Here’s my second post about the Paul Selig retreat I attended last week on Maui. The first one about love being the only way through was April 22, here. You’ll see about half a dozen, all explaining what I hope are useful tools and ways to frame the very difficult times we’re in right now. So here we go:

The Upper Room: It’s a phrase that shows up often in the teachings of Paul Selig’s Guides.

It sounds almost biblical. Mysterious. Maybe even a little out of reach.

But the longer I sit with it, the more I understand—it isn’t a place we go.

It’s a place we are.

Or more accurately, a level of consciousness we can align to, even in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday, even in the middle of something hard.

Because if there’s an Upper Room, there is also—by implication—a lower one. And most of us know that room well. It’s where fear runs the show. Where we compare, judge, brace, react. Where every piece of bad news confirms what we already suspect: that things are fragile, uncertain, and possibly about to fall apart. Where we curse and damn those we consider evil.

I know it well. You probably do, too.

The Guides don’t shame that room. They simply say: you don’t have to stay there.

And that’s where things get interesting.

Because the way they describe “getting” to the Upper Room is not what we’re used to. There’s no striving. No ladder to climb. No gold star for effort.  We don’t earn our way there.

We align.

That word matters.

Alignment is not about becoming something new. It’s about consenting to what already exists at a higher level of our own being. That’s right: it’s already there, within us.

In Selig’s work, this is often as simple—and as profound—as a quiet inner declaration:

I am in the Upper Room.
I am in alignment with the Divine.

Not as affirmation theater. Not as magical thinking.

But as a willingness to stand in a different place within ourselves.

And here’s the part that can be hard to swallow: We can do it any time. While we’re anxious. While we’re overwhelmed. While our mind is making a very convincing case for why everything is not okay. Any time at all.

Because the Upper Room isn’t the absence of fear.

It’s the absence of being ruled by it.

Fear may still knock on the door. It just doesn’t get to rearrange the furniture.

The Guides are pretty direct : if we take every cue from fear, we will keep recreating the conditions of the lower room. Not as punishment, but as resonance. We stay aligned to what we believe is true. I feel this and see it happening all over the world. So how to align differently?

The practice of aligning with the Upper Room is pretty simple.

We notice the fear.
We don’t argue with it.
But we also don’t hand it the keys.

Instead, we ask—sometimes through gritted teeth:

Can I meet this from a higher place?

Not perfectly. Not all at once. But even a small shift counts.

Because something does change when we begin to live this way.  The world doesn’t suddenly behave. People don’t become easier. Loss doesn’t stop being loss.

But our relationship to all of it begins to soften and strengthen at the same time. And that’s comforting.

We react less.
We see more clearly.
We find, unexpectedly, that we are not as easily pulled under by every wave.

I’ve noticed a steadiness that wasn’t there before. Not because life got simpler. But because we are no longer standing in the same place within it.

And maybe that’s what the Upper Room really offers—not escape, not perfection, but perspective.  A way of being in the world where we’re still fully human, still feeling everything there is to feel…

…but not entirely defined by it.

And on some days, that is more than enough.

My own goal is for it to be more than enough every day.

That’s a tall order. But one I’m willing to aim for.