Lately my spiritual investigation is about living in the future.  I find myself thinking about the future a lot.  When I’m living in the future, I’m missing now.  When your house scares you and your job overwhelms you it’s easy to assume the future will be better and to think about that.  But, then that adds stress too because I have no idea what I’m going to do in the future and I feel like I should have a plan since it’s only a few months away.  I can’t stop it from happening – my mind jumping to the future, but I can notice it when it happens.  Just the practice of noticing is helping me to bring my attention back to now.  I don’t want to miss all that is going on now.  I’ve been able to relax more.  I’ve been able to enjoy what I do like about here more.  I want to spend more time with my friends here and more time exploring Thailand before I have to leave.  And of course, I want to spend more time everyday present instead of in the future.  I already spend a lot of my time in presence, but little bit by little bit, it’s more time spent in presence.

Hand in hand with the future is the need for a to-do list.  I’ve always used a to-do list to keep things in order.  If I didn’t, I’d forget so much or I’d drive myself nuts trying to not forget.  I learned a long time ago that if I kept a to-do list I could relax more.  When I set out on this adventure one of the things I so looked forward to was not having a to-do list.  If I didn’t have a social life, an engineering job, and the the busy life I had in the US, the to-do list would disappear.  I would teach and in the evenings I’d read or sit and watch life happen.  The to-do list followed me here and it’s as long as it ever was.  There’s a lot to do to get my furniture out of my house, sell my house, deal with the car drama, make hotel reservations for next weekend, research how to get a book published, research possible jobs for the future, lesson planning, engineering work, this blog, laundry, cleaning, cooking, call mom, and on and on.  The list may be even longer because I don’t have much free time.  On one hand the list helps me not worry as much about the future.  On the other hand, it is the future.  Tricky…..

Movement helps.  I’m trying to find the time for conscious movement every day.  I try to get massage at least once a week too.  My fingers are still feeling numb.  I’m wondering if it is my diet or if I have some nerve damage from something.  No clear answer on that yet.  Massage is still so painful, but I think it’s getting slightly better.  Reading Almass helps the most though.  He still has a way of writing a long time ago exactly what I needed to write today.  He might as well be sitting across from me when I read his books.  I can’t read a whole chapter in one sitting because half way through a chapter I am no longer able to understand words.  My thinking brain no longer works and I am just here.  Nothing else.

Here are a couple Almass quotes that I liked this week.  In what I’m reading now he’s talking about how we take the physical world we see to be reality.  It’s not.  It’s all concepts in our mind and we’ve taken it to be reality.  Reality is more than just the physical world.  And as long as we believe that we are our bodies and our thoughts and the only thing that exists is the world we see, then we are missing reality.

“Reality is so mysterious, so amazing, so magical, that seeing it is bound to change us and change our lives.  Knowing what is real, we can’t continue to live in the same way”.

“Our belief in the fundamentalness of physical reality remain solidly entrenched in our souls.  In any authentic spiritual work, this conviction must eventually be confronted, shaken, and dismantled.  It must be shattered before we can perceive totally, completely, what is actually there”.

I feel like I’m in the middle of this shattering.  My body is holding on to being all there is to reality so tightly that all my muscles are so tight.  If I give up on the physical world being reality, I fear that it won’t exist at all.  Part of me knows this isn’t true, but the part that has that fear is what is in the process of shattering.

(c) All rights reserved Kimberly Fiore