried or anxious” about someone or something, suggesting unhealthy attachment or toxicity. At the same time, Love pretty much accepts things as they are without trouble, worry or anxiety.

It’s important to differentiate between the two because caring too much can detract from our Awakening. We can become so wrapped up in worrying about someone or something that we forget our needs and identity.

Caring is often driven by a sense of control and fear, while Love is based in our Real Self Identity. If you find yourself constantly caring, i.e., about things beyond your control, it may be time to become more loving instead.

When we love instead of care, we’re more flexible, relaxed and open to what’s happening in and around us. We’re better-equipped decision-makers. We have compassion and serve the best interests of others whenever and however we are able, but we’re not attached to “should do’s” or outcomes.

Learning how to love more and care less helps us live more peacefully, efficiently, and without stress or tension. As Tony Robbins said “What a concept!” A  Love-directed state of mind can and does influence our temporary world view, i.e., perspective of human life in loving ways. We can apply Who We Are into our lives and drop our worries, one by one, or all at once. The best way to serve others is through serving who we really are. We are One Love Consciousness.

Trust – Let Go of Everything Else

It’s easy to want to control the person or situation when we care. However, if examined closely, this isn’t always possible; if ever, some might debate. Accepting that we can’t control things and it serves us best to Trust shows us it works to love more and care less.  

Accept Things as They Are

Yes. Accepting things as they are is the healthy way to go. This doesn’t mean we don’t take action when necessary. It just means that we don’t allow our happiness to be contingent on things going perfectly.

Let Go of “Need” Driven Caring

When we love more and care less, we let go of the need-driven behavior and outcomes. We also release co-dependent conditioning and enabling life-taking habits that we pay far too much attention to in others. We wait to see what happens and trust that whatever happens will be for the best, even if it’s not what we may have thought we wanted.

What life Really is takes care of itself. We can, through awareness, drop the need to care and see how to elevate our perspective to one of love instead. If we are patient, the bliss from the expanding clarity of this practice brings a deeper cognition of Universal Laws at work in our lives. These are Laws or Principles which operate at all levels of existence. Flowing with these immutable laws requires we learn how to love more and care less.

Needing things to be a certain way creates suffering. When learning how to love more and care less, we let go of need-based mind models.. We trust that whatever happens will be for the best, even if it’s not what we wanted.

Conclusion

When we sense ourselves caring about things beyond our control, it may be time to start loving instead. Accepting things as they are, letting go of the need to control everything, and stopping the need for things to be a certain way are all key steps in moving from a place of caring to a place of Love. When you love instead of care, you trust that whatever happens will be for the best. You find you don’t care much what happens as you love the experience of the “is-ness” of things. We can Breathe, Relax, and Let Go. We can Love instead.

Love and Inner Peace,
Kaye

I hope to see you for next week’s

Are You Connected or Attached? Part Two.

A Death Blow to Egoic Arrogance:
Four Muses to Stimulate Inner Awakening

Introduction

A death blow to egoic arrogance is an idea whose time has arrived. And what’s great is it is an inside job. The following four muses – if we pay attention — can stimulate our inner Awakening, day in and day out, eventually bringing stillness within and our Inner Self to life.

Each of these muses contain vast wisdom and power and are beautiful mirrors of who we are. By bringing our attention and integrating these deeper into our lives, we open up the possibility for profound inner transformation.

Let’s take a look.

1. Love

There is nothing wrong with duality as long as it does not create conflict. Multiplicity and variety without strife is joy. In pure consciousness there is light. For warmth, contact is needed. Above the unity of being is the union of love. Love is the meaning and purpose of duality. Nisargadatta Maharaj

Unconditional Love is the foundation of all existence. It is the energy that creates and sustains us. From an evolutionary perspective, Love is what motivates us to survive and thrive.

When we feel loved, we also feel safe and secure. We are more likely to take risks and explore new terrain when held in Love’s warmth.

We can intend to see through the eyes of Love. Each time we align with Love, we deal a death blow to egoic arrogance.

2. Gratitude

Gratitude is the abiding recognition and appreciation of all the gifts and blessings in our lives (even the ones that carry pain). It is an acknowledgment that we are fortunate to be alive.

Gratitude allows us to see the world through a lens of abundance instead of scarcity. It shifts our focus from what we lack to what we have.

When it comes to Gratitude, we can know one thing for sure. If we are ever feeling out of sorts and “want to get back to the Garden,” this muse is the doorway to success. All we have to do is center and start practicing gratitude moment by moment.

Larry and I once took an entire year to work with author Angeles Arriel’s Living in Gratitude: A Journey That Will Change Your Life. We loved it.

Gratitude is also a form of self-love. When we are grateful for the good in our lives, we also acknowledge our intrinsic goodness. We recognize that we deserve to have blessings show up in our lives and learn from those things that appear otherwise.

3. Forgiveness

Forgiveness is releasing resentment and anger towards someone who has harmed us. It does not mean condoning bad behavior but letting go of the bitterness and hatred that can poison our hearts.

Often, when we hold onto resentment and anger, we are holding onto a version of ourselves stuck in the past. Forgiveness allows us to let go of this old version of ourselves and move forward into the present.

If you want to mine the depths of this muse, you can rely on Desmond Tutu, who, with his daughter, Mpho Tutu, wrote the Book of Forgiving. This one will grab your heart with its mind-boggling stories of betrayals and forgiveness.

Recently, a dear friend sent me a great article on the Hawaiian path of forgiveness.

Forgiveness is also a way of honoring our journey. We all make mistakes, and we all have moments of weakness. Forgiving ourselves for our mistakes is a significant step in awakening to pure Consciousness.

It allows us to see our common humanity and strikes a death blow to egoic arrogance every time we forgive and stop judging ourselves and others.

4. Humility

Humility is recognizing that we are not as separate or special as we may think. We are a small part of a vast and intricate web of life. Seeing ourselves this way can help us let go of the ego’s need to be in control.

Another word for Humility is flexibility, the willingness to see if we have an issue or problem and how we might be a part of it. This muse allows us to be more open to others and the world around us.

If there is a problem in our community, it’s our problem, too, and so on. To be flexible enough to self-reflect and see how small our human mindset is in the totality of life is a death blow to egoic arrogance. We truly have nothing to lose but pain, in the Humility, to surrender to things “as they are.”

Michael Sayer’s “The Surrender Experiment” is a great read and go-to for more on this muse.

Conclusion

When we bring our attention to Love, Gratitude, Forgiveness, and Humility, we can see how waking up is an inside job. It is something that we each have the power to do.

We’ve seen that we can use the four muses to stimulate awakening. By contemplating deeper levels of their attributes and how to apply them, we can create a solid yet relaxed foundation from which to flow. We can expect a more conscious and awakened life as a sweet result while giving a death blow to egoic arrogance.

Please share your insights, etc., in the comments as moved. And share this blog with those it may serve. Thank you. Have a blessed week!

Awakening to the pain we don’t know we’re in occurs as we peel away the inner blindness we accepted at birth. We did this to play the human game of life.  We begin our transition from a much lighter form of reality that includes a clear direction and understanding of the life game and role we’re about to play while in our mother’s womb. Slowly, we adjust to our upcoming human experience.

Then, just like that . . .

We pop out of our moms, completely forgetting we had a “before” and will have an “after” human life, and settle into the often-painful assumption that this three-dimensional world is pretty much it.

Throughout early childhood, we learn about human life from our environment and our primary caregivers until we seem to fully identify with our names, bodies, thoughts, feelings, perceptions, heritage, culture, beliefs, etc.

In Reality, who we are can’t be completely forgotten and is always present even if we aren’t aware of it. We are never asleep, only pretending for the fun of it. When the time is ripe, we’ll become aware.

Osho says . . .

“Man is not born into mastery. (We) are born a slave of unconscious forces. The first step toward mastery is to recognize (our slavery.) To see that you are unconscious is the beginning of consciousness.” 

The quote sounds brutal, and we don’t want to hear it at first, especially when so many of us already struggle so hard to “get it right,” while the rest seem to “know for sure we already know what’s right.”

An example of denial and how suppressed pain serve to wake us up.

I remember how I first caught a glimpse of denial in the role of co-dependent behavior patterns. Early on in life, I married someone with alcohol issues. Al-anon became an oasis in recovery from denial of my inner misunderstandings about who I am, rather than blaming another. It offered and I accepted a new perspective on humility, self-responsibility, and when “help” really helps and when it doesn’t. 

It was astonishing how unhappy I was and for how long I suffered without being the least bit aware of the reality of the cause of it. In retrospect, there is nothing but gratitude due to how much pain I lost from diving into that experience.

And Another . . .

I felt intimidated by my hand and arm surgeon, the best around, who would remove a small growing lipoma in my elbow. I was an astrologer for a dozen years then, and the day I was scheduled to have surgery to remove a lipoma was a no-go astrologically.

I didn’t speak up. Yes. I was afraid to mention astrology due to the pain stored from the prior acceptance of people teasing and ridiculing my perspectives. The consequence of giving this fear my attention was that the doctor severed my radial nerve during the surgery, which paralyzed my lower left arm, fingers, and hand for life. There was a LOT of self-reflection on that one. I learned not to give my power away to others, and to speak up when it’s important. Otherwise, the pain we may not know we’re in grows. We can not afford to listen to those “identities” that aren’t us. 

Pain has become my favorite loss. It always brings freedom when I can see things for what they are or are not and decide to be grateful either way for what become obvious reasons.

And one more . . .

Do you ever wonder why life is so full of roadblocks and issues? I remember watching a YouTube where Eckhart Tolle patiently listened to a counselor in the audience’s lament. No sooner than she helped a client work through a thorny problem, they would come up with another one! Sometimes even similarly manifesting the same thought and emotional patterns she thought they healed. Why, she wanted to know, didn’t they get better and move on? It seemed that no matter how hard she worked to help bring into balance with these clients, they still had problems.

With his hand on his heart, Eckhart laughed until finally, he caught his light breath and said something along the lines of “Well, isn’t that how life is? There’s always one thing after another. First, it’s this, and then it’s something else. And that’s the way life is here.” More laughter.

The Takeaway

Looking back over my life, I can see what Eckhart said is true for most, if not all, of us. Let’s face it. Evolving our consciousness and humanity is an intense experience in duality. And as long as we are still above ground, there will remain a continual adventure of unexpected treasures of light and dark that are not what they appear to be. Only the Love is Real. We must hold on to letting go of all else.

The content in which suffering appears may differ from person to person, but the context is the same. The game of life has us making decisions while having forgotten who we are. When these are out of balance, we experience the consequences, and if we’re lucky and blessed, a bigger picture emerges in our understanding.

Three Additional Tips

Some painful patterns like to stick around. An ongoing and earnest deep practice of the following three qualities is profoundly powerful in helping to gently awaken us from the pain we are in.

1. Gratitude for every experience, life-giving or life-taking.
2. Humility i.e., Flexibility of Perspective
3. Forgiveness or Compassion for our and others’ unconscious acts

Conclusion

To live in these current times where we have the opportunity to wake up en masse “while still embodied as humans” can be likened to the narrative many traditions worldwide use to suggest life was not always so hard or misinformed. There was a garden paradise they say. Further, these traditions agree that one day it will be time to collectively “get back to the Garden,” where life is once again loving, creative, healing, in balance, and where truth is lived collectively in a pure state of Love Consciousness in human form. Imagine that. It seems we have a long way to go because we have to come to terms with Awakening to the pain we don’t know we’re in – and feel the creative freedom that moves mountains inside and out!. Feel free to post your comments, but no pressure!

See you next week! Please share if you think these words might serve someone you know. Thank you.

Love and Awakening,
Kaye