Inner Wisdom

Take a day and sit down and think.

Feeling connected to the natural world connects us to the rhythms of life.  Get away!  Any way you can.  Walk, drive, take a train or hop on a bus to a peaceful place where you can enjoy the beauty of nature.  In the winter, I go skiing with my husband, and while I'm not that anxious to navigate my way down some steep and winding slopes, I love taking the ski lift up to the majestic mountaintop.  I am awed when I behold the magnificence that God has created all around us.  God's glory is everywhere:  in a field of weeds and wildflowers; in the stillness of the woods with the trees arching over us; in a crystal lake lapping softly at the shore; in the rustling of leaves, the scamper of little animals.

If you can't escape to the country, you can still sit at your window and watch the sky.  You can watch the rain and the snow.  You can visit a nearby park and watch the foliage change with each season.  You can turn your face toward the warmth of the sun or feel a gentle breeze whisper against your skin.  You can wonder at the changing patterns of light in a summer sky, and feel the brisk tingle of snowflakes in a winter storm.  Revel in the knowledge that your senses are finely attuned to these sensations of the natural world.  By staying in tune with nature, you nourish the eternal spirit within, you come back to the center of life and to the awareness that God is everywhere present at each moment in time.

Our beloved poet and sage Maya Angelou believes that every few weeks we should take a day off to do absolutely nothing.  "What we really have to do is take a day and sit down and think," she shared in a recent interview.  "The world is not going to end or fall apart.  Jobs won't be lost.  Kids will not run crazy in one day.  Lovers won't stop speaking to you.  Husbands and wives are not going to disappear.  Just take that one day and think.  Don't read.  Don't write.  No television, no radio, no distractions.  Sit down and think. . . . Go sit in a church, or in the park, or take a long walk and think.  Call it a healing day."

How wise Maya Angelou is.  A healing day, a day just to sit and think, a day in which you become still and experience each precious moment of time.  By learning to stay centered in the moment, we put ourselves in charge.  We experience the joy of living, the wonder in each breath.  If we take control of the world within ourselves, no circumstance outside us will have its way with us.  When we live moment to moment, we place ourselves at the center of life, where infinite wisdom abides, rather than on the periphery, where things are forever changing and we are susceptible to the vagaries of the world.  It is in our awareness each moment of our oneness with God that our inner peace and greatest strength lie.

Susan Taylor.

You are the force that’s creating everything in existence.

You can become a better reflection of life by changing the language you speak. You can change the way you deliver a message, the way you communicate with yourself and with other people.

Now a simple question for you. I want you to understand the question, but don’t allow that voice in your head to answer the question. Just allow these words to go directly into your heart, where you can feel the meaning and intent behind the words. This is the question: What kind of messenger are you?

If you tell me what kind of dream you’re creating for yourself, I will tell you what kind of messenger you are. How do you treat yourself? Are you kind to yourself? Do you even like yourself? Do you respect yourself? Do you respect other people? How do you feel about yourself? Are you proud of yourself? Are you happy with yourself? Is there any drama or injustice in your dream? Does your dream have a judge and a victim? Is it a dream of predators, a dream of violence? If so, your dream is distorting your message. The judge, the victim, and all those voices in your head are distorting everything.

Right now, you’re delivering a message to yourself and to everyone around you. You’re always delivering a message, and you’re always receiving a message from one mind to another mind. What is the message that you are delivering in this world? Is the message impeccable? Just observe the messages that you deliver. Are the words that you’re speaking coming from the truth, or are they coming from the voice of knowledge, the tyrant, the big judge? Who’s delivering the message? Is it the real you?

What really matters is to be what you really are—to be authentic, to enjoy life, to be love. And not the symbol of love that humans have distorted, but real love—the feeling you can’t put into words, the love that is the result of being what you really are.

Always remember, you are the force that’s creating everything in existence. You are the force that opens a flower and moves the clouds, and the earth, and the stars, and the galaxies. Whatever your message, love yourself anyway, because of what you are, because you respect what you are.

Once you have awareness, you cannot claim innocence anymore. You know exactly what you’re doing, and whatever you’re doing is still perfect, but now it’s your decision; it’s your choice. Now the question becomes: What kind of message do you choose to deliver? Is it truth or is it lies? Is it love or is it fear? My choice is to deliver a message of truth and love. What is yours?

The Fifth Agreementby Don Miguel Ruiz.

We can lift our thoughts up. We can greet each day with a smile.

Today is a day for you to begin creating a joyous, fulfilling life.

Today is the day to begin to release all your limitations.

Today is the day for you to learn the secrets of life. You can do it.

You can change your life for the better.

You already have the tools within you to do so. These tools are your thoughts and your beliefs.

  Don’t waste your thoughts on blame. No person, place, or thing has any control over your feelings because they don’t think in your mind.

This is also why you really have no control over others—you see, you can’t control their thoughts. No one can control another unless that person gives permission. So you want to be aware of this powerful mind you have. You can take total control over your own thinking. It’s the only thing you’ll ever have total control of. What you choose to think is what you’ll get in life. I’ve chosen to think thoughts of joy and appreciation, and you can, too.

We can learn to think only about all the good in the world. We can lift our thoughts up. We can greet each day with a smile. We can let the world know that we’re happy to be alive. We can express gratitude at every turn. We can love our bodies. We can be our best friends.

Louise L. Hay

Only if you risk are you free.

"You can't have a better tomorrow if you're thinking about yesterday." ~ Charles Kettering.

To laugh is to risk appearing the fool. To weep is to risk appearing sentimental. To reach out for another is to risk involvement.

To expose feelings is to risk exposing your true self. To place your ideas, your dreams, before a crowd is to risk their loss. To love is to risk not being loved in return.

To live is to risk dying. To hope is to risk failure. But risks must be taken. Because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing. If you risk nothing and do nothing, you dull your spirit. You may avoid suffering and sorrow, but you cannot learn, feel, change, grow, love, and live.

Chained by your attitude, you are a slave. You have forfeited your freedom. Only if you risk are you free.

“The person who risks nothing, does nothing, has nothing, is nothing, and becomes nothing. He may avoid suffering and sorrow, but he simply cannot learn and feel and change and grow and love and live.”

~Leo Buscaglia

Authentic Power.

"Illusion holds power over you
when you are not able to remember that you are a powerful spirit
that has taken on the physical experience for the purpose of learning.
It has power over you when you are compelled by
wants and impulses and values of your personality.
It holds power over you when you fear and hate and sorrow
and fester in anger or strike out in rage.
It has NO power over you when you LOVE,
when compassion opens your heart to others,
when your creativity flows unimpeded joyously into the present moment.
In other words, the illusion had no power over a personality
that is fully aligned with the soul."

~ Gary Zukav ~

"We are evolving from a species that pursues external power
into a species that pursues Authentic Power...
Authentic power has its roots in the deepest source of our being.
An authentically empowered person
is incapable of making anyone or anything a victim.
An authentically empowered person is one who is so strong, so empowered,
that the idea of using force against another
is not a part of his or her consciousness."

~ Gary Zukav ~

The Fifth Agreement by Don Miguel Ruiz.

1. Be Impeccable With Your Word – Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love.

2. Don’t Take Anything Personally – Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won’t be the victim of needless suffering.

3. Don’t Make Assumptions – Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness, and drama. With just this one agreement, you can completely transform your life.

4. Always Do Your Best – Your best is going to change from moment to moment. It will be different when you are healthy as opposed to when you are sick. Under any circumstance, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgment, self-abuse, and regret.

5. Be Skeptical, But Learn to Listen – Don’t believe yourself or anybody else. Use the power of doubt to question everything you hear: Is it really the truth? Listen to the intent behind the words, and you will understand the real message.

The Fifth Agreement by Don Miguel Ruiz.

Expect Good Things. . .

This Vibrational Reality is spinning and becoming, and if you are in anger or fear or despair, you’re nowhere near it. When you get in the vicinity of hope, when you start feeling hopeful, you’re within range. When you feel hopeful, it’s drawing you in; it’s drawing you in. And once you begin to believe or expect good things to come—you’re in the Vortex. And once you get in there, you’re no longer the only uncooperative component.

Now you are a cooperative component. Now you get to rendezvous with your money. You get to rendezvous with your vitality. You get to rendezvous with your clarity. You get to rendezvous with your lover, with your loving neighbor, with the things of your environment that you’ve been wishing for. You get to rendezvous with all of the good stuff that you’ve put there once you begin to get in the vicinity of what feels good. And you can train yourself there—you can do it in a day.

By tomorrow, you could be Vibrationally so close to who-you-are that you would begin to see the evidence. You would begin to see movement: Your bank account will shift toward what you are wanting; the people in your neighborhood will begin to be more cooperative. . . . You have control of everything that rendezvous with you when you get control of the Vibration that you offer, and you get control of the Vibration that you offer when you care about how you feel.

When you care about how you feel and you lean in the direction of what feels best, you become, in a very short time, a Vibrational Match to who-you-have-become. And then people who are watching you say, “What happened to you? You’re just happy all the time, and every time I turn around, some other wonderful thing is coming to you.”

And you say, “I got inThe Vortex.”

They say, “What?”

You say, “Yeah, I got into the Vortex, and I’m in the Vortex.”

“What? How do you get in? Where’s the door? Where’s the door? I want in, too.”

And you say, “Well, you’ve got your own, and you have to feel your way in. There’s not a written script. There’s not a detailed manual. There’s not an obvious door. There’s not a combination lock. You just feel your way in.”

“Well, how do you know if you’re on the track?”

“You feel better than you just did.”

“Well, I feel like revenge.”

“Well, you’re probably moving in the right direction. Because right before revenge, how did you feel?”

“Well, before revenge I felt powerless. Now I’m feeling revenge.”

“Good. You’re on the path.”

“I’m feeling revenge and I’m on the path to the Vortex of Well-Being?”

“Yeah, yeah. Just don’t go back to powerlessness, and you’ll be on the path.”

“What comes after revenge?”

“Anger. You’ll be real mad at a lot of people.”

“Oh, I’ve been there.”

“Well, go there again, because when you’re angry, you’re on the path. Anger is better than revenge. It’s closer to your Vortex.”

“What comes after that?”

“Frustration. Overwhelment. Pettiness.”

“Hmm, hmm, I can sort of get that. What comes after that?”

“Hope.”

“Haven’t had any of that in a long time.”

“Well then, look forward to it. Look forward to hope because when you get (you can say to your friend) in the vicinity of hope, you’ll get in the Vortex. Occasionally (every day) something will happen that will give you evidence that you are the Deliberate Creator of your experience. If you can hang around in hope, even only on two or three subjects, you’ll get in the Vortex enough that you will come to believe. If you can make your way to hope—and it’s not hard—you’ll get in the Vortex often enough that you’ll start to believe.”

“Believe what?” your friend will say.

• You’ll begin to believe in the power of your thought.
• You’ll begin to believe in the goodness of this Universe.
• You’ll begin to believe in the worthiness of your Being.
• You’ll begin to believe in the power of who-you-are.
• You’ll begin to believe in the cooperative Law of Attraction.
• You’ll begin to believe that all things are possible.
• You’ll begin to believe that you are the creator of your own reality.
• You’ll begin to believe that you can control your thoughts by paying attention to the way you feel.
• You will begin to believe that you can be or do or have anything.  

“That’s what I know,” you will tell your friend, “now that I am in the Vortex.”

And what isThe Vortex? It’s just the Vibrational, advanced announcement of who you have become. All the cooperative parts of the Universe have already been gathered

Allow! by Louise Morganti Kaelin.

Life reminds me a lot of high school, where we went to different rooms with different teachers to learn different subjects.  And then there was homeroom, that place where we gathered every morning to "check in," get the miscellaneous non-"technical" information we needed to go through the day, greet our friends and, if we were lucky, get our homework done.

I think life is exactly like that.  The classrooms don't have seats lined up in neat columns and rows, however.  They're just wherever we happen to be.  The teachers are whomever we happen to be with. And the subjects are as varied as we are.  Luckily, we weren't given a "schedule" on that first day of life.  Most of us would have opted for permanent truancy, finding an "alternative" school somewhere on some distant and simpler planet.

The homeroom of life?  That inner space where we check in with ourselves, assimilating all the varied lessons, sifting through the monumental stack of incoming data, incorporating that which "feels right" into our daily lives, relegating that which doesn't to some archived file, hopefully never to be seen again.  How do we get to our homeroom?  By meditation, breathing, sitting with nature, running, dancing--whatever it is that puts us in perfect peace and harmony with ourselves.

And in life, as in school, there are home-room teachers.  Not really teachers, of course, but administrators and facilitators.  In our calm and centered place, we find objects or individuals who represent our highest wisdom.

They may be faceless and nameless or may have form, substance and history.  They may be a synthesis of all wise people we have come across or they may be individuals who lived and breathed and represent the pinnacle of some quality we value.

These teachers may play different roles in our life.  For example, there are four separate energies I connect to when I meditate.  Although I often think of them collectively, they each represent one of the four major divisions of life:  Mental, Emotional, Spiritual, and Physical.  One, representing the Mental sphere, helped me open doors I didn't know where there, allowing me to learn that oneness with all creation is possible.  Another, representing the Spiritual realm and through his teaching of unconditional love, has helped me experience that oneness.  A third, representing the Emotional, well, he has given me practical advice for living that oneness.

And yet the main lessons I've learned from this third teacher are very simple, so simple that I almost missed them:  the first is to allow and the second is to live in the moment.  Sounds easy, doesn't it?  That's what I thought, too.

After being exposed to the teachings of an Eastern philosopher, I found that I could remember only one phrase:  "All we need do is allow."  Allow what?  He didn't say, so I concluded that I had to figure out that part by myself (we all know how contrary some teachers can be--they want us to do all the work!).

I started by trying to finish the sentence.  Allow others to be who they are?  Of course, but that seemed limiting.  Allow others to be?  Better, but not quite right.  Allow others.  Allow them what?  And that brought me back to allow, just allow.  The same thing happened with "Allow me to be who I am."   No matter how I tried to finish the sentence, I kept coming back to that simple word, all by itself, no qualifiers.

No qualifiers?  Just allow everything and everyone?  But some of those people and things are a little crazy.  Do I allow them to be crazy?  Well, why not?  For some reason that I can't understand, they have chosen to be crazy.  It needn't affect me, not if I can understand there is a lesson in craziness for them.  I have my own lessons and I know I would like others to allow me to learn those lessons the way I need to learn them, the way that I will learn them.

Allowing includes allowing me to be me.  And by allowing myself the full range of human emotions, by being a person who loves, gets angry, knows joy, feels resentment, cries, feels tired, experiences satisfaction, in fact by feeling every emotion and admitting (and therefore owning) that emotion, then I can be a "perfect" human being.  For that whole range of emotions is part of the human experience, and keeping those "unacceptable" (by whom?) feelings bottled up, I'm only short-changing myself.

And I've noticed that people who never allow themselves to get angry are really always angry, the proverbial fire keg ready to explode.  Yet how many times have I noticed that "getting it out of my system," through yelling or tears, does actually that, it gets that feeling out of my system!  Experiencing the feeling isn't bad, it's living it, staying in that negative mood that's unhealthy.

And allowing ourselves to feel, really feel, the emotion we're experiencing is what living in the moment is all about.  Yet there's a big difference between living in the moment and living for the moment.  There's no sense of purpose in living for, while living in allows us to take all the information we need from this moment, whether it be joyful or sad, and bring it into our next moment.

I found myself worrying about staying in the moment, worrying that I wouldn't "move on" with my life.  But the more experience I get at living in the moment, I find that I make better, more informed decisions about what the next moment will be.  Better decisions than when I spend all of this moment worrying about what happened yesterday or what's going to happen in the future.

And moments are controllable!  When I live in the moment, the decision to stay, or move on, is definitely something that is in my hands--and moments I can handle. Yet each moment is a forever, when we are truly in it.  Learning to allow and to live in the moment is, I'm finding, anything but simple.  Or perhaps I should say it's incredibly simple, just not easy!

It's hard to break the old habits of fear and guilt, but the more I can do that, the more assured I am that that's the way I want to live.  How do you start?  By noticing where your attention is at any given moment.  For example, this moment, right now, is about reading this article.  If you can remember what I've written, the essence of it, then you're living in the moment.  If you can't, then take a deep breath and read it again. Then check in.  Do you remember the gist now?  Congratulations!  And welcome to the moment!