Loving in the Moment: Moving from Ego to Essence in Relationships

Living in the Now provides practical wisdom that will help you live in this world as the spiritual being that you are. They can be read in any order and used in daily contemplation. They address many questions raised by the spiritual search, offering insight on fear, anger, happiness, aging, boredom, desire, patience, faith, forgiveness, acceptance, commitment, love, purpose, meaning, fulfillment, meditation, being present, quieting the mind, letting go of the past, healing conditioning, dealing with emotions, trusting life, trusting your Heart, and many other deep subjects. These essays will help you become more present and aware of your true nature and feel more loving, happy, grateful, and at peace.

Being in the flow and not being in the flow are two very different states. One is dominated by the ego-driven mind, which is the cause of suffering, while the other is the domain of Essence, the Divine within each of us. We are meant to live in the flow. The flow is the experience of Essence—our true self—as it lives life through us and fulfills its purpose for this life. Return to Essence describes how to get into the flow and stay there and how to live life from there. It also explains what the flow is, how it feels, and what you find there; how the ego/mind and conditioning keep us out of the flow; how to get back into the flow; how action, talking, knowing, and choosing come out of the flow; how to discover where the flow is going; and how to find and fulfill our life purpose. Exercises throughout provide an opportunity for practicing and integrating the understanding.

From Return to Essence: “You cannot be fulfilled by someone else’s life purpose; you can only be fulfilled by yours. You won’t find out what that is by listening to the mind because it doesn’t know. Only by paying attention to what is coming out of the flow and letting that lead you through your life will you fulfill your life’s purpose.”

The Now—this moment—is the true source of happiness and peace and the key to living a fulfilled and meaningful life. Embracing the Now by Gina Lake is a collection of short essays about the Now that can serve as daily reminders of the deepest truths. Full of clear insight and wisdom, it explains how the mind keeps us from being in the Now, how to move into the Now and stay there, and what living from the Now is like. It also explains how to overcome stumbling blocks to being in the Now, such as fears, doubts, judgments, misunderstandings, distrust of life, desires, and other conditioned ideas that are behind human suffering.

From Embracing the Now: "You don’t have control over what arises in any moment, but you can control where your attention goes, and that will determine how you experience the moment. Any moment can be an experience of peace and contentment or an experience of upset and dissatisfaction, depending on where you put your attention. If you put it on thoughts and emotions and identify with them, you won’t experience peace and contentment, but if you put it on your senses or on what is arising from Essence, you will be content and happy. Attention is the secret to happiness!"

Review: Dennis Trunk, Editor, Third Millennium Gateway:

"This book from Gina Lake is a collection of essays packed with practical advice about how to find happiness by living in the Now....Gina understands the ego's nature very thoroughly and examines it in many different ways in these essays....she leads the reader into analyzing it, exposing its many pretenses, and then shredding it....Gina's purpose in these essays is to help move her readers beyond the pain that is cause by the ego. To do that, she points to another voice, one more subtle and quiet, one that sometimes requires spiritual sensitivity training to hear: the voice of essence. Essence--also known as Awareness, Being, Self, etc.--is who you really are. As Gina says, `You know essence when you experience it, just as you know the ego when you experience it. They feel very different and are very distinct.'....Gina offers guidance on developing sensitivity to it, such as by meditation and by the simple but powerful act of noticing. By various means, its presence gradually becomes obvious, so much so that it can actually be felt, and it becomes an anchor for living in the Now. Gina's writings have an especially notable characteristic. When she discusses the nature of essence and how to live from its perspective, her words take on a special life and energy. There is a feel of essence speaking through her. In this set of essays, that voice has come to the fore, speaking ever more strongly and with the authority of understanding. And that may be an understatement."

Fear and distrust keep us from living the life we were meant to live, and they are the greatest hurdles to seeing the truth about life—that it is good, abundant, supportive, and potentially joyous. There’s nothing more important than seeing this truth, because the degree to which we trust life is the degree to which we can be happy and at peace.

Trusting Life is a deep exploration into the mystery of who we are, why we suffer, why we don’t trust life, and how to become more trusting. It offers evidence that life is trustworthy and tools for overcoming the fear and beliefs that keep us from falling in love with life.

We expect that getting what we want will finally make us happy, but what we find is that it mostly just leads to wanting more or wanting something different. Our desires toss us to and fro until we tire of this and begin to question the value of following our desires. Anatomy of Desire will help you understand desire and its purpose in your life. It will also help you discriminate between your Heart’s desires and the ego's and to relate to the ego's desires in a way that reduces suffering and increases joy. By pointing out the myths about desire that keep us tied to our ego's desires and the suffering they cause, Anatomy of Desire will help you be happy regardless of your desires and whether you are attaining them. So it is also about spiritual freedom, or liberation, which comes from following the Heart, our deepest desires, instead of the ego's desires. It is about becoming a lover of life rather than a desirer.

Review: Neale Donald Walsch, author of Conversations with God:

“Conversations with God says that happiness is not getting what you want, it is wanting what you get…Few books do as good a job, as quickly, of reconnecting us with that wisdom than this entry by Gina Lake…The practical information in this book demystifies desire and helped me to distinguish between the fear-driven desires of the ego and the urges of Essence. Anatomy of Desire: is an easy, quick read that has had a lasting impact on me. I highly recommend it…It offers a simple, accessible, articulate, and interesting take on the very human experience of desire and gives us the tools to make clear choices about how we want to live our lives. An easy, excellent read.”

Freedom from your conditioning is possible, but the mind is a formidable opponent to freedom. It was designed to keep you thinking of yourself the way you do. Getting free requires a new way of thinking or, rather, not thinking. Healing our emotional selves entails changing our relationship to our mind and discovering our true nature. This book will help you do that. It will also help you reprogram your mind; clear negative thoughts and self-images; use meditation, prayer, forgiveness, and gratitude; work with spiritual forces to assist healing and clear negativity; and heal entrenched issues from the past. Exercises throughout provide an opportunity for practicing and integrating the information.

From Getting Free: “Getting free of our conditioning is a two-fold task: We can free ourselves from our negative conditioning by reprogramming our mind with positive conditioning. We can also get free by seeing that all of our thoughts are just conditioning, and this conditioning doesn’t have to be what determines our actions and reactions.”

Radical Happiness: A Guide to Awakening provides the keys to experiencing the happiness that is always present and not dependent on circumstances. This happiness doesn’t come from getting what we want, but from wanting what is here now. It comes from realizing that who we think we are, that is, who our thoughts tell us that we are is not who we really are. This is a radical perspective! True happiness comes from experiencing our true nature by being present in each moment.

Radical Happiness describes the nature of the egoic state of consciousness, how the ego interferes with happiness, how to detach from the ego, what awakening and enlightenment are, and how to live in this world following awakening. Exercises are included to help you apply the information and transform your experience of life—and become happier!

From Radical Happiness: “When we are identified with the mind, we believe that we are who we think we are: our self-images and the labels that we have for ourselves. But is that who you are? If that is who you are, then who is it that is able to think about this question? What is it that is aware of the ideas that make up your self-image? What is it that is aware of the coming and going of thoughts?”

The secret to happiness is moving out of the mind and learning to delight in each moment. In What About Now, you will find over 150 quotes from Gina Lake’s books—Loving in the Moment, Embracing the Now, Radical Happiness, and others—that will inspire and enable you to be more present. These empowering quotes will wake you up out of your ordinary consciousness and help you live with more love, contentment, gratitude, and awe.

Here is a sample: "Surrender happens simply and naturally whenever we stop paying attention to our mind’s version of life and start paying attention to life, itself, as it is coming out of the Now. There’s something else to do besides think! And that is to notice, to be aware of what is happening now. Notice, look, feel, listen, sense, and give yourself fully to the experience you are having, and you will drop into the Now."