What is your inner work? You may know in advance. You may not. Your work may relate to what is happening in this world, your personal experience of it or a larger perspective, including protection of friends, your community or the resolution of a war.
How to begin? Enter the attention space previously described. If you are followed by wishes or concerns that do not mire you in thinking or personal reactions, this may be the subject of your work at that time. Or you may enter free of content and feel your way to the work you are asked to do.
Each of us has particular proclivities or resonances. In a state suitable for inner work, the correct orientation is likely to arise.
I can always begin with an apology for having forgotten to do this work, for which I have accepted an obligation. I acknowledge my obligation. I submit to it. My heart responds. A pressure enters me, pushing me to surrender and accept what comes. I may have an idea of what the work is for but it has its own intending. Often I do not know what that is. Sometimes my wish for some action is allowed, even encouraged.
Inner work proceeds in love. It’s love that takes me outside myself and into this engagement, perhaps with the sorrow and suffering of sentient beings, their strivings, fears and aspirations. Or perhaps love expresses itself as glorification of the Absolute. There is no room for self-concern. Love is the center of a constellation of feelings which further inner work. There is compassion, intimacy, gratitude, praise and humility. Inner work will move you among these and more.
For every crisis, every tragedy, every possible joy, there is a good which has the possibility of entering and completing it.
Suppose that I feel the wish to pray for the end of a war. The resolution exists. I do not need to create it or know what it is. My task is to give the resolution room to enter. Holding a connection to the war in my attention, in my heart, without judgment, without expectation, with love, this is the nature of this work. God has an answer for every problem. Can I faithfully submit to this understanding, that He is the answer and I can assist Him to enter this world through loving attention.
Submission. Faith. The power of Intending. What am I intending? His will. I do not need to do. I only need to allow.
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October 14, 2025
Tags: inner work, intending, what work
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September 4, 2025
On reactions, and on a personal note, I recently met a woman who within the last year had experienced a sudden awakening. All her life she had suffered from anxiety, and then one day she didn’t, ever again. Some time after her awakening, her 12 year old daughter commented, “Mom, what happened. You’re so chill.” I take that comment to imply that Mom no longer reacted to the 12 year old daughter’s shenanigans. I asked Mom about meditation. Before her awakening, she didn’t know what meditation was, and still doesn’t meditate now. Rather, she pointed to a wasp and said, “I could watch that for hours.”
Tags: inner work, non-reacting, reactions
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September 3, 2025
The personal self is a bundle of habitual reactions. To react is to be expelled from the attention space.
It is the work of a lifetime to live without reactions. Non reaction enables direct reading of, and engagement with, sensing and feeling. A whole universe opens to one who is free of habitual reactions. This is what it means to be realized. Not some super-duper higher state of bliss and omniscience.
How to be free of reactions? First you have to see them in your behavior, your gestures and postures. Then sense them in the body. Then see the judgments and justifications which prolong them. Then cease to react to the judgments and justifications. Then, silence. Is this work ever finished? I don’t know. But an island of equanimity can arise where you can be reliable enough to work inwardly.
A bonus: Equanimity accesses more attention. Reaction loses it.
If you wish to be useful as one who works inwardly for the benefit of the world, you must begin the journey as soon as you can. Perhaps you will then be able to work before you die. Life is short. The way is long.Tags: inner work, not reacting, reactions
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August 5, 2025
You can’t work inwardly without help. The biggest recurring trap is that you enter this work actively, with the intention to ‘do’ it. As soon as you reverse this impulse, things become possible.
You will need to find for yourself what this means. There are inner gestures of submission, apology, contrition that enable you to receive help. When I try to do this work on my own, by my own light, I feel the dryness of it. When I ask for help and acknowledge my poverty, I feel that my state becomes ‘juicy’.
As one of my teachers once said of this work, when you volunteer for service, you are given what you need to proceed. A janitor is not expected to work without a broom. You do not need to know what is needed. The work knows.Tags: help, inner gestures, inner work
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July 21, 2025An attention space is established by calling your attention. I call it ‘your’ attention but really it is that part of the universal attention that you can access as ‘yours’. To call it, you must be here and now. No past. No future. No elsewhere.
Your attention has been left in many places, on many things you care about, your job, friends, money, and possessions. If you are present, all these bits of attention will come back to you from where you unconsciously left them. If not, you may have to go and collect them. Try asking them to come home, at least for the time you are doing this work. They can always go back to your worries and obsessions later.
Attention has a strong attraction to itself. It accumulates and strengthens. It is self-magnetized.
To pull the plug on you as thinker, attention attends to sensations and especially breathing. Thoughts arise and fall away. Attention does not follow them, which would form the thinker. Attention is directly on sensing, not funneled through thinking.
There is a special benefit to this process. Attention directly on sensation transforms the energy of sensation into the energy of consciousness. The singular becomes the multiple, the linear becomes the simultaneous. You can know this transition as it occurs.
Tags: attention, inner work
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July 7, 2025
Perhaps no one will follow these instructions or even have an interest in doing so. It is my obligation, nonetheless, to record this information for the future.
The essence of inner work is to establish an attention space above, but connected to, the physical world that is ruled by time, distance and separation. In this attention space, the facts of the physical world are fluid. They can be touched and caressed in this space without the limits of time and distance. You and they are moved together by universal forces unimpeded by separation. The facts of ‘what is’ can be induced to dance with you, sometimes to respond to your wishes.
I speak of making prayer space. This space is a wish-fulfilling jewel in which you lay your wish at the feet of the source of all attention and will. Its nature is intimacy. The active element of intimacy is love.First, consciousness, then realization.
To be conscious is to hold many things in the attention space simultaneously…thoughts, feelings, sensations…which requires that you not be the thinker. Do you see that having thought is not the same as being the thinker?
To be realized is to cease to react to facts. You can then be trusted to engage with the forces that shape the inner worlds where things take form. If you react, you are expelled from the attention space.
Inner work is not forceful. It cannot be willed. It has no ambition. It has no personal emotion. It does not want. It lies in the world between.Tags: attention, inner work
