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FIVE WAYS OF BEING

In my book, Waking Up with Everyone Around Us, I identify five specific challenges or inquiries that everyone, regardless of age, gender, nationality, or religious belief, has the task of being with in Life, consciously or unconsciously. I call them The Five Ways of Being.

1. Being Clear

Being Clear about our purpose in Life: inquiring into who/what are we and why we are here, then aligning what we do in any given day with our greater purpose. i.e. living more purposefully. 

4. Being connected

Being freed from the ‘terrible myth of separation’ in which our only reality is that we individuated beings and bodies disconnected from the greater whole, from awareness, from Love. 

2. Being Present

Being Present from moment to moment: watching our thoughts rather than being caught in thought and balancing constant ‘forward motion’ with slowing down and being more still/aware.

5. Being Heart-Directed

Being able to follow our inner guidance and creative longings in daily life rather than follow our social conditioning that primarily encourages the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain.

3. Being Real

Being Real with ourselves and others: communicating authentically so that how we present ourselves to others and ourselves, matches what we are actually experiencing.

The Five Ways of Being provide a map or framework for living. There isn’t a set of prescribed ‘things to do’ that go with them. Teachers can’t provide us with ultimate answers to these inquiries because they are, in fact, self-inquiries. They are ‘living’ questions that must be ‘lived into’.   

Thus, daily practice, first and foremost, is one in which these inquiries are woven into our day/life. We ‘remember’ to inquire because it is sustained inquiry Itself, that reveals the answers.

Holding these questions in our daily awareness is difficult because there still is not yet the cultural support to do so. The current culture actually encourages the antithesis of The Five Ways of Being: don’t inquire, stay busy, hide your emotions, see life through the distorted lens of separation, and do what is expected of you rather than what you are intuitively called to do.

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