Below are some of my note I made about the points that jumped out at me and my 2 cents about them:
1:25 the biggest suffering is people not liking themselves…it made the Dali Llama weep when he heard that Americans don’t like themselves
I was particularly struck by this as I remembered how much I used to feel real hatred for myself. I constantly criticized myself and what a coincidence; I had lots of headaches and health problems. I never felt good physically.
2:15 self importance – the tendency we have to make ourselves the center of our experience-we imagine we control our lives… then with our self as the center, we don’t feel important at all
I have formed a relationship with my Higher Self and what I think of as my spiritual team that I imagine is there just waiting to help me. That is always comforting in those times when things seem to be out of my control. I always know that I can quiet myself, communicate what I’m feeling and turn things over to get help from “someone” who sees a much bigger picture. Doing that allows for the highest good to manifest.
4: 20 happiness, that state of being in which you do not want to be in another state – you’re not restless, distracted, you don’t have a desire to be doing something else- you are completely engaged and involved in your direct experience…
I love this because I have been thinking a lot about happiness lately since my webinars have been about health, happiness and prosperity. I know that people want to feel happy with their life and get up each day with happiness about the day that is ahead of them. I’ve been thinking about what happiness would mean to me and that statement nailed it. I don’t want to have any desire to be doing something else at the time. Being present and happy in the now seems like a pretty good use of time to me.
5:45 Instead of feeling like we are fashioning our own world, instead our ideas come to us and… it’s kind of like a flow
I discipline myself to sit down for at least 5 minutes/day and focus on my breath, and then sit quietly for even a few minutes and feel inner peace. I am always amazed by the thoughts and ideas that seem to flow to me instead of having to work so hard to figure things out on my own. The real answer, I have learned, is to just stop trying so hard and get quiet and let the flow come to my conscious mind.
9:20 ” …we are participating in a fabric of being that we do not understand…”
This strikes me because so many new discoveries these days make it obvious that we know very little about the way things work. But we do know that we are active participators that impact the energy that becomes physical matter.
Polly Young-Eisendrath continues, “If you are not fascinated by that all of the time, it is because you are collapsing back into this tiny little center and you are worrying yourself to death with your self-consciousness.”
My thoughts again: We are all a part of something that is so big and vast and powerful yet our human tendency is to close ourselves off from the place that we derive our real power from. We focus on tiny little things out there in our tiny little world. Then we make them seem huge instead of going inside to the stillness where things make sense.
I only say that because during my “near death experience,” that is exactly what I saw. Everything I was so concerned about looked so small from over there. When you look at the big picture, you see how narrow your focus really is.
10:35 (my thoughts) great points about the self-conscious emotions that separate us from the real us.
Shame, guilt, envy, jealousy, pride, self-pity, embarrassment are not feelings that are empowering, obviously. You simply can’t feel these things and inner peace at the same time.