Transcription
A life of ease. We really want to invite you to see that this is much simpler than you think. That there is a power inside of you that’s been there all along. It might be covered, but it’s always been here.
Now, when I was growing up, I really wanted life to be easy. I would read any book you told me to read. I would eat any kind of diet that could make my life easier. I would have gone to any seminar that you can imagine. All for the same reason, to have an easier life, to have peace of mind.
I bet many of you have felt the same way. That we are told that if you have enough money in your bank account, life is going to be a lot easier for you. Or if you get the right partner, that’s that’s the ticket. If you live in the right place, in the right house, have the right circumstances, then life is easy. And so probably like many of you, I grew up believing that to be true, and I tried a lot of different things.
Yet in my mid-30s, even though I was very successful as a business consultant, I was living in the right part of Denmark according to the statistics. I was I was in a relationship. I was there was a lot of things that were working for me. I even owned a sushi restaurant and I love sushi. But I was not happy. In fact, I felt quite depressed. And on the outside, it it looked like I had success. But I was unhappy inside.
And then when I was 42 years old, I met a person who tells me about the three principles, and I’m like, “What? Never heard about it. Can’t be any good.” But I was curious. I really liked this woman, and and uh she was telling me about it, and we we went to a Michael Neill training together, and I was very curious what was going on here before my eyes that seemed so easy yet I couldn’t really see what was going on. And that curiosity led me on this path to realize more and more that what I’ve been looking for all my life is right inside. I didn’t know it. I might have intuited it, but I really didn’t know it. And I have a sense that that’s true for many people. That we in a way are seduced into believing that there’s something out there that can make us happy, that can give us peace of mind, an easier life.
So what this journey is about for me and and also this journey of writing our book together, “Life of Ease,” is really in a very plain language, let everyone know that this really is quite simple; that we don’t have to do a lot of fancy techniques. There’s no methods, nothing to remember, but there’s something that we keep overlooking because it’s inside of us.
Now, we may stumble upon this from time to time, and when we spontaneously land and it’s like, “Oh, wow.” Well, it’s because it’s a beautiful day. It’s because it’s it’s you know it’s spring and things are blooming. The birds are singing. We keep equating our sense of well-being with something on the outside because it looks that way, doesn’t it? I can hear the birds right now outside my window. So, it’s easy to think that there’s something on the outside that creates my inside. We have it on on on the other way around.
And then when we start to realize, oh, there’s something inside here that is always present. There’s something inside that is an incredible power. Life starts to become easier. Not because anything in the outside circumstances change, but because I start looking within rather than without. I start realizing that I’m part of a larger whole. I’m part of an intelligence beyond this tiny little intelligence in my in my own little personal mind, and all the things that I needed to run towards and work very hard to get and control and predict, all that working very hard, running very fast, I start to realize that I don’t have to do that; that there’s something guiding us constantly.
It’s easy to see in nature. We see the birds flying away in the wintertime, coming back around. Now we see all the things that are coming out of the ground. It’s easy to see in nature, but it’s as if we people have overlooked that we are part of the same nature. We work in exactly the same way. It’s the same intelligence that’s living us that’s living in nature. We overlook it. And because we overlook it, we think that we are the ones in control. We think that we must be; if I let go of the wheel, nothing will happen. My life will go to hell. So, we’re running fast. We’re using our intellect to try and control things, to try to get things to happen. And we miss the sense that we can align ourselves with of life itself. Life itself moves us, guides us, always has, always will. And when we allow ourselves to align with that life, something incredible happens. It’s it feels like a miracle. Things that seem difficult fall away. Paths that we never thought about appear to us.
I was reflecting the other day on how the intellect is such a great machine. It It can really help with a lot of things. And I’ve been trying to figure out some things lately. I’ve been trying to use my intellect to find the solutions. The thing about the intellect is that it always uses like it’s I I sometimes think of it as a little black box, and in that little black box is is all the things that I know, and when I have an issue I try to solve that issue with my intellect. So here’s a problem. Here comes the intellect to try and solve it. But what I see more and more is that we have this wisdom. We’re connected to the wisdom of the entire Sorry, I hadn’t switched that off. We’re connected to this incredible I’m sorry intelligence, this wider picture that doesn’t only look at the certain problem that that that the insect is trying to solve, but looks at everything all at once. So, it’s able to see that this person needs to be be involved in this kind of problem, and this it it sees the whole thing. I sometimes think of it as like we’re looking through a a little keyhole, and all I can see is what I can see through my keyhole. But there’s a wisdom, there’s an intelligence that that sees everything. So very often when I’ve been fighting and trying to figure out solutions to things, I I may be able to find something that has worked before. But when I leave it over to this guiding wisdom, something new comes in, a completely fresh idea that I hadn’t thought about. Something occurs to me. Oh, you could call this person, or oh, why didn’t I think about that before? It it’s easy. It comes with ease.
So something very powerful happens when we start to really see that we are part of this intelligence behind all of life, that we are life itself, like a wave in the ocean is still ocean. We might have different sizes and shapes, but we are all made of the same. And that’s one of the beautiful things about the principles is that it points to what we are on a deeper level, what we all connected to, what we all are part of. And you can sense even probably right now if you go within for a moment, a sense of life. It might be easy for you to connect with. It might be more difficult, but there’s something that’s alive in you right now. Even if you ask yourself a question, “Am I alive?” You have to check, don’t you? Well, yes. Are you aware? Yeah, I’m aware. Do you think? Yep, I think. The three principles are that thought, consciousness, and mind, and we live them. We are the principles in action.
So when we start to see the bigger picture, when we start to see who we are behind the surface level, what we are beneath the surface level, then something amazing happens. We start to be much more sensitive to the guiding that’s happening all the time. We start to sense the small nudges that’s taking us in in different directions. And that’s what creates this sense of ease. It’s not that the circumstances change. I still have lots of different challenges in my life, but the way I deal with them have changed completely because I trust that there is this guiding force behind everything and within me. This incredible power right here, right now, in every single one of us, available at all times, under all circumstances. Isn’t that great news? It’s right here, right now. That was what I was inspired to start with today.
It sure was good news to me, Natasha. Great news. I had no idea how much my thinking burdened me, weighed on me, weighed me down, made me anxious, made me depressed, made me upset. You can see people. You just walk down the street. I remember walking down the street in Dublin. You could see people that were unburdened. You could hear the music coming out of them. It’s really easy. And then you’d see other people very serious, tense. I want to share with you what I’ve learned about be how easy it is to become unburdened and to live more like we lived when we were little children.
Many of you have heard me talk many, many times about how much I learned just watching people who are unburdened, of any age. I love watching my grandkids just all day long because they’re unburdened. They’re light-hearted. They dance, they sing, they run, they play, they jump, they laugh, they laugh. I thought as you became an adult, you had to become very responsible for everything in your life, which in my case meant thinking about everything that I felt like I was responsible for. So as I became older, I did more and more and more thinking so that it was harder and harder for me to be fully present. Isn’t that something? The more education I got, the older I got, the more serious I got, the less playful I became, the more anxious I became, the more stressed I became. And I assumed, well, that’s just part of being an adult. So I studied everything I could to learn how to be have more well-being, and I worked and I worked and I worked and I worked on having well-being. It seemed elusive because no matter how much I worked, I still had so much anxiety. And I did not like my anxiety. When I felt that, I went, “Oh god, I hate feeling this way.” I didn’t like how I was when I was all stressed. I didn’t like what kind of parent I was. I didn’t like what kind of husband I was. I had no idea that the only thing that kept me from being like that little the little 5-year-old teachers that I have, the only thing keeping me from being light-hearted and playful and enjoying life was a misunderstanding. And working on myself didn’t clear up that misunderstanding. I thought if you if you were anxious and stressed, you had to work really hard and use a lot of techniques in order to become unstressed, unburdened, happier. It’s the opposite. You just have to understand how this works. It doesn’t require work. Our freedom, our well-being is always inside of us, perfectly developed and and it can’t be damaged cuz it’s spiritual. It’s formless. It’s energy. It’s life energy. It’s our true nature, our true self.
I had been a psychologist for 10 years, and I had not heard a single person say, “Dickan, you have perfect well-being inside all the time.” All the time. And the only thing that ever covers that up is you leave the present moment and you start thinking about things that create tension, stress, or upset. That’s the only psychological problem you have. You do a lot of thinking that creates tension, stress, or upset, and you don’t realize it. You don’t know that that’s the problem. Cuz when I felt anxious and stressed, you know what I did? What most people do? I thought it was the amount of work I had. I thought it was situations were stressful. I thought certain people were stressful. I had no clue that 100% of my stress was created when I leave the present moment and think about things in a way that generates tension, and that if I realize that it brings me back to the present moment, there’s nothing wrong with those feelings. It’s just a misunderstanding when we think our stress has to do with something other than our thinking. No one had told me that. I’d been a psychologist 10 years. No one said there’s only one psychological problem. You hold on to thoughts that create stress. People hate being chronically stressed, hate being serious all the time. It doesn’t feel good. We don’t like feeling burdened. We don’t like being confused. We don’t like being anxious. We don’t like being depressed. Well, the answer I thought might be on the outside. So, I tried all different things on the outside. Money, food, sex, drugs, rock and roll. The long list. Maybe this will make me happy. Relationships. Just a misunderstanding.
Sydney Banks was the first person that I had ever met that that had gone completely beyond his intellect into a space that’s available to every single one of us. And he was insistent about that his whole life. You have this space inside of you. But you can’t think your way into it. No one can. It’s impossible. I’ve tried. Isn’t it interesting? Most adults when they’re feeling stress of any kind of any kind, tension in your body, stress, they do more thinking because they have a misunderstanding that it’s impossible to think your way to well-being. You can’t think your way to the present moment, which is the only place we can experience well-being. You can’t think your way to answers to problems. I tried. I see people around me trying. I see people like me as they get older doing more and more and more thinking. I’ve worked in some of the top countries in the United States. One problem. People overthink everything, and they get closed off to life, closed off to the feelings that lift us, closed off to new and fresh thinking, closed off to our relationships innocently.
When Sydney Banks said to me, “Dickan, you’re no different than anybody else. You have perfect well-being inside,” I cried. Cuz he said it from such a deep knowing that I knew he knew something that I didn’t know. And it rung it rang true to me. I was talking to a group of people from Sweden the other day, and I just shared some things that clear up this misunderstanding, and people just started crying or they got goosebumps, one or the other. They people got goosebumps or cried. When people hear something that’s true, it resonates not in your intellect, just a a knowing of its truth. We are connected to an infinite field of energy. And that energy is what’s living us and running us. It’s like you have a computer, but it’s not plugged into electricity. You wouldn’t call it a computer cuz it couldn’t compute. It couldn’t live. If you tried to take the energy out of a human being, they would be dead in an instant. You couldn’t think. You couldn’t be aware. You you you you wouldn’t feel alive because energy is what makes us feel alive. And Sydney Banks discovered that that energy is full of intelligence, wisdom that will solve any problem you have easily, that will guide you through any difficulty, is the intelligence that knows how to create the universe. Intelligence. My little pea brain computer can’t compete with the intelligence of the universe. What a gift that we’re connected to that intelligence. No one is wiser than you. You have the same act. You’re part of the same field of intelligent life energy as anybody else. We’re all waves on the same ocean. No one can say “I’m ocean and you’re not.” It doesn’t even matter if you’re a little wave. When it comes to ocean, we’re all the same. You can stop trying to be somebody else or somebody different or somebody better. You already are this perfect unity with nature, with life.
And then Sid Banks realized that that infinite field of life energy is conscious. It’s aware. It’s alive. It it everything that is created is born of consciousness, made of consciousness. So consciousness is such a gift. It allows me to see you. It allows my senses to come alive. Allows me to see you, hear you, feel you, taste you, touch you. What a gift. If we weren’t connected to this energy of life, we wouldn’t have any awareness of anything. We’d have no senses. Isn’t it interesting that when we’re caught up in our thinking and stressing out, people say, “You’ve got to come to your senses.” Isn’t that interesting? You got to come to your senses. And then Sid Banks realized that that intelligence is full of creative potential, full of the possibility of new and fresh thoughts and ideas that are created fresh in the moment, knowing to that creative potential. And then he went on to say, “Your true self is creative potential, awakeness, aliveness, and wisdom.” And that when we drop into that quiet within us, we experience those things free, we get a glimpse of enlightenment. And Sid says there’s only one problem. We get caught up in thought and hold on to it. You can’t drop into your heart, into your soul, into your life energy while you’re caught up and blocking life energy from flowing through you.
Okay. So, there there’s some hints, and I just have three hints for you today. I love Sid would give us hints all the time cuz we were pretty wedded to our own beliefs and ideas, wedded to a misunderstanding that we had grown up with. My first hint, you’re going to experience stress cuz there’s times when you’re going to get caught up in your thinking. I can see you. You can’t hide. You can’t hide. We all at times get caught up in our thinking, and it starts creating stress. It’s the only place stress can come from, being caught up in our own thinking, not being fully present. Cuz when you’re fully present, you can’t hold on to a single thought if you’re fully present. Thoughts are just flowing through you, but you’re not paying attention to them. You’re not holding any of them, and you’re not believing any of them to be true. You’re free. So you are a free thinker. It’s built into you to be a free thinker. But in order to be a free thinker, we can’t hold on to thought and experience freedom, psychological freedom. So first hint, you’re going to experience stress. But my the hint is let stress be your friend. It’s a good thing. It’s really a good thing if you understand it because it’s like an alarm clock going off trying to wake you up out of the thinking you’re holding on to so that you can be fully present to your kids, to your wife, to life, to problems, to situations. Wake up. So, we have a built-in alarm system. Thank God. What a beautiful thing. Oh my god, it’s so beautiful that that happens. I used to hate my stress, and I thought I just have to get rid of it. Now I go, “Thank you for reminding me that I’m connected to an intelligent, wise, loving, creative life energy.” And you’re inviting me back to the present moment so that I can experience life fully. Being fully open and receptive to what? To love, to wisdom, the beauty. When our senses wake up, we experience beauty. Sid says if you really see that stress is thought, there’s no technique, it’ll bring you back to the now. If you put your hand on a hot stove, you don’t use a technique. No one has asked me for a technique. “How do I get my hand off the stove?” You do this. If you really see holding thought is burning you, burdening you, weighing you down, stressing you. Boom. Why would I hold on to anything that makes me feel not only stressed but cut off from my love and wisdom temporarily? Okay, that’s the first. Let stress be your friend. It can wake you up to the now. It’ll help you become like a kid again faster than anything you know. It’ll help you become just like you were when you were 5 years old, resilient. In other words, you get upset, but you don’t think about it. You don’t hold on to it. You come back to the present moment, and before you know it, it’s you’re it’s gone. They say even at the worst, six minutes. Hey, can you can you manage that? Six minutes of worry instead of an hour. Six minutes of stress instead of a life of stress. Six minutes of being down instead of a life of depression. I’ve seen miracles happen. People have spent their whole life in anxiety and stress beginning to understand the nature of how the mind works, of how thought creates stress, no other source. And that beyond our thinking, there’s this quiet space within us. It’s always there. Roomie called it that space inside of us that’s quiet and full of love and wisdom. He called it the tavern. And you go there to meet your friends and hear music and and and get intoxicated on spirit. That’s called being really happy. Intoxicated in spirit. Well, I’ve been to a few Irish pubs, and it’s a great metaphor for what lies inside of us. Oh, some of the best music I’ve heard my life. I’m drinking a pint of Guinness and this…
A little 16-year-old girl comes up with her flute and sits next to my wife and I. And I say, "Are you going to play?" and she goes, "Yeah, they've invited me to play with them." All the all the best local musicians invited her to play. And after a while, she joined them. Oh my god, was was it beautiful. You have music inside of you called joy, happiness, aliveness.
So my second hint is that anytime you are really resting in the now, your thoughts will flow. You'll get over your upset. To be fully in the now, there is no holding of thought in the now. As soon as you give your attention to your thinking and start thinking, you've left the present moment. So this is what I told my daughter. When you're fully present and your mind quiets down, you will always fill up with beautiful feeling. She started learning that when she was 14. She's 50 now. She is like a kid. Sure, she has her down times. We all do. We all get caught up. It's not a problem because stress is your friend in the now. You fill up with feelings of well-being, peace, joy, love, contentment, compassion, caring, courage, strength. It's built into us. Sid used to say, you have beautiful feelings inside of yourself. You just have to find them. More accurately, you just have to get out of the way so they can shine through you.
Third hint. When you wake up to the now and are not holding but are open and receptive, you'll start to fill up with a nicer feeling. And when you when your mind is quiet and your bird is full of feeling, that feeling is full of wisdom. It's full of knowing and it will guide you. In other words, you'll have I used to the way I told that to my daughter when she was learning this. I said, "When you're quiet, you're going to feel better and you're going to have all the common sense you need to do well in life." So I told my daughter, "Simple as one, two, three. Stress is your friend to wake you up out of your thinking. Rest in the now and you'll fill with feelings of well-being. And when that happens, trust trust your own common sense. Trust what feels right, what makes sense, and just let that intelligence live you. It's doing it anyways. It's doing it all the time. It's always when you we when this is over, you'll stand up and you walk out of the room. You won't be using your intellect to tell your legs how to move so you don't bump into things. That's wisdom. You drive a car, you're not going to be trying to figure out with your intellect how far to move the steering wheel every second. That's wisdom guiding you. If you're in a family crisis and you're getting stressed out and you realize it and you wake up to the now, that stress will start to open up and there'll be just enough relief, just enough well-being to start shining through and you'll have all the guidance you need. You won't make a mess of things. You'll say the right things. You won't even have to think about it. That's how it Sid said. Wisdom is a formless intelligence. It's it's the intelligence that's there before you process it with the intellect. It's our natural response to life. Our natural movement through life is that wisdom.
So, we're going to go Nadash and I are going to go into this with more stories, more practical, more how extraordinarily it easier life becomes when you clear up the misunderstandings about where your experience comes from and your capacity for well-being. Honest to God, it's just it's going to be fun. It'll be interactive. It'll be plenty of time for us to hear what you're seeing that's coming alive and to answer any questions you might have. That's what came to me 10 minutes before we came on the came on the talk. I had told Natasha I've been thinking about this for a few days and had all these ideas and well this is this is what came up just before we came on this hints I had even planned on doing that but it came out that way quiet mind new and fresh comes in the music isn't this great news folks that this a misunderstanding that most of us have lived with that our intellect is seeing life in such a small way compared to who and what we really are. It's a misunderstanding. And once we realize that it's not the way we thought it was, we immediately have access to so much more creativity, inspiration, motivation. It's immediate. I bet any one of you who've come in touch with the three principles either if it's just recently or this is brand new to you or you've been in the understanding for a few years something has touched you something has awakened something in you because it's true. Isn't it great news that we're not saying, you know, go out from here and remember these 10 things or do these exercises or you have to master these techniques. We're saying the opposite. We're saying that you already built to have a life of ease. You just didn't. Nobody told you. No one told you that you already have everything you need inside.
So, this is the best news ever. To me, it is. And that's why I'm continuously excited about sharing this to as many people I can possibly get in touch with as is Deacon. Some of the work we do together is to reach all parts of the globe. It's so great to see people from so many places here, Africa and United States and Europe, lots of different places. It's wonderful that this understanding is reaching so many places that Sydney Banks hopeful message is coming out to so many. Isn't it wonderful to finally see something that is easier than anything you've ever done? It sure was to me. And so a life of ease is really an invitation to look within. See what and and who you really are. See that you're not the limiting beliefs that you might have grown up believing either because your family said you were this or that or you just started to believe it. You're something so much more. And the more you realize that, the more you see it, the more all the labels fall away all by themselves. Things you used to believe about yourself fall away. I sometimes like the image of of thinking of having Post-it notes all, you know, covered in Post-it notes throughout my life, like I am I am a girl or I am uh good at math or I'm great at table tennis or I'm bad at blah blah blah. No, all these labels and just more and more as I grow into maturity here, they fall off. And I just am. We all just are. And it's so freeing not trying to live up to all the labels that I thought I was, all the labels that others wanted me to be. There's something incredibly freeing in letting the labels go. And you know, yellow stickers, they don't stick very well, do they? They can fall off pretty easily when you see that you are so much more than your body, than your thoughts, than your beliefs, than your capabilities. Sure, you you include all of those, but you transcend them, too. You're much more than that. You are the universe in action. So this is wonderful news and we love sharing this with people and in our new book we're trying to reach an audience that goes outside of the three principles community which our first book um very much was written towards. This is really for for new people. We're trying to say this as plainly as we can so that more and more people can realize this misunderstanding and start living with more peace of mind and an easier life.