Resources
Talks, questions, meditations and self enquiry exploring:
The meaning of life, suffering and trauma, being in the present moment, dealing with emotions, finding true happiness and mind identification.
Talks, questions, meditations and self enquiry exploring:
The meaning of life, suffering and trauma, being in the present moment, dealing with emotions, finding true happiness and mind identification.
Tom introduces The Light That We Are. A movement and a dedication to providing wholeness, truth and light of the reality we are living.
Tom explains about The Light That We Are is, which as a concept, to explain the nature of experience. The experience of all that is, the ‘permanent On switch’ of life. He explains that what ‘all of this’ (Life) is, is quite unexplainable, but the Light That We Are is an offering of an explanation, a road map, to the Truth of what we are living.
The purpose of life is to wake up from the dream that we are a separate self. We are not one wave, but the entire ocean. We are the momentum and magnitude of life itself, and our 'purpose' is the experience and realise that, and then even let that concept too go. So we truly enter the presence of Now over and over again.
The purpose of this work is to realise that there is no 'self'. It is only a separated self which can suffer, but that self is only made 'true' by believing all the thoughts which occur in consciousness. It is our job to recognise that the 'thinker' is also a thought, just along with all thoughts. The purpose of the work is to truly be in the presence of Now. It must be experienced directly, not recognised with the mind.
Tom speaks about how we work together, and what sorts of inquiry, practices and tools may be included. The work can be introspective, internal and also out in the world, using all the opportunities and resources available to us to drop deeper into the Now. We unpick suffering, and answer questions which arise. We confront patterns which keep on reappearing in our lives, and get curious and question the source of suffering. We adopt an attitude of being determined to see everything differently and getting more and more curious about our experience of Now, outside of the norms of what the mind says.
Overthinking can be overcome by seeing that we are in fact aware of all the thoughts going on, but we are not the one overthinking per-se. Even the thought ‘I am overthinking’ is a thought. We can watch all the thoughts coming, and realise a lot of thoughts are coming, but none of them are actually us, or the true self. The Mind wants to always identify and grip to something, yet in truth we are the boundlessness of everything.
We can move through strong emotions by making room for them, and allowing them to be there, to be felt and experienced - in awareness. By accepting, witnessing and being with strong emotions, we stop struggling and resisting against the flow of life. Each emotion or sensation arrises, and if we reject it or resist it, we continue to keep it fighting for attention to be seen. We can first acknowledge and feel the resistance to the strong emotion, and once we move through the resistance, we can feel the emotion - the sensation - as it is, in the here and now. We can also lay the thinking mind aside, and to just see that thoughts are offered as an additional commentary to ‘jump’ out of experiencing the feeling, but if we can gently remain in the sensation, we can truly alchemise and arrive into Now.
Tom talks about some of the fundamentals when working together. Training how to recognise thinking, and be able to watch it, rather than believe it. Training together how to feel emotions or sensations fully and safely. It is a shared, collaborative experience. The training is to arrive more and more deeply into the truth of right Now. To truly experience unfiltered reality.
Change seems to be so hard because we become heavily identified with the idea of who we are. The idea of 'who I am' is a series of thoughts which loop, or we accept and believe. We follow around, or identify with recurring thoughts and continually accept the thoughts which are being offered up by the mind. Tom shares here that we simply don't need to identify with these thoughts. We can allow the thought to be there, and pass through us. It is in fact the resistance to the thought that creates the identification with it. When we stop continually engaging with these thoughts, they begin to fall away, and not continually turn up. When we stop resisting what is occurring, and accept that thoughts can appear and disappear if we don't grasp onto them, then we can continue to be in the Now, and the idea of change becomes an acceptance of the flow of Life.
We seem to suffer because we identify with the mind. We are having an experience, and the mind actually labels what is happening as 'wrong' or 'bad' or 'too much'. We learn through this work to challenge and question 'who actually is the one suffering'? Tom gives the example of listening to a concert of music playing, and the mind talking and commentating over it giving its opinion. The mind wants to give its opinion of how the music is, what it should be like, as opposed to us being with the music, as it is, washing over us, unfolding in perfection. All responses we have to situations are learned and conditioned. In this work we learn to question all these learned and conditioned responses, and open up to ask, perhaps all of this is happening in perfection?
Tom explains that things dont go the way we want them to, because we believe that things should go a certain way. We have made deep set assumptions about how things 'should' go, based on conditioning (by family, society, culture age etc) and that is for us to question. The moment we judge the situation we are in, we give birth to the problem, by having the problem with what is in the first place. It is a resistance to what is. By questioning 'why is this actually a problem?' or 'what assumption have I made here?' we can drop deeper into the Now of just how everything is unfolding. Stepping outside of the mind which created the problem, and into curiosity of the Now, is a huge leap towards freedom and peace.
Tom answers the question, which is a judgement made by the mind, that life for this person is moving too fast. It’s just a thought. It’s just a judgement. We can let it go. The mind commentary occurs on top of simply what is happening. As a practical application, he suggests to the questioner to choose to ‘do less’, and then see what reaction the mind and body have, to doing less. Often we are so busy to mask or cover up the sensations which are underneath this. We get so busy to distract away from the feelings and thoughts we have underneath. Tom suggests to see if you can do a little less, and begin to feel what lies beneath, which when embraced and felt, leads to longer lasting peace with what IS.
We can inquire, who is the problem happening for, where is this problem coming from? The problem alone is a thought, a judgement of what is simply occurring in consciousness. Thoughts label everything. Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet - 'there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.' Simply everything is occurring. If we inquire into where the problem comes from, we realise we actually create the problem, by accepting the thought, of having the judgment of the situation.
All suffering is created by the mind, by thoughts. The mind labels sensations as 'bad' or 'wrong' or it shouldn't be happening. This is fighting what is occurring in the Now. It is bringing in narratives which are simply not even happening. The dentist example in this video.
The mind paints over the purity of the present moment with thoughts. We have the power to bring in presence to the thoughts which occur. We can choose to interact with them and accept them. Or let them pass by. We can either see and watch thoughts occurring, or we can believe and get hooked into what thoughts are being offered and allow them to cloud our sense of reality.
When we are believing our thoughts, most of the time, we are then living in an obstructed sense of reality. Listening to thoughts can drive us into a deeper sense of separation, of an individual self, and therefor enhance the suffering.
Make a commitment to be present. To be aware of what the mind is saying, and see you are not that.
When suffering is occurring, begin to ask, who is the one suffering? What decision or judgement have I made about simply 'what is'?
Happiness can be found in accepting the present moment in its fullness. Nearly all suffering will arise from resisting what 'is'. But accepting the now, can allow the experience to flow though, like Tom says here, we can be like a tube of experiencing. Letting emotions / thoughts flow through us, and clinging to none of them. Joy is here, we can be with it, then it end, then sadness may come, and by then accepting that, it's felt, experienced and then the next emotion arises. That old saying of "What we resist, persists" is prevalent. All form of consciousness simply want to be felt in the Now, and can be. When they are felt and accepted, they can slip away, and consciousness can continue to flow.
Tom shares that we can get into the place of awareness where we can observe thoughts. But see they are not WHO we are. With a meditation practice, we stop all distractions and begin to see this ‘operating centre’ of the world of thought. All thoughts can be interacted with or not. We always have that choice. By actively rejecting thoughts - we can also cause resistance. So it is simply about learning to see that thought occurs. Regardless. But it is not WHO we are. Thought can be essential for activities which use logic for daily life. But unconsciousness of thinking can result in suffering. In the end we see that everything is always taken care of outside of thought. But that is a process we have to learn and trust.