July 10, 2011

Facing Issues




Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know. It just keeps returning with new names, forms, and manifestations until we learn whatever it was to teach us about where we are separating ourselves from reality, how we are pulling back instead of opening up, closing down instead of allowing ourselves to experience fully whatever we encounter, without hesitating or retreating into ourselves

July 5, 2011

Steps to Wholeness

by Deepak Chopra

1. Nourish your "light body." If you feed it with fresh energy every day, it will provide you with inspiration and guidance.

2. Turn entropy into evolution. With constant input from your soul, your mind can generate never ending creativity.

3. Commit yourself to deeper awareness. Ask for new vision, new beliefs, and a new sense of self every day.

4. Be generous of spirit. Generosity begins at the level of the soul, which never runs out of the two things totally necessary to life: energy and awareness.

5. Focus on relationships instead of consumption. Wholeness depends on relationships that are whole. You cannot be whole in isolation. As your soul sees you, you are connected to everything. To be connected means to be in relationship.

6. Relate to your body consciously. Every day, your body consciously tends to you, never losing focus. You can acknowledge this faithful service by consciously relating to your body in turn with trust, consideration, honesty, mutual cooperation and loving appreciation.

7. Embrace every day as a new world. There seems to be a gap between mind and body. Since the mind sets the body's agenda, if you win the tiny battles against routine, inertia, and boredom, this gap will close and every day will seem like a renewal.

8. Let the timeless be in charge of time. Your soul's frame of reference is timeless. Live from that timeless place. At your source all events are laid out with perfect timing. Time submits to your desire, not the other way around.

9. Feel the world instead of trying to understand it. The flow of life refuses to be analyzed. Yet you were designed with sensitive awareness that goes far beyond thinking. Instead of trying to understand the endlessly changing world, you can feel your way and trust those feelings. Only then will you know what is unfolding around you.

10. Seek after your own mystery. You must want wholeness as fervently as you want a job, house, car, and family. You must be willing to walk the path alone. The answer lies in seeking your own mystery, not a mystery handed to you by anyone else.

July 4, 2011

Friendship


Friendship is about reciprocal cherishing. It may come as a surprise that to be a good friend you might need to be able to receive loving care as well as give it. But this is the essence of friendship. If you look at what you and your good friends actually do for each other from this perspective, you can see how when you are able to indulge each other you open emotional doors. The knots of hurt, the grudges, dissolve.

You are receptive, responsive. So you have the feeling when you're with your friend that you are suddenly more able to express yourself, to relax, to breathe. It's like coming home to wishes that you were not able to feel, much less express. As one student wrote: "Talking with Isabelle after a painful evening, I felt free, content, lightweight."

You tell your friend, "You won't believe what happened today..." and this means, "You, as my friend, will help me figure out what happened today." This "you won't believe..." conversation is a crucial part of friendship; because it is the channel for relieving a diffuse "down" feeling we all have under our surfaces at times. Everyone has experienced some degree of depression, and at the bottom of that depression is our shock that our inborn expectation of cherishment has not been fulfilled. We are incredulous to find that our expectation could have been disappointed, whether it happened today or in the long ago past. "I do not believe that they treated me like that!" we say. Or "Oh my God, they were not there for me!" "My parents expected me to parent them!" "Why was I surprised...?"


Your friend is the one who can hear this cry of incredulity and comfort you. How? By being there, by letting you be a child asking for help. With your friend, you can revisit and work through your disappointments, get back in balance, restore your trust in people's goodness.

~Elizabeth Young-Bruehl~