What if There's Nothing Wrong?

Balboa Press

Chapter One

Hi there. This book is a transmission to you, energetically encoded and written in a style to give you an experience, rather than a mind-to-mind, cognitive engagement of the mechanics of thinking, concluding, judging, categorizing and labeling as you go through the book. In fact, it's been written to help take you out of your mind. Your current mind, that is, and helps you step into something bigger within yourself so we can also step into something bigger as a society, collectively.

The reading of this book is a direct experience of what the ideas are suggesting.

This book is meant to connect to and ask questions of the higher part of you, beyond your everyday cognitive, "ego-mind." This discovery process has to happen experientially. Therefore, you have to go through it; it can't be delivered in quick bullet points. Otherwise, it becomes what it is intending to help dissipate.

The first pages of the first chapter will most likely not feel "right" to your mind. The wording will feel strange. Some of my preliminary readers who experienced this said they caught the rhythm around page forty. The ideas won't be directly delivered, but circular, almost in the obscure way a Master addresses her disciple, but always eventually delivering the teaching. Like a Chinese Chi Gong Master or a Zen Master with his koans. Frustrating at first. And this will cause reactions, judgment and conclusions as the mind acts in its predictable ways, wanting the meat to chew on-the conclusion. It will also possibly react to certain sections with impatience and frustration as your mind resists the information and the energy behind the ideas because it is in fact challenging this very part of your mind by working around it.

This is key to understand. Cultivate mental agility and flexibility; challenge that conformity to the mind's rigid demands for sound bites and quick delivery of tidbits of information. Get out of formulaic reading and thinking. Awaken even more, beyond your everyday thoughts and mind. Experience this book as if it is a workshop or retreat-or gym-in how to work with your mind. Indeed, that is exactly what this is.

As I tell my yoga and meditation students, and my clients who come to me for individualized meditation programs, you're meeting with resistance because you're just starting.

In meditation when we first sit down to observe our mind, it does not really react well at all. In fact, it tends to rebel. We notice more restlessness, more "monkey-mind" bounding from tree limb to tree limb, or thought-to-thought. Or conclusions about how there's no clear goal, or how we can't do this, or how we can't be this way, and off we go following the mind, quitting before anything in us beyond the mind has had time to be engaged.

There is a reason why you picked this book up. Trust that.

The more steadfastness you exert, the more you can stay right with what's being said in the line you're reading right at that moment. So you'll be more in present moment, where energy expands and presence occurs, making less room for the cognitive mind. There will then be less clinging to the mind's judgments. Following your thoughts and going off on one of your mind's habitual trains of thought will happen less this way, too. This is one of the intended outcomes of taking in this book. I have written this as a meditator of twenty one years, and a meditation and yoga teacher of fourteen years. You will feel this, eventually, under the words, if you don't right away. It will be re-working your cognitive mind's natural tendencies to be jumpy, easily distracted and busy with its concluding, labeling and judging, as if you were in fact meditating.

However, this is not a self-help book. Rather, it is a commentary on the state of our country, and the West in general, due to the obesity we have allowed the mind to become. However, in order to deliver this message, key aspects to how the mind became this way, and then other ways of being in our human minds with a lot more comfort, are presented.

So, the first part of the book is a clearing process. After a few years into my teaching career, I realized that I did this with my students during the first month of school-when I taught at the high school level. This was apparently not needed at the middle school level. The first part of the book, as you readjust, will most likely challenge your mind's demands to hurry up. Another key suggestion is that you engage the Observer in you. We each have this ability in us whether we're meditators or not. The Observer is on top of a boulder raised high above the little personality, "ego-mind" version of ourselves, looking down and simply observing itself make choices as it goes through life. Observe your impatience with wanting the point to be delivered immediately. Observe your desire for conclusions to be made so you can feel more comfortable being in the known rather than the question. Observe your mind's demand for a clear understanding right from the start. Practice the art of allowing. Allow the points being made to develop and unfold.

This is a transmission that is meant to be experienced. Reading this book will take you through a process of de-conditioning your mind from its feeling of being in control. The writing will softly, gradually, but very clearly put your mind in the back seat, while something Higher in your consciousness gradually begins to step forward and receive this book's content.

This book activates other parts of your human system, your intuitive inner knowing. This happens even though it goes in through your mind. The questions asked of you are connecting to something beyond the every day mind, asking this part of you to step more forward and interact with the ideas. It does not present issues or problems for the mind to chew on. It instead presents the way it has been in order to understand why it's the way it is now and gently asks you to consider seeing yourself, our society and our role on the planet in a different way now, here, in 2012 and beyond.

This different way is not from the mind. So, this book is not speaking to your mind. It's going at your heart, your wisdom and your Higher Self. The writing style is therefore not quick, sharp, demanding nor direct, as the mind is. It is instead, the same energy as where these ideas are meant to go to inside of you. And where it's meant to take each of you, and all of us. The hope here is to give you access to another energy, another way of being, another way of existing on this planet different than it has been.

So, that means a different way to deliver this message. I am loaning you a set of eyes from someone—me! —who was removed from our country two months prior to 9/11 and returning two years into Obama's administration. This country has changed. The content of the typical concerns, and the level of fear the average citizen seems to display, has changed. I can feel it so much so that within the first month back here I visualized an astronaut's helmet around my head. I did not want to absorb the general climate of thought as it has become here in the United States. It has apparently been a decade moving full throttle into fear. This has pulled at my heart, so much so that the labor behind this book increased in order to get this message out to more people. My workshops have increased and changed in their original intent and thus content, upon learning more and more what the everyday person here is worrying about....