What’s New
The latest video clips, podcasts episodes, and blog posts from Gangaji, plus new articles from our community magazine and upcoming events. If you have a topic you’d like to hear about or any questions about Gangaji, please email us.
Is your inner critic running your life? The inner critic tells us how we are not enough, how we should be more, how we should be better than we think we are. Thinking about what is wrong with us can eat up our lives and ultimately distracts us from the essential truth. In this episode of Being Yourself, Gangaji demonstrates how to confront the inner-critic without judgment, and finally end the war between ego and superego.
The Opportunity of Retreat with Gangaji is to step away from your daily life and in a deeply supportive environment, suspend any habits of fixing yourself, and recognize your patterns of unnecessary suffering. It is a time to rest and retreat from the stories you may be telling yourself, or definitions or identities you may have constructed in your imagination. It is a time to bring your full attention to diving deeply into the depths of your bei…
Unnecessary Suffering remains as long as there is limited identification with yourself as just a particular body, or a particular history, or the latest evaluation. When the identification shifts to yourself as the consciousness that everything is appearing and disappearing in, your unnecessarily suffering ends.
You have the capacity and the intelligence to recognize when you are involved in the habit of suffering. There is always a storyline: you’re in the story, you’re the victim or the perpetrator, and there are emotions involved – shame, despair, grief, fear, anger, righteousness, embarrassment, and all the others – all to different degrees. The story has something to do with the past and something to do with the future.
After a retreat with Gangaji, I arrived home and learned that an out-of-state transmission developer was planning to use eminent domain to route a transmission line through 100 miles of family farms, including our homeschool land.
It is easy to see from your own life experience that no matter how much you try to run away from hurt, you still experience it. When you stop running, turn and experience what is chasing you, when you remain open and unprotected, you are free. Are you willing to be free?
“Through poetry, the unspeakable can be spoken, the unendurable endured, and the miraculous shared.”- Kim Rosen
Where is your attention? Our minds are designed to recognize what is “wrong” and needs fixing. This aspect of our ego serves our survival as human animals. There is nothing wrong with this aspect of our ego, but if we only look for what is wrong and neglect to honor what is already whole and free, then we suffer unnecessarily. Wherever you find yourself, you can take this moment to shift your attention to what is right: the wonder of existenc…