Since I was about 12 years old, I have been searching for my wife. While navigating the terrain of hormones and fumbling my way through social interactions, I regularly fantasized about the woman I would someday marry. The one with whom I would have the honor of being called her adoring husband. About 27 years later, I would have the privilege of meeting the most incredible woman. Her beauty captivated my senses, her grace engulfed my spirit, and her charm delighted every cell of my body. I told myself the moment we met, “I will do anything to be with her.” And so our courtship began. From long-distance dating to moving in together and then a marriage. It was every bit as magical as I had imagined it would be from a very early age.
Often in marriages, patterns and routines develop. As much as both of us tried not to play these roles, it was impossible to avoid. There was never a single argument or moment of discord—just two different energy fields attempting to harmonize in rhythm, only to bump and collide more often than align. We both loved each other so deeply, and yet the romance would come and go like a fleeting seasonal harvest. Our relationship ended, then we came back together, hoping we had healed whatever was causing our romance to erode and dissolve. After coming back together three times, the mystery of our dance was solved. We stayed the course, remained true to the process, and out of this journey birthed a soulful friendship that no desire for romance could deny. I thought it was the love I had been waiting for, and it turned out to be an even better dose of healing I didn’t know I needed.
Of course, there were incredible levels of pain, loss, and grief. These came and went like waves of helplessness that would horrifically crash upon my heart, breaking me open wider each and every time. It felt like the cells of my body were on fire. I felt lost and bewildered, having lost a part of my identity that I had waited a lifetime for.
There were stages of disbelief (“What did I do to upset the Universe in order to be punished like this?”), then bargaining (“What must I quickly learn in order to not attract this again?”), all leading up to full-blown implosion.
When transformation goes this deep, it’s not a moment where you casually acknowledge the importance of surrender. You’re being pulled into the deepest surrender that cannot be resisted, avoided, or outrun.
The end of my marriage was devastating and humbling. Ultimately, it was liberating. My heart has never felt so pure with the utmost pride and respect for the man I am now.
Our journey of emotional freedom brings us to the seventh Golden Rule: “Everything changes, but it can only change you for the better.”
Why does true, abiding happiness come from within? Because everything changes. If your happiness is defined by outside things, then your happiness is like an emotional stock portfolio governed by the movement of your personal markets. Self-worth goes up, and it crashes and plummets, based on the circumstantial movement of your personal reality.
While life conspires to always change from one form to another, the law of reality is that anything and everything can only change you for the better. It may not change your circumstances into better circumstances, but it’s always guaranteed to change you into a better version of yourself. This is evolution’s timeless guarantee. While circumstances don’t always immediately improve, you always get better.
When you really internalize this rule, you become a conscious participant in life. That’s when you start to really accept the deeper invitations into the heart of surrender. Surrender is not sitting on the couch waiting for life to do it for you. Surrender is facing what you encounter, opening up, receiving what is given, and knowing it will only make you better because that is life’s only option. You can’t go backward. You can only stay exactly where you’re at until you are ready to step forward into the destiny of your true glory and greatness. Best of all, you don’t have to wonder what series of events you might need in order to become this highest you. All you need is to be willing to stay the course by letting go and loving yourself throughout each twist and turn.
In order to become a willing participant, you have to know what it means to be an unwilling participant. An unwilling participant is one who is attempting to avoid the gravity of surrender, who is negotiating with life instead of opening to it. In the old spiritual paradigm, it would be seen as a form of contemplation. But in order for true insight to dawn, we must ask how our lives are only changing us for the better with no further negotiations in mind. Within this Golden Rule is the opportunity to discover meditation from a different perspective. Oftentimes, when we try to meditate, we likely find a quiet space, close our eyes, and begin negotiating for more preferable circumstances. Meditation is not negotiation. Meditation is what happens when negotiation dissolves. Negotiating with life is to assume that what’s happening is a mistake. Remember Golden Rule #6, “the Universe always has a plan”? If the Universe always has a plan, then any form of negotiating could only veer you off your highest path.
When you are embodying this Golden Rule, you are cultivating the soul’s attribute of stillness. The ego lives to negotiate, but the ego isn’t capable of being still. This is why if your ego is attempting to meditate, it’s likely an internal negotiation with the beauty of empty space.
In order to cultivate the quality of stillness, I want to give you the experience of being meditated instead of someone trying to achieve a state of meditation.
As stillness is cultivated, you want to allow the meditation to be done to you. All you need to do is sit and simply listen. You may hear sounds to confirm that you’re listening. Even if you don’t hear anything, the fact that you hear nothing means listening remains active. Whether you hear something or nothing, listening is always an uninterrupted state of being known as stillness.
To deepen your awareness of stillness, please repeat these words out loud:
I am stillness itself,
not the one trying to be still.
And anything that seems to disrupt stillness
is simply the experience
stillness is noticing.
Just like
no noise interrupts listening,
noise is simply what listening listens to.
And even when there’s nothing to hear
it’s only noticeable
’cause listening continues.
Only stillness is the listener.
And because I am the one listening,
stillness could only be
WHAT I AM.
I can see how everything changes me for the better whenever I am still.
When adversity enters your life, what is really happening? Adversity is often how you interpret change or loss. When the perception of adversity strikes, it means your current rhythm has been disrupted to let you know it’s time to grow and expand to the next level. When this happens, that jarring rhythmic disruption simultaneously expands the light of your soul, while also triggering your ego. As you become more emotionally free, you are more aware of how often the soul expands, instead of feeling overwhelmed by the reactive nature of your ego.
I remember many years ago, I was in the airport waiting for a flight. The person in front of me was talking to the ticket agent. To his horror, he arrived a few minutes too late and wasn’t allowed to board the plane.
“I’m supposed to be on that plane,” he said.
The ticket agent said, “The door is closed—you’re gonna have to be on the next flight.”
To which he replied, “But that’s gonna make me late to where I need to go.”
This is an example of a jarring rhythmic disruption we commonly perceive as adversity. Sure, the change of plans will guide him along a path of greater expansion, but before he arrives, he is facing the part of his ego being triggered by the process. If this happens to you, yes, your entire day is now different. The way it was supposed to be has now been categorically altered. What does that amount to? A series of inconveniences. At the end of the day, your biggest problem with inconvenience is you are being forced to spend more time where you did not plan to be. Still, you have the ability to go where you need to go, just not in the way that you had planned or imagined. Your way became life’s way, and life had far different plans than you had. It happens to the best of us.
As a result of being in a position of spending more time where you didn’t plan to be, believe it or not, you’ve received a gift. You’re going to be where you didn’t plan to be, around people you didn’t plan to be around, and you’ll have the opportunity to become better as a result. The question is—are you willing to fully participate in life’s plan for you? When you are living from the light of your soul, inconvenience can be unexpected, but it’s more hilarious than it is harmful. I’ll give you another example.
A year or so ago, I began watching the NBC show This Is Us. I was hooked. Every week, I couldn’t wait for the episode to come on. I’d even have a three-day countdown. Check the calendar. What day is it? Oh my God, one day until This Is Us is on. At that time, it was building up to a season finale. Finally, I arrived at two minutes before the show. The show was getting ready to come on and my cable went out. It was as if my cable box decided it was done serving me. Here I was, looking forward to this show for days.
I took a deep breath. Then, I laughed. I thought to myself, Well, there’s that. Apparently, I’ll watch it some other time. I decided to take a walk instead.
When you are emotionally free, when you are the light of your soul, you can look forward to something for days, even years, but it is all grounded in the maturity of surrender. As this depth of maturity awakens in you, your relationship with inconvenience is more of an ally than an enemy. I wasn’t glad that it happened, but no harm was done to me. I had thought that from 8:00 to 9:00 p.m. on that night I’d be watching my favorite show, and life had a different plan. It didn’t even strike me as inconvenient. It struck me as unexpected. That’s all it was—unexpected change. Wow, I get to spend time doing what I didn’t plan to do. No negotiation necessary.
You know what I didn’t do when my cable went out? I didn’t blame myself. In Golden Rule #2, we learned that anyone who blames you isn’t happy. So now we deepen that insight by not blaming ourselves for the way things unfold. Sometimes, when we rationalize things, we blame ourselves. “Oh, I know why this happened. I should have gotten the other cable plan.” It’s usually something you think you did wrong. This is why Golden Rule #1 is “You’ve done nothing wrong.”
What is it like in this moment to not blame yourself for anything? What if you no longer use the soul’s journey to find spiritual ways to blame at all? Oh my God, my cable went out. What happened to my vibration? Did I not have tonight’s episode on my vision board? Did my cable go out from empathing the people who don’t have cable?
What is it like to not blame the ego for anything? What is it like to not blame your shadow for anything? What is it like to not blame the collective unconsciousness for anything? What is it like to blame nothing or anyone at all?
If there’s any tendency to blame, you’re already in a state of negotiation, because negotiation begins with the assignment of blame. You’re only negotiating out of something that you feel you’re being punished by, and in that, you’re unaware that everything is here to help you. More than likely, you’re trying to negotiate out of an opportunity to be more still in an environment where you get to spend more time being where you didn’t plan to be. The only example where this doesn’t directly apply is in toxic environments or abusive relationships. If your innocence is being disrespected, suppressed, dominated, or overpowered, any form of inner or outer negotiation just makes you an accomplice to the crimes committed against you. Yes, you will heal and be an even better version of yourself than you could possibly imagine. But in order to facilitate this growth, you must say no to abusive environments and toxic relationships so you can find the inner resolve and outer safety where true stillness can blossom.
When we meditate, typically we’re meditating under the most ideal conditions. You’ve blocked out some time in your day from work or family commitments. You’re in the comfort of your home or at a yoga studio, filled with incense and soothing music. You’re in a comfortable posture, feeling relaxed. But how does that prepare you to be in harmony when life becomes less than ideal? It’s one thing to be at peace and totally still when you’ve prepared to stop. But the real measurement is how peaceful you are when you are stopped abruptly while in motion. During any state of disruption, your nervous system has to go from movement to stillness, and that change will show how much ego remains to be integrated.
As you cultivate stillness, you are able to freely go from being in motion to unexpected stillness, from chaotic, external situations to inner peace. You’re able to weather the storm, to accept when there are unexpected changes between your personal plan and the unique journey life has in store for you.
Meditation can’t just be a practice employed under the most perfect set of circumstances. It must possess the ability to be applied throughout your life, at a moment’s notice. Closed-eye meditation is what we commonly think of when we imagine meditation. It’s wonderful. I’ve meditated with my eyes closed for most of my life, but in recent years, I’ve begun doing open-eye meditation.
Closed-eye meditation helps you strengthen harmony with closed-eye experiences. But wouldn’t you agree that most of the experiences in your life that disrupt you occur when your eyes are open? If most of your moments of being triggered occur when your eyes are open, then your most functional approach to meditation has to be done as an open-eye experience. Through an open-eye meditation practice, you will find that when your eyes are open in everyday life, you will be triggered less and less by any form of inconvenience.
If you can’t sleep at night, then closed-eye meditation would be perfect. But, if like most people, your disharmony is during open-eye experiences, then try meditating with eyes open and see how quickly relief may come. Simply sit, be still, face forward, and listen. From this space, being stuck in traffic, missing a flight, or waiting in line won’t throw you off—it will just be a different meditation to embrace.
No matter how much we think we know better, it only takes a series of surprising occurrences or a consecutive number of setbacks to make you question what you’ve done wrong to earn this imagined form of karmic punishment. Because we live in an all-knowing and all-loving Universe, nothing occurs to punish us for the very experiences we incarnated to act out and learn from. We may believe we are being punished. While the ego believes pleasure can exist only beyond the threshold of pain, the soul knows degrees of pain and pleasure often exist in the same exact space.
What we often experience as pain is mainly how our nervous systems interpret rhythmic disruptions. This is where we go from the momentum of doing to the stillness of being so suddenly that it jars our innocence. As our nervous systems relax through the path of emotional freedom, sudden loss or unexpected change doesn’t have to feel so damaging. When not so assaulting on your senses, it’s easier to see the gift each experience provides, instead of seeing it as any form of punishment. While sudden loss, unexpected change, or even a surprising turn of events doesn’t have to be seen as joyful, you will be able to see how true, long-lasting happiness doesn’t have to be disrupted when unexpected changes occur. It’s simply a mirror of your own depth of adaptability. The more able you are to adapt to change and flow in the direction life is guiding you, the more rewarding your evolution becomes with less time spent perceiving life as any form of punishment. Why would you be punished for playing the exact role that gives you the amount of experiences you need in order to evolve from great to greater and beyond? Why is the Universe only supporting you when life goes your way? Where is the unwavering trust in a higher knowing beyond the ups and downs of gain or loss?
From the soul’s perspective, we accept that life could only change in whatever way helps us sharpen our ethics and cultivate deeper values. It doesn’t have to be a popular experience to be the everything you need to shine brighter than you could possibly imagine. From this perspective, you cultivate an inner radiance to serve those still finding their way out of the despair of blame, scarcity, and victimhood.
You are never being punished by life, and your manifestation skills aren’t broken. You are simply seeing each moment through, from start to finish, while becoming the embodied essence that attracted you to the beauty of this exact incarnation.