To read six essays from Embracing the Now, click here. Short Excerpts from Embracing the Now About who you are Becoming aware of yourself as Awareness is as easy as noticing that you are aware. Awareness is so obvious that it’s taken for granted, overlooked. Yet, when we turn our attention to what is aware, we get a glimpse of the mysteriousness of who we really are. What is it that seems to be looking out of your eyes and taking in the world? It isn’t your eyes. They are an instrument of this awareness, which isn’t even located inside your head or body, although it seems to be. It’s more like this awareness is funneled through the body-mind. When you are in your body and senses and not in your head, or mind, you experience a sense of aliveness, which is felt as a subtle energetic vibration, or tingling, and a sense of being alive, illumined, and aware. This is how who you really are is experienced by the body-mind. This aliveness is the felt sense of who you really are and what you experience when you are in the now. When you are aligned with who you really are and not identified with the ego, you feel this aliveness, beingness, Presence energetically, and it is very pleasurable. There is a big difference between the experience of yourself and the experience of the image of yourself. The image is an idea. It’s flat, unalive, and you have to work hard to maintain it (especially without mirrors to help you), while the experience of yourself is mysterious and ever-present. It’s just there; you don’t have to work at producing it. It’s experienced as what is looking out of your eyes. This is very mysterious—what is this that is looking out of your eyes? Just take a moment and experience what it’s like to look out of your eyes and experience yourself that way. What a different experience this is from imagining what you look like in your mind’s eye. About being in the now To experience the now, we merely have to notice what is true about the present moment, without our interpretations, opinions, judgments, beliefs, or concepts about what we are experiencing. This may sound difficult, but all that’s required is a shift from giving our attention to the mind and its ideas about the now to noticing the ideas the mind spins about the now. In addition to this, noticing whatever else is present—without interpreting or judging it—brings us into the now and can keep us there as long as we continue to notice. However, once any judgment, opinion, or belief is considered and not just noticed, we are back in the mind and identified with the ego again rather than with essence. Whenever we notice and become fully involved in what is without becoming involved in the activity of the mind, essence becomes apparent. Noticing is a doorway to experiencing essence because noticing is a quality of who we really are. We don’t have to suffer. It’s more of a choice: We can have our story of “me” or we can just be here and be alive in this moment and see what happens next and what essence moves us to do. Life springs out of the now. We can trust life to do that. Life doesn’t need the ego’s agenda or desires for life to happen. These only create suffering over what is happening. When you drop into the now, there’s the opportunity to just experience the life that you are having, without trying to make it be any different than it is. That’s where you can finally find peace, contentment, happiness, and love—everything you’ve been looking for. From this place, life takes care of itself because you are Life. Surrender, or acceptance, allows you to experience life as it is unfolding, instead of experiencing your resistance to it. When you are identified with the ego, you aren’t experiencing life but, rather, your resistance to it. You’re actually missing the experience of the now because you’re not in the now but in your thoughts about the now—and that is a very different experience. About the ego We want to know the future because we want confirmation of the ego’s belief that the present is flawed and that it will be redeemed by something better in the future. We want someone to tell us “Yes, your prince (princess) will come and you will live happily ever after.” The ego’s basic stance is that what is happening now isn’t good enough, but someday it will be, and that will last forever. It is a fairytale that is so deeply embedded in our makeup that we don’t even realize we are telling ourselves this. When you find yourself wanting a better moment—wanting something else in the future—it can be helpful to ask: What will that give me? We think we will finally be happy when that moment arrives. What we discover when we do get what we want is that even that wonderful moment disappears and is replaced by the next one and then the next. Life keeps moving on, bringing us a mixture of what we like and don’t like. Why not like—love—it all because it won’t be here for long, it will never be this way again, and it is all we’ve got. We assume that our discontentment is the result of something actually wrong with or missing in an experience. We don’t realize that it comes from taking on the ego’s viewpoint. Life just is the way it is, neither good nor bad really. Experience is the way it is, and that will soon change. Why make it wrong? Nevertheless, discontentment is the ongoing experience of the ego, and when we are identified with it, that’s what we feel. Every moment becomes something to complain about, and these complaints fuel actions, many of which are a waste of energy, except from the ego’s point of view. About feelings If you find yourself angry or sad, ask: What did I say to myself that made me feel this way? Seeing that you created those feelings by believing your thoughts empowers you to move beyond them. Your feelings are the outcome of believing negative and untrue thoughts. There may be some truth to them, which is why you believe them, but they are a story you are telling yourself that leaves out much of the truth, and partial truths are lies. When you feel bad, it means you have bought into the ego’s story about you, your life, or others, and the ego’s story is a negative, shortsighted, and ignorant one. What story would essence tell? Essence sees the big picture and the truest perspective. It always has a positive story to tell. If you are going to tell a story at all, find essence’s story. Better yet, just be in this moment without any story to distract you. Healing an emotion requires not reacting to it in the usual ways and not repressing it but just being with it, befriending it, allowing it to be here, and bringing awareness to the experience of it. This way of experiencing an emotion is very different than identifying with it. Rather than experiencing yourself as angry, sad, or whatever, you experience the pure emotion, as if you are outside of it, as a curious observer. In bringing awareness to the emotion, you are outside of it, being aware of it. This is a state of dis-identification with it. It is experiencing it from the perspective of essence. When you are identified with an emotion, you aren’t aware of it, but just reacting to it. There’s a very big difference between that and bringing awareness to it. It is the difference between reinforcing it and healing it. When you bring awareness to an emotion, it’s possible to discover the truth about it—where it came from and how it doesn’t serve you now, and that releases and heals it. About the Heart Following your Heart is the only trustworthy choice, really. Trusting the Heart seems difficult, but when you see how untrustworthy what you have been trusting actually is, it becomes much easier. Has following your Heart ever failed you? Everyone has had experiences of following their Heart. What happened when you did? Yes, it was probably scary (and exhilarating), and it didn’t mean that everything went smoothly and exactly as your ego wanted (does it ever?), but what you discover is that the challenges you meet when you follow your Heart are rich, and the resources you need to deal with them show up. Following the ego’s desires and plans by no means guarantees getting what the ego wants either; it’s only the belief that this will that makes trusting the ego easier. What if you believed in the Heart as much as you believe in the ego? Try it! You might like it. About meditation Meditation is as simple as just sitting and noticing, or being aware of, what is occurring—what is coming into your senses, what thoughts and feelings are arising, what intuitions or inspirations are arising, what drives and urges are arising, and what energetic sensations are being experienced—without getting involved in the mind’s commentary about these. The goal of meditation is to experience your true nature, or essence, and essence is this noticing, aware Presence that you imitate when you sit down to meditate. In imitating Awareness by being aware of everything you are experiencing in the moment (but not identifying with it), you become that Awareness, you drop into it. Noticing without getting involved in any mental commentary or thoughts about what you are noticing aligns you with essence. About happiness The alternative to rejecting something about the moment, 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? Being happy and not being happy is largely a matter of what you focus on. When you find yourself struggling against life, stop and notice what is beautiful and loveable right now. And don’t just stop with one thing; find another and another. Your life can be lived from a place of celebration and gratitude rather than from a place of rejection. It is your choice. All it takes to love what you are experiencing is attention. When we give our attention to something, love flows to it. So, if you want to love what you are experiencing, rather than resist it, then give it your attention. That is the antidote to the ego’s resistance. If you give your attention to your resistance, then you are loving that, and that becomes your experience, and that becomes magnified. About trusting life There are two possibilities: trusting the ego or trusting essence. There isn’t anything else here to trust. In any moment, you are trusting either the ego or essence. Most people are trusting their egoic mind, not essence, but even they respond to essence some of the time. Whatever you give your attention to is what you are loving and trusting, and for most people, that’s the mind. What makes life so difficult to trust is that the ego doesn’t trust it, so if you are trusting the ego, you won’t trust life. The ego wants life to serve it, but life doesn’t do that very well because it serves a higher purpose—the evolution of the Whole. No wonder the ego doesn’t trust life to serve it—because life doesn’t serve it! Because life isn’t the way the ego would like it to be, it proclaims it untrustworthy, but it is just the way it is—and you can trust that. When you expect life to be as it really is—unpredictable, changeable, challenging, and full of growth—then it is absolutely trustworthy. It is perfectly trustworthy in these ways. Essence has designed it this way and therefore has no problem with it being this way. Life is about something much more profound and wonderful than fulfilling the ego’s desires and dreams. It is about evolution and, more specifically, our evolution toward love and away from fear. For providing that, life is totally trustworthy. Click here to purchase a paperback on Amazon bookstore Click here to purchase a download/e-book of Embracing the Now from our bookstore Reviews “Embracing the Now is startlingly clear. On the mainstream nondual spirituality front, Gina Lake is a contender for top author/top teacher honors, along with Eckhart Tolle. Both she and this book have what it takes.” –Jerry Katz, author of One: Essential Writings on Nonduality and editor of www.nonduality.com “Gina Lake's book Embracing the Nowis a completely comprehensive guide to waking up out of ego-identification and learning to live as Essence in the world. It is consistently luminous, remarkably clear, and deeply wise in every single sentence from start to finish. This book is a marvel.” –Victoria Ritchie, Editor of Eckhart Tolle's books The Power of Now and A New Earth “Gina Lake has done it again, and Embracing the Now may be her best work to date. This is an outstanding, clear, and practical guide to awakening…Great teachers like Eckhart Tolle are rare, and they speak of living in the NOW. Gina, who is in that class of great teachers, offers us immediately useful advice and shows us how to live one's life from that state…This is a wonderful book to be treasured and re-read throughout one's life. There is great wisdom and comfort in its pages, and there is much to be gained by studying it as a manual for living a more enlightened life.”—Jeff Bronson “If there were a way I could just click and put this book in your cart and have it fast on its way to each of you reading this review...I would! It is that important. As many of us, I have devoured Eckhart Tolle's work and was intrigued and dazzled by its brilliance...but maybe a little intimidated. This book helps us understand Be-ing in the NOW and making it work! I have read it twice in one weekend and am ready to call Gina for a private reading, as this work is just that amazing. She digs right to the core of the EGO and helps us understand how it works (and doesn't work) and how to tame it! I actually gasped at some passages as it was so clear now. It was one huge AHA moment after another as I turned each page. Not only does Gina give us the workings of the ego, she also helps us learn how to tame it and lead a life...yes IN THE MOMENT! All weekend I have had a big grin on my face and my heart feels ready to burst with contentment at finding this book. Please, click and get it...your life will be enriched...mine certainly has been. I thank you, Gina.” –Kathy Vitcak “Gina's written a powerfully clear book about living from presence (as Eckhart Tolle calls it), or essence, as she does. The formidable opponent on such a path is of course ego. But ego is not to be resisted or fought against or repressed or denied. Instead, Gina explains how to accept the ego as it arises, while still seeing through its various tricks for pulling one out of presence. She details the various emotions, judgments, fears, denials, and mind games that are common tools of the ego in clear and easy-to-understand language. I find Gina's books to be as helpful as Eckhart's in the journey to living from presence…Gina outlines the ego's mechanisms so clearly that it becomes difficult not to recognize, accept, and thus heal them in oneself. All of this is in the service of greater peace, greater joy, and eventual liberation. The messages may be conceptually simple, but in an ego and mind-dominated time and society, they are easy to forget. I enjoy reading Gina's words to remind me of what I know in my own heart to be the shining truth.” –Seda Unlucay “Powerfully clear and full of Light—another gem from Gina! While reading the book, my breathing slowed and my mind quieted, as if an energy was actually being transmitted somehow through the words on the page. Written clearly and simply, this book is packed with powerful pointers to Truth, which only resides in this moment. Written as a series of essays, Embracing the Now expands on issues only touched on in previous books. If you hunger for truth and peace, this book points the way. I highly recommend any and all of Gina's books—start with whichever one you are drawn to. If you enjoyed Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now, likely you will draw sustenance from this as well. Read it—you and Life itself will be glad you did!”—Carol Murphy “I have read several of Gina's books, and I have to say I was more deeply affected by this book than I expected. Many times while reading, I had to just stop for a few minutes and let the truth of her words envelop me. However you want to put it: doorways of conscious opening, limiting beliefs being eliminated, old hurts being cast off, feeling profoundly in the flow of life, awareness of Presence. Quite a gift. I love the format. I can pick it up anytime and choose a subject, or just pick it up and read the essay it opens to. Gina does it again.” –Leann Lawrence “In this case, you can tell a book by its cover—this is a beautiful book written by a beautiful soul whose essence comes through and awakens our own. Gina Lake is a true ally in our awakening, and as I read Embracing the Now, I could feel my whole being relaxing and letting go of stress I wasn’t even aware I was holding. This book gives us the permission we really need to let go of all the doing and thinking and just be happy and at peace right now. It is filled with many simple and straightforward pointers to help us focus on the presence of essence and let go of the suffering of the ego. This is an easy to understand guide to shifting from suffering into awakened awareness.” –Janet Montcrief “If you like Byron Katie or Eckhart Tolle, don't miss this extraordinary book by Gina Lake. It really tells you how to lead an awakened life, continuing where those wonderful authors leave off. It gives the hopeful message that we can stop suffering once and for all and tells us that not only is it possible, but that's what we're all here to do. I’m blown away by Embracing the Now. After reading all of her books and doing many private sessions with Gina, I thought, ‘What more can she say on the subject that I haven't already heard?’ The answer is: a tremendous amount. This book is filled with innumerable insightful gems that are so easy to apply to everyday life—on trusting life, coping with feelings, loving your work, and finding work you love. The new short essay format made the book very easy to digest because it distilled each topic into bite-sized pieces. This book was so incredible that I'm about to reread it to make sure that I haven't missed anything!” –Laura Prue “The latest book from Gina Lake is a collection of 52 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.” —Dennis Trunk, Editor of Third Millennium Gateway, www.thirdmg.com. Click here to read the entire review.  “Do you want to be happy at all times? Do you want conditions to not influence your happiness? Embracing the Now by Gina Lake is a clear guide to reach this goal. It is about letting go of the ego, about letting go of your ideas of what should be, about letting go of your resistance to what is. The solution to real happiness is not to go after the longings of the ego, but to contact your true self, the pure awareness underneath ego and the mind. That pure awareness has an undertone of happiness always, whatever the situation arising in the Now is. In this book, Gina helps the reader to develop this state of unconditional happiness. This can be one of the most important books you read because it helps you remain happy, whatever the form the Now moment takes. It helps you to realize the vision of books like The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle in your daily life, especially when life gets tough from the point of view of the ego. The book is easy to read and practical. The language is clear and to the point. And most important of all, the book is transformative and gives you the tools to live from the state of awareness rather than from the state of ego.”—Roeland de Looff “In reading this book, I was hoping to finally be able to know what is meant by living in the present and to finally get it, so to speak. Well I have, and I am so excited. Embracing the Now has helped me so much. Words cannot even begin to explain. I have read many books, and will say that this one has taken me to a whole new height of being!! I am now more fully in the present since reading it and live each day in this way ..more and more. Helping me to understand the ego more fully and get it well in control in a sense has been the best thing for me. No longer do I have the struggles with it as much. It still makes its presence known to me, but I just now smile and move away from it, knowing that each time I do, more and more of everything just simply falls into place, and by allowing this splendor is just well—wonderful. Life has been opened up so much more to me, and for this I am very grateful.” –Molly Merritt "Embracing the Now just may be Gina Lake's best book yet. In it,  Gina methodically dissects the structure of the ego state of consciousness with clarity and wisdom. By looking where she is pointing, you will become conscious of the ego's strategies and tendencies and thereby break free of its conditioning. Gina then skillfully encourages ‘embracing the now’ to realize true happiness and peace. This book is a clear guide that you will return to again and again. It could be a valued companion as you discover the pathway to loving what is." –Katie Davis, author of Awake Joy “Embrace this book! Gina Lake’s latest book, Embracing the Now, is not to be missed. Once again, she displays her gift of being able to point directly to the Truth in an extremely readable and accessible way.  This collection of essays presents a powerful worldview that shines with clarity for both the mind and the Heart. Highly recommended.”—Chuck Hillig, author of Enlightenment for Beginners and The Way It Is Click here to purchase a paperback on Amazon bookstore Click here to purchase a download/e-book of Embracing the Now from our bookstore To go to free downloads of e-books and chapters, click here.

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