LOVING WORKS, DOING DOESN’T 

No moment is better than another

We are all over conditioned to do.  Something must be done, we must accomplish and finish, get it done, check it off, do, do, do.  If we aren’t doing we tend to feel purposeless.  Doing provides the meaning for our existence.  Each day we wake up and think about what we must do that day.  Our day revolves around our doing.  We do our morning workout, yoga or mediation, we eat our breakfast, we work, we run errands, we make dinner, we do our hobbies and then we “relax”.  So often we are trying to get to this place where we can just relax, but we have to finish all of our doing first.  This is the pretty typical day to day human existence, thinking there is somewhere to go, something to get and some place to arrive.

Doing is so close to us that we often don’t see that we are in a state of constant doing.  We might not even think to think that there is another way of living other than doing.  Pause for a moment and ask yourself what would happen if you stopped putting any focus at all on doing, accomplishing or getting things finished or done.  The most common answer is that nothing would get done.  However do you know this to be fact?  Have you ever stopped focusing on getting something done while engaged in doing and noticed what happens?  The experience tends to be what people call a flow state, which is one of the most desired states for many.  

Why do we get so trapped in doing?  The primary reason that I’ve discovered is that people tend to perceive that one moment or experience is better than another moment or experience.  It is easy to fall into flow and joy while hanging out with friends, being on vacation, playing your favorite sport or eating a decadent meal, but less easy to fall into flow while exercising, working or running errands.  These are aspects of experience that many try to get over and done.  When you stop trying to get an experience over than there is nothing left but to be in the experience that you are in.  

The judgment, preference or bias for one thing or experience over another thing or experience puts us into doing mode as we attempt to get where we more desire to be, which is frequently other than where we are.  Doing mode takes us out of presence and is mechanical in nature.  Mechanical because it is work that is disconnected from aliveness.  It takes effort and is hard.  Its focus is only on something physically shifting or changing and does everything from a physical perspective to shift a physical thing.  It gives the appearance of getting somewhere or something happening when there is no where to get and nothing to happen.  If you were to instantly realize that you can never get somewhere other than where you are and nothing can happen other than what is, you would see how preposterous all of the doing really is.   

FOCUS ON LOVING 

Work through giving & receiving

What if rather than focusing on doing, getting it done or accomplishing something, you instead focused on loving?  What if you stopped all the incessant brain activity and brought your awareness into your heart and just left it there?  How different would your life be?  How different would you feel?  How much more would you overflow with radiance and serve?  From my experience doing doesn’t really work.  Its tiring, its hard and oddly at the end of the day I don’t feel like I did anything except make myself really tired.  Maybe actions occurred that gave the appearance that stuff happened, but nothing really changed.  The only thing that occurred was movement from place to place to place or moment to moment to moment, and while movement happened there was nothing there doing the movement, no real conscious one home inside.  This is quite honestly the state of most of humanity.  It is not bad, it just asleep, disconnected, and not aware.  

If we are to live more awake then we must realize that we are in this perpetual doing mode and wake ourselves up out of it.  This requires being more attentive to self and to your patterns of doing.  Learning to refocus your focus from the linear projected course we all believe that we are on into the present moment heart.  The heart equally gives and receives.  It is through receiving that it gives and through giving that it receives.  This is how doing or work gets done.  Work by and through radiation and invitation.  Actions still occur when you are loving, it’s simply that you are not focused on the actions themselves or trying to make anything different.  Instead your focus is on loving and that is it.  Change effortlessly and instantly occurs.  This is because that natural state of love is recognized and seen by you and through you.  

The change that occurs through loving is an opening into more.  It is through opening into more that our perspectives widen.  How we see changes what we see, not because the actual object, person or thing changes, but because we see it differently.  This is how you begin to really get that trying to shift or change an object by physical means from a physical perspective is really hard and actually maybe even impossible.  Instead loving melts, molds, and reshapes everything into its original forgotten nature. 

Doing is an elementary step in the evolution of remembering what we are.  You realize at some point along the journey that the doing mode is optional.  The more you bring into focus loving and drop into your heart the more you increase your awareness of yourself and your energy becomes more coherent.  Magic occurs, and its not even really magic, its just the way it is when you live loving rather than doing, but it seems like magic to the ordinary mind.  As always please don’t just take my word for it.  Try it out.  Experiment.  Try only focusing on loving all day long no matter what actions you are engaged in or what experiences present themselves.  Stop trying to get anything done and just love and see how you experience life.  

Dr. Amanda Love, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado