Buying reality in "as is" condition has the potential to end stress and unhappiness. When we practice leaving all sense perception, thought and emotion as is, we relax our reactivity and come into harmony with what is.

Last night I had a full-blown awakening experience without the help of psychedelics or extended meditation or breathwork. I was however, on the tail end of an IFS session and this certainly had me in the right neighborhood for magic to happen.

When I was high and experienced oneness with everything, I looked to see if there were stepping stones back to this perspective in sober consciousness. What I found was that the breadcrumbs were hard to see because absolutely everything was a breadcrum, and so became hidden as separate "things". It's almost too simple to see because we expect it to be something else or more complicated than it is.

I've made a recent discovery that my mindfulness practice wasn't working because what I thought was mindfulness was actually recognition. True mindfulness needs to be free of aversion and clinging. What I was practicing was recognition without an awareness of my attitude toward what was being recognized.

As it turns out, I have even less control over my mind and mood than I thought.

It seems as though the only way for there to be some suggestion of my existence as a separate "self", it can only be hinted at through assumption. The second I start looking for it in my direct experience, it vanishes.

Coming out of a few weeks of fairly potent sadness and overwhelm and depression, I've gained a little bit of insight as to what I can be doing as unpleasant thoughts and feelings arise (alarms) two more skillfully triage my taking action into "now", "later" or "never."

The last time my wife and I were really high together, we came up with a saying that seemed to capture the feeling of being completely open to everything that was happening. Now, that same saying is a window which either opens to happiness or closes, and keeps happiness out.

Somehow I thought all the spiritual practice had put me in a position of being immune to overwhelm, burnout and feeling stressed out. Turns out, I was wrong.

We are fortunate in that we can actually conditioning service systems to become more accepting of unpleasantness while simultaneously accessing states of relaxation. This means external circumstances are no longer what govern our sense of "things being okay," and instead we find ourselves in a position where we can gradually increase the territory of what we consider to be "okay."