Quotes from Gina Lake

Problems seem to exist, but problems are actually illusory and part of everyone's illusory reality. "Problem" is a concept, not a reality. The mind turns something into a problem by telling you it is a problem. In reality, problems do not exist. You cannot touch, see, hear, smell, or taste a problem or sense it in more subtle ways, because there is nothing there to sense. A problem is imagined.

You are not who your beliefs tell you that you are, and reality is not what your beliefs tell you that it is. Beliefs stand in the way of experiencing your true self and experiencing reality. Beliefs are all that stand in the way, but that is enough to make this human life a challenge.

Thoughts are conditioning, so when you believe your thoughts, you become the conditioned self and lose touch with your real self. As a result of the distance from thoughts developed by meditation, the real self comes back into the picture. The real you is what is aware of thoughts and of everything else. The ego can't be aware of thoughts because the ego is, in essence, itself a thought. The ego belongs to the conditioned self and has no awareness of its own.

The way to living without judgments is simply to see the truth about them: They don't serve us or others. The ego leads us to believe they are important, relevant, and useful, and they just aren't. Once we see this, we are free to not indulge in them. They may arise in the mind out of habit, but eventually, if we don't give them our attention, this habit of thinking and talking about others will subside.

If we believe our thoughts, then they define us and determine our experience of life, how we feel, and what we do. We are, in many respects, a puppet to our conditioning, to our thoughts and feelings—when we believe them. When we are identified with them and believe them, we are at the mercy of them. They run the show.

Nothing is ever lost in choosing love. Your judgments never worked anyway. They only created anger, hurt, and separation. When you see the truth of this, it becomes much easier to choose love over judgment.

As soon as you see you are ego identified, you are outside of it and you have some choice—to either reidentify with the ego or not.

We know love by its fruits. Love gives: It listens, it caresses, it nourishes, it nurtures. It does whatever is needed of it.

If loving something means giving it our attention (and it does), then most of us are in love with our thoughts. The irony is that this lover doesn't love us back but, instead, gives us a lot of negative messages and poor advice. In short, this lover makes us unhappy. What can explain our devotion to such a poor lover?

Beliefs can't change reality, even though they change one's experience of it. To be helpful, beliefs have to reflect reality accurately. The ego tries to change reality with its faulty beliefs—its shoulds and coulds—while the hero doesn't bother with beliefs that aren't true. He knows that only the ones that stand up to experience and match reality work and are useful.

Language such as "good" and "bad" and "I like" and "I don't like" divides the world into what you want and don't want. Then when life shows up in a way you don't like, you suffer. By wanting life to look a certain way, you cause your own suffering. The hero has seen how such dualities and desires create suffering and how suffering wouldn't exist without them.

The hero noticed that if he let love, excitement, and joy lead him, he would be happy and find his way to greater love, peace, and happiness. He discovered that love is both the path and the reward of following the path.

The spiritual journey is about the gradual and sometimes sudden clearing away of the mistaken beliefs and misperceptions that have interfered with experiencing reality and with experiencing yourself as you truly are.

We were never meant to be anything other than the way we are right now. True perfection is life just as it is.

Beliefs are more often than not self-fulfilling prophecies. That is why becoming aware of your beliefs is so important. A self-fulfilling prophecy is a belief that is not true but becomes true merely because it is believed.

The you is programmed for unhappiness because it is programmed to seek that which can never bring true happiness. It goes after more and better and different from whatever is actually present, and that creates ceaseless searching and dissatisfaction with whatever is found. This is a very unhappy predicament, and yet this is the human condition.

your attention to what is here, not to what isn't.

really involved in whatever you are doing. Experience it fully with all of your senses. Be in the experience of the present moment and not lost in your thoughts.

It doesn't take the partner's words and actions personally.

To help bring the rest of reality into focus and put the feeling in its proper perspective, we can ask ourselves: "Is there space around the feeling? How big is that space? Can I make that space even bigger? What is that space like? Is peace there? Is love there? Is compassion there? Can I be that space? What's it like to observe the feeling from the perspective of space? As space, what can I discover about this feeling? Can I, as space, give love and compassion to the feeling?

Don't say yes out of obligation. When you don't feel an inner yes, say no to others' requests for your help. Reserve some of your time and energy for things you love to do.

The spiritual heart has been guiding you all along, but it is often overshadowed by beliefs. When beliefs stop running your life and the heart takes over, your life will change because you will no longer be caught in your personal illusory reality. You will see all the beliefs and stories that created your illusory reality for what they are, and then you will know reality.

Love thrives when we accept others as they are, while allowing them to grow, develop, and be as they are meant to be. This is the kind of environment that we, as parents, would hope to provide our children. Being there for others, supporting their growth, supporting them in their trials, and celebrating life with them is a great service to others.

What happened in the past was what it was, and no amount of speculation can change that. This rumination about reality is just the mind's way of not accepting a former now and its way of taking you out of the current now.