Our mind constantly narrows the stream of input it receives down to definitions,  conceptions and categories.

It makes it easy for our brain to manage the wide complexity of modern life, and make predictive decisions and inferences about what is currently happening. I am sure that we have evolved this way with good reason, and I bet we were doing it back when we all lived in caves or the wild grassland of prehistory.

Our minds treat objects not as they are, but as abstract categories of things. Men are treated with a certain subset of behaviours, women with another. We treat all physical objects as if they are the idea and not the thing. Bowls are treated all the same, as are knives, or fridges, or televisions.

But really I think that life is ultimately unquantifiable. Everything always seeks to transcend its definition, and concrete descriptions break down when you turn up the resolution. The harder you study what defines a certain thing, the more you see the diversity within the category.

It’s a hard concept to grasp, or get our minds around, which is always a good indicator that further thought and study would be worthwhile.

Really our every thoughts about a certain thing are not about the real things themselves, but about our internal concept of what that thing is.

This has made it easy for our modern civilization to develop, because when you can quantify something, person or place then you can put a value on it.

But really, what price can be put on an hour of your life, or a finite resource which is the common good of all, or even the land inhabited by a people for thousands of years, and their culture? It just can’t be done unless the quantisation is taken to the extreme levels we see today, where everything is a commodity, and there can be decisions made.

Should I work today or enjoy the sunshine… hmmmm, not working will cost me $200. The sunshine is worth $0. Ok work it is..  What a shame we look at the $, and not the unquantifiable reality that is really there. The pure experience of living and enjoying life.

When I bought my house just over four years ago, the area behind the back shed was an absolute mess. There were weeds taller than I am, an old incinerator and rusty pieces of discarded metal poking out of the ground and out from under piles of rubbish.

Although I had never gardened much before (you tend to only do the bare minimum when renting), I saw this overlooked and mistreated piece of land as the perfect place to start a veggie garden. It got plenty of sun, I could catch water from the shed roof for a rain tank, and the weeds obviously loved it, so I supposed carrots, potatoes and tomatoes would as well.

It took me a few weekends, but I eventually cleared the area, made garden beds, set up a compost bin and I was on my way.  Over the past 4 years, having a vegetable garden has given me such knowledge and enjoyment, things that I would not have ever thought of. It is one of the most basic things we can do to feel some kind of connection to nature and the seasons.

Most people growing up in today’s society have absolutely no idea what goes into the planting, growth and care of some of the most common things that we eat each day. By becoming so disconnected from the way our food is produced, we lose perspective of the vast amount of resources that must go into feeding the 6 billion plus denizens of our planet.

Another benefit is that you get to taste what real food should taste like, and not the factory farmed, tasteless and artificially ripened versions that they sell at the local supermarket. Growing your own food is an empowering thing, and a skill that more people should have.

The list of benefits goes on. There is a sense of community when you share the surplus that you have grown with your friends and neighbors. There are fewer relaxing, Zen like moments than the time taken of an evening to go out and water your plants.

Hey, so i know this posts sounds like an advertisement for ‘Gardeners Warehouse’ or something, but seriously, find a patch of land, or even a pot that you can plant something in and give it a go. You will be surprised at the results.

Image by Laura & Garrett

You can learn a lot about life from reading and listening to the life stories of others. I love biographies, to see how my personal hero’s have structured their lives. The struggles they have faced, strategies they have used and the way that they have structured their lives in order to do what they love every day. The insight gained from looking at the place where people have started their life journey, and the steps they have taken to get to their goals is extremely valuable, like the condensed experience of every year of their life, put into the few hours it takes to read the book.

While it is important to use biographies and stories of success to learn and motivate us, there is one thing to be wary of. That is using the circumstances of others as excuses for not taking action ourselves. In the past I have caught myself, after reading about another self made billionaire, thinking things like “If only I got that big break then my life would be different” OR “if I didn’t have all of these responsibilities then I would have time to plan for success.”

This has lead to periods of inaction, or for settling for life circumstances that are less then favourable because I didn’t feel that I had the resources or advantages that others may have earned or been given by fate. I am now the first to admit that when we compare our life circumstances with other people, and then use the differences as excuses, we are entirely missing the point.

It is not that important to get hung up on the facts, but more to take the broad lessons of another’s life experience, and then apply them to your current life and dreams. Sure, your hero may have been a millionaire by 25, and you are close to pushing 40. Does that mean that you are in any less of a position than them? No, it just means that you have walked a different path, a unique experience that is the most valuable thing that you could possibly possess.

Sure, some of your idols may have been overnight successes, or been given a massive “lucky break”, but in general they were people just like you, following an inner urge to do their own thing, and not be confined by the rules of others. Don’t get caught in the game of looking for reasons why your life structure is less than ideal and stopping you reaching your goals. Look to see the advantages and benefits that are unique to you and give you an advantage. Always look to make small gains every day, and utilise the resources at hand as fully as possible.

If an interest in deeper spirituality has taught me anything in my life, it is that each of us must walk their own path towards their own truth.
We are here in this life as individuals so that we can learn and explore a way of living and a path to fulfilment that is unique.

For most of our daily life, we are completely saturated with ideas and messages that do not originate from ourselves. Walk down the street and you are bombarded with advertisements, sit down on the internet and you are quickly mind boggled by the sheer amount of content available. The modern world has provided us with access to information that would be beyond the wildest dreams of someone even 20 years ago.

The paradox is with access to so much information about other things; we have become detached from a large amount of knowledge and wisdom about ourselves. There are so many distractions available, and so many different types of media to consume. The very fact that we may have to sit alone, with our own thoughts for even 30 minutes fills most people with a small sense of dread.

I am sure that this is not the natural state of human consciousness. In the past, you would assume that there were vast stretches of time, once food and shelter had been looked after, that men and women would be able to sit around and think. In this time they would have the power to consciously address the contents of their minds, rather than let themselves run on autopilot, never really exploring the depths of their inner life.

People in modern society however just aren’t used to the idea of having nothing to do, and we have been pre-conditioned to think that time not being productive or time spent with our internal thoughts and feelings is wrong. We get the idea that time with ourselves is time wasted, and so we push on without really taking stock of our own mental landscape. It seems as if the only types of introspection that people undertake on a regular basis are based on worry and anxiousness. People worry about the future endlessly, and they go over past events with an eye to what they could have done better.

Most people will do just about anything to escape their own company and feelings of “boredom.” They will read 5 year old gossip mags while waiting for the dentist, or watch endless repeats of shows on TV. They will surf the internet aimlessly, going to the same sites over again. But in reality, a little time addressing “boredom” is extremely well spent. When the mind finds that it has nothing active to address, it brings up unprocessed information, allowing it to come up to the surface, and be “seen” by your conscious mind. Your worries, your frustrations, your fixation on things like work, being productive or becoming free. All of these things which are always “kind of there” in the background become more real and tactile.

The three different points below are things that you can try to address next time you find yourself with a spare hour and nothing to do. Just sit and let the mind go where it wants, without your conscious interaction :

1. Use the time to break cyclic thinking
Realise that your mind is the most powerful tool and resource we know of in the UNIVERSE. There has been nothing more complex ever discovered. Although it may not fit in with a number of current scientific paradigms, I am here to tell you that for most practical purposes, YOU (the observer you) are in control of your brain and your thoughts.

If you find yourself in these times of introspection going over the same thoughts without ever resolving a solution, then make it your goal to break out of that cycle and get some closure. Look for patterns in your thinking, and devise some clear action points to get from where you are, to where you want to be. This is not worry time, this is looking at the deeper thoughts and addressing them head on.

As the Buddha said “Strive for your own liberation with diligence.”

2. Is there someone you need to call?
Quite often in times of introspection, my thoughts will (for no apparent reason that I can fathom at the time) find their way to a past or current friend or acquaintance. I think about something they once said, or what they are doing, or things that I may have said to them.

I can’t tell you the number of times that this has happened, and a week or so later I get a phone call or email from the person saying they really want to catch up with me, or I hear through the modern grapevine (facebook) that they are in need of something, or having a rough time. If you have thoughts about people that may have once been part of your life, perhaps it is time to give them a call “just because” and see what is going on.

3. Get to know your true self.

I am sure that there a lot of people out there in blogoland that don’t even know who they really are. I mean at a deep level, life is a process of discovering exactly who we are as people.

In quiet times, is there a voice inside you saying that the life you are presently living is not for you, that you yearn to do something different? Modern life is very good at pigeonholing people into neat little boxes, and railroading them into careers that sound promising, but in reality are a minefield of stress and boredom. Use the time to look at the possibilities, not just a few but the massive set of options that are available to everyone. I heard it said in the last week that people under a great deal of stress can only see 3 options at most to any situations, where in reality there may be 100′s

Also I am sure that there are people very well acquainted with their ego selves, as they see that aspect expressed every day, but not the true, deeper self that is connected to the universe and everyone else around you. That aspect needs time to come out on its own, in quiet and creative time. By listening to the quieter voices within, we get a sense of the whole of ourselves, and a more intimate understanding of the parts of our personality that make us unique.

As the Greek philosophers were fond of saying “Know Thyself!”

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Many eastern spiritual texts put forward the idea that you must learn to have a full awareness of your whole self. While our self looks like it is an integrated whole from one level, scratch the surface (via meditation or other methods of self-enquiry) and you will find a whole heap of different parts of your personality, all striving to express themselves. The one that stands out the most initially is the Ego, the self-important, self-centric aspect of our personality . The ego (which is a modern western psychological term I might add) has been given a fairly bad rap in the modern “new age” scene.

image by Swiss Bones

Somewhere along the way, our Western minds have turned this into the ridiculous notion that to be happy you must get rid of, or even completely destroy the ego.

My own personal experience has brought me to a different understanding. I believe that there is no reason to destroy what is essentially a part of yourself. The real power is in learning to integrate this and all of the other interesting and unique parts of your personality into a functioning whole.

People go through life without a second thought to the idea that there are separate parts of their self, which manifest themselves at different times and in different situations. The ego is just one of these parts, the one that thinks that it is separate from the rest of creation, and that IT is the most important thing in the known Universe.

And quite frankly, it is good to have this instinct kick in from time to time. It stops you getting walked all over, gives you the confidence to claim your place in the world and also to create and express yourself. Knowing that YOU are you, what your place in the world is has a profound importance to our whole selves. But it also has a negative side of selfishness, aggressive behavior and helping us justify doing things that may not always work out best for everybody involved.

The image that makes the concepts more tangible for me is the Yin-Yang. Your personality is in constant flux, and each part must be in harmony with the other for balance. The Ego, or separate, selfish self must be brought into balance with your quiet, inner, calm, connected observer self. Let one part express itself too much and you become overbearing, self-important and obtuse. Too much of the other and you become meek, mild and can have no meaningful interaction with the outside world.

Hey, and don’t get too beat up if you find yourself acting like a complete tool from time to time. Seriously, everyone does it!

DYNAMIC balance means that even though you may find yourself at one end of the Ego scale, you have the self awareness to bring yourself down to a centered state at the appropriate time.

Of course it is not as clear cut as all that, and these are only arbitrary labels that we have placed on very strange and complex phenomena. But at least it gives you a framework to get our talking monkey-brains around and be able to see where all of the pieces fit in.

So in order to address this all important balance, here are my top 5 strategies to keep your ego in proportion.

1 Realise your size in proportion to the universe

When it comes down to it, you are a tiny speck on a tiny speck, floating in a vast sea of nothing more giant and unfathomable then you could ever get your head around. The very notion that what you do on a daily basis affects things at the scales that really seem to matter in the universe is wishful thinking gone crazy. As Seamus put it in his excellent “Looking through the wrong end of the telescope“: You. Don’t. Know. Anything. About. Anything.

The liberation and true freedom of insignificance is yours to grasp at any time. When the ego gets up and starts jumping up and down about its importance, just keep this fact in mind to bring it all back to perspective.

2 Realise that you are where you are only through the help of others

The network of other people you build up around you in friends, co-workers, family and neighbors is one of the most fundamental assets in life. Think that you have accomplished so much in your life? Sure, a lot was done by you, but there is no way anyone could get anything done without the help, co-operation and support of people around them. All of life is a team exercise.

3 Understand that everyone is just as important as you

A lot of the ego’s jumping up and down, complaining and self importance is because it believes it is more important than ANYONE else in the world. You know why so many people in traffic jams start getting irate and honking their horns? It is because each of those people think their journey is more important than the person in front of them. Next time you feel the anger and indignation that the ego fires up when it feels like it is being threatened, just remind yourself that everyone, and everything is just as important as you in the universe. No more, and no less.

4 Realise the inherent impermanence in all things

As I stated before in the “Impermanence Top 40“, today’s front page news is tomorrow’s forgotten fact. So many events in our life that the Ego blows up into monumental proportions seem trivial the next day, and are forgotten next week. Nothing lasts forever, and nothing remains in the same state as it is now for even a second. Strive for your goals, and enjoy the journey. But realise that everything is just a castle in the sand, to be washed out to sea by the waves of time.

5 Realise that humour is the true currency of the universe.

Just about anything in life has a funny side to it, when looked at from a certain perspective. The greatest way to disarm the Ego is to see the inherent humour in everything. When we laugh, we see the connectedness of things, the joy in everyday life and realise that the world is not such a serious place after all.

Humour is all about connectedness, it shows us how previously unthought-of concepts are connected in unexpected ways. It connects us to others in the shared experience of having a laugh and goofing off for a while. Next time you find yourself acting from ego, have a laugh.

Mystery makes the world go around. The only reason you are reading this article, and not checking your facebook or twitter profiles is that you don’t know how it is going to end. When things get predictable people tend to lose interest and look elsewhere.

When you get down to the fine detail and study life closely, Mystery is the animating force of the world, the reason why every man and woman gets up in the morning, has breakfast and steps out into the wild crazy world.

The search for meaning and answers behind the events of your life is fueled by your innate curiosity. Curiosity is a force so powerful that it sets the direction of our civilization and species, fills the wallets of gossip magazine publishers and drives people to continue to search for answers against great odds.

You only need to look at prime time TV, with its wall-to-wall crime shows and detective dramas to see the popularity of people searching for the unknown. Do people like the blood, the gore, the tales of tragedy? Some do perhaps, but most glue their eyeballs to the screen 4 nights a week because they are addicted to the idea of mystery.

The Seeker

Most spiritual and personal development seekers start out on journeys of self improvement and inner reflection with the best intentions, looking for truth and insight wherever it appears to be available.

It soon becomes apparent that there is a huge amount of people willing to share their answers with you. Some will give them to you for free, other want you to buy it from them, and of course there are others that will give you their version in exchange for the sane, rational part of your brain. There are simple answers, complex answers, mantras that explain the universe in a single Sanskrit sentence, through to multi-layered pantheons and metaphysical systems.

Some people will get sick of the searching, and go for a “quick fix, one answer fits all” approach to life, which could take the form of joining an organized religion, buying the full $30,000 training package from the personal development guru or becoming a strict and unwavering atheist.

Others will become disillusioned with the search altogether and fall back into old patterns, exchanging the path of awakening for a lifetime of being asleep. For them the seeking is a painful experience, something that must be accomplished or they have somehow failed. They are always looking for that missing part of themselves out there in the world.

Some people think that once you become enlightened, suddenly the answers to all of the questions of the universe are revealed. The true wisdom (or at least my version of it) is in fact the exact opposite. It is the idea that the truth may never be found, but it is in the seeking and searching where the realities of life, the universe and the contents of your inner world become visible.

I tend to search and read and meditate without the need to lock down a certain fact as being true. Once you get to the stage where the answers are no longer important, the search becomes pure joy, it is truly the stuff of being alive. You embrace the fact that you don’t know everything, and will never know everything. There is always another perspective to every situation.

A lot of the things that I once considered true have revealed themselves in my life to be false, and vice versa, so that I can safely assume that any of my beliefs could be thrown on their heads in the very next instance.

OPEN AND AWARE MIND

An open but aware mind is the key. With a developed skill of discernment you can separate the wheat from the chaff (or use another less polite euphemism) and take every “answer” and truth provided to you with a grain of salt, knowing that only via the power of direct experience should you take anything for a truth.

By living this way you can use the perpetual mystery to propel you through life. To always seek new experiences and adventures, to truly experience an enlightened state by seeing everything in the world through fresh eyes, like that of a new born child. Once you realize that every experience in life is unique, and that most of your truths are really just preconditioned assumptions then the everydayness of your life takes on a life of its own.

You are not searching for something outside yourself to complete something that is missing, but marveling at the strange place we call our lives, with all its hidden subtleties and whack-you-over-the-head realities.

By keeping your sense of mystery and wonder at the universe, you continue to feel alive inside.

The answers are the boring part; it’s the journey that is the thing of value. The journey to understanding and wisdom is the thing that can’t be bottled, packaged or put into a 10 stage seminar program. That is the true gold of the eternal quest of the spiritual seeker.

Firstly, Hi to all of our new subscribers to Rebel Zen and for the great comments we have been getting for the latest posts. Both Seamus and I really appreciate your thoughts and feedback.

I wanted to write today about a concept that is all too common for modern, internet connected people.

Almost everyone I know these days seems to be living their life at a frantic pace, working far too much and not spending enough time on themselves. They are living life at a speed that would make even Led Zeppelin circa 1973 want to lie down and take a Nana Nap. Sure it’s not hard livin’, hard drinkin’ party all night style living, but attaching yourself to a computer screen for 12 hours a day can certainly take its toll.

There is so much media and connectivity simultaneously vying for our attention that the important things like personal development, exercise and spiritual practice are often let go.

We put it to the back of our mind, and instead of keeping our meditation times and going to our yoga classes; we put personal time to the side until the busy period is over. Which is a shame, because meditation, yoga, and any other time where you get to sit, center your mind and simply be is the BEST thing to do when you are crazy busy.

It’s what you should be taking the time to do at 3.00pm when your mind is completely fried from a hectic work day. If you start to feel the old brain doing back flips under the strain of another spreadsheet or word document take 10 minutes to stop, and refresh yourself the best way you know, and then continue.

But if we don’t do this, and continue to push ourselves past our limits without rest, then there is the risk losing our true selves to work. Our unique personality, the fun loving part of ourselves that makes us who we are, is often the first part to fade when we become overtired and too obsessed with the unimportant things in life. We lose our ability to connect in a meaningful way with those we love, or don’t find value in spending time just being. Do this for long enough and all that will be left are the boring, stressed out and grumpy parts of us.

You see workaholic types that have lost any idea of who they are and what makes them happy. They lose that spark that makes them who they are; they become someone that is just “going through the motions”.

Don’t let this happen to you, you owe it to your SELF.

There is nothing better then finding that you have carved out a spare hour in the day to sit and meditate.

The daily worries of the world have started to float away, and the big thoughts that fill your normal waking mind have started to quieten down. A slow, easy feeling of peace works its way over your body as you focus on the simpleness of in breath and out breath. You begin to focus on nothing, to pull your observing mind out of the “stream of consciousness” and begin to notice your thoughts as something separate.

Then you start to hear them.

“Oh yes doing well, yes quieten down the thoughts” says one.

“You really should be doing that blog post and not meditating” says the next.

“Sounds like a truck outside, wait.. wait… no it’s a bloody leaf blower!” complains a third voice.

It’s the small voices of the mind, the thoughts that during waking life dictate your actions and way of thinking, but now in meditation serve to distract you from your aim of letting go and giving the mind a rest.

In the still silence of meditation each of these small voices begins to sound very loud. And while you would think on a Zenish blog such as this I would be all against the annoying babble of the ego, I have come to have a small sense of respect for this misunderstood aspect of my psyche.

The way that I see it, each of those voices is a mini revolution in your head. It is your mind, or more accurately your ego rebelling against the idea of being quiet. The ego will do anything to get you to stop focusing on something else, but instead go back to how you spend a lot the other hours of your waking life, focusing on it. It puts on characters, it puts on plays. It will start to talk to you like yoda.

It will send you off on strange mental journeys to remember what you had for lunch on the 3rd of April in 2004. It will try to convince you that are 232 better things that you could be doing with your time right at this very minute. It will try to send you to sleep; it will try to make you uncomfortable. Some call it monkey mind, but more often then not it acts more like King Kong then a friendly chimp.

So you can see that while you start to quieten down these voices, the ego part of you starts rebelling against the observer.

An internal war escalates, with both sides digging in and upping the ante from minute to minute. The harder you directly fight the inner voices and forces of the ego, the harder it will fight back.  If you continue to fight it will end up in full on war, with all of your attention being used to quell the voices and associated images, and none left to focus on the object of your mediation. And you thought this stuff was all peace and love?

Well, instead of fighting this inner rebel, the thing to do is to accept him. Let go of the idea chasing all of the voices down and let them speak. As they do though, imagine that the volume on each is turning down, and that the voice is slowly floating away.

Allow them to say what they have to say, but don’t buy into the story that they are telling you.

Remember a few years ago when that song came out, I’m sure you know the one. It had a super catchy chorus, more hooks than a fishing shop and embedded itself so deep in your skull that you found yourself humming it while “on the job”. Sure it was annoying as hell, but everyone was going nuts over it. For weeks it was all you could hear on the radio. It was so popular that it sparked new novelty dance crazes, giving wedding DJ’s an excuse to throw out their tired old copies of the “Grease Megamix” and the “Bus Stop”, and play something new for drunk old people to dance to.

Then one day, something happened. A new song came along, and it had a really catchy chorus, hooks aplenty and was heard pumping out of radio’s from New York to Upper Cumbucta West. Two weeks later no one wants to hear the Macarena, and everyone wants to hear Beyonce. Time moves on, things change.

Just like popular songs, movies and books, everything that we can see in our world is in a transitory, impermanent state. People and places, empires and cities all come from nothing, grow and flourish for a time, and then inevitably at some stage return to nothing. It’s the nature of reality. The Buddha said that “Decay is inherent in all component things,” and his followers accepted that existing in the world meant being in a state of flux, a continuous becoming.

Just like these one hit wonders, most of the stuff that happens in our day to day lives is transitory and impermanent. Events so strange, unpredictable BUT also over so quickly that if you weren’t living through them you would laugh. Events, like being stuck in a traffic jam on the way to an important meeting, or missing out on concert tickets arise into the NOW, flourish for a short time and then vanish, never to be seen again. Detachment to thoughts and negative emotions of past events becomes easier when we gain a perspective of just how small a role in the events of the Universe we take.

But just like the top 40, where the current hit songs are change positions dramatically from week to week, it is this constant flux, this interplay between Ying and Yang, manifestation and destruction that makes life interesting. Change is what makes life worth living. It can be exciting, frightening, exhausting, or bring relief. It can deliver sadness or happiness, resistance or attachment.

If everyday of your life did not have this underlying impermanence, the world would be a very boring place. To me there is no more motivating or perspective changing idea then “No moment ever again, or ever before in the history of the Universe will ever be this moment.” The nature of your impermanence means that the fact that your are alive and conscious in the here and now, thinking these thoughts, breathing this air, seeing these exact things is remarkable. Of all of infinite time and infinite space you are here right now.

And once this microsecond has passed, The Universe as it exists right now will never exist again.

You possess a chronicled history of your past, a unique viewpoint on the present and a predictive prophecy about what you assume is going to happen to you in the future.

Everyday when you wake up you listen to the story of what today might be like, and the story of what occurred yesterday. We are constantly re-telling this life story to ourselves, checking it against our immediate reality in order to make decisions, evaluate what other people are doing and to know our cultural place in certain situations.

This story is the blueprint that the voice inside your head, your inner narrator, uses to explain to you what you are seeing, thinking and doing in the present moment.

When we start to meditate, one of the first challenges we come up against is how to work with this inner narrator, to detach the observer part of us from the narrator part, so that we can begin to see the stream of consciousness for what it is… a story. This inner narrator is the ego, the part of the mind that will do anything to remain in control. As we go deeper into meditation, the ego/narrator will begin to recite parts of your story in order to get you to listen. It will tell you that you should be thinking about money, it will say that it was unfair that that guy pushed in line at the supermarket last week, and that you should go out for dinner on the weekend.

The ego is like Uncle Bob that you have to sit next to at a family BBQ because all of the other chairs are taken. You are trying to relax and enjoy your steak and beer, and he is constantly waffling on about what he did last week, what he thinks about a vast array of mind numbingly boring topics and why he likes to wear blue socks. It is a never ending stream of inane chatter.

We listen to the ego telling this tale to us all day, and one of the ways that meditation benefits us is by giving the poor observer part of us 5 minutes break to start to collect its own thoughts, and not listen to Mr Ego’s waffling 24 hours a day. So what can we do?

SEE IT FOR WHAT IT IS.

While there are many ways to detach from our thoughts during meditation, I find one of the techniques that has worked for me is to label each thought as “Story” as it arises. When thoughts break into my meditation space, I can push them away by the thought “Story”, and they are not picked up by my observer and listened to. By coming to the realization that most thoughts are just the ego playing the role of narrator, I can keep a Zen-like perspective with them and see that the thoughts are not reality at all. They are just an interesting tale constructed by your ego to keep your attention focussed on it, rather than the timeless, universal, limitless real you that lies beyond.

KEEP IT IN PERSPECTIVE

By learning this perspective about ones thoughts during meditation, you gain a valuable skill. Instead of constantly referring to the story of your past to determine what you should do, now you can break this conditioning and start to live more in the now. You can take the circumstances and events of your life on face value, and not be trapped in past negative behaviours, or do things just because “that’s how I have always done them.” Now I am not suggesting that you should be ignoring the story all of the time, here at Rebel Zen we are all about keeping and enhancing the one thing that makes you different and unique in the world, your personality and “Youness.” I am just asking that you recognise your inner narrative and are mindful of it.