Dear friends:: Here are a few things to keep in mind from our first seminar.
 
GIVE YOURSELF A GIFT:

give yourself some time at the beginning or end of the day to be with yourself.  Walk in nature, or listen to some music that takes you to the edge of the stillness.
 
GET TOGETHER WITH SOME FRIENDS THIS MONTH AND MEDITATE AND SHARE REMEMBERING.
 
Take some time to look into mind.  Listen within to stillness.  Practice in order to hear more deeply.  Know the mind by which you know the world.  Read something that come from the stillness: keep it in mind and let it sink in.
 
Being yourself starts by being WITH yourself.  It starts with being aware of your state of mind.  Bring your attention back to yourself.  Knowing yourself is being yourself.  You can only know yourself by being.

Be aware of awareness is a helpful pointer.  Another is: ask who is looking?  Another is: be aware of the space in which thhe words, thoughts, feelings arise.  Listen for the space, the space of stillness.  
 
There is the questions: what am I?  This I am not, I know that. But what am I?
OR: who is looking?
Or simply affirming: I-Am…    remember who you are .  remember THAT you are.
 
Before Annelie was, I Am.  Put your own name in for Annelie. Before is not in time or a sequence. It means always and already, before in principle.  Use the dream analogy.  The person in the dream is not the dreamer mind.  Who wakes you up?
 
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REMEMBER WHO YOU ARE: many short moments of remembering: stop, breathe, remember who and what you are.

   1. Remember to remember.
   2. Stop doing: breathe and be with yourself.  Just be.
   3. Remember what you are

When you give attention to the other dimension, you invite it more into your life..   invite doesn’t mean you send out a letter.  You live your life in a way that allows the divine to make itself felt to you.  You live in a way that allows you to RECOGNIZE who you are, what you are.  That undercurrent of awareness, is you.  That other dimension, the black hole in back of everything, from which everything arises, is you.
 
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PARADOX: Act as if your life depended on it, and remember you are always safe

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LOVE ASKS FOR NOTHING.  Love allows everything to be as it is.  Love accepts its identity with everything. Being in love means no sense of separateness.  To fall into love is to fall into yourself.

Love, Joy, compassion and peace are called in Buddhism the “four immeasurables.”
 
If you don’t feel love, or aren’t with a lover: then it is time to love with yourself.  It is time to be with yourself to give yourself love.  Loving kindness: Change the current from taking love to giving love.

A STORY: Rumi knocks on the door of the beloved.  “Who is there?” asks a voice inside.  “It is me, Rumi.”  The voice says: “go away.”  Rumi goes away, he prays and meditates for a year.  He comes back.  “Who is there” asks the beloved.  “It is you,” says Rumi.  The voice says: “Come in beloved,”.

 
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GRATEFULNESS.  Whether the contents of life are good or bad, the ego doesn’t really know.  You already have the greatest gift there is: Life, Is-ness, awareness.  You Are.  This is gratefulness. Imagine if you “weren’t”?  Nothing else would matter.  Yet, we take for granted the most essential feature, and think everything else matters so much.  Breathe in YES.  Breathe out THANK YOU.

 
SELF-RESPONSIBILITY is the way to freedom: the ability to respond. There is no other way out of the mess you have created yourself, but through cleaning it up.  don’t blame society.  Don’t blame god.  But don’t blame yourself either.  You did it out of ignorance?  OK.  So now learn.  Do it differently.  Learn how to learn.  Review the day.  Be mindful.
 
The way BEYOND what is, is THROUGH what is.  Anger arises.  You react to it, or you deny it.  The reaction causes much suffering.  Denying it causes suffering.  It is more honest to start with what is actually arising in the mind: even if it is anger, fear, jealousy—than to be dishonest and say “I am not angry.”  Once you start where you are, once you are aware of where you are, then you can engage what is there.  And once you stop fighting the contents of the mind, you can begin to be aware of the nature of the mind itself.  Real courage is not in the outer war, but the battle for freedom: to confront your ego.

Experience you resist becomes memory and habits.  Living life completely is not rejecting or resisting or clinging.  It is living cleanly and completely in the present, with what is. Life needs your attention, fire, to turn to compost and distill the essence.

IDEAL IMAGES. Whenever you feel frustration, anger, resistance, you can be sure that you are working with an “ideal image” of what is, which does not fit with what is.  Isn’t it strange, then when our image does not fit what is, we go with the image, not what Is?  When you resist what is, you will suffer.

PARADOX: when you accept what is, then you can change.  When you resist what is, it persists.

PARADOX: when you take full responsibility for your states of mind you realize that they are not yours anyway.

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An obstacle is not a wall but a state of mind.  Our “dimension” metaphor shows that contents or circumstances may be obstacles only when we think of them as obstacles, and think of ourselves as limited, or ignore our other dimension.  When you take obstacles as real, and feel you must be free of them, you are giving them a reality and power they don’t really have: and you give the ego something to do, a sense of self-importance: “I am on a quest.”

TWO PARAS
Think of yourself as the individual and you are sure to die; think of yourself as the universal and you enter deathlessness, for the universal is always and eternally there. We know no beginning and no ending to the cosmic process. Its being IS: we can say no more. Be that rather than this--that which is as infinite and homeless as space, that which is timeless and unbroken. Take the whole of life as your own being. Do not divorce, do not separate yourself from it. It is the hardest of tasks for it demands that we see our own relative insignificance amid this infinite and vast process. The change that is needed is entirely a mental one. Change your outlook and with it "heaven will be added unto you."  Notebooks 21:5.95)

Don’t let the mind take itself too seriously.  Put on Krishna Das Sita Ram and Dance.

Finally, a follow-up para to a practice from Gothenberg:

…Discussion with one of these (black-belt karate) adepts brought out some common ground between the practice of karate and the practice of contemplation. One of the principal feats necessary to achieve the Black Belt grade is to cut through one or even two bricks with a single blow of the outside edge of the hand. If the karate pupil concentrates on the brick itself, he will never succeed in breaking through it. He must instead concentrate on the ground beneath the brick, thus admitting no thought of doubt, fear, or hesitation as to whether or not he can cut the brick. In fact, during the moment before striking the brick, he must suspend all thinking. And if any such negative thoughts do enter his mind, he must then abandon the attempt altogether for that period. The emphasis is laid on immediacy, on direct penetration unobstructed by thoughts of any kind. The meditator whose mind is centered on his own working of the meditation technique is like the karate pupil who fixes his mind on the brick. This is a mistake. But the meditator who fixes his mind on the Overself is like the pupil who concentrates his thought on the ground below the brick itself, and this is what leads to success. Obviously, such advice is not suited to the early or elementary stages of meditation where concentration is required. On the contrary, it belongs to the more advanced stage where success comes not from trying but from letting go, relaxing.   Notebooks 23:7.33