How to Connect with Yourself

Preface · People Often Lack a Connection with Themselves

1. Their intuition is in disarray, so they cannot rely on it. They have to rely on thought, but their thoughts are even more disordered. Their intuition becomes even more painful.
2. They feel nothing (a lack of connection) and have no interest in anything (a lack of mental energy). Depleted and dried up. The opposite of connection is dissociation.
   The direction to move toward: feeling, interest, meaning, direction, unconditional confidence, freedom, and ease. Fullness, abundant mental energy.
   Taking good care of yourself is key. Gathering your energy inward + connecting with yourself.

I. Connect with Your Body
Let exercise and other healthy habits arise naturally. As discussed in the earlier essay “My Experience with Exercise: It’s Not How Much You Have to Exercise, but How Much You Want to Exercise”: running into the wind is a human instinct. People have innate wholeness; the body naturally wants to move, and the heart naturally yearns for truth, goodness, beauty, and light. Just look at children: running wildly, chasing and roughhousing, shouting at the top of their lungs, playing ball until dark. This is human nature.
Connect with your feelings and listen to your body (for example, tension, stiffness, fatigue, joy, and exhilaration).

II. Connect with the Deeper Mind / Libido
Libido is a person’s mental energy, unconscious, and deeper mind. It is a mixture of karmic obstructions + true nature.
For a detailed discussion, see the earlier libido series, including “My Structure: The Real Me Accompanies the Libido.”

III. Connect with Your Dark Side
The dark side is the side of ourselves that we fear, reject, fight against, evade, and put off facing. It includes the inner ego, emotions, trauma, defenses, attachments, and karmic obstructions. (See the earlier “Special Series on Karmic Obstructions.”)
For details, see “How to Embrace Your Dark Side.”

IV. Connect with Your True Nature
Record your true nature: keep a diary of instances when the light of your true nature (deep wisdom) shines through.
Connect with mindfulness: when you feel peaceful, happy, and full of energy, it is your true nature that is feeling. When you are at one with heaven and earth, your own light connects with the light of the universe. Gratitude, cherishing your blessings; light, truth, goodness, and beauty.

V. Connect with Your Past Self
Do not dwell on the past or worry about the future. Connecting with the past is different from getting caught up in it. Only by connecting with the present can you connect better with the future.
See your past self’s trauma and efforts (be grateful to your past self), and see the light of your past self’s true nature and innate wholeness.
In each of those present moments in the past, what did you do right?
See the earlier essay “Be Grateful to Your Past Self, Be Grateful to Your Present Self.”

VI. Connect with the Present
“On Living in the Present”:
Record the present;
The central issue of the present, small changes;
Connection.

VII. Connect with Your Studies and Career, and with Conditional Confidence
Connect with your core conditional confidence and the flow of high energy. Conditional confidence can ease your sense of lack a little and bring greater peace of mind, but it can also feed the karmic obstructions of narcissism and superiority.
Achievements, capital.
A sense of competence at work and professional confidence.
Writing for your own media channels also increases confidence and a sense of connection.

VIII. Keeping a Diary Is a Person’s True Channel for Communing with Spirits, Communing with Gods, and Worshipping the Buddha
Keeping a diary means recording countless present moments of “moderate,” high, and low awareness, leaving them for reference in other present moments at other levels of awareness. During periods without clarity, you communicate with your clear-minded self, your energized self, your true nature, and your Buddha-nature. The mind itself is Buddha. This is a person’s true channel for communing with spirits, communing with gods, and worshipping the Buddha.
This seems to be one of the few genuine techniques of “spiritual practice” available to human beings. It also shows that effort is a false concept: we find it quite difficult to learn this technique.
Why don’t people keep diaries? Or why does their diary writing fail to have this effect? They lack the awareness (they do not know this is possible), the capacity (mental energy, avoidance of pain and the dark side), or the habit. Only after repeatedly experiencing moments of “awareness” and recognizing the wonders of keeping a diary do they keep at it—a result of growth, rather than its starting point.
Habit itself is a deep connection. Can we cultivate new habits by force? No. Habit is mental energy -> experience -> connection, a natural process.