Monday, September 21, 2015

Time Machines!!

"We all have our time machines, don't we. Those that take us back are memories...And those that carry us forward, are dreams."

English writer H.G. Wells (born September 21, 1866) first fell in love with books after an accident left him bedridden with a broken leg when he was eight. With nowhere to go and no one to play with, the boy became devoted to fictional worlds.

What a lovely way to think about our thoughts~ clj

On Children~

What I Have Learned as I’ve Matured…  Don’t Be In Such a Hurry to Grow Up.

Why?
"Children deal well with their fears…
They admit them.
Children deal well with their problems…
They ask for help.
Children deal well with their pain…
They cry.
Children deal well with their tension…
They play.
Children deal well with their uncertainty…
They ask questions.
Children deal well with their vulnerability…
They accept help.
Children deal well with their weaknesses…
They rely on those stronger than they.
Children deal well with their dreams…
They follow them.
If only KIDS knew what NOT to change
and
If only I could learn to be a kid again."
By: Amie Joy Chiarelli – Wylie
If only I could be a child for a bit of time I may relearn or remember a few of these very simple things~ clj

Saturday, September 19, 2015

Wisdom~

"Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it."

September 18, 1917: On this day, dystopian fiction novelist Aldous Huxley began teaching at Eton. One of his pupils was Eric Blair, a young writer who would grow up to write 1984 under the pen name George Orwell.

Gosh this is so true, so true, so true~

Thursday, September 17, 2015

Make a Decision!!

“Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.”  

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Wednesday, September 16, 2015

From Wayne Dyer's daughter, Serena


This is from Wayne's daughter Serena again from their family Celebration of Life ceremony in Boca Raton.
My dad didn’t have a filter, so I am going to not filter this either. I want to share with all of you some things about my dad that you probably wouldn’t know unless you were one of his children or closest friends…
Two things stand out to me about dad, one is his sense of humor, and the other is his desire to share, whether that was share knowledge, share money, share stories... He was always teaching and sharing with everyone around him.
One summer when we were on Maui and I was about 8 years old, our family and friends took a catamaran over to the island of Molokai, where we swam, ate lunch, climbed trees, swung on vines, and played in a giant valley of mud that we used to cover ourselves in from head to toe. Some of the little kids were running naked in the mud and my brother Sands asked my dad if he was going to get naked and run in the mud too. My dad replied to us that he couldn’t get naked and run in the mud for three reasons. The first was that if he did, all the women would go crazy over his peeper (our family word for penis) and chase him all over the island. The second was that the kids would mistake his peeper for a vine and try and use it as a swing, and the last was that his peeper would drag on the ground and scrape and he didn’t want to get hurt. We were in hysterics over his responses and to this day we have never forgotten those reasons, even though this happened some 20 odd years ago.
My dad is funny, really,really funny, and every time we were together we were laughing and telling stories. My dad rarely had a simple answer for any question we may have asked. Just a few weeks ago we were taking Sailor’s pacifier out and dangling it in front of her, trying to encourage her to use her hands to reach. My dad was laying there watching and said “this is like the myth of Sisiphus, every time she gets close you take it away.” Having no clue what he was talking about he went on to explain the greek mythology of Sisiphus, and all of this was before breakfast! He was always telling stories and teaching us, his children.
He was creative in his story telling, he had his own language, he could deliver a punch line like no other. He was obsessed with not wasting things. He never wanted to throw anything out and because of that, his fridge was full of items way passed their expiration date. He would sense Skye or myself sifting through the fridge, looking for things to throw away, and he would fly into the kitchen and exclaim, mustard doesn’t’ expire! I don’t care if it says 2009 on it that mustard is perfectly good you are not throwing that away. He went one entire summer using one paper plate for his toast every morning just to prove that could. One paper plate for breakfast for the entire summer!
He and technology had a terrible relationship. He could never figure out how to use his ipad and would call me and say something like “the google isn’t letting me youtube the website," or "I want to send my website to someone in an email, how do I give them the password." The first time he saw one of us put in a password on a computer he smirked and said, I know your password! And we were like oh yea dad, what is it? He was completely serious when he said “four stars.” I was at the mall with Matt recently and my dad called twice in a row, which meant a technology panic, and I answered while Matt was in the dressing room. For the next 30 minutes I had to explain to him how to copy and paste the link to a website that he wanted to email to someone. Other people in the dressing rooms were cracking up listening to our dialogue..
Another summer we put a couple of pictures of our family on the wall in the kitchen and when we came back the following summer, the collage of pictures was now covering the cabinets. That Christmas, when we were all there on Maui, the photos were now spreading out to the walls, but the best part about it was that about a third of the photos were of people we didn’t even know. We would say, dad, who is this kid? And he would say "I don’t know, his mom sent me his picture so I put it on the wall." His condo on Maui is basically covered in photos of our family and friends and complete strangers. His love for people always so apparent.
Dad had an inherent sense of justice, of doing what was right, even when it may have been easier to ignore something. He is just so good, so full of love, and he did so many generous things in ways that never brought attention to himself, and I would like to share some of those with you.
He saw an HBO show a few weeks ago that highlighted a story of an elderly African American woman named Harriett Cleveland who was 61 years old, living in Montgomery, AL and was raising her 3 year old disabled grandson . Unable to pay a driving fine as well as her medications and food, she put the bill in a pile of unpaid bills to be gotten to later. Over time, the fine compiled and built, eventually going from $75 to over $3000. She was arrested in her home in front of her grandson and brought to jail, spending 2, two week sentences in a confided cell. My dad, having seen her story, was so moved that he had his assistant, close friend, and coauthor, Dee, look her up, locate her, and he wrote her a letter and sent her $3000 to cover the fine, and additionally sent her two multiple thousand dollar checks just to make sure she was alright. The woman called him in tears, she couldn't believe that a complete stranger sent her more money than she had ever had at one time in her life. This woman’s story aired on HBO and only one person, one person in the whole world, reached out to help her, without seeking any attention or praise, and that on person was my dad.
He received hundreds of pieces of mail a week and there were always letters asking him for money or financial assistance. Coincidentally, there was always money being sent to him from his fans as well. People who believed in tithing would send him odd dollar amounts all the time. He had a system where, when someone wrote asking for money, he put it in a pile, and when he received money from someone, he would take a letter from his pile and send that person the money he just received. He maintained a constant flow of financial support to complete strangers just because he could.
He has paid for the education of over a dozen children unrelated to him, children of friends or even strangers just because he believed in the value of a good education and he was capable of providing one. He set up a million dollar college fund at his alma mater for inner city kids struggling to pay for school and to date over 74 inner city kids have benefitted from that scholarship.
Every time we took a walk together on Maui, which often times was everyday I was there, someone would stop him to tell him that his work changed their life and every time he would engage with them as if they were the most important person in the world to him at that time. Then, he would ask what hotel they were in and what their room number was and he would send me to deliver a few signed books to their room. This happened constantly. Daily, really.
He had an incredibly powerful platform. He attracted huge audiences all over the world and he knew how much sharing the stage with him could impact someone's career. Every year, without fail, he would find someone whose cause or story or message he believed in and he would include them in his program for that year. He would endorse their work and if they did work together, he gave them every dollar of the royalties he collected on it, never taking any of it for himself.
As weird as this sounds, I had a longing to be near my dad. I had a longing to talk to him, to hear his voice, as he has always been the person I most wanted to be like. Incredibly kind, generous to a fault, interested in the world and in people in particular, funny. On his birthday this year I sent him a card and in it I wrote that on his 75th turn around the sun, he should be so proud of the fact that his children take all of their free time to be with him, to be around him, and that that is the mark of a great man and an even greater father. He called me after he got my card and told me he loved that, he loved that his kids always wanted to be around him. I am so grateful that he knew how much I loved being with him.
My dad and I took several trips around the world together, just the two of us, and on one of those recent trips I wrote him a letter and told him how much I loved him. He read that letter at every one of his talks afterward and my sister Skye even turned it into a song that she sang to us while we danced together at my wedding. I am so grateful to have that memory. In that letter I told him that I could feel that he believed in me, and what greater gift could a parent give their child but to make them feel how much they believed in them?
When we came up with the idea to write a book together, a book about how I was raised and what it was really like to grow up in the Dyer household, I felt daunted and thrilled. I wasn't sure I could adequately express what it was like to have him as a father in just 10 chapters. But he was so encouraging, so loving. He worked with me, telling me over and over again, "Serena, you have a gift at telling stories, just tell your stories and it will be perfect." At the end of writing that book together, we were both so proud of it. I felt his love and pride for me. I am so grateful he is the kind of dad who shared that. I am grateful that he taught me to go within and find God. Grateful that he taught me to be open to other people's ideas and ways of living. He taught me to leave the judging to someone else, and instead, to just treat people with compassion, understanding that everyone is just doing the best they can. Most importantly, in this moment, I am most grateful that he taught me that even in death, we are just shedding one coat and putting on another. He told me he would never leave me, even when he left this earthly realm, and I am most grateful that I know this to be true.
Everyone that knows me knows I am a talker. My dad is a talker too. Talking to him is and was my most favorite thing in the world. I think that is what is so hard for me about all of this. Our relationship was built on talking to each other. We spoke on the phone almost every single day. We talked so often and about so many things that for me it is impossible to narrow down who my dad is to me on a few pages
In closing, I want to tell you that Dad and I agreed to name our book "Don't die with your music still in you" because for me, it was the most important lesson he taught me. Dad came here with music to play and he played it so loudly, it changed the world. One man, with some really big ideas, changed the lives of millions of people for the better. My dad, with his love of teaching, of sharing, of story telling, helped millions of people improve their lives. It is now my promise to you dad that I will not die with my music still in me. I carry who you are within me, and I will do everything I can to continue your message as you had just recently asked me to one day do. For me, this isn't goodbye. I could never say goodbye to the person who is everywhere and everything for me. To me, this is just learning to see you and hear you in a new and different way, cause as you said, when you die, you will still be here, just in another room… I love you forever and ever dad. Thank you, for everything.
I AM
Serena

Twenty~Four Hours a Day~ September 16, 2015

Meditation for the Day

"We seem to live not only in time but also in eterity.  If we abide with God and He abides with us, we may bring forth spirtiual fruit which will last for eternity.  If we live with God, our lives can flow as some calm river through the dry land of earth.  It can cause the trees and of the spiritual life~ love and service~ to spring forth and yield abundantly.  Spiritual work may be done for eternity, not just for now.  Even here on earth we can live as though our real lives were eternal.

Pryaer for the Day

I pray that I may try to make my life like a cool river in a thirsty land.  I pray that I may give freely to all who ask my help."

Tuesday, September 15, 2015

Obstacles~


Guest Writer for Wake Up World
You probably don’t need me to tell you that spirituality isn’t all about feeling positive or uplifted. The enlightenment path requires us to sacrifice things that hold us back and keep us from making spiritual progress, and maybe this is where the literal notion of religious sacrifice first originated; from the external and even internal sacrifices we have to make on the enlightenment path.
Why do we have to make sacrifices on the spiritual path? Because there are a lot of things here on Earth that stop us from making genuine progress toward enlightenment, so we are best to release or avoid these things if we want to elevate our consciousness and contribute to the awakening of others.

The purpose of self-sacrifice isn’t to boss ourselves around or give up things we cherish, unless they cause serious damage – it’s to detach from things that are destructive or which hold us back, so we can make room for more wholesome elements in our life, that accelerate our evolution.
Here, I’ll discuss five things you’ll want to consider releasing from your life, if your goal is to walk a spiritual path without falling back into limiting habits and mindsets. Taking steps to rid ourselves of these attachments right now will allow us to forge ahead with strength and clarity. Over time, they will fade away and eventually stop influencing our lives.

5 Attachments to Release on the Path of Enlightenment

1. Negative or Toxic People
I’m sure we all know someone who seems overly negative or constantly upset with life. Energetically speaking, we’ll want to keep our distance from them for the sake of our spiritual growth.
We’re all subconsciously connected, and the words and actions of people we’re close with can affect us in a deeper way than we realize. When we’re around other people, we tend to be influenced (subconsciously or otherwise) by their expressions and, sometimes, their outbursts. If we aren’t careful, we can end up repeating or reflecting their behavior and energy, find ourselves frustrated with life or with the people around us, without even realizing we were influenced by someone else’s negativity.
With all of this said, we should remember that the issue isn’t always black and white. We might have a loved one who means a lot to us but who tends to dwell in negativity, or who has random or not so random outbursts (or their opinion on any issue may just be too pessimistic to take). We don’t want to abandon our family or people we’re close with just because of their (relative) negativity, so we’ll have to find some kind of middle ground. We don’t want to spend so much time with them that they start to influence us, but we don’t want to avoid them just because we don’t like how they feel, or express themselves.
Walking a true path of enlightenment, we’ll want to stay balanced and listen to our intuition when we’re met with any difficult relationships and circumstances. Our intuition will help us to make the best and most helpful decisions to our spiritual wellbeing. It is also possible to spend time with a pessimistic or angry loved one while finding ways to stay impervious to their negativity.
2. Sugary, Artificial, Processed and GMO Foods
It’s no secret that our modern society is filled with cheap, fake foods that make big food corporations money while slowly poisoning us and ensuring that we’ll be sick (ie. good medical/pharmaceutical customers) when we’re older. Not to mention the health dangers associated with genetically modified foods.
These foods don’t just hurt our physical health, they’re a detriment to our spiritual health as well — because mind, body and spirit are one. What we put into our bodies affects us deeply on a mental, emotional and spiritual level, and if we want to be clearheaded as we go throughout our day or we want our meditations to be more potent, then clean, healthy and preferably organic food is our best bet.
We’ll also want to avoid unhealthy eating habits, like eating too much, too fast, too late at night, and without mindfulness and gratitude. We don’t often realize how these factors affect us while we’re eating, but the effects make themselves known at a later time when we don’t feel our best (and can’t understand why.)
I’m not trying to be one of those food snobs who tells you how to live your life, and while I try to be healthy. I have eaten as much fake, sugary food as anyone else. I’ve felt firsthand the difference between healthy and unhealthy food — the first choice gives us energy, clarity, vitality and an enhanced sense of passion while the latter pleases our taste buds before dulling our sense, making us feel lazy and tired.
3. Television and Excessive Technological Stimulation
Watching television is one of the most destructive things a spiritual seeker can do. Again, I don’t want to tell you how to live, but a lot of things in this world seem intentionally designed to keep people unhealthy, disempowered and unthinking. Television in particular dumbs us down while keeping us fixed on the artificial reality we’re presented with — a reality that’s usually violent, over-dramatized, fear-inducing, hypersexual or just plain juvenile.
[For more information, please see the article: Digital Deception – Can You Trust What You See?]
5 Things to Release on the Path of Enlightenment 2
Undoubtedly, spiritual seekers would benefit from avoiding TV and immersion in other kind of technological stimulation, but realistically, there will always be times when we have to use technology. Like most writers, most of my work is done on a computer, but when I’m done working for the day, I can always get outside, go to a spot in nature, ride my bicycle and generally detach from artificial technologies. It’s important to reconnect with nature, which technology can prevent, because it is our true home; it provides everything we’ll ever need for survival or leisure. That is nature’s way.
We can’t reconnect with nature if we’re too busy staring into the TV, our smartphones or any other gadget that distracts us from life, so we’ll want to put these things down sometimes and rediscover reality.
[For tips on reconnecting with the Earth, check out the article Conscious Connection – A Practical Guide To Grounding Your Energy.]
4. Laziness 
I know that fatigue is sometimes unavoidable, and we never want to feel it when it comes along. However, there are driving factors that we’ll want to be on the lookout for if we don’t want laziness to bring us down and impede our journey of enlightenment.
While the advice we’ve been given from various spiritual teachers to ‘become nothing’ is helpful on the path, I believe we should be active in the midst of all of our experiences and spiritual practices that reconnect us with nothingness. Exercising a little each day is highly beneficial to our physical and spiritual wellbeing, and is known to help reduce fatigue, which in turn helps to boost our meditations and make those higher vibes easier to feel. Eating well is also crucial to your maintaining your personal energy.
Being active can also help us find a sense of purpose, and once we find what we want to do in life, we can enthusiastically pursue it with an active, awake perspective instead of sitting down on the couch to be entertained by whatever reality TV show is on.
[For more on this, please see the article: Transpersonal Purpose and the Impulse for Spiritual Development.]
Being active is an important part of our spiritual evolution, and laziness or fatigue won’t go away until we take steps to actively release ourselves from the patterns that keep us feeling that way. It might require us to step outside of our comfort zone, but we’ll see that it was worth it when we begin to feel better and the good vibes can flow in without being impeded by our choices.
5. Suppressing Negativity or Avoiding the ‘Shadow Self’
We all have a ‘shadow self’, which is the aspect of our personality that’s constantly negative, hurtful, narcissistic, etc. Contrary to what you might assume, I’m not encouraging us to give it up; I’m encouraging us to give up trying to suppress it. The ‘shadow’ is a crucial part of our selves that we must learn to embrace, heal and release.
How we handle this is our choice entirely, and we can do it with grace, patience, and most importantly, centeredness. When we deal with these kinds of situations, leaving our center can cause us to lose ourselves in the emotional fray. In embracing the shadow self, we’ll also want to stop avoiding the negative, difficult or confronting situations we have to deal with in our lives. No matter how hard we try to stay ‘happy’ or aligned with our higher consciousness, we’re going to have to deal with negative situations that we’d rather sweep under the rug, sooner or later. It’s up to us.
Our destructive tendency to suppress negative situations or even the negativity we carry within ourselves will stifle our spiritual growth in the long run. So let’s give it up and willingly confront any negativity that comes our way – from the world or from within.
[For a deeper exploration of the Shadow Self, please see the article: Into the Deep – Learning from the Shadow Within.]

The Final Word

We’re all unique. As we continue along the enlightenment path, we’ll each find plenty more attachments that we have to release into the ethers if we want to keep thriving. It might be a difficult or uncomfortable process for a lot of spiritual seekers, but it’s an inevitable part of the process of seeking enlightenment. Although we may not always see the benefits, the positive changes we make today becomes evident when we stop and look back tomorrow.
To move forward, we have to be willing to give up things that no longer serve us, and this gets easier when we can call on our higher consciousness and allow our spiritual/creative essence to work through us. Opening up to the ‘higher self’ will make our disciplines and sacrifices easier, and whether we know it or not, we have an infinite source of love, guidance, potential and creativity within us that we can access at any time. Our connection with this part of ourselves will become clearer and more refined as we willingly sacrifice and release the things that stop us from actively maintaining it, and the guidance we receive from our higher consciousness in return will make any future sacrifices easier.
With this in mind, we see that our sacrifices really don’t have to be hard. They will only be hard as long as we build them up to be that way in our minds. By opening the mind and connecting with our intuition, we come to understand that sacrifice and discipline boils down to a moment-by-moment choice ~ a choice that comes with infinite rewards.

My Spiritual Path~ Get on BOARD!!



5 Obstacles on the Spiritual Path
12th September 2015
By Wes Annac
Guest Writer for Wake Up World
Deciding we want to commit to the spiritual path is easy, but it can be harder to live up to our commitment. At the first sign of trouble, we could easily depart the path in favor of a lifestyle that doesn’t challenge us as much, but if we do, we’ll miss out on all of the incredible things the path has for us.
We’ll miss out on spiritual evolution and the wonders that come with it, and we’ll eventually realize we’ve taken a wrong turn. We might try to steer our ship in a more positive direction by then, but we would’ve been much further along the path if we hadn’t stopped in the first place.
I’d like to share five things that can distract us from the path, so we know what to look out for and what can hurt us.
The common spiritual seeker has to be diligent in this day and age, because there are all kinds of distractions out there that can halt our progress if we let them. Now’s a better time than ever to increase our dedication and find out how far we can go, but we have to watch out for the things I’ll list here as well as anything else that can stand in our way.

1. Fatigue, Laziness, Complacency

These three qualities can halt our progress by encouraging us to stop, relax and think more about the ego-driven self than our path or the people we want to help. If we give in to fatigue, it can take away our inspiration and encourage us to do little more than sit on the couch, binge watch our favorite TV shows and generally fail to get anything done.
Laziness compliments fatigue, because it encourages us to be unproductive for long periods of time.
Complacency is the icing on top of the cake that encourages us not to care that we’re no longer getting anything done. Complacency can encourage long periods of careless laziness, and if we can recognize and try to combat fatigue as soon as it starts to affect us, we can get away from all three of these qualities and continue with our inner work.

2. Difficulty

We’ve heard from practically every spiritual source that we’re infinite, and if we have love in our hearts and we can persevere in times of trouble, there’s nothing we can’t do. This includes keeping up with our spiritual practices (meditation, prayer, etc.), but we can easily convince ourselves that keeping up with them is just too hard.
If we convince ourselves we can’t keep going, we’ll naturally set them aside and we won’t pick them up until we once again find the motivation to give them a try. I’ll repeat what I said earlier: If we hadn’t set them down in the first place, then we’d have made a lot more progress by the time we were ready to pick them back up.
It helps to understand the role of love and perseverance on the spiritual (and creative) path, and the only time we fail at something is when we give up. None of us are failures until we allow ourselves to fail, and when it comes to our spirituality, that’s the last thing we want to do. If we’re serious about elevating our consciousness, we’ll quickly understand the importance of dedication and refusing to give up.
We might surprise ourselves with how much we can achieve if we keep going, and before we know it, we’ll be in a higher place each day and our radiance will become apparent to everyone in our vicinity.

3. Forgetting about love

I mentioned love earlier, and I can say from experience that forgetting to call on it can make the journey more difficult; especially if creativity is a big part of it. In my opinion, we can’t have true creativity or spirituality without love, and love makes it easier to keep on in hard times.
Love gives us the inspiration to keep going when our stresses pile up and we don’t feel very enlightened or inspired, and to fall away from it is to fall away from the greatest creative, spiritual, inspirational source around. The journey’s a lot easier and more worthwhile when we have love, and without it, life can seem empty and hollow – and not in the good way.
Plenty of spiritual teachers encourage emptiness, but love offers a unique type of emptiness where the mind is empty (as it’s meant to be) but the heart is full of inspiration, creativity and the willingness to tackle our most difficult challenges.
We’ll still have a clear, open, empty mind, but we’ll also be aligned with the creative force that’s responsible for our existence, our planet’s existence, and, in my opinion, everything we create. It all comes from love, and we’ll understand this when we’ve done the most potent inner work that gives us access to higher dimensions where everything is clearer and more amazing.

4. The distractions of our mainstream culture

5 Obstacles on the Spiritual Path - Pop CultureYou probably don’t need me to tell you how our mainstream culture can distract us from the path.
Imagine it’s a Friday night and you feel inspired to meditate, write a spiritually inspired article or compose some spiritually inspired music. Perhaps your better half tells you they’d like to spend some time with you, and instead of the plans that were forming, you decide to watch a movie or catch up with a television show you both enjoy.
I’m not saying that spending time with loved ones will take us off of the path, but pay attention to how you feel once you’re done indulging in those movies or TV shows. Depending on the type of content you watch, you could feel awful or completely uninspired to do anything that has to do with your spirituality.
In fact, it could go in the opposite direction. All those influences swirling around your mind could encourage you to partake in more shows, movies, etc., and finding inspiration again could be difficult. You could fall prey to more and more distorted cultural influence, and as you all probably know, there are a lot of negative influences out there.
Television and movies are filled to the brim with negative, brutal and lusty programming, and they have a greater effect on our mind and our subconscious than we realize. If this type of programming takes hold in our subconscious, it can make us want more and more of it to satisfy the subconscious craving it created.
We might want to avoid these things altogether, and this is why so many spiritual seekers and organizations have removed themselves from the influence of western society. Its influence can keep us from making valuable progress, so instead of indulging, maybe we can find a healthier way to spend time with our loved ones.

5. Loneliness (i.e. the absence of people to share our spirituality with)

Being a spiritual seeker can often be lonely, because some of us are the only ones in our area who embrace spirituality or the various concepts that come with it. This might be different for people in western states like California, where there are a lot of ‘conscious’ people with various beliefs, but a lot of spiritual seekers are alone in their knowledge, their awareness and the way they feel about life.
5 Obstacles on the Spiritual Path - Loneliness
This can discourage us from making progress, because there are plenty of people around us who’ll talk about trivial, cultural things all day long. It never feels good for a spiritual seeker to take part in mundane discussion, because they’ve begun to tap in to the secrets of the universe and this quickly becomes their only interest.
Can you imagine having all these thoughts and feelings about enlightenment, UFOs, meditation, etc. burning deep within, but all anyone around you wants to talk about is the debt ceiling or everything wrong with the liberal or conservative parties? It can be maddening, and if we subject ourselves to too much nonspiritual influence, it can slowly take hold in our subconscious. Before we know it, our minds are once again on all those trivial things we wanted to get away from and we have to start the process of personal liberation back over again.

Conclusion

These are just a few things we’ll want to avoid if we want to successfully elevate our consciousness, and they’ll no longer hinder us when we reach a certain level of progress. We’ll have learned to stay away from most of them, but even the ones we can’t stay away from will stop affecting us like they once did.
The path will get easier as we learn to avoid things that keep us from making progress and embrace things that elevate our progress, and as long as we’re dedicated to the process and our intent is genuine, getting past the obstacles that stand in our way will be a breeze. We’ll no longer feel disconnected from our creator, our higher consciousness or anything else that liberates us, and with our love-fueled connection intact, we’ll be able to emerge into the world and make a positive impact on others.
For now, let’s keep in mind what helps and hurts us on the path, and in all situations, let’s call on our inner love to make things easier. Love is always here for us, and it can always help us through the challenges that could otherwise bring us down. Routinely calling on it can make life easier, more flowing and more worthwhile, and we’ll enjoy all of our challenges when we approach them with love and the willingness to stick with our spirituality in the face of all odds.

The Light at the End of the Tunnel!!!


"Don't wait for a light to appear at the end of the tunnel, stride down there and light the bloody thing yourself."
 
When her husband died in 1985, Austrialian pastoralist Sara Henderson (born September 15, 1936) took over managing duties at the Bull River cattle station. She was named Businesswoman of the Year for her efforts and wrote about the experience in her autobiography, From Strength to Strength.

Monday, September 14, 2015

THe Beast Within Us?

"Maybe there is a beast… maybe it's only us."

September 14, 1953: On this day, William Golding submitted Strangers from Within to a publisher. The manuscript was rejected, but a month later a young editor picked it up from the reject pile. With some work and a new title—The Lord of the Flies—Golding's novel was published in 1954.

Perhaps it's true?  Man certainly can make a mess of things.... How simple to turn this around...love first!

Friday, September 11, 2015

The Unendurable~

"The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy."

September 10, 1967: On this day, American poet Djuna Barnes proudly told a friend she had become "the most famous unknown in the world." She guarded her privacy by living in a tiny apartment in Greenwich Village and avoiding most public appearances.

I know this to be true however when I'm in my own quandry, irritable and discontent, that curve feels so very far away... I know it begins slowly and quietly and builds until I reach the epithetss that we all long for~ slowly and quietly..oh so very slowly and quietly....

Wednesday, September 9, 2015

On Spiritual Growth~


We are not all born at once, but by bits. The body first, and the spirit later... Our mothers are racked with the pains of our physical birth; we ourselves suffer the longer pains of our spiritual growth. 

American nature writer Mary Austin (born September 9, 1868) has a mountain named after her. Mount Mary Austin is located in the Sierra Nevada and is home to the Sierra Nevada Bighorn Sheep.

I believe... we are born as spiritual beings and that we become what we are open to, ebbing and flowing over time live the tides, the winds, the land and sea~ ever reaching to new levels, however sometimes dipping, dropping to place we would rather not see~ It's the ongoing process of life, ever ongoing.  clj

Tuesday, September 8, 2015

Truth aout Truth~ always


The truth may be stretched thin, but it never breaks, and it always surfaces above lies, as oil floats on water.
 
September 8, 1883: On this day, Sigmend Freud wrote a letter to his fiancée urging her to finish Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra's Don Quixote despite the novel's "many coarse and in themselves nauseating passages."

Sunday, September 6, 2015

RISING STRONG~ Brene' Brown


Rising Strong: Brené Brown on the Physics of Vulnerability and What Resilient People Have in Common

by 
“If we are brave enough often enough, we will fall; this is the physics of vulnerability.”
“There is no science without fancy, and no art without facts,” Vladimir Nabokov famously proclaimed. Today, hardly anyone embodies this sentiment more fully than Brené Brown, who came of age as a social scientist in an era when the tyranny of facts trivialized the richness of fancy and the human experience was squeezed out of the qualitative in the service of the quantitative, the two pitted as polarities. But like Susan Sontag, who recognized how polarities limit and imprison us, Brown defied these dogmatic dichotomies and went on to become what she calls a “researcher-storyteller” — a social scientist who studies the complexities and nuances of the human experience with equal regard for data and story, enriching story with data and ennobling data with story in a quest to “find knowledge and truth in a full range of sources.”
In Rising Strong (public library), Brown builds upon her earlier work on vulnerability to examine the character qualities, emotional patterns, and habits of mind that enable people to transcend the catastrophes of life, from personal heartbreak to professional collapse, and emerge not only unbroken but more whole.
Art by Lisbeth Zwerger for a rare edition of 'The Wizard of Oz.' Click image for more.
To be sure, this isn’t another iteration of “fail forward,” that tired and trendy (but far from new) cultural trope of extolling failure as a stepping stone to success — Brown’s research is about what happens in the psyche and the spirit when we are in the thick of the failure itself, facedown in the muddy stream, gasping for air; about what those who live from a deep place of worthiness have in common; about the choices involved in living a wholehearted life and the consequences of those choices in rising from our facedown moments to march forward.
Brown writes:
While vulnerability is the birthplace of many of the fulfilling experiences we long for — love, belonging, joy, creativity, and trust, to name a few — the process of regaining our emotional footing in the midst of struggle is where our courage is tested and our values are forged. Rising strong after a fall is how we cultivate wholeheartedness in our lives; it’s the process that teaches us the most about who we are.
Brown argues that we live in “a Gilded Age of Failure,” where we fetishize recovery stories for their redemptive ending, glossing over the large swaths of darkness and struggle preceding it. (Some time ago, I too lamented this cultural tendency in my seven most important learnings from the first seven years ofBrain Pickings.) This, Brown points out, does a disservice to the essence of grit, which has been shown to be a primary trait of those who succeed in life. She writes:
Embracing failure without acknowledging the real hurt and fear that it can cause, or the complex journey that underlies rising strong, is gold-plating grit. To strip failure of its real emotional consequences is to scrub the concepts of grit and resilience of the very qualities that make them both so important — toughness, doggedness, and perseverance.
Although we live in a culture of perfectionism where our idealized selves become our social currency, we know, at least on some level, that risk-taking, failure, and success are inextricably linked. Brown captures this elegantly:
If we are brave enough often enough, we will fall; this is the physics of vulnerability.
Art by Lisbeth Zwerger for a rare edition of 'The Wizard of Oz.' Click image for more.
Brown considers the trifecta of resilience her research has uncovered:
The most transformative and resilient leaders that I’ve worked with over the course of my career have three things in common: First, they recognize the central role that relationships and story play in culture and strategy, and they stay curious about their own emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. Second, they understand and stay curious about how emotions, thoughts, and behaviors are connected in the people they lead, and how those factors affect relationships and perception. And, third, they have the ability and willingness to lean in to discomfort and vulnerability.
Another common denominator Brown found across those able to rise strong from their facedown moments is an active engagement with the creative impulse, whatever the medium — a physical practice integrating the intellectual, the emotional, and the spiritual:
Creativity embeds knowledge so that it can become practice. We move what we’re learning from our heads to our hearts through our hands. We are born makers, and creativity is the ultimate act of integration — it is how we fold our experiences into our being… The Asaro tribe of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea has a beautiful saying: “Knowledge is only a rumor until it lives in the muscle.”
Yet another commonality among the resilient is some form of spiritual life rooted in love and belonging — be it communion with nature or a meditation practice or the reverence of art or the divinity of solitude. Brown, who comes from “a long line of folks who believe that fishing is church” and had her first taste of spiritual transcendence in the wilderness of Lake Travis as a child, writes:
Our expressions of spirituality are as diverse as we are. When our intentions and actions are guided by spirituality — our belief in our interconnectedness and love — our everyday experiences can be spiritual practices. We can transform teaching, leading, and parenting into spiritual practices. Asking for and receiving help can also be spiritual practices. Storytelling and creating can be spiritual practices, because they cultivate awareness.
In the remainder of Rising Strong, Brown goes on to explore the principles and practices of psychoemotional resilience through a tapestry of research findings and real human stories. Complement it with Parker Palmer on the six pillars of the wholehearted life, Cheryl Strayed on the art of living with opposing truths, and David Whyte on the true meaning of heartbreak, then treat yourself to this magnificent On Being conversation with Brown about her work and the insights it has furnished:
"HOPE IS A FUNCTION OF STRUGGLE"