How To Stop Fighting Against Life

We spend our time mostly fighting against something, good or bad that something becomes a disease because it consumes the subconscious mind then when you are stressed it bubbles to the surface and explodes into a disaster. People get hurt, people you love people you care about often feel the bluntness of your wrath. Stop fighting there's a better way.

Transcript

The concept of being loose and natural was brought to me about almost 30 years ago,

Back in the late 80s,

By a man simply known as O'Sensei.

His name was Morhei Ueshiba,

And he was the founder of Aikido.

Morhei's brilliant concept was that you can't fight 24-7.

You can't continue to put up a fight.

Fighting is like having a closed fist and quenching that fist really hard and really strong and you feel powerful and you feel strong and you feel like you're invincible with this fist closed and held very tightly.

If you hold your hand up,

Make a fist,

And just hold it tightly for as long as you can.

You'll find out that you can only hold it for so long.

And then you get tired.

Your energy gets exhausted.

So many religions are just like this fight.

Every religion out there except for Tantra and Taoism all believe in putting up a fight.

And having that energy exhausted,

Whether it's Buddhism or Christianity or Jainism or Judaism.

Any one of these religions says put up a fight.

But you can't fight.

Morhei Ueshiba taught us this and showed us this in our Aikido training.

You can't fight forever.

And also when you fight,

You're absorbing negative energy.

You're bringing things into you that are toxic for your system.

So his whole approach was basically to open that fist,

Open the hand up completely open.

And if you find that you're holding your hand and held your fist tightly up to now,

That you're probably already getting a little tired of it.

And you just can't do it 24-7.

But being loose and natural,

You can do 24-7.

And what doesn't rob you of your energy is that you can practice your awareness 24-7 being loose and natural.

Just being aware and conscious of the moment.

Not looking for the next moment in the future because that brings tension in.

And not worrying about the past either because that brings tension in.

So if you think about it,

Tantra is one of the only religions that you can practice 24-7 because it says that don't fight.

Accept everything.

Accept the opposites as dielectrics as they complement each other.

Accept good and bad,

Light and dark.

They all complement each other.

They all help the other to exist.

And when we learn to live in the middle of this,

Then we're living in the Taoistic experience.

And also a tantric experience too.

Tantra says to always accept the negative also and you don't fight against it.

Instead of fighting,

You're accepting.

And that's not to be mistaken with indulgence.

Indulgence is not done with awareness.

In fact,

When a person like,

I get to say for instance,

They start drinking alcohol,

At first they're totally conscious and aware.

But as the alcohol gets into their bloodstream,

Then they become less aware and less aware.

And then they keep drinking more and more.

And they're not aware that the amount of alcohol they're taking in at that moment compounds itself on the alcohol that's already affecting them from early in the evening.

So that would be indulgence,

You could say.

But if you bring awareness into any negative emotion,

Then just become the watcher.

You use your energy to sit and watch this negative emotion like anger,

You could say,

Or anxiety,

Or stress,

Or depression.

By watching it,

You absorb the negative into your total being,

Into a total awareness of the present moment.

And this differs from other religions because like in Christianity or Judaism,

They're told to push it out of their minds,

To shove it into the background.

And what it does is it leaks into your subconscious mind.

And then you have dreams that night.

Many priests have had many dreams about gorgeous women always trying to seduce them in their dreams.

And what's happening is they're pushing things into their subconscious.

They're pushing things to the rear where they can't be seen,

Or felt,

Or heard.

But if you think of a spring,

And you compress a spring,

And you hold it tightly,

Compressed for a long period of time,

Of course you're going to get sore,

And your fingers are going to get sore,

And you have to let the spring go.

But if you watch what the spring does,

It goes from one extreme to the other extreme.

So if it's tightly compressed,

Then it goes to extremely loose.

And it's like riding a teeter-totter,

And you go from one extreme all the way to the other extreme,

And you stay on this teeter-totter ride for as long as you can handle it.

And this is the fighting that I'm talking about.

This is the energy that you just can't fight all the time.

You have to learn a better way,

And learn something that can really transform your life.

And I know I keep preaching Tantra,

Because Tantra was the straw that broke the camel's back for me.

I was already living at maybe 89%,

Maybe more than most people actually,

And I'm not dogging anybody out there at all,

But this is just the way I was living at the time.

I was always a spiritual type of person.

But I wasn't living to my full capacity.

I was living to about 89,

Maybe 90%.

And unfortunately in the spiritual world,

It takes a total commitment.

It takes a total dive into your awareness,

A dive into the present moment.

Like if you're playing sports or something,

Say you ride motorcycles or you ride motocross bicycles,

When you're on your course and you're in the zone and you're doing your thing,

You become so absorbed into the present moment that the mind almost stops thinking,

And your consciousness takes over.

And your consciousness will guide you and help you get through the race faster than your mind could.

But this only happens when you're 100% absorbed in the present moment.

And that's what they call Zen too.

Zen is basically action,

Performance,

And awareness combined.

But 89% just won't get it.

I mean,

It's beautiful to think that you're this spiritual person,

And you might be up there in the 89,

90,

99%.

But it's just like water that boils in Celsius.

And Celsius is 100 degrees,

And water starts boiling.

And Fahrenheit,

I think it's 242 or some high number like that,

The temperature before water will actually start to boil,

And then it turns into a gas.

Well that's exactly the same thing that happens in the spiritual world.

You dive into what you're doing,

Dive into your awareness of whatever you're doing.

And Tantra says that you can be doing this 24-7,

Because you're not exhausting yourself by fighting all the time.

By consciously paying attention to your awareness,

In a way you gather more energy.

You're like a bee that's collecting pollen from every flower.

And the more pollen you collect,

The more awareness you exude about yourself and practice,

Then the more energy you're going to have.

You'll find yourself vibrating much higher.

And this active meditation is very common in Zen practice.

But it's also a tantric way,

And just being loose and natural.

Loose and natural,

But aware,

And absorbing,

And growing from every experience,

Whether it's negative or positive.

I mean,

It's real easy to be not attached to the negative,

But to be not attached to the positive too is a little bit of a chore.

And that takes you into a higher level of being.

In this higher level of being,

You become basically not a happy individual or not a sad individual.

You transcend both of these things,

Because they're part of dualities,

But you become blissful in a sense.

You become in a blissful state of being.

And it's not something that you're doing or trying to be.

It's just what radiates from your soul when you transcend the lower energies into the higher energy.

And I mean,

If you think about it,

Life seems a little odd at times when you think that there are all these horrible things that happen to you in life.

All these bad instances,

These situations that come about,

Young people dying without cause,

Drug abuse,

Many,

Many horrible things happen in life.

But one might ask themselves,

Is God mad at me?

It's a funny thing in life,

And it doesn't make sense sometimes.

But in reality,

If your approach was a little different,

See,

In a broader sense,

You're basically trying to swim upstream against the current.

You're trying to fight.

This continual fight.

And unfortunately,

You just run out of energy.

You can't keep struggling all the time,

Always struggling to go upstream.

It's a fight.

And you will exhaust yourself.

You will become weak.

And then you'll wonder,

Are you giving in to sin or something?

If you're at this weak state of mind,

Because you cannot control every situation that comes your way in life.

But there is a better way.

There's a different way.

And I'm not condemning Western religions.

Western religions have a beauty of their own.

And one day we'll sit down and we'll talk about other religions and things I adore about them.

But this is a talk about Tantra.

This is a talk about learning to go with the currents in the river.

And I'm not saying give in to indulgence.

There's a big difference between indulgence with awareness and pure adulterated indulgence,

Where it becomes very healthy and a destructive part of your life.

But awareness,

When brought into everything you do,

Just changes the quality of what's going on in your life.

It changes the situation.

And then it seems like when you start to accept that,

Okay,

This is happening to me,

And how do I grow from it?

How does it affect my life?

And maybe this current situation is just to help me get to the next point,

Or the next time it happens.

Because it could reoccur.

It could come back and happen several times.

But if you bring awareness into it,

Then the next time it does come,

You'll know how to avoid it.

You'll know how to say,

Okay,

I've gone past this.

I've transcended that.

And now I've reached a higher level,

And I no longer have that desire affect me like it used to.

So you transcend things.

You transcend sex.

You transcend,

Say,

Something simple like cigarette smoking.

Even cigarette smoking can become a meditation if done right.

But all these things,

You have to transcend.

And once you transcend it,

Then basically you're able to put it behind you.

And it doesn't affect you.

And you lose no energy.

Because you're flowing with the river's currents.

And one day the river's currents will take you to the ocean.

And when that happens,

Then you melt and you merge and become one with the ocean.

But as long as you're fighting and trying to go upstream all the time,

Then it seems like the occurrence of blending with the ocean.

And when I call the ocean like this,

I mean in reference that it is basically God,

Or Godliness.

And this melting is like the essence of the saying that the drop becomes the ocean,

And the ocean becomes the drop.

And true celibacy happens when you go through something.

Not when you repress it.

Not when you push it under to the subconscious mind and tell yourself lies like that you're celibate and you're in control.

When what really happens is maybe on the surface you appear to be a celibate.

But deep down lurking in the underground caverns of your mind lurks what seems to be an evil presence,

But really all it is is what you've repressed in life.

Everything that you've pushed down and tried to tell yourself that you're the master and you're in control.

All those things might appear to be evil,

But in reality it's just your subconscious mind and it's a part of you.

But you created the split.

When you said that you're the master and you're in control,

Then this emotion that was bottled up inside of you and pushed into the background,

When it was pushed that way,

It will build up energy.

And it will keep building up energy.

And then a moment will come when you'll be weak and it'll spring to the forefront.

And who knows what could happen from that.

It could be disastrous in your life.

You might snap at your children.

You might snap at your wife when you didn't mean to.

Because you've pushed these things aside.

You let the boss talk to you in a certain way or you let a friend talk down to you.

And I know that's probably not very good of a friend to do,

But some people are just like energy vampires and they try to suck energy out of you.

And the way they do that is by belittling you or trying to make you feel less than human.

But if we look at these people,

Like Morhei Ueshiba would have done,

The founder of Aikido,

Basically he's like,

Whatever is inside of them does not have to be inside of you.

And Aikido even goes into a psychological sense in the fact that you don't have to let people's negative energy get absorbed by your being.

You can find ways of saying to your boss like,

Yeah,

I know it's a cruddy day and things are really going bad for us right now,

But this too will pass and we'll figure out together a way to get over this situation and move on to better times.

That's a total Aikido approach to how to deal with a situation,

But it's also a tantric method to not absorb and just blend with and go with the energy.

Just circle around it and just say,

Okay,

I am me and I'm not going to let this affect me this way.

And this centering you do when you do that gives you a new ground to stand from.

It gives you a being that becomes strong.

A lot of so-called spiritual people are not really centered in this way.

So the keynotes to take away from this talk are a couple things.

Of course,

One,

Practice awareness.

Two,

Don't fight the energy.

Blend with the energy.

Absorb it in a way that it doesn't affect you,

Where you keep your center and it's there,

The energy is there,

And you just go with the energy and you go with the flow.

Be aware while you're doing this,

While all this stuff is going on in your life,

Bad day at work or whatever,

Just be aware and be conscious.

That will change basically your whole outlook because that of a fighter changed to that of a,

I don't know,

Yes,

You could say a lover.

That's a good word for this case,

For tantrika,

For someone practicing tantric principles.

And don't be afraid of the word tantric.

The word tantric itself just means technique,

Applied technique.

So I hope you guys enjoyed this conversation.

Like I said,

Just remember,

If you can be total,

Totally present aware in the present moment and focusing your life as this awareness becomes your new center,

Then life has a new essence about it.

It has a new vitality.

And all those things that were going bad in your life will seem like stepping stones to help get you to the next level,

To raise more energy within yourself,

To learn to deal with life in a better way and not let people drain you of your energy.

So I recommend you spend your lives being loose and natural.

Go with the flow,

But be aware as you're going with the flow.

That's the difference.

That's the key difference.

That's the key ingredient that makes everything better and brings you to a new center and helps you gain energy instead of robbing you of your life force every day.

But this is it.

I hope you found this an entertaining and informative talk.

I'm mostly stoked to bring these things to you and talk about things that I love.

And that's the thing about me is I only share things that I've experienced myself.

I don't talk about things that I really don't know.

Things that are spiritual or reflective in life and how to make life better.

These things I can say,

Yeah,

I've experienced this and this and this and this and this and this and on and on to infinity.

And share those experiences with you and help you to grow from them and help you to learn life lessons.

Hopefully,

You don't have to learn them the hard way.

I mean,

You might be able to listen to what I say and go,

Okay,

Well,

Maybe this guy knew what he's talking about,

Or maybe he has some insight that might be able to help me out in my life.

And that's what it's all about.

I'm no greater of a human being than any of you.

I might be farther down the road.

I'm a little bit older.

I've gone through some things,

Things that happened to me and I didn't know why.

But when I look back at them,

I can almost say that it's not that these things happened and there was a purpose to them.

It happened and I learned from them.

There's a difference between that.

Because a lot of people say that for everything there is a purpose or we have a purpose in life.

And when in reality,

The only purpose we have in life is to learn and to grow from it.

Because life is a continual growing phenomenon.

But anyway,

I guess we should end it there.

Thank you again for listening to me and taking the time to absorb these words and hopefully you grow from them.

But anyway,

Namaste to all my spiritual friends and aloha to all my surfing buddies and chums and pals and much love to everybody else.

Anyway,

Take care of yourselves.

Bye bye.

I'll see you next time.