Three Principles Living

Judith A. Sedgeman, EdD

Finding Ease, Loving Life

Finding Ease, Loving Life

In my young adulthood, I looked at life as binary. There was “real life,” filled with stress, anxiety, pressure, obligations, exhaustion, responsibilities, demands. And there was the occasional “vacation,” when all that real life stuff was set aside and, for a brief time, days were filled with quietude, fun, ease, relaxation, and enjoyment of beauty. On vacation, you renewed your love of life. In real life, you dealt with frustration and disappointment. Oh, well. That was the price of adulthood and success, I thought. The goal seemed to be to strive hard enough in real life to provide, as years passed, for a little more vacation.

It did not occur to me, until about 35 years ago, when I met people who saw the Principles behind life, that it was possible to live ALL of life in ease and joy. It did not occur to me that life was simply being, and the binary idea was something we made up about it. I would have called those thoughts silly, if not totally irresponsible. But, before my very eyes, I saw people living at ease, and managing to have meaningful jobs, families, homes, responsibilities, as well as vacation. They did not spend most of their time in stress and anxiety, pressure and exhaustion.

What great luck and good fortune for me to stumble into that small group of people whose circumstances, at any given moment, seemed to have nothing to do with their outlook! They faced adversity with the same deep feelings with which they approached good fortune. Life events didn’t get them down. They weren’t unusually lucky, or unusually successful, They had ordinary lives just like mine, with plenty of highs and lows. But they were relaxed and happy, and I was not. How could that be?

That question threw into doubt everything I assumed about life. Why wasn’t I — why weren’t most people — just grateful to be alive and finding ease and joy in simply living? Life was all we had to work with, and we didn’t have any choice about where we landed in time and space to pursue it. But maybe we did have a choice about how we looked at and experienced it?

Within a short time, I started to understand how to change direction, and I have been moving into increasing ease and joy ever since. There’s no end to that journey. As I continue to look, I see more and more that it is inevitable, and it is our fate, to live the life of our dreams — or the life of our nightmares — depending on how we use our minds. And it is our gift always to be able to decide how we use our minds. I see more and more clearly that life is simply a spiritual adventure that we create.

Ever since the beginning, it has been my hope to share what I was learning and seeing with others, and help them realize how to look within themselves to find the insights they were hoping for about their own lives. That sharing has taken many different forms over the years, from business, to individual and corporate mentoring and consulting, to education, to writing and speaking. It has taken me all over the world. It has given me the dual pleasure of learning more and more myself, and seeing others blossom into their own understanding and sharing. I could not be more thankful for the wonderful life I have had.

Among the people I met first, and among my very best friends in this work, is Christine Heath. We have been colleagues and done many things together over the years, and recently, we decided we wanted to come together to share and celebrate the true nature of life with others in an online format that would be easy for people to come in and out of, and fun for people to enjoy together. And thus was born a ZOOM Webinar program we are launching on Tuesday, February 19, called Finding Ease, Loving Life.

Our hope is that the calls will be healing and helpful, light-hearted and deep, a pleasurable experience of insight and discovery for all of us. So we invite anyone interested to join us. Initially, we are going to limit each weekly call to 15 participants, just to be sure everyone feels included and has a chance to speak. If a lot more people want calls, we will add calls at different times and days. But we’re just feeling our way into it, keeping it simple, keeping it small, keeping it affordable. We just want to be as generous with the gifts of understanding that we continue to open as others have been with us, most especially, our original mentor Sydney Banks. And selfishly, too, we have seen over the years that the more we share, the more we all learn for ourselves.

As Sydney Banks says, in The Missing Link, a small but powerful book we encourage everyone looking for more ease and joy in life to read and reflect upon:

“No one can give away wisdom. A teacher can only lead you to it via words, hoping you will have the courage to look within yourself and find it inside your own consciousness … Beyond the word. The wisdom humanity seeks lies within the consciousness of all human beings, trapped and held prisoner by their own personal minds.”

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