Gina Lake
MA
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Spiritual Growth and Awakening Expert
Gina Lake Quick Facts
- Main Areas
- spiritual teaching
- Career Focus
- author and spiritual teacher
Gina Lake is a spiritual teacher who is devoted to helping others awaken and live in the moment through her books, online courses, and intensives. She is the author of eight books, including Loving in the Moment, Embracing the Now, Radical Happiness, Living in the Now, Return to Essence, What About Now? Anatomy of Desire, and Getting Free. The focus of her writing and teaching is on helping people be in the present moment and live the happy and fulfilled life that is possible and on shedding light on the programming that interferes with awakening to one's true nature. She is also a gifted intuitive with a master's degree in counseling psychology and over twenty years experience supporting people in their spiritual growth. Her website offers information about her books, free e-books, book excerpts, a monthly newsletter, a blog, and audio and video recordings: http://www.radicalhappiness.com
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Gina Lake Books
Articles by this expert
SelfGrowth articles and saved writing connected to this expert.
Article
Love Is a Way of Being
Love isn't something that someone causes us to feel, but a state of being that we experience whenever we are fully present in the moment to whatever or whomever is showing up. Love is our natural state, and we experience our natural state whenever the chattering mind is quiet or simply ignored. This state of being is one of peace, acceptance, and love. The only thing that can interfere with experiencing the love of our true nature is absorption in our thoughts and any feelings generated by those thoughts.
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How to Create Stress (and How Not To)
• Think about all the things you have to do. Do this as you are going about your day. Go over your to-do list mentally many times a day, especially in the midst of doing something. Then talk about how much you have to do and how busy you are with everyone. • Keep checking the time, and think about time a lot: how much time something took, how much time something takes, how much time something will take, how much time you have left. Tell yourself you don't have enough time, or worry that you don't.
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Loosening the Grip of Desire
Nearly everyone is in the grip of at least one desire, sometimes many. Desire is a natural part of the human condition. It comes from a sense of lack that is created by the ego, the false self. It comes from the belief that we need something outside of ourselves to be happy, which is the lie that makes the world go round. What would we do and what would our lives look like if we didn't believe we needed something else to make us happy or fulfill us?
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Little Things Matter
Some things matter too much to the ego, and this is a source of unhappiness, things like performing perfectly, looking a certain way, having certain things, and so on. The flip side of this is that many of the little things that actually turn out to matter, especially to true happiness, are overlooked and underrated by the ego.
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Happiness Is Being in the Present Moment
Love naturally flows out of the present moment, which is the only moment that exists. The present moment is what is real. When we bring a memory from the past, a fantasy of the future, a fear, a judgment, or any other self-centered thought into the present moment, those thoughts draw us out of the present-moment reality, where love and the potential for happiness exist, and into the ego's world, which is a world of discontentment, judgment, striving, and desiring. All of the pain in the world is created by identifying with such thoughts.
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Navigating Changes and Challenges
Change feels like tossing a coin up in the air—you don't know which way it will land, good or bad for the ego? The ego is deeply conce ed it will turn out badly. The ego considers the worst case scenarios and fears the worst. It attaches a story to what's going on: "My life is going downhill."
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Wanting To Know The Future
One of the ego’s strongest desires is to know the future. It wants to know the future very badly, so badly that it often resorts to making it up, if not in a full-blown fantasy, at least in thoughts and beliefs about the future that constantly change. Sometimes such fantasies are negative and depict the ego’s fears about the future. The likelihood of events actually occurring in the often dramatic way the mind imagines is miniscule; and yet our thoughts about the future grab our attention, stir up our emotions, and can even cause us to act in certain ways.
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Living Without Mirrors
How we look is so important in this culture. How we look becomes how we see ourselves. The image in the mirror seems like who we are. We carry that image around with us inside our heads, and when we think of me, we think of that image. We have many self-images, and our inner image of what we look like is perhaps the strongest. We are most identified with that self-image because identification with the body is so strong and because the mind needs something to pin the idea of me on.
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Happiness Is Here Right Now
Many people would define a successful life as a happy one, so we go about trying to be happy in many ways. Some people try to attain happiness through accomplishments and material things, while others use spiritual means. The problem is that happiness isn’t something to attain or achieve, but something to notice. If you are busy trying to achieve happiness, you are probably overlooking it. The ego tries to get happiness from doing, having, or being someone, while the spiritual ego tries to get it from transcending all of that.
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All You Have Is Now
The Now is the only reality. It’s all that really exists. The past is a memory, the future is a fantasy, and memories and fantasies are just ideas, and quite inaccurate ones at that. Thoughts arise in the Now, but they are only a small part of it. However, because we are programmed to pay attention to the egoic mind, thoughts often take the place of experience: We think about life and think about what we are experiencing rather than experiencing life purely, without thought. Experience colored by thought and experience uncolored by thought are very different experiences.
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There Is Always Something To Love
The alte ative to rejecting something about the way things are, which is what the ego does, is finding something to love about it. There is always something to love in every moment. Can you find a sensation, something of beauty, or a sound that is loveable? Is peace here, even just a sliver? Is love? Is contentment? Is the universe holding together?
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Noticing Happiness
If you notice, you will see that happiness is already here. Still, no matter how good life may be, the ego says no to it: “It would be better if….” “I will be happy when….” As long as we don’t follow those thoughts, we will be happy. But usually we give our attention to the ego’s rejection of what is instead of to what is. We give that no the power to steer our actions: We jump from one idea to the next, trying to make life and ourselves better.
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Websites & resources
SelfGrowth-published websites, downloads, and contributor profile websites connected to this expert.
Website
Radical Happiness by Gina Lake
Offering spiritual books, excerpts, free e-books, a blog, a free newsletter, audios and videos about waking up out of the ego and living in the now, and spiritual and astrological counseling services to support spiritual awakening. Discover how to be happy and how to find and fulfill your life’s purpose.
Recently added
Website
Radical Happiness
Offering spiritual books, excerpts, free e-books, a blog, a free newsletter, audios and videos about waking up out of the ego and living in the now, and spiritual and astrological counseling services to support spiritual awakening. Discover how to be happy and how to find and fulfill your life’s purpose.
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Favorite Quotes & Thoughts from Gina Lake
About Being in the Now
Your hands are alive, and this aliveness can be felt. Take a moment and just feel the aliveness. It’s experienced subtly, like a vibration or tingling or warmth. Notice how this aliveness is not only in your hands but throughout your body. Can you feel it in your face?…your scalp?…your feet?…your arms?…your thighs?…your chest? Every part of your body is alive, and this aliveness can be felt subtly by you when you pay attention to it. Paying attention to it will automatically bring you into the now. Experiencing life brings you into life and brings you to life, you could say.
This experience that you are having right now is it. This moment is life—it’s what is real. And it’s just what it is. You can pile all the thoughts, feelings, and imaginations into it that you want, but it still is just this. And no matter how much money you have in the bank or don’t have, how youthful or old you are, how talented or untalented you are, how successful or unsuccessful you are, you still have just this. No billionaire has any more or less of this. People try to dress it up in ideas, but it still comes down to just this simple moment. You can love it or hate it, but you still just have this.
The mind is always trying to improve on this moment, but instead, it ruins it with its dissatisfaction. It tells you that this moment would be better if…. (Fill in the blank: you were richer, prettier, thinner, more successful, in a relationship, not in a relationship, etc.) That’s a lie. None of those things changes your experience of this moment unless you believe this lie. If you believe this lie, you won’t enjoy this moment. You won’t really let yourself fully experience it. If you don’t believe this lie, you discover that you have everything you need to be happy. You need nothing more than this experience. It is enough. It is plenty. It’s perfect just as it is. It was designed for you—given to you for your experience. All you have to do, and all you have ever had to do is accept this gift. Take it and let it in. Let yourself experience this moment just as it is. It doesn’t get any better than this.
What makes the choice of being in the moment difficult is that you must surrender your need to know. The ego gives you a false sense of knowing, which is comforting, even though it doesn’t really know where life is going or what will happen next. So, all you really have to surrender is the pretense of knowing, not actual knowing. The truth is that you don’t know what the next moment holds. That’s both the challenge of being in the now and, actually, the true joy of it. To be in the moment, you have to be willing to just be and to respond naturally to what arises out of the flow, without pretending to know what to do next or what will happen. The thing is, you have never known what was going to happen or what to do next. Admitting this allows you to move out of your egoic mind and into the moment, where true happiness, peace, and alignment with essence and its intentions are possible.
Every moment is an opportunity to love. Of course, the ego doesn’t see it that way. It sees every moment as an opportunity to try to get what it wants. It focuses on its desires and needs and sees the moment through this lens. Is this moment giving me what I want? The answer is usually no. Even when the moment is giving the ego what it wants, it worries that it will stop or it imagines how it could be even better. To the ego, the moment isn’t an opportunity to love but an opportunity (hopefully) to get. The ego has it backwards, which is why it is never happy. It doesn’t do what will make it truly happy, only what it imagines will make it happy. It believes that happiness lies in getting, not giving, and that is the great misunderstanding.
About happiness
So much of what makes for true happiness is free—available to rich and poor alike. What gives essence joy, and therefore you, is experiencing life, expressing yourself, and serving others. For instance, it costs you nothing to experience the beauty of nature, to sing, or to speak kindly to others or in other ways serve them. Many of the things you can do for others don’t cost anything but perhaps time and energy. There’s great joy in experiencing, expressing, and serving. Furthermore, these are things you can do again and again. You can’t do them too much and you won’t run out of opportunities to do them.
You know what it feels like to have both feet in an experience. These are the times when you feel most happy, most free, and when life feels the juiciest. For most people, these moments are brief, although memorable. Life can be and is meant to be like this all the time. It’s a matter of recognizing that every moment is an opportunity to say yes to life. When you do, you enjoy it, regardless of what’s going on. You enjoy the moment for its uniqueness and unpredictability, and for how it evolves you—because ultimately life changes you when you let yourself experience it, and it’s meant to change you. Life takes you along with it. It’s taking you on a ride. You can go kicking and screaming (which is what the ego does), or you can say yes to it and enjoy the ride. You can relax because Life knows what it is doing. You are in good hands.
Notice how much enjoyment is already possible in the simple things in your life. The more you notice how much you enjoy little things, the more you will realize that it doesn’t get any better, really. You always only have this moment, and every moment has an equal potential for enjoyment, no matter what is happening. Enjoying life is really a matter of choosing to not want something other than what you’ve got. When you stop desiring something more or better, you can begin to enjoy what you have right now.
Contacting Gina Lake
Gina Lake
How to get started
To learn more about Gina Lake, her teachings, and her books, visit her website at www.radicalhappiness.com. There, you can read free book excerpts, listen to recorded talks and watch videos, download free e-books, and sign up for a free monthly newsletter.
Other highlights
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