I’m sure many of you have thought about the concept of reality and even had discussions on the subject. How many times have you heard someone say or even said yourself, “This is my reality and that is yours. But reality has nothing to do with what someone thinks, it simply is. When our life really begins to rock and roll is when our opinion of how it works and the way it really works are the same, they are in sync. The space between what we think and how it truly unfolds determines the amount of incongruity in our lives. This incongruity gives us pain, suffering and confusion and is in exact proportion to our separation from reality. When there is a wide gap between what we say we want and what we keep getting, this is a clear indication that we are not “getting it”, we are not in the flow, not connected to reality.

So…if we just think for a minute and remember a time when things just went our way. We say the timing was right, the people were right; everything seemed to just fall into place. I’m sure if you can connect to the feeling you can feel the effortless quality, the ease with which things unfolded. Very little thinking takes place in this space, and that’s because we are present, squarely in the moment. We are not in our heads, we are centered right here; directly experiencing what is. When we are present we “know” there is no gap between our opinion of reality and how it really works.

The key to experiencing “reality”, i.e., “what is”, is to be present, and the only way to do that is to “feel”. What we are talking about here is not emotions, but that spot in the chest that resonates as truth. And to do that, we must pull the energy from above the neck to below it.

We can never really know anything with the mind, because the mind operates in the world of duality. As the Tao says, when we find one thing beautiful, we find another thing ugly. Only by dismissing one idea, does the intellect or mind accept another. But to really know something, we have to experience it unconditionally, to step outside the mind. To test the “realness” of something, we must feel it, and to feel, we must get out of the mind and into the body. The minute the energy settles in the heart, we become present. At that moment we are no longer one step away from the action; we are the action. Rather than thinking about our life, we are living it. This congruence of being present is reality. 

In a national competition, Chandra Alexander, MSW, was selected by THE OPRAH MAGAZINE as the Life Coach to deliver a series of coaching sessions to the grand prize winner of their prestigious Toyota Moving Forward contest. She also spent five years on NBC/TV “DAYTIME” giving a weekly “Reality Check”. Chandra has been living and teaching authenticity for the last 30 years and is the founder of Coaching for Authenticity, a place to explore and discover the essence of who you really are.