Much like the hands of a clock go nowhere fast, anxious thoughts run us round-and-round without taking us anywhere!
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Enlightening articles by Guy Finley on a wide range of topics address practical life issues and deepen your spiritual understanding.
Short but powerful quotes by Guy Finley will inspire you throughout your day.
Heartfelt inner-life questions from people around the world, and Guy’s enlightening answers, will shed light on your own issues.
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Enlightening articles by Guy Finley on a wide range of topics address practical life issues and deepen your spiritual understanding.
Short but powerful quotes by Guy Finley will inspire you throughout your day.
Heartfelt inner-life questions from people around the world, and Guy’s enlightening answers, will shed light on your own issues.
Read Guy’s newest insights as he jots them down, spontaneous and uncensored.
Watch or listen to the specific talk we will all be discussing during this week’s Online Study Group meeting.
If you have a few minutes, and want a burst of enlightenment, watch or listen to these brief talks by Guy, filled with concentrated wisdom.
Hearing Guy interact with an interviewer is a delight. Listen as he makes deep spiritual principles easy to understand.
Be encouraged by hearing fellow members share their experiences and discoveries as they bring higher ideas into their daily lives.
The Life of Learning singers and instrumentalists perform beautiful music that will inspire and uplift you.
Join us for exclusive live broadcasts of select Guy Finley talks.
Start your day off right with a nugget of wisdom that can transform your experience with everything you do and everyone you meet.
Inner-life exercises and special writings deepen your understanding.
Longtime local members speak for 10 to 15 minutes on a special topic. Hear the explorations and discoveries of others on the inner journey.
Dive deep into a subject on your own! Work at your own pace with a series of talks by Guy on topics critical to your inner development.
Catch Guy Finley’s weekly message that focuses on spiritual and personal breakthroughs. This is updated weekly and is available in video, audio and text.
Join a lively online discussion with other members each week of “This Week’s Topic” – a new Guy Finley talk selected for in-depth study.
You are not alone on the inner journey. Listen to lively, weekly online discussions between members.
Every Saturday Guy leads an open discussion. Local members share their discoveries, and Guy’s comments deepen everyone’s understanding.
Guy regularly holds open Q&A sessions. Often members of our global community send in questions, or speak directly to Guy online.
Access to all our private Facebook updates, student Facebook discussions, and our LIVE Saturday lunch roundtable discussions.
This member forum is where you can write in your observations and experiences, and receive feedback from fellow members. Read-only access for Free and Basic members. Full access for Premium & All Access members.
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Shop eCoursesMuch like the hands of a clock go nowhere fast, anxious thoughts run us round-and-round without taking us anywhere!
The meditative life is not limited to sitting down someplace quietly, nor is it limited to someplace in time where we can control conditions so that we can experience something of a quiet mind. It can be said that meditation is the active relationship that an individual has with the whole of his or her life.
Indeed, if we were able to see clearly enough into our own life, we would see something that is in itself an invitation to meditation: we are always off balance.
Curiously, and what takes time to discover, is that individuals in this world are so used to being in search of balance that the search for balance has become their sense of balance. This is a phenomenon that has to be seen interiorly in order to understand it.
Are we in balance or out of balance when we're unhappy, afraid, lonely, ambitious, excited, or anxious? For example, you're at the supermarket, and you ask the produce man why the price of lettuce is so high. He gives you a reason, and for the next five minutes you think about lettuce. Do you even see the person in front of you? No. You're not aware of anything because you're caught up in worrying about lettuce world! It sounds silly, but the fact of the matter is, when that kind of thinking is going on, aren't we looking for a way to resolve the disturbance that's inside of us? Are we not looking for a way to find what we would call the center of ourselves, a neutralizing balance, so that we don't feel the disturbance anymore? If we're going to understand what it means to have a meditative life, we must understand this.
All it takes is a thought or feeling, a piece of news, and we're rocked off center. The "center" becomes something "out there" having to do with the condition that knocked us down -- an opposite in the mind of what we imagine will finally restore the sense of stability that was lost prior to the blow we received.
Every single day, we are on a mission to bring balance to ourselves -- achieving nothing but to throw ourselves further out of balance. Our life becomes a kind of reeling to and fro, and afterward we say balance is the search for that moment where at last we won't feel like we're going to fall down. That is not what balance is! A person has to look at his or her life and see very clearly that the pursuit of balance is not the same thing as balance.
If we are walking along and someone bumps into us, the sensory capacity of our body will instantaneously seek balance. We have become wrongly captive of the idea that being balanced, centered, is a sensation like that. In contrast, true balance is an awareness, just like beauty or stillness. Stillness doesn't have a center; it's everywhere. Awareness of stillness -- and the stillness that one is aware of -- are one thing, which means that real awareness has no center. There is nothing to be gained. It is already there. Likewise, beauty has no direction, which means that its center is everywhere. Everywhere we look it's the whole thing . . . and so it is with real balance.
How would we know how to walk straight unless there was the idea of a balance that already existed as a rectification between opposites? It is the same thing when it comes to being still. When we're quiet -- whether we're sitting in silence or walking down the street doing a walking meditation -- we must learn to recognize those thoughts and feelings that push and pull on us. We must start to become conscious of their movement, because it is their movement that presently drives us to seek balance. If we let them go as they come up, balance is there. That is meditation: letting go to be where balance already is the center of everything in us.
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The Quiet Beauty of Being Inwardly Balanced
Posted by Guy Finley in 459 Galice Road, Merlin, OR 97532 on , and updated on .
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