Keeping attention

In just last week, I made a huge progress in my meditation practice.  I am gaining CLARITY bc I am less and less willing to compromise or wait or pretend....  I have matured enough to allow myself to just BE with WHAT IS.  IN CLARITY.   I passed the quiz yesterday - after talking with my mother (she always goes into drama how she is dieing to see me, please come home, but yesterday I said I am coming and she said don't! it's not convenient for me... so I cancelled my ticket). I felt sad and angry, and i felt it, and yet, it did not impact me negatively, I felt RELIEVED that the truth was out, it just washed over me and didn't leave a trace, I was CLEAR.

This change started last week with me doing a wrong thing. I paid $50 for a consultation with a Hawaiian elder who claims to be kahuna - which is debatable - who told me things I already knew, and didn't answer the questions I needed to have answered about my apartment or schedule for the summer, and I was REALLY FURIOUS at myself for not listening to ME and having to pay for someone else to tell me what I already know and not help me go any further.

So a part of the consultation was to bring photographs of important people in my life. So... I took a few photos with my cell phone. We never looked at them during the meeting, but I looked at the photos. One of them was ME as a small child. I had questions about that small child. The child has a face that indicates something is wrong.

I reviewed my life and realized how stupidly I lived bc I really had no clue bc of how I was raised. Nobody took care of me and I was also abused severely. No wonder I had no clue about life.... 

All my questions were answered, less than a week later. God started giving me lessons in how to take care of myself. I was babysitting a small boy who is well taken care of and I SAW what happens when you treat a child well - that boy was happy - and what happens when you don't., even for a short time

Then the board of our building issued collection letter for the illegal assessment they issued. I was very upset, angry and depressed about it. I HAD A CLEAR SENSE THAT I WAS DESERTING MYSELF.  The image I got was of a parent who is drinking or under drugs and completely unavailable to their child and not taking care of them, abandoning them. That is what negative emotions do!

At that moment I had a choice - to be a good parent to myself and take care of my inner self, or to abandon myself and go into self pity and desperation and anger. Little boy whom I babysat was teaching me a lesson...... Either I could take care of the child or not, and take the consequences. I chose to come back to myself and take care of myself.

THIS IS INCREDIBLY STRONG.

The lessons about HOW to be a good parent continued.... I texted with my housesitting job and that was all good, business, AND THEN by mistake my employer texted me thinking she was texting her daughter. The tone was obviously different..... Text to her daughter had hearts, smiles, flowers, etc. and it was all in superlatives and in super mellow loving tones. And then finally my mother who didn't want me to come visit them bc it was inconvenient for her.

Also, later I was experimenting with attention and how attention just goes away from you, how something "eats" you when you focus attention away from yourself, on external things.
Actually, thinking of Yogananda makes it possible to pay attention to the outside and at the same time stay focused on oneself.

I feel like I have "hatched" in some way, like I went to a higher level of consciousness. Everything is clear and I don't fight to see the truth, whatever the truth is, it is what it is, so truth comes easily and quickly, and I feel all right, just keep on going forward. 

I am fit to live in a monastery but somehow I am "special forces" and have been sent to live with people and in spite of everything, get enlightened. and this is HOW you do it. YOU KEEP ON TRYING.