Being Online

Regardless of our personalities and personal histories, we all have within us a deeper essence that’s untouched by conditioning and circumstances. We could call this part of us ‘the light within’ or ‘the inner flame’ and it’s the source of our fundamental sense of inspiration, crackle, and aliveness. Some of my clients have called it their ‘twinkle’ – the spark of life inside them that appears as a twinkle in the eye on the outside.

This inner glow is made of pure Consciousness, but when we get caught up in the dream of thought, we get cut off from it. Most of us don’t notice this disconnection at first, except as a vague sense of something not being quite right. Work just isn’t as fulfilling as it once was, our partner isn’t quite as handsome or beautiful or loving as we thought they were, and don’t even get us started on what might be wrong with us…

Because we’ve been conditioned from birth to believe in the myth of an outside-in world, we assume the path back to well-being and joy and peace of mind must be through getting a better job or a better partner or working on becoming a better person. The irony is that the harder we work on changing ourselves in order to change the way we feel, the more distant we become from our true self, and the more important it seems to work on all those things, and the more lost we become.

So, regardless of what ‘problem’ we think we have, our only real problem is feeling cut off from our innate wisdom and well-being. And the moment we reconnect to that source energy, our problems stop being so problematic and we move into a new reality.

In my Learning How to Thrive retreats, I call this natural state of connection to the whole ‘being online.’ It’s the space of relative clarity and well-being where we have access to both our personal database of knowledge and the deeper wisdom of Mind.

When we’re online, we can be assured that whatever comes through us is likely to be of use. At these times, intuitions and insights flow through our mind like gigabytes through a data cable.

When we’re offline, feeling uncomfortable, stressed, pressured, scared, or just numb, we get caught up in trying to figure things out, work them through, or overwhelm them with our brilliance.

In simple terms, being online feels better – it’s that quieter, deeper feeling I’ve been pointing to throughout our time together. People describe it as clarity, contentment, happiness, ease, well-being, or even peace. In the quiet of that deeper feeling, we can easily hear the still small voice within. This is the way our mind is designed to work – as a clear channel to our higher wisdom.

Here’s an example of how a typical day in the life might play out from these two different levels of clarity:

You wake up in the morning feeling a little bit tired. Before you leave for work, your partner reminds you in no uncertain terms that you agreed to take the kids to practice and rehearsal after school, although you’re pretty sure that conversation never happened, and if it had, you would never have agreed to it in the first place.

As soon as you log on to your e-mail at work, you’re faced with three urgent messages about three critical projects, each saying that strategic decisions need to be made before the end of the day if not sooner.

A quick look at your calendar shows a completely full schedule and you realize that you would need to stay at work until nearly midnight to get everything done (and that doesn’t include leaving in the middle of the afternoon to drive your kids around).

How are you going to handle it?

If you act unchecked in an ‘offline’ state of mind, you’re likely to turn each one of your daily dramas into a crisis. You and your partner will be at each other’s throats over the children and you’ll each be wondering how the other can be so inconsiderate. Each of your work colleagues will become the villain as you try to play the hero, working all the hours God sends to save the day whilst simultaneously bemoaning the fact that you’re surrounded by incompetents.

Now imagine being online and living through the exact same day. You recognize that your partner’s having a bad day and the impact their ‘offline’ state of mind is having on their communication. Their tone of voice and rolled eyes have become non-issues by the time you get to work, and you make a mental note to call them later to check in on how they’re doing.

You look past the urgency in your colleagues’ e-mails and see which projects really need to be acted on immediately and which will keep until the next day or even later.

Rather than try to force a decision if you don’t know what to do about the kids, you put that one on the back burner, trusting that the incredible resource of innate wisdom will provide you with an answer by the time you actually need one.

And you recognize that all you can do for now is all you can do for now and don’t put additional pressure or stress on yourself to play the hero and save the day.

When we’re online, we see that any situation can be handled through a combination of common sense and insightful action. Any changes to be made become obvious, and while not always easy, remarkably straightforward. Life stops seeming so overwhelming, and the world stops seeming like a problem to be solved.

So how do we do it? How do we go online?

As with so many of the things we’ve been discussing, there’s nothing to do:

Being ‘online’ is our natural state.

We don’t need to worry about learning or practicing techniques to get or stay there, because the moment our mind clears, even if it’s only for a moment, we automatically return to our factory default.

Understanding that we’ll always get back online when our thinking slows down takes the pressure off – it’s not up to us to manage our state. This allows us to take advantage of our state of mind when it’s high, stay in the game when it’s low, and not waste much mental or physical energy trying to change, control, or ‘fix’ it in between times.

Meanwhile, we’ll do less damage in the world. In my experience, this is one of the most beneficial and least considered implications of the inside-out understanding – recognizing the role of Thought in creating experience makes us less inclined to run amok when we’ve gone offline. Instead of blaming our job, our partner, our kids, or the universe in general for our problems, we recognize that but for our thinking, we’d be having a completely different perception and experience of our situation. Consequently, there’s nothing to be done other than the basics of what needs doing.

"Ross and I feel immense gratitude and appreciation for the time we spent with you. It was a true oasis of peace, transformation and joy. You lovingly created a space to explore � and showed me how magic can be created without magic tricks.Just awareness and understanding � in the company of a delightful group of people, and absolutely beautiful surroundings. Thank you!"

- Kimberley Hare

"The unequivocal highlight was meeting and spending time with all of the people on the retreat. Learning How to Thrive was a life changing experience and I am so grateful to have taken the journey with such remarkable human beings."

- Susan Ferino