December 9, 2011 — Since the only reality is now, the only thing you ever resist is your own story about the future, and the only thing you ever regret is your own story about the past. Cease resisting and allow Life to come to you; cease regretting and allow forgiveness and acceptance to overtake you.
November 29, 2011 — Until you experience biological healing, you will fear sickness. Until you experience psychological healing, you will fear condemnation and rejection. Until you experience emotional healing, you will fear true love.
November 29, 2011 — All of Life is an experiment. And we, each one of us, get to experiment with the precious life we’ve been given. These are opportunities to learn the far-reaching extent of who we are and to enjoy the thrill of contributing something brand new to the mix of Life itself.
As with all experimenting, with any attempt to put new ingredients together in never-before blended combinations, there cannot be “trial” without some ”error.” Yet, error, just like “sin” is simply missing our intended mark. Be compassionate with yourself and others. To err, to fall short of our intended goal, to lose our way is pain enough. “To condemn the man who has lost his way is to punish the already punished.”
November 25, 2011 — When you feel good or even simply better than you had been feeling a while ago, give yourself time to pause, to relax into your experience of being in this moment. And in that pausing, give yourself time to choose the thoughts that will inspire your next good feeling.
November 25, 2011 — A mass movement has no room for the individuated you. And yet, the ideas and leadership of the man or woman who can stand in unity and understanding with their true and individual self is precisely what this world and the successful evolution of humankind needs.
November 16, 2011 — The therapeutic model of scaling, or giving a specific numerical value to the degree of intensity of one’s state, is a very useful tool for gaining the observer’s perspective on your situation. And, it is most useful to make the higher number equivalent to improvement or enhancement of the situation or condition you desire. For example, frame your scaling question like this, “On a scale of 1-10, 1-100, etc. how much ease, peace, confidence, good-will, health, happiness do I feel right now?” Scaling how awful or worried you are can be useful when you are going to come back down to a relaxed and contemplative state for therapeutic purposes. However, rising up to move toward what we desire is a natural parallel to the ever-expanding Universe in which we live and thrive.
Now, at any given time, especially when you are aware of the grip or troubling presence of a worry or concern, play with scaling for a few moments to recognize and remember how much of your life, right now, is actually at ease, in peace, or moving ahead in eager anticipation of the next good thing on its way into your lovely life.
November 16, 2011 — Why do Buddhists suffer? Could it be because they focus their attention on the physically manifested here and now as the totality of life? Could the visitations of expanding possibilities, irresistible to the human mind as it contemplates the ever-expanding universe, spark such a joy of happy expectation, which at that very moment cannot be seen with the earthly eye, that this lack of instantaneous evidence incites a sense of impossibility, frustration and despair? Not realizing that it is this limited view and not a true limitation of life, does then the frustrated Buddhist throw up her hands and wail that this does indeed prove that all of life is suffering?
November 6, 2011 — Since attention directly influences space and time, can any object truly have a fixed size or location relative to the minds that either contemplate it or ignore it?
October 25, 2011 — Once you can accept that everyone in your life is transitory, simply because we are transitory, then you can open your eyes, your ears and your heart to just how long you might have available to savor the moments of this engagement. Every journey of friendship traveled has an end. And, even if the imagined destination isn’t admitted or acknowledged, it is alluded to in the language of the very incipient moments of getting to know one another. Thus, should you discover that the other, from the outset, only intended to use your company as a safe harbor while, in other realms of their life they were traveling through a difficult passage, if you choose to stay, let your time with them be practice, even as you love the person as deeply as you can. Continue to develop your own skills of companionship for future friends and lovers who wish to remain longer, or for the rest of here and now, in your lovely company.
October 25, 2011 — A while ago, I was invited to consider the thought, “Everything we do, we do to feel better. Everything.” During these subesquent months since hearing that, I’ve richly contemplated the idea while observing the actions of myself and others. And, I’ve come to consider it a valid observation of human activity. What comes with this is the fantastic recognition that in every action taken to feel better is the opportunity to consciously feel better. By this I mean, when you take action in your day, give yourself the full experience of why you did what you did. Be alive in the experience of feeling better and better.
October 20,2011 — No spiritual path can ever be traveled in a three-legged race. Although you can study the works of mystics, and follow the precepts of gurus and masters, and listen to the advice of parents and teachers, and seem to be traveling beside others in the congregation or hand-in-hand with companions or lovers, you can only enter the Kingdom of Heaven on your own. The Lord of all spiritual practice, whichever path we take, accepts us one at a time.
October 17, 2011 — It’s not the people who do a lot for us, who think through our issues and who solve our problems whom we grow to love more and more — that is the behavior of parents. And, it’s natural to grow away from that support in order to find our own legs, and wings. It is more often the people who insist upon achievement and deeds from us, who refuse to look for answers on our behalf, and who demand that we solve our own problems who we come to ardently adore.
October 14, 2011 — In the book, Feeling is the Secret, 20th Century philospher, Neville, wrote, “Through his power to imagine and feel and his freedom to choose the ideas he will entertain, man has control over creation.”
October 14, 2011 — A very familiar means of increasing your satisfaction in life is to increase the frequency with which you say, “Thank you.” “Thank you” being, after all, acknowledgement of a desire or need having been met. Yet, to avoid the illusion that someone else must perform a service in order for you to feel gratitude, acknowledge, also, the actions your body, your mind and your overall self do on your behalf, day in and day out. Say “Thank you,” frequently to the elements of your own being which serve you with unabated devotion, then bask in the satisfaction that this acknowledgement brings.
Dare to be grateful for and satisfied with what you have and with who you are. Despite popular belief to the contrary, satisfaction is not a place where you will become stuck and immobilized. Satisfaction is, instead, the root source of all your courage to grow ever bigger and more influential in the world.
October 14, 2011 — There is a great difference between a deep thinker and a dramatic thinker. Where the former sees what purpose and potential lie beneath all human activity, the latter is spell-bound by the play of human events and rides the incessant roller coaster of emotions that attend the rise and fall from comedy to tragedy. Consider choosing, at first light, which way of thinking will engage you today.
And, understand, any media production worthy of its Nielsen Ratings will always strive to engage you with dramatic thinking.
October 14, 2011 — What grows on your body was born in your own mind as surely as the clothes you are wearing came from the closet you, yourself, filled.
October 14, 2011 — The only thing that carries forward in life from one day to the next is your story about life. Everything else is ephemeral and ever changing.
October 14, 2011 — The most unconscionable theft from children is to rob them of their innate ability to experience satisfaction. When parents model incessant dissatisfaction, their children — out of abject and unquestioning love – will abandon this natural ability to appreciate what is in favor of imitating the parental model. This is the true end of innocence.
October 14, 2011 — Understand that every life you live, you will leave unfinished, and everyone you meet will someday leave, as well. I say this not to worry you, but to inspire you. Live as richly and vibrantly as you can right now, and love as deeply as possible whoever else is in the room. Someday, both the life and the person will be gone.
October 14, 2011 — Although a long-contented man is usually a poor author of dramatic literature, pay attention to him when he tells you his own story. For he is the author of a satisfied life. And, one day, after you’ve had enough high drama and sturm und drang to last a lifetime, you will find that you, yourself, desire to live the rest of your days in the deep peace of a satisfied life.
October 14, 2011 — We simply cannot live without satisfaction. Yet we mete it out to ourselves in such penurious and impoverished increments, starving day and night, right here in Heaven. And, with starvation comes frustration, which is the fertile ground for desperate thought, wild impulses and self-destruction.
October 14, 2011 — Everything we do, we do to feel better. Either we act in order to relieve a real or imagined pressure on us, or we act to experience more pleasure. Notice which predominates in your own actions. Simply, in the noticing, you will find it easier to begin acting to enjoy more pleasure. To practice how to do this, play the About Face Game in 21 Games for The Mind that Won’t Shut the @#&* Up!
October 11, 2011 — In the first few seconds after waking, you make up a story about yourself and your day, and then you invest the remaining hours looking for proof that you’re right.
October 9, 2011 — When you’re looking to keep company with someone beautiful, consider that the beauty seen through her eye provides vastly more pleasure to her companions than the beauty of her eye.
October 9, 2011 — Sometimes, it is best to close the open hand with love. And, if that love was also linked to intertwined emotional involvement, it may be best to, as quickly as you can, allow that love to fall away and welcome indifference in its place. This latter step is a sweet and self-loving means of moving on from what you once cultivated as a source of nurturance, so that you may make room for the ” abundant, ever more” that awaits you.
Consider the story of Jesus and the fig tree that bore no figs. The King James Bible, Matthew 11:12, quotes him as saying, “No man eat fruit of thee hereafter for ever.” And, Matthew 11:21 tells of the next morning when Jesus and his disciples passed and Peter called out, “Rabbi, behold, the fig tree that you cursed is withered away.”
Yes, consider the wisdom of this, and then, give some thought to the rest of this story:
22 “Have faith in God,” Jesus answered. 23 “Truly[a] I tell you, if anyone says to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and does not doubt in their heart but believes that what they say will happen, it will be done for them. 24 Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. 25 And when you stand praying, if you hold anything against anyone, forgive them, so that your Father in heaven may forgive you your sins.”
October 9, 2011 — The timerous, self-doubting man can never be really satisfied with free gifts, for his faltering belief in himself will convince him that he isn’t the one who truly deserves them.
Only the self-confident person can genuinely accept a gift without tying it up with the strings of doubt, suspicion or unwarranted meaning. For she knows she is deserving (as she knows that all of God’s children are deserving) of every ounce of good and gold which falls, by Grace, into her hand.
October 7, 2011 — Every story you tell about someone else becomes a thread in the fabric of your own life’s tapestry, one that will influence the warp and weft of what happens to you. Be mindful, then, about the bad news you spread regarding others’ adventures. Not only does this sort of gossip show a callow misunderstanding of the fact that we each have our own experiences through which goodness reveals itself to us. This pattern of spreading bad news ensures that some slight, or significant, event of like nature is certain to unfold in your own life. Let your mind and your mouth be guided by the suggestion, “Prophesy and do only that, which when expressed, glorifies, dignifies and brings joy to the expressor.” In this way, you are destined to weave a beautiful tapestry and to live a beautiful life.
October 7, 2011 — In 12-step programs, there is a saying, “Take what you like and leave the rest.” I find it fascinating that so many people trance themselves with the perceptual pattern of taking from situations, encounters with others or personal experiences what they didn’t like and making important those two or three features they found unloveable, while leaving the rest –the vast and immeasurable rest of the story – uncelebrated.
October 6, 2011 — Every encounter with another person is an opportunity to help her on her way through life. If you are old enough to read this, you know from your own experience how wonderful it is to recieve even a small gesture of help, a moment’s thoughtful assistance, an encouraging remark or a little patience. Ask yourself, whenever you encounter another person, what can I do to help this person along on his life’s journey? Then, when you open your mouth to speak or lift your hand to engage with the person, the answer to that question, asked of yourself alone, will guide you to do good.
October 4, 2011 — Consider this: Whenever you are moved to warn another person of the dangers ahead of them on their path, what you are attempting to do is to cast an unlovely spell upon them.
How?
By having unwittingly first fallen into your own vivid trance of impending tragedy, and then casting your friend in the ill-fated starring role. Asleep in this envisioned horror yourself, you use the language of alarm and shock to plant that ugly seed in their minds, too.
As Eric Hoffer pointed out in his 1949 treatise, The True Believer, When we love, we don’t need to seek allies. But when we hate, we do. Fear, along with hate, must seek perpetual ratification in order to compel a person to behave so unnaturally as to shrink from opportunity and arm himself against others. Yet, all the while, the river of love pours incessantly over us, irrefutably proving its authority by this infinitely fecund and life-affirming world.
October 4, 2011 — Do you not yet believe in miracles? Do you not yet accept that you, yourself, are an incessant stream of miraculous moments linked by breath alone?
October 2, 2011 — Each one of us is a miracle and a mystery. To apply any other label to ourselves or others and then insist that’s all there is, does not reveal the limits of that person, but instead only shows the circumference of your own innocent ignorance. I say innocent because when you are awake to the fantastic and unfathomable nature of people, you would not be bound by limited terms. The circle you draw around yourself or another person only encages your mind and nothing else. You and they continue to be unbounded miraculous mysteries.
October 2, 2011 — The story you tell is the story you live. This is why advertisers and proselytizers are so eager to plant their words in your mouth. Surely the greatest success for a product manufacturer is to hear a consumer defend the use of the product as the customer’s “right,” and for a zealot to see his followers march to their deaths defending his philosophy.
October 2, 2011 — The rose bush doesn’t trouble itself about who will pick its blossoms, who will smell their fragrance, or on whose table they will be displayed. The rose bush, for the joy of being, simply blooms and blooms and blooms.
October 2, 2011 – The universe is ever expanding even while it is always complete. In this way, there is always room for more, even when nothing is missing. We can say this moment is full, and then comes the urge to breathe. In-breath is the universe’s expressed desire for more, while out-breath is the satisfying confirmation that more has been welcomed and added to what is.
October 2, 2011 — Before you ever buy anything, you first buy a story about it. And, it is the story that sets the price.
October 2, 2011 — Regardless of who you speak to, everything you say is suggestion to trance. And yet, often the trance isn’t personal, meaning that, even if it comes out of your mouth, it doesn’t really belong to you. The one thing you can know is that the trance will die unless someone takes the suggestion, unless it roots itself in someone’s mind to be passed on to another receptive, or unguarded, mind when the mouth opens and begins to speak.
September 30, 2011 — Running full tilt, face-first into a spider’s web creates a fascinating sound — a whooshing hum that rises in intensity as the central fibers paste themselves over your face and the whole woven thing enshrouds your head. It is one of the rarest rhapsodies on earth, and I dare you to find a head-high spider’s web and hear this music for yourself.
September 30, 2011 — Until you are ready to free yourself from the belief that you must be “right,” understand that you will sacrifice everything for this — your marriage, your children, your sanity and your very life. Let it go. Today. Choose your own sweet fallible life. Be easy on yourself, and you can then be accepting of others, knowing that every perspective has its own inherent “rightness.”
September 30, 2011 — The moment you allow another person’s name for you to become the name you take on for yourself, in that moment, you begin to let their story about you become your story. Accept, therefore, as true and worthy of repeating in your own voice only those descriptors which glorify, dignify or bring you joy. When someone describes you in any other way, immediately leave the words with them by saying, “I agree that you are free to see me that way, and I would add, I shall continue to see myself as worthy and a valuable blessing on the planet.”
September 24, 2011 — Be aware of teasing people about those aspects in their nature which they, themselves, most vociferously ridicule and malign. The anger and enmity an individual harbors toward such an unforgivable quality will immediately be turned toward you. Best to listen with an open and compassionate heart and, if you choose to respond to a person’s self ridicule, consider using the “I agree, and I would add…” language pattern. In this way, you can allow for the person’s view of himself, while contributing some statement of kindness and appreciation for either the maligned quality or the person inhabiting it.
September 22, 2011 – At some point in coming to full maturity, we must accept that our moods are our own doing. Regardless of the moods of others or their actions to provoke a mood in us, we can know the level of our own maturity by the steadiness, or lack thereof, with which we meet and respond to the fluctuating currents of others’ ups and downs. The marvelous philosopher Vernon Howard offered a secret phrase to help hold this steadiness. In the presence of someone caught in an emotional storm and attempting to pass along its contagion, Howard suggested saying silently to oneself, “I have nothing to say to that.” I’ve found it worthwhile to use this or any statement of one’s own design to remain on solid ground while another person is floundering in a rough sea. After all, in the end, the best gift we can give a faltering other is a steadying hand, not another body drowning.
September 22, 2011 — Consider the last note of life is satisfaction. An out breath. It is done. The last effort made. A wonderful finality. The ultimate relaxation and release. Olympic numbers no longer matter — you did the best you could do.
Now, consider engaging this awareness with every out breath. There is actually no difference. We die to each moment with our every exhalation in order to make room for the desire for life — the next inhalation. Regardless of all our imagined defenses, excuses or celebrations of the preceding moments, we are as dead to them as are people in their graves are dead to this world.
And, consider, too, it is not you who desires this life you are living; it is Life itself. Life is breathing you… in… and out…. Allow Life to breathe you, be present to its living you, and relax with satisfaction as you let it go, with every act of breathing out.
September 22, 2011 – When someone claims they need you, recognize they don’t need you. This is simply a conventional, albeit deceitful, misuse of language. The actual message is that the speaker wishes to quell a painful yearning which, once projected onto you, he will burden you with the expectation of taking this longing away.
September 22, 2011 — Be mindful of how much baggage you strew into the lives of those you befriend, charge them to take care of it, then leave in search of someone else not so encumbered by stuff.
September 22, 2011 — When you refuse to notice what is lovely, worthy or miraculous, the only person you rob is yourself. Yet, it is a great thievery and pillage of a limitless treasure.
September 22, 2011 — There are two types of comparison. A person engages the comparison of discernment when she makes a choice or takes an action according to her own tastes and desires. The other, the comparison of judgment, relates the value of things and people, options and choices, relative to what others choose or do. The first looks inward for its compass direction, while the second spins around and around without a reliable point of its own.
September 22, 2011 — You belong exactly where you are. Not simply because there is goodness for you to get here, but even more importantly, there is goodness for you to give. And, in that giving, you will experience the grace of satisfaction, which is the ultimate Oneness, here and now.
September 22, 2011 – When one uses media primarily to communicate with others, one is most susceptible to mimicking the language of media, which, as any first year journalism or fiction-writing student knows, relies on conflict and drama. Therefore, consider well your words if you are wishing, instead, to communicate collaboration, agreement and goodwill.
September 22, 2011 — Be mindful about having other people answer your questions. To come to the end of what you currently know is to embark on a new frontier of understanding. To remain in wonder, at least for a little while, allowing your own mind to piece together information in a brand new way, is one of life’s greatest satisfactions. This activity, for which each human mind is perfectly suited, includes discovery, insight and an unshakeable knowing that cannot be experienced when someone else tells us what the generally accepted ”truth” is.