Happiness is the absence

 

Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness.

CHUANG-TZU

Evolve not revolt

Like: Bill Straehl

Seeing as I'm an eternal being, I often view things from a more distant perspective. I'd like to think that I'm beginning to detect a leak in the 'dike'. Guiliani being barred from practicing law. Pence breaking with trump on Jan. 6th. Bi-partisan movement on infrastructure. trump's fading media presence. In-fighting within the GOP. Their lack of loudly distancing themselves from the crazies in their ranks. Criminal investigations proceeding forward (admittedly at a snail's pace) against trump and the gang. Mitch's moves to set up his retirement. Biden's continuing quiet competence and popularity. With the handling of the pandemic, the economic recovery, and things actually getting done, I think America has grown tired of the 'circus', and is regaining its appetite for more boring, but competent government.

5 Steps to Setting Powerful Intentions Deepok Chopra

 Intention is the starting point of every dream. It is the creative power that fulfills all of our needs, whether for money, relationships, spiritual awakening, or love.

Everything that happens in the universe begins with intention. When I decide to buy a birthday present, wiggle my toes, or call a friend, it all starts with intention.

The sages of India observed thousands of years ago that our destiny is ultimately shaped by our deepest intentions and desires. The classic Vedic text known as the Upanishads declares, “You are what your deepest desire is. As your desire is, so is your intention. As your intention is, so is your will. As your will is, so is your deed. As your deed is, so is your destiny.”

An intention is a directed impulse of consciousness that contains the seed form of that which you aim to create. Like real seeds, intentions can’t grow if you hold on to them. Only when you release your intentions into the fertile depths of your consciousness can they grow and flourish. In my book The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, the Law of Intention and Desire lays out the five steps for harnessing the power of intention to create anything you desire.

1. Slip into the Gap

Most of the time our mind is caught up in thoughts, emotions, and memories. Beyond this noisy internal dialogue is a state of pure awareness that is sometimes referred to as “the gap.” One of the most effective tools we have for entering the gap is meditation. Meditation takes you beyond the ego-mind into the silence and stillness of pure consciousness. This is the ideal state in which to plant your seeds of intention.

2. Release Your Intentions and Desires

Once you’re established in a state of restful awareness, release your intentions and desires. The best time to plant your intentions is during the period after meditation, while your awareness remains centered in the quiet field of all possibilities. After you set an intention, let it go—simply stop thinking about it. Continue this process for a few minutes after your meditation period each day.

3. Remain Centered in a State of Restful Awareness

Intention is much more powerful when it comes from a place of contentment than if it arises from a sense of lack or need. Stay centered and refuse to be influenced by other people’s doubts or criticisms. Your higher self knows that everything is all right and will be all right, even without knowing the timing or the details of what will happen.

4. Detach from the Outcome

Relinquish your rigid attachment to a specific result and live in the wisdom of uncertainty. Attachment is based on fear and insecurity, while detachment is based on the unquestioning belief in the power of your true Self. Intend for everything to work out as it should, then let go and allow opportunities and openings to come your way.

5. Let the Universe Handle the Details

Your focused intentions set the infinite organizing power of the universe in motion. Trust that infinite organizing power to orchestrate the complete fulfillment of your desires. Don’t listen to the voice that says that you have to be in charge, that obsessive vigilance is the only way to get anything done. The outcome that you try so hard to force may not be as good for you as the one that comes naturally. You have released your intentions into the fertile ground of pure potentiality, and they will bloom when the season is right.

“Your task is not to seek for love, ..."

 

“Your task is not to seek for love, 

but merely to seek and find

 all the barriers within yourself

 that you have built 

against it.”

 

You were born 

with wings,

why prefer 

to

crawl through 

life?

 

Why do you stay in prison

when the door

is

wide open?

 

I want to sing

like the birds

sing

not worrying 

about who 

hears

or what 

they

think.

 

Goodbyes 

are only for those who love

with their eyes

because

for those who love

with heart

and soul

there is no such thing

as separation.

 

Wherever you 

are

and

whatever you 

do, 

be in

love            Rumi   

Your responsibility to sense the rareness and value of your own life.

 

The more you sense the rareness and value of your own life, the more you realize that how you use it, how you manifest it, is all your responsibility. We face such a big task, so naturally we sit down for a while.

KOBUN CHINO OTOGAWA ROSHI This book captures the essence of Charlotte Selver’s practice of SensoryAwareness like no other publication. It is an invitation to experience lifefirsthand again, as we did when we were children. In a culture where we havegrown accustomed to accumulating knowledge from teachers and experts, it israre to find a book that actually invites us to trust our own senses again. Itis the authors’ intent to give back to the reader authority over his or herown experience and learning processes. Much of the book focuses on reviving the senses in order to open the mind andbody to direct learning. The book imitates an actual Sensory Awareness class,involving the reader as a student, guiding him or her along a journey with andthrough the senses to a way of living that is in accordance with the naturalfunctioning of the human organism in its environment. The range of explorations include a renewed connection to the support of theearth as a foundation for trust; the central role of gravity for our healthand for finding orientation in life; a study of breathing that promotes healthand vitality; and connecting and interacting with other people. A handbook toa more genuine and connected way of living, the work is also a beautifullycrafted account of Sensory Awareness, showing these profound teachers at workwith their students and with the reader.

WAKING UP TO THE BEAUTY OF LIFE

 

Active Hope is waking up to the beauty of life on whose behalf we can act. We belong to this world.

JOANNA MACY tHE OLDER i GET THE MORE BEAUTIFUL LIFE BECOMES. fRANK lLOYD wRIGHT tHE UNIVERSE IS WITHIN YOU. BRIGHT AND BEAUTIFUL. Yogi tea Walk beautifully, talk beautifully, live beautifully. yogi Tea

MozArt

 “Music gives a soul to the Universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and life to everything."

Listening to Mozart a lot lately and my creativity is increasing daily.

One of the illustrations in my book SAILING AND SWIMMING WITH DOLPHINS by Chad Chrysler

All the feels: Toddler boys run to give each other a great big hug

Egoless or need for stronger ego?

 

Hola Relatives  - sending you some kupuri/chi/mana love-light energy to support

you in polishing up your stardust in the Medicine Meadow to Live Love Now with some wisdom words from  Dr. Sydney Cohen, one of the first doctors to work with LSD whom i met and heard speak back in 1965 who said:   "We are born into an egoless world but we live and die imprisoned within ourselves.  Our fear of death is a function of our ego, which burdens us with a sense of separateness."     and from Albert Einstein who called the modern human's sense of separateness "a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness."   We are WAYYY More Than We Think We Are!     May we honor our ego's as tools we need to get around in this Middle World but not let them run the show of our lives remembering that the deepest truth of our being is that we are love and our love is for giving.   love, tomás Dear Tomas, what is the difference between a "strong ego" that allows one to overcome fear to do righteous things such as what MLK, Gandhi, and others have done. and a "big ego" that appears as narcissistic like in the case of someone like Trump? I maintain that a "weak ego" due to childhood abuse that manifests in someone trying to prove themselves all the time such as myself, and possibly Trump himself? My becoming a sailing captain was, I think, trying to prove myself. I have studied in an Ashram with a famous Guru who supposedly had let go of his ego and needed lots of servants to help him maintain his bodily needs. He would wake up in the middle of the night screaming for one of their servants, who later, I was sad to hear died of breast cancer. What about your lying on a rooftop in furious winds? Or climbing Mt. Shasta and other vision quests? Are you trying to strengthen your "ego"?  The Texas Democrats who left their Congress to stop the terrible voting laws by their GOP appeared to have strong egos. Can we really let go of our egos while in this body? Isn't a weak ego more of a problem than a "strong ego" which can accomplish good things in the world. I am coming from a place of having to develop a stronger ego in my life in order to try to do good things. My Unity Minister switched to an "unhealthy" ego, formerly blasting "egos", after I challenged him several times about needing a "strong ego" to run our church. Myself, I prefer the term "balanced ego", with the ability to become detached from it, with the help of awareness and the Great Spirit in mindful living on this beautiful planet. Can one let go of fear of death without a strong ego?                                Inquisitively yours, Ron

NO ALIENS IN NATURE

 

In nature there is no alienation. Everything belongs.

DENG MING-DAO

LIGHT UP THE WORLD, YOUR WORLD

 

It isn’t more light we need, it’s putting into practice what light we already have. When we do that, wonderful things will happen within our lives and within our world.

PEACE PILGRIM

Madeleine Peyroux - Smile

The wild, like the human spirit, cannot be managed or reproduced...

 

Again and again, I am reminded that the wild, like the human spirit, cannot be managed or reproduced, it can only be recognized, protected, and honored.

RICK BASS

Touched liberation? The importance of celebrating Juneteenth!

 

No one who has ever touched liberation could possibly want anything other than liberation for everyone.

REV. ANGEL KYODO WILLIAMS We should talk about Juneteenth while we still can.   I say this only half in jest. As reactionary forces advocate restricting what schools can teach about the history of racism in America, one can imagine they may seek to extinguish all honest conversation about such a day as this.   After all, to commemorate Juneteenth—June 19, 1865, the day enslaved persons in Texas first learned they were free, two-and-a-half years after the Emancipation Proclamation—requires us to know first about the system of enslavement whose ending it celebrates. That means confronting the truth that this nation’s promises of liberty were never intended for everyone. “All lives” had not mattered for a long time because Black lives were considered outside the circle of “all.”    Too often, this is still the case. So although we celebrate literal emancipation on Juneteenth, a larger freedom from economic inequality and police brutality, among other things, still awaits the descendants of those released from bondage six generations ago.   But the incompleteness of the struggle does not diminish the importance of partial victories. We should celebrate these, not to partake in a premature victory lap or use “progress” as a way to paper over ongoing injustices, but to pay tribute to those who set us on the path to making the nation’s reality comport with its rhetoric. Juneteenth could never have happened without the brave rebellions of the enslaved, the moral force of the abolitionist movement, and the Black troops whose infusion into the ranks of the Union army helped turn the tide of the Civil War.   Although the importance of celebrating Juneteenth might be evident to Black folks, it should be every bit as important to those of us who are White because the liberation of Black people is the only hope for our own. The literal chains that bound Black bodies always, metaphorically, bound us as well: to a mindset of human inequality, the perpetuation of unspeakable horror, and the numbing of one’s conscience necessary to make that horror acceptable.    Scientists are now beginning to speak of the intergenerational transmission of trauma among oppressed peoples, as well they should. But I also wonder about the intergenerational transmission of moral anesthesia among those who descend from oppressors. Surely that too can be inherited as a legacy, much as enslaved bodies themselves once were.    Because reading the 1844 will of my four-times great-grandfather, Samuel McLean, makes the cost of desensitization all too clear. To wit: “I give and bequeath unto my loving wife, Elizabeth, my Negro woman named Dicey… and all my household and kitchen furniture, wagons, horses, cattle, hogs, sheep and stock of every kind except as may be necessary to defray the expense of the first item above.”   To speak of a Black woman in the same category as furniture and livestock and to think nothing of leaving all equally to one’s heirs is undoubtedly a kind of bondage, no? White supremacy’s most horrific iteration—chattel slavery—destroyed Black bodies as it confined the White soul. So too did segregation require moral sequestration among its beneficiaries. And the same ethical novocaine that made possible human trafficking makes probable our indifference to systemic suffering today.    By embracing the liberation struggle and each of its signal events, of which Juneteenth is one, Whites can begin to reconnect with that humanity whose forfeiture was the price of our ticket.    How we commemorate is less important than the fact of commemoration itself. We must speak with our children about the cost paid by Black people for the national bounty we enjoy, about the bill that has come due for that history, and how we intend to make payment on that bill, materially, and by linking to the tradition of White allyship and antiracist solidarity. No, it is not a long enough tradition, to be sure; but it is there for the joining, there to teach us a different way of living in this skin.   We must commemorate Juneteenth—a day of deliverance from one form of racist evil—by recommitting to a fuller liberation that can deliver the nation from more subtle forms. This comes not from a place of guilt but one of responsibility. We are not guilty for the world as we find it, but we have found it all the same. And if that world has marginalized some as it has elevated others—in this case, ourselves—responsibility requires us to say “enough.” And to celebrate those steps on the road to something better.    TIM WISE is an antiracism educator and author of nine books, including the memoir White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son (Soft Skull/Counterpoint) and his latest, Dispatches from the Race War (City Lights).

Six ways to offer an apology that can help heal, rather than cause additional harm

 Most of us haven't been taught how to apologize, and our efforts tend to be deleterious: vague, intrusive, demanding, or full of caveats that can leave the recipient of an apology feeling even worse. "When the apology is absent or it's a bad apology, it puts a crack in the very foundation of a relationship and can even end it," Lerner says. And that's why it is critical to get it right.

LIFE KIT

How To Control (And Even Use) Your Anger — With Meditation

A good apology, she explains, is an opportunity for us to take clear and direct responsibility for our wrongdoing without evading, blaming, making excuses, or dredging up offenses from the past. It brims with accountability, meets the moment, and can transform our relationships.

Here are six ways to offer an apology that can help heal, rather than cause additional harm.

LIFE KIT

Too Much Focusing Is Draining. Here's A Better Strategy

Drop your defenses.

"Our automatic set point is to listen defensively," Lerner explains. "We listen for what we don't agree with, so we can defend ourselves and correct the facts." She suggests keeping an open mind and listening with an explicit intention to understand the other person. "Try to wrap your brain around the essence of what that hurt party needs you to get."

Be real.

When you're apologizing for something, it's critical to show genuine sorrow and remorse. It feels vulnerable to not be in control of the outcome, but as Lerner reminds us, it is also courageous.

Photo Illustration by Becky Harlan/NPR

No ifs or buts.

A sincere apology does not include caveats or qualifiers. "'But' almost always signifies a rationalization, a criticism, or an excuse," Lerner says. "It doesn't matter if what you say after the 'but' is true, the 'but' makes your apology false."

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Less is more.

Keep your apology short and mind the histrionics. "If you've forgotten to return your friend's Tupperware, you don't have to overdo it as if you've run over her kitten." Over-apologizing is not only irritating — it disrupts the flow of the conversation and shifts the focus away from the person who needs to be attended to, Lerner explains. "You've hijacked the hurt party's emotionality and made the apology about you."

LIFE KIT

Burnout Isn't Just Exhaustion. Here's How To Deal With It

Stay focused.

Your attention when apologizing should be on the impact of your words or deeds, not on your intention. Zero in on the situation at hand and stay attuned to the needs of the person who is hurting. "It's not the two words 'I'm sorry' that heal the injury," Lerner explains. "The hurt party wants to know that we really get it, that we validate their feelings and care."

And remember: A good apology is a beginning, not an end.

In her book Why Won't You Apologize, Lerner reminds us, "An apology isn't the only chance you ever get to address the underlying issue. The apology is the chance you get to establish the ground for future communication."

An apology creates an opening. When done with attention and care, it can be a conduit for greater understanding and deeper connection.

---

Simran Sethi is a journalist who reports on psychology, sustainability and ways to make the world more just. The podcast portion of this episode was produced by Clare Marie Schneider. Gilly Moon provided engineering support

Enchantment, a vivid sense of belongingness to a rich and many-layered world, a profound and whole-hearted participation in the adventure of life.

 

Enchantment…has nothing to do with fantasy, or escapism, or magical thinking: it is founded on a vivid sense of belongingness to a rich and many-layered world; a profound and whole-hearted participation in the adventure of life.

SHARON BLACKIE a feeling of great pleasure; delight. "the enchantment of the mountains" Similar: captivation entrancement seduction allure enticement delight charm beauty attractiveness appeal irresistibility magnetism pull draw lure bliss ecstasy heaven rapture joy Opposite: repulsion misery 2. the state of being under a spell; magic. "a world of mystery and enchantment"