Acceptance

I wonder what the world would be like if we did not work so hard to avoid everything. So much in our lives exists to help deaden our senses: not only drugs and drink, but electronics and countless other diversions. If we really felt everything there is to feel, I wonder if we would fall apart. The world seems like it would drastically change if we just accepted and encountered the pain of our circumstances head on, as it is. But we do not. We anesthetize in order to avoid feeling too much.

If we allowed ourselves to feel the pain in the world, I believe we may move on to better things. We would have to change things. We would not be able to bear things the way they are.

There Is Enough

So much of our stress must come from this mentality of scarcity, which is borne of the belief that there is not enough. There is never enough time, money, energy, love, so we hunker down and protect what we do have. We have this irritability that springs from the belief that if we do not fiercely guard our space, time, energy and money, someone will come and take them from us. It’s true: people will take what you give them, and there is also this ...  Keep reading

Work/Rest

Remember that there is a natural rhythm to life. You must work and you must rest. Too much of either of those is not a good thing. If you are constantly working and not resting, you will run yourself into the ground. And if you rest too much, you will actually make yourself more tired. Instead, it is wise to heed the adage: “work hard, play hard.” When you are working, you should give yourself to it fully, not constantly wishing for rest while you do it. And when you are resting, you ...  Keep reading

I Am Valuable, I Am Nothing

The paradox of being human is that you are nothing and very valuable all at the same time. It’s a little hard to understand, but if you look around, you will see that you are a very small part of a very big universe careening through time – just one very small speck in a very large nebula of actions and reactions. It’s easy to think that what you do doesn’t really matter. It’s true, it doesn’t; and yet, you are also very important. You have probably also had ...  Keep reading

Sketching

I heard a friend say once that “works of art are never finished, only abandoned.” My art teacher in high school taught me to develop a composition moving around and across the entire image at once, sketching in parts of the whole a little at a time, rather than  finishing one part in detail and then moving onto another (which may be our tendency). Life is kind of like that, too. You don’t ever really finish it. It’s just that one day you die. You might not have everything ...  Keep reading

Real Strength

Real strength is not defined by your ability to conquer any and every thing that might stand in your way. To overpower and dominate is often weakness. Real strength is knowing your own fragility (for you can be snuffed out at any moment). And it is realizing that though they kill your body, they cannot kill your soul.

Me

I am learning that getting older means becoming more like myself than anyone else. Before, in the name of becoming a more balanced human being, I spent a lot of time trying to become more like someone else. In doing so, I did not trust my own compass to lead me to what I needed. That has caused a lot of anxiety for me. I was the most healthy when I was a kid and I didn’t know any better and I just developed my own way of coping and dealing with life out of necessity. 🙂

A New Story

A child who hates himself will act in such a way as to cause you to hate him as well. This is the only safe way he knows to find out if there is something other than hate in the world. He acts this way in order to check and see if there is love for him even when he is at his worst. One of our only jobs with children is to show them that there is something other than the choir of voices that confirm the way they already feel about themselves.