The News:
Consuming the news is like eating fast food: empty calories designed to stimulate our appetites, trigger our addictions and provide a false sense of control. Consume too much, you get deluded, depleted and sick. Indulge now and then, but look elsewhere for nourishment.
The Ego and the Mind:
Make friends with your mind—or live in a tiny room with your worst enemy.
And don’t fight with your thoughts. It’s like fighting with a pig—you never win and only get covered in muck (adapted from G.B. Shaw).
Thoughts are the voice of the ego, beliefs are its bones. Never trust your own beliefs!
The Ego’s four demons:
The wish to be special and the center of the universe
The need to control everything and everyone
The urge to judge and criticize
The tendency to self-deception and blindness
Relationship:
Love rests on a foundation of tolerance, acceptance and understanding.
Relationship is the marriage between Sharing, Loving and Growing.
Intolerance and indifference are addictive. Like all addictions, they blind us to our chains.
Sometimes an old relationship is only the lingering fragrance of nostalgia.
True humility is without self-denigration.
Compassion and Love:
Charity is intelligent love in action: head, heart and hands working together.
Compassion is the touchstone of a true human being (see Charter for Compassion).
Life is the path; love is the compass.
Balance compassion with clarity and firmness; compassion without boundaries is simply mush.
We cannot be human if we are cut off from humanity; compassion and love links us into one glorious whole.
Pain and Purpose:
Pain is unavoidable, suffering is optional; do not suffer for no purpose.
Purpose and happiness are the difficult choices; meaninglessness is the lazy option.
Our life purpose is the reflection and manifestation of our Inner Nature.
Why struggle; why not dance?
Intention:
Ego intentions inflame desire; Self intentions expand the soul.
Intention requires effort and surrender; it is the movement from will to willingness.
Intention is a message from the conscious to the unconscious, from small-self to soul, from ego to Inner Nature.
Vision does not define a destination; it creates a pathway for our intentions to unfold.
Embrace everything with gentle persistent curiosity.
Be like the wind: it moves and shakes whatever it touches with no desire except to be itself.
Knowing:
Certainty is blind; embrace not-knowing if you want to see.
When in doubt, be still, quiet and patient.
We are a travelling flame of awareness that illuminates only the present moment.
Understanding is knowing what we know. Understanding the limits of our understanding is wisdom
Spirituality:
Only words filled with Spirit touch the soul
Surrender to the moment; God is each moment.
Dreams: night-gardening for the soul.
Balance effort with surrender: do what needs doing – let go of the outcome.
Be inwardly attentive; discover how rich you are.
God is the unfolding experience of divine presence; there is no God without experience.
Religion is the bright shiny paper that wraps the precious gift of the spirit. Don’t mistake the wrapping for the gift within–the presence of fire and radiance.
The God we think we know is not God. God is unknown and unknowable.
Illuminating words! I love the image of “Dreams: night-gardening for the soul.”
Thanks Melisa, I hope you are both a gardener and a dreamer.