What Is Ease?
Here is what Ease feels like to me:
My Mind – Quiet and focused, free of judgment
My Heart – Full of appreciation for What Is Here and Now
My Body – Vibrantly alive; aware of, but not tied to life’s ups and downs
My Spirit – Securely connected to All That Is
What Ease is not
Ease is not a life in which nothing difficult happens. It is the capacity to meet life without creating unnecessary struggle or manipulation.
Ease does not mean effortless. Every day I must tend to my inner and outer garden, following the path of least resistance to shape what’s already wanting to grow. My actions are intelligent, focused, and meaningful. I clean the house, not as someone doing chores, but almost as if I am caressing a lover’s body. Vivid feelings of appreciation for being alive make any task joyful. I also know when to rest.
Ease does not mean constantly happy. I still occasionally experience resentment, anxiety, and grief. But when I dare to fully embrace what hurts as it moves through me, my heart stretches to more fully experience peak emotions, too. When a floating butterfly causes my senses to quiver, I can now sustain those once-fleeting feelings of pure delight for the rest of the afternoon. The entire range of rich human emotions provides contrast for my steady state of contented ease.
Ease does not mean having all the answers. It means knowing where to look for them and daring to trust what I find. I have learned to intentionally slow my thoughts, so that higher guidance can slip into the spaces between them. I practice tuning into my body for the energetic signals that tell me whether to move toward a possibility or away from it.
Ease does not mean perfection. Ease is found through my simple acceptance of all that is still a work in progress. Which is everything — whether an overgrown patch in my backyard, old habits of judgment, or a struggling corner of my heart.
Play with these ideas and ways of being
What if you didn’t have to believe everything your mind tells you?
Thought is extraordinarily useful, but the unconscious stream of interpretation, judgment, prediction, projection, and worry isn’t reality. Once you can see thought as thought, you don’t have to live inside every story it generates. A tremendous amount of unnecessary suffering falls away.
What if life required far less management than you think?
There is a difference between taking intelligent action and attempting to control outcomes. You can plant the garden, make the phone call, prepare carefully, say what needs saying — and then relinquish what isn’t yours to manage. Go take a slow walk. Have a cup of tea. :)
What if there are ways of knowing that go beyond what you can explain?
The Way of Ease asks us to stay open to many sources of wisdom. This doesn’t require abandoning science, ignoring skepticism, or blindly pursuing every intuition. It means being willing to live with the possibility that rational analysis is one magnificent human instrument rather than the boundary of all that is possible. Intuition, bodily knowing, dreams, images, and synchronicities can participate in what we come to Know.
What if this moment is actually much more peaceful than your thoughts about it?
A remarkable amount of distress occurs in remembered pasts and imagined futures. Coming back to what is actually happening right now doesn’t magically remove real problems, but it often removes the second layer—the mental struggle surrounding them.
What if resisting what is happening causes more stress than the experience itself?
Pain, disappointment, uncertainty, aging, loss, other people’s choices—these are part of being alive. The additional demand we make that this should not be happening to me multiplies our suffering. We make our lives easier by simply accepting What Is and then deciding what, if anything, we want to do about it.
What if the people you love don’t need you to manage their lives?
You can love someone without managing their development, correcting their understanding, preventing their mistakes, or getting them to become who you wish they would become. Their life belongs to them. Paradoxically, relinquishing that responsibility can make love cleaner and relationships freer.
What if you could begin feeling better before anything about your circumstances changes?
Feeling good isn’t necessarily the reward at the end of getting everything arranged perfectly. Perfection has a way of never materializing. But in each moment, you can learn to focus and refocus on thoughts and feelings that offer relief from stress. In a relatively short time, you will replace mental and emotional habits that lead to dis-ease with habits that generate ease.