Be, Do, Get: Getting Your Life to Flow

And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile, with a beautiful wife, and a beautiful house, and you may ask yourself, “How did I get here?”.

-The Talking Heads

We tend to live by this rule: Get, Do, Be. First we decide what we want to get. Then we figure out what to do to get it. Then after the doing and getting we should end up in some state of being. The state of being is truly our goal, such as happy, peaceful, or connected. Our big mistake is not realizing this, thinking the getting is our goal. The difficulty is that what state arises out of our getting and doing is rather unpredictable: if we Get, Do, Be, what we get may not be in alignment with who we are. It is hard to buy a present for someone you've never met. And this time, the recipient may be yourself.

If, on the other hand, you start from a place of being, then you have a better chance that where you end up is in alignment with your deepest sense of being. Let the doing arise out of the being, and then let the getting unfold from the doing, then whatever you get will be aligned with your need for a state of being. When you are moving⎯doing⎯opportunities open up along your path for getting. And here, getting is better called receiving. Because it is on your path that you created from the place of being, when you Be, Do, Get, what you get will be perfectly what you need, in alignment with your deepest desires.

So here is a prescription for aligning your life: start from a state of being (this is the hardest part, because you must let go of anything you hope to get). Make sure that this is not a state of doing, like “walking in the woods”: there, peacefulness may be the state of being. Then begin to envision a doing arising out of this state of being. You must then choose from all the possible things you can do. Choose the one that makes your heart the warmest. Then once you are doing, let the getting unfold. What you receive will be equal to, and in alignment with, the energy you pour into it from your state of being. See it all lining up: the Being, the Doing, the Receiving. See yourself as the headwaters for your life. Let your life pour down the mountain out of the joy in your being. This is flow.

Finally, at Peace

It has been a long road to this moment, captured by my photographer friend Marcy Mendelson. Finally, I can stop running: I am enough. Finally, I know that I matter. And when I completely matter, nothing matters---when I know the love that I am, nothing is at risk anymore. I have what I need. What a wonderful sense of freedom! There is nothing to do. Just sit and breathe and enjoy the sun and the air and the ocean and my warm skin and the hard rocks under me so solid and my heart beating and beating and beating and I am alive. It is intoxicating. And then a desire to do arises: to help. To help other people to understand. To help other people to understand the love that they are, that we all are.

The root of attachments: Attachments are not the cause but the result of our pain.

The root of all of our pain is not our attachments. Our attachments are a symptom of the root of our pain. The root of our pain is not knowing that we are love. When we don’t love ourselves, we attach ourselves to entities to create an illusion of being love. When we do not know that we are love, we ask everything around us to tell us that we are love. And then we have attached our hearts and our souls to something that has nothing to do with us, is on its own ride. This is a dangerous thing to do, because when it goes up, you go up, and when it goes down, you go down, and when it dies, you die too. So it may appear that the attachments are the cause of your pain, because it is such a poor way to manage your deeper pain of not feeling loveable. So don’t cut your attachments, for that is harsh, almost cruel to yourself. It is akin to yelling at a child who is crying to stop crying. The way out is to feel your attachments, fully embody your attachments, and see through to their roots. And begin to see the child who is crying down there on the other end of your attachments, and begin to love that child.