Appreciation Journal :11th Apr 2020

' You are living in a tremendously beautiful dream. But you have to be awake about it, then only a gratefulness arises. I call that gratefulness true religion. All you need is a deep gratitude towards existence. He need not believe in God or heaven & hell, just a simple phenomenon : a deep-felt gratitude that this existence would have been missing something without you; that this vast existence needed you...no one else. And your place was empty before, will be empty after you : it is irreplaceable. That gives a great contentment because Man's greatest need is to be needed & when you feel that the whole existence needs you or else you would not have been here!' :O

'Fear thoughts can be adaptive in terms of real danger, but they become maladaptive when they become a habit of our mind & the more we run them the more they become the inclination of our mind : so the habit of fear-thinking fuels difficult emotions & difficult emotions fuel more fear-thinking - it's circular. When we are living out stimulus-react looping, this unintegrated brain, we are believing something that is not true; we are living in a very confined reality of a separate & limited self, a reality that has us locked into a very small sense of who we are. We don't have to keep living in this looping but in order to wake up from it, in order to re-member/re-connect, we need to begin to activate the prefrontal cortex, we need to begin to call on mindfulness. To break the looping, begin the practice of waking up out of our thoughts( 'I am not my thoughts' ):

• Please don't believe your thoughts
• Please just pause & come back into presence
• Please remember love

The point of mindfulness meditation is not to get rid of thoughts but to just know they are there so that you don't mistake them for reality': TB