There’s surprising relief and regeneration in finding ourselves within a moment of genuine grace, however small or temporary it may be.
…one lives and analyses data within a frame, unaware that the solution is most often just outside of that frame. Never underestimate the depth of your subjectivity.
Laughter has got to be the single healthiest activity one can perform. Just think how healthy you would be if you could sincerely laugh at that which now oppresses you.
Well-being, or wholeness, implies integrity and harmony between all existing elements, providing freedom for the whole.
Yearning often does not provide a sense of attainment or “peace,” as it is fuel for one’s personal purpose, to in some specific way give or create; to do that is not necessarily easy or peaceful.
People generally believe that stress is responsible for depletion, but apathy and uninspired systematic repetition are equally responsible. Or rather, systematic repetition produces as much or more stress and anxiety as anything else.
Getting down to the gym a couple days a week and having low-fat milk in your morning latte isn’t going to make much of a dent in a system or lifestyle that is essentially, well, unwell.
A balanced diet” is not so much about protein/fat/carbohydrate ratios. The real ratios to consider, at least for the typical American or European, are energy consumption/expenditure, pleasure/actual need, food/everything else.
Appreciation, affection, focus and intention fill up the space of self-reflection, and one loses oneself in the engagement. And what a relief it is when you get there.
Everyone claims to want the truth. If you really want it, I’d suggest investing seriously in humor and this mysterious skill of transforming bad news into good. Otherwise, you’ll only get more frustrated.
The nature of yearning is urgent so as to guarantee evolution, change.
The essential war within, and the cause of suffering, begins with the presumption that yearning, impulse and curiosity, desire and question, exist so as to end them. To attain, to acquire, to answer.
Although each of us has the right to believe we are suffering, I suppose, there is a definite and ultimately essential distinction to be made between actual suffering, its cause and resolution, and invented or imagined suffering.
The subjective experience of intense pain (“That’s all I can take”) corresponds exactly to one’s subjective experience in relation to truth (“That’s all I can take”).
True balance, and harmony, necessitates finding a way to override the addictive, reactive emotions that are the fabric of one’s subjective illusion, and discover emotions that correspond to actuality.
By its nature, what you yearn for is most often intimidating. It produces, and itself is, a question, and one that is not easy to engage or answer.
My intention is not to define a perfect life and then cause an unhappy analysis of what you are not doing correctly or are incapable of doing.
If you are “playing” too much or “working” too much, you will have a reaction on the other side, which indicates your pace is off, too slow or too fast.
The infinite possibilities that exist in any given moment cause infinite possibilities in response. The wording is correct here; the possibilities exist already, and have already caused the existing possibilities of response.
Sometimes I wonder how much of our suffering we allow or impose on ourselves simply in search of our worthiness to accept our own respect and appreciation.
The exact proportion and combination of the qualities within you, as they are, even while you search and struggle for them to be different or better, is a unique beauty.
In making a clear distinction between desire (answer) and yearning (question), we inevitably end up back at personal purpose.
You have everything already inside you necessary for the true response to any challenge you will meet. Usually, it’s just a question of assembling some elements in a way that you didn’t think to do before (which brings us to intuition…).
What you have to do to achieve what you want necessitates the creative actualization of the totality of your being as it is. Nothing more, but also nothing less.
Because as you become better at everything, as the innate skills actually manifest in reality, the bar rises for the next jump. The core demand for evolution is relentless, and respect, happiness, love and joy are irrevocably tied to it.
The challenges are illusions, but necessary ones to determine if you can see through them.
Once you get off the bandwagon of believing that truth is your enemy and is bad news with all kinds of associated unhappy obligations, you can then afford to take it on with some enthusiasm and start to have some fun with it.
You may have noticed that the questions asked are better than the answers given. What do you expect? Perhaps we could submit these answers in a game and see if anyone could figure out what the hell the question was. “Ahh, how to be happy?
It takes a relative amount of courage just to get out of bed each day. There are those who are stronger in their courage, and they help to compel us along a little further in the fulfillment of our faith.
Transcendence is more about the personal act of not engaging the enemy, finding a way out of the cage that is being designed for you at a particular moment by others, circumstance, or your own bad habits and ignorance.
What is at the base of shame or guilt? It is the consciousness of an imbalance, or of an action in the past that has caused, and probably continues to cause, suffering.
If you know what life really wants, and if you know what you really want, you can begin to create the relationship.
Transformation, on the other hand, is creating beauty from horror or destruction (or, for beginners, an actually pleasant evening with the usual family problems).
I think that as a species we’ve played at being the self-indulgent, spoiled adolescent way too long, and now there are permanent damages and absolute risks that most people are ignoring.
More focus has been placed on these subjects through human history than on anything else—mystery and mysticism, God, imagination, intuition, the nature of relationships, human purpose, happiness and salvation…
Through the realization of the potentials and possibilities within and outside of you, one connects imagination with reality. What could be becomes so.
The purest definition of “religious” is: relating to or manifesting faithful devotion to an acknowledged ultimate reality.
One could make a nice link between imagination and spirit. To make that link, all we need is some inspiration. Essentially, imagination has the innate potential to compel or inspire and to set in motion causation. That’s why it exists.
It’s misleading or deceptive in a way that such skills are learned like any other — simple practice, sincere investment over time. Yes, like small steps, one at a time, to cross the bridge. Just a single step today.
We do have some capacity to determine how things evolve, and how we evolve, individually and as a community or race. That’s a tremendous freedom and a tremendous responsibility.
As a soul, you have the freedom – and earned responsibility – to transpose your personal process of evolution, to manifest your greatest talents and vision, into the work that matters to you most as a means to personal redemption.
Forgiveness is really about absolution: to set free. But if you look carefully at the dynamic, the one you’re setting free is yourself.
If you don’t practice presence, you never learn how to have busyness facilitate accomplishment.