CwG Weekly Bulletin #189 - Neale Talks about Meditation.

Neale Talks about Meditation:

Conversations with God invites us to strive always for awareness. It even gives us several formulas by which we can arrive at this place of consciousness. One of the most effective of these methods is meditation. There are many ways to meditate, and it was a wonderful discovery when I learned this.

One of the most powerful forms of meditation for me is what I have called Stopping Meditation. The reason this is so powerful for me is that it can be done anywhere, and it takes very little time. Therefore, it is perfect for busy people “on the go.”

Stopping Meditation means just that. It means we stop whatever we are doing for just a moment and pay attention to something about it. We dissect it in that moment, and then look closely at one of its individual pieces. Here’s how Stopping Meditation works.

Decide that six times today (and every day) you will stop whatever you are doing for 10 seconds and look closely and intently at one of its component pieces. Let’s say you’re washing the dishes. Stop what you’re doing for 10 seconds—just stop in the middle of it—and peer deep inside one aspect of what you are doing.

Look, perhaps, at the water. See it splashing on the dishes. See if you can count the drops of water on the dish in your hand. Just count the water drops. I know it is an impossible task, but undertake to do it anyway, just for 10 seconds.

"Maybe you catch a reflection of yourself in a store window. Maybe you see a bus going by. Perhaps you spy a dog on the street, or a pebble at your feet."

Consider the wonder of the water. Look deeply into it. Peer inside. GO inside, in your Consciousness. See what you experience there, see what you find. Just stop for a tiny moment and appreciate that moment in a singular way.

Okay, now the 10 seconds are up. Now pull yourself out of that highly focused reality and back into the larger space of your experience. Don’t get “lost” in it. Blink your eyes rapidly, or snap your finger, and literally snap out of it. Then, notice what you experienced for that brief moment.

Now go on with what you were doing. Yet don’t be surprised if it takes on a whole new quality. What you have done is truly appreciate something. To “appreciate” something is to make it larger, to increase it, just as property is said to appreciate in value. When you use Stopping Meditation, you increase the value of your life. And of life itself. It has been my experience that this inevitably returns me to a place of peace.

In order to remind yourself to do this six times a day you may wish to have a little timer with you, or set your watch to beep. Later, as you get used to doing this, your stopping will come automatically to you.

You will do this without having to be reminded. Walking down the street, you will simply stop for a moment and select a portion of what you are seeing and see it again, in a deeper way. You will know what you already know about that, but you will know it in a deeper way. This is called “knowing again,” or re-cognizing. The purpose of all of your life is simply this: to know again, to recognize, what is true, and Who You Really Are.

There are a thousand ways to do this. Maybe you catch a reflection of yourself in a store window. Maybe you see a bus going by. Perhaps you spy a dog on the street, or a pebble at your feet. It does not matter what you focus on for those 10 seconds. Just stop for a tiny moment and appreciate that moment in a singular way.

I have regular times when I do this, and listening to music is one of them. Standing in the shower is another. Eating food is another. Pick up a pea from the plate, or a kernel of corn. Consider it. Appreciate it. Taste it utterly and completely. Your meal times will never be the same. Your showers will never be the same. YOU will never be the same.

This is Stopping Meditation. It takes one minute a day. Sixty seconds, in six individual installments. Six

"As is love. For peace and love are one and the same, and you become One and The Same when you enter into The Holy Experience."

moments within which you may produce The Holy Experience.

Today, stop what you are doing. Just STOP. Look deeply into the moment. If nothing else, just close your eyes and focus on the sound of your own breath. Experience the pure energy of life moving into and through your body. Just for that moment, listen to yourself breathe. Watch yourself take deeper breaths.

Just listening to yourself makes you want to go deeper into the experience—and so you begin to breath more deeply. It is a wonderful thing, an extraordinary thing. Just STOPPING makes you go deeper. Deeper into your experience, deeper into the mind of God.

Now here is a meditation program that I have recommended to many people: (1) Walking Meditation in the morning; (2) Stopping Meditation during the day, six times; (3) Sitting Meditation at night.

The purpose of all of these meditations is to create focus. It is about focusing your attention on your experience. The reason for focus: it allows you to be here now. Focusing on Now pulls you out of yesterday and out of tomorrow. You do not exist in those illusions. You have your only reality in This Moment, right here, right now.

Peace is found in such awareness. As is love. For peace and love are one and the same, and you become One and The Same when you enter into The Holy Experience.

NDW

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For me, that looks like letting go of a lot of tired ways of being. I am tired of being less than who I truly am, and I am ready now to move to the next level in the day-to-day experience of myself. I am also tired of the world around me being what it is, but I cannot expect IT to change if I am not willing for ME to change.

"I hope and pray that people everywhere might come to a new understanding of themselves and of who they really are..."

This week has been particularly challenging for me, in that I have been confronted with repeated opportunities to look at my life and peer deeply into it, exploring where I have been (not a pretty picture, in terms of how I have treated other people) and where I wish to go. I am begging myself to do better. I am urging myself to rise up to new levels of awareness and commitment and growth. I am daring myself to reach beyond what have been my lifelong limitations. I am better than I have been demonstrating. I am larger. I can be more.

This, as you may have noticed, has been a recurring theme in my life. I want now to end the frustration of my highest potential not achieved. I want this for our planet as well. And, you see, as I have said, what I want for the planet I must want for myself.

I hope and pray that people everywhere might come to a new understanding of themselves and of who they really are, a new awareness of life and what it is really all about, and a new experience of That Which Is Divine which will allow them to embrace their God with joy and not fear, celebration and not trembling.

I am so grateful to all of you for the many emails and letters you have sent, telling me how much the Conversations with God material has meant to you. I hope that we will all go out now and demonstrate and LIVE this wonderful freedom-giving message with all those whose lives we touch, for the world desperately needs a model for a new message of hope and unconditional love and freedom for the soul right now.

Have a wonderful week, my fellow travelers, and embrace the joy of life even as you share it with others.

Always,

Neale

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Hello Everyone,

Well an update on the “time off experiment” I shared with you last week. Right after I emailed my bulletin article to Joanna, last Wednesday I shut off the computer and turned off the cell phone and began my three days of serious downtime. I’d love to tell you that I did this with uncommon grace and ease, but such is not the case.

That Wednesday I went and crawled in my bed and caught up on my favorite TV shows on the TIVO. That was fine for about two hours, but then I took a nap and from the time I woke up until Friday morning I found myself struggling with a profound sense of depression and agitation. I just didn’t know what to do with myself.

What I came to understand is that I clearly use doingness as a huge avoidance mechanism and without it all kinds of stuff came up for me. I was restless, irritable and somewhat discontent. It had been so long since I had taken away all the distractions of computers, video games, and telephones etc. and I was just lost.

During the course of a regular week, because I work two jobs the only time off I have is from Friday evening until Saturday evening and during that time I usually will catch up on sleep or errands and chores, but these three days off were so much different than that regular familiar time.

Wow, I sit here and write this and I imagine there are a bunch of you out there saying to yourselves, “Oh my goodness, this Marion Black character is really screwed up!” but on the heels of that thought comes my understanding that I’m not unique – there must be some of you out there that are somewhat similar to me, and if it can happen to me it can happen to anyone.

Anyway, it was interesting – finally by Friday morning something had shifted for me and the depression lifted and I found myself in a really wonderful state of being, and it was from this really joyful place that I decided what I wanted to do next.

I have two children, my son Travis is 12 and my daughter Kelly is 8. Since these wonderful master teachers came into my life I committed myself to being what I would have considered a “cool Mom” when I was a kid. So in that spirit of being that “cool Mom” on Friday I did something my mother would never have considered doing. I went around 1 o’clock and picked up both of my children from school early to go play hooky with mom. Since it was Easter weekend and I was going to have to work Saturday and Sunday night we went to the store and bought Easter presents and then when I brought them home they got to open their Easter baskets. We laughed and played and just had a wonderful time together and later we cooked a big family dinner together and then watched movies until late into the night. It was just wonderful.

I guess the most important conclusion I came to through this entire exercise is that I need to make it a point to take a little more of this unfilled time off. I need to be able to easily take a few days off and not have to go through two days of work withdrawal to be ok. This feels like a very crucial and necessary next step. Maybe I’ll get to that in the next year or so - unless I don’t. (Just kidding!).

Next week I’ll share with you all that is going on at the Foundation and some of what it is the five of us do to get ready to put on a seven-day intensive retreat with Neale and the gang. It’s a blast and it gets pretty hectic, but how we pull it off is quite something.

Marion Black, CEO
ReCreation Foundation, Inc.
dba Conversations with God Foundation

PS: My email is marion@cwg.org or my cell number is (541) 301-0365.

I thoroughly enjoyed Home With God. It confirmed my own convictions about "death" and shed light on other areas I hadn't even pondered.

The day after my father died in 1999, I wrote a song for him called "Just A Heartbeat Away." It turned out to be a song for me, from him. I thought you and your Bulletin readers might enjoy this online presentation of the song at: http://www.googolpress.com/heartbeat/

Enjoy!
Scott

Thank you so much for "Home With God"!! Finally my experiences with death and dying have been validated. I have been a nurse for 30 years and have worked with the dying for many of those years. Being in the presence of this holy event over and over again with people, I have witnessed such remarkable things.

I have so many stories I could tell, but don't share because people would think I am making it up. My upbringing was in a home with atheist parents. Speaking about God or religion was punished. I graduated from nursing school and my first assignment was the Oncology floor. Patients were there either for treatment or to die. I had no experience with death and dying, nor any spiritual foundation at that time. It was such a gift to be there!

Slowly, I began to discover the miracle of death. It brought me to God and my present spiritual beliefs. I have no fear of death and I am excited about seeing all those beloved on the other side.

My question pertains to the steps immediately after death. The first, as I understand it, is to become aware of leaving the body and realizing that life has gone on. The second is to experience whatever it is that we believe about what happens after death.

In my readings about near death experiences, people have stated they experienced a life review right after death. All events of their life passed before them, like a movie, and they re-experienced them from the perspective of others. Therefore, if our behavior hurt another, we would feel the hurt of the other; and likewise, if we helped another, we would feel their gratitude. In your conversations, was a life review discussed? Is this something that happens? Or only to those that think it will?

nikki

Dear Nikki,

HOME WITH GOD describes essentially the very same experience that you have described here. Please read Chapter 30. There you will find the following...

Imagine now a large room where the portions of the mural that you looked at when you were coming down the Corridor of Time are mounted on the walls.
The entire mural is not there, only the parts of the mural, only the sections of the overall painting, upon which you focused as you moved through the Corridor.
These images now hang on the walls like an art exhibit, and you walk through this “art gallery” slowly, examining the pictures one by one.
As you explore these paintings deeply you experience everything that is happening in the painting. Not just what is happening with you,
but what is happening with everyone else in the painting.

These images represent each of the moments of your life, and now, examining them, you have for the first time
a complete picture of all that is going on in every moment.

This is often not what you thought was going on,
and it is always more than you imagined.

and from Chap 31...

...you see all that is in the "art gallery," all the experiences of your life, and you can look at them objectively, as if you were flipping through a picture book, or watching a movie or studying a great work of art
—which each experience is.
You study each moment until you feel that you understand it.
Then you move on to the next image, the next moment, the next “painting”.
In this way you move through and around the entire gallery;
you make sure that you have seen the complete collection.
Every moment is important to you,
because you realize as you examine the individual moments of your life
that those moments are what you used to create your experience of Self—and soon you are going to decide how you wish to recreate your Self anew.

Okay, hold it one minute. I’m confused about one thing. I know this is all a metaphor, and not really “how it is”—

—describing “how it is” without using metaphor
would make it virtually impossible for you to comprehend.

I understand. But even knowing this is a metaphor, I have to “pick it apart” a little. There is one thing I am not clear about. I thought I “regained” my identity when I emerged from The Essence, when my “meeting with God” was over. Otherwise, how would I know “who I am”?

Then how is it that I can go through this “life review”—take a look at all these pictures of moments from my life just lived—and not feel anything? I’ve done some pretty ugly things, I’m sorry to say. And a few nice things, too. How is it, if I have regained the identity that I shed in the early stages of death, that I don’t have any feelings of sadness or happiness or suffering over that?

When your “meeting with God” is over
you regain your awareness of the limited identity
that you held in your last lifetime, true,
but you do not move back into that identity.
Rather, you experience your Self as much larger than that,
much more unlimited.

In Chapter 31 I go on to use an analogy to describe how it is possible for the soul to undergo such a "life review" without feeling any pain or discomfort while we watch the "scenes" of our life, but knowing in fullness exactly the experience that others had as a result of our choice, words, and actions.

Hope this clarifies things for you, Nikki. Thanks for writing.

If you would like to send a comment or a question to Neale here at the Weekly Bulletin, you may do so by addressing an email to: weeklybulletinresponse@cwg.org. Please note that because of the volume of mail that we receive, it is possible your letter will not get printed here. However, we do our best to see that all letters get a response, if not directly from Neale, then from a CwG Foundation staff person, or LEP participant.

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“LIVING WITH PASSION - Finding the Erotic in all areas of your life", two-part series.
Facilitator: Sheila Pearl
Thursday evenings, June 1 & 8 at 7PM PST (10pm EST)
Thursday mornings, June 1 & 8 at 7AM PST (10am EST)

The CwG Weekly Bulletin is written by Neale Donald Walsch. It is produced by Joanna Gabriel and edited by Rose Wolfenbarger with technical contributions from Marion K. Black and Roger Mellon.