Becoming Familiar with Being

What have you been up to lately? Whenever someone asks me this question, my answer is usually a recitation of things that I have been doing. We love spending our time doing things and all of our attention is focused on the next thing to be done. We go to work, hang out with friends, spend time shopping, work out at the gym and clean our houses. We get a sense of accomplishment and usefulness by keeping busy. Doing is an activity found in the mind. The ego defines itself by our past actions and our anticipated ones of the future. While our ego is busy ‘doing’, our soul is longing to be.

When have you spent some time just being? Being allows us to know our compassion, patience, happiness and joy. When we permit ourselves the time to be still, we become attuned to who we really are. There are no steps to happiness. You can only be happy. When we stand in our ‘beingness’ of being happy, we are telling the Universe what we are. The Universe responds with experiences that confirm our good feelings. We get more than we can handle. When we are still, we soak in the moment and root ourselves more deeply in Life. We relax into the moment and accept it as is. We learn that there is nothing that we have to do, nothing that must be said and no one to forgive.

I have experienced times in my life when, by all outward appearances, not much has been going on. In fact, I have recently acknowledged my own ‘dark night of the soul’ – a period of incubation, transition and spiritual alchemy that forces a person to let go and let God. While my external experiences are seemingly sluggish and uninspired, my internal world is being reshaped, reconfigured and reborn.

Letting go of the steering wheel of Life and trusting I will be guided brings me into a state of being. From that place, I allow the creative powers of Life to present possibilities I could not have imagined.

Achieving things can be enjoyable but too much focus is on material things and accolades rather than personal development and spiritual expansion. The ideal is to be both engaged in an active life and detached from it in your stillness. It has become an increasingly common experience to tell people that although I may not be working in the traditional sense, I have been hard at work developing a deeper connection to this universal truth: There is nothing that you need to do. Being is more than enough.