Author Archives: AChacksfield

Letter to Newsletter Subscribers – May

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I’ve just returned from the delicious Portland retreat of The Center for Nondual Awareness, (the community of nondual teachers that I’ve led – with a lot of support – for last three years). There’s such an overflowing abundance of love and gratitude here, that is independent of any story or reason. Just a devoted willingness to serve love.

Abundant love to you,
Adam

Being Good and Right?

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Being Good and Right?

In response to something you said at satsang last night: What is there to be, if not “good and right”? – Julea D., Berkeley, CA

Are you “good” and/or “right” in this moment? Where do you look to find out if you are good or right? Do you try to assess all your past actions, thoughts, and feelings? Do you try to evaluate your current actions, thoughts, and feelings? What do you compare them to? What do you imagine you should or should not be doing, thinking, or feeling in order to be good or right?

“I’m reading an article when I should be feeding the hungry!” “I’m reading a nourishing spiritual article rather than drinking myself into a stupor!” Even when our judgments of ourselves are more subtle than these examples, they are still made up. What you are is never really good or bad, right or wrong. These labels are slapped on by the mind.

Most people judge themselves harshly as bad or wrong, or at least as not good enough. We typically hold some idealized image of what we ought to be and then berate ourselves for all the ways in which we fail to match the image. Other times we judge ourselves as good and right and find images of comparison to support these judgments. But even here, there’s always part of us that knows we’re making it up. We’ve got to keep our eyes fixed on this point of comparison and avert our eyes from anything that threatens to make us bad or wrong.

The whole game of labeling ourselves as good or bad, right or wrong, sets us at war with ourselves. When we need to be good and not bad, we must be constantly wary and struggling against anything in us that we associate with badness.

What if we feel things that the mind might label as bad like anger, sadness, anxiety, envy, neediness? How are we going to prevent or stop such feelings? Nobody gets to pick or even know their next feeling, so all our struggles are in vain.

But what if all our feelings are just innocently appearing? What if there’s no such thing as a good or bad feeling? What if the sensations the mind labels bad are just as valid as the sensations the mind labels good?

What if being here as we are is enough, regardless of what thoughts we have about being good or bad, wrong or right? What if everything that we are can be met with love, even the parts that we are most convinced are bad?

Letter to Newsletter Subscribers April 2014

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As you read this, I will have just arrived in the San Francisco Bay Area. I spent this last week in Macomb, my home for the last fourteen years, organizing my move and saying goodbye to many of my dearest companions. It has been heart breaking at times, and yet it remains clear that I’m called to make this move. This clarity is all the more surprising to me, given how few clues I have about what will happen next.
Much love,
Adam

Follow Your Heart?

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Follow Your Heart?

For many years of my life I found the phrase “follow your heart” completely incomprehensible because the heart didn’t seem to say anything. It doesn’t speak in words like thoughts do. But this is precisely the point of the invitation to “follow your heart.” We’re being asked to let something deeper than words guide us.

It’s really no different from “trust your gut” or “listen to your intuition.” We actually can’t say what this other source of guidance is because it’s the non-thing that includes all the things that the mind delineates. All these phrases are inviting us to feel into and be moved by the whole field rather than pretending, as we typically do, that our particular worldview is the whole field.

However, even when we have some appreciation of the nature of the invitation to “follow your heart,” we can often find ourselves wary of doing so. Thought, especially if narrow and familiar, can provide a reassuring sense that we know. When we believe our thoughts we erroneously believe we know the truth. Even though listening to the heart connects us with deeper wisdom, it often feels like not knowing, because we’re leaving behind the familiar ground of our repetitive thoughts.

The heart is mysterious and confounds the mind with its subtlety. The mind creates fixed images of the good life for us to move toward, but the heart is completely disinterested in the fixed and dead. Thought defines things as this or that, good or bad, black or white, but the heart receives all the nuanced undefinable flavors of life.

So even when we do feel into what’s here, it may not produce the clear “yes” or “no” that thought would like. Following the heart often means honoring not knowing rather than trying to grasp an answer. Not knowing is, in a way, the baseline state of the heart. We’re just innocently exploring and playing in the rich, ever-evolving field, having little sense of direction or of what will happen next. And yet, like a miracle, clues can appear to guide our next movement.