Monthly Archives: August 2016

Renew Yourself

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Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.  Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.  The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of Autumn.  John Muir

We can be tired, weary, and emotionally distraught; but, after spending time alone with Nature, we find that our bodies are injected with energy, power, and strength.   Charles Stanley

Make sure you take the time to feed yourself with what your spirit has to offer.  Darren L. Johnson

Sensitive people feel so deeply they often have to retreat from the world, in order to dig beneath the layers of pain to find their faith and courage.  Shannon L. Alder

You’ve done it before and you can do it now.  See the positive possibilities.  Redirect the substantial energy of your frustration and turn it into positive, effective, unstoppable determination.   Ralph Marston

Solitude is where I place my chaos to rest and awaken my inner peace.  Nikki Rowe

Recharge

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Last week I spent four days in Sequoia National Park, courtesy of a dear friend.  I woke up every morning, ate breakfast, and spent the entirety of each day walking on different trails.  Much of the time I was by myself, surrounded by nature.  Thinking I would have a lot of quiet time, I brought my laptop and journals, planning to write and get a head start on a few Ancient Seeker posts.  Total waste of energy and space.  Our phones did not work.  There was no wi-fi, no cellular, no internet.

After walking all day, my friend and I talked nonstop until we went to sleep; then, woke up for another day of hiking for me and retreat activities for her.  On our last day, we hiked together.  For both of us, it turned out to be the most beautiful hike of our trip.  I was filled with immeasurable gratitude for being in the midst of a modern day Garden of Eden, complete with black bears with which I learned to share paths.

It took me a week after returning home to turn on my computer and that was only because a friend wanted to Skype.  I didn’t feel like doing anything.  I didn’t post Ancient Seeker.  After a few days, I became depressed.  I didn’t know what was going on, what was wrong with me.  Prior to the trip, I had been eating healthfully and exercising; afterwards, I began to stuff myself with ice cream and buttered popcorn and chips and pasta.  What was going on?

A week after my return, I hit rock bottom – again.  I’ve had many rock bottom episodes throughout the years, where I feel like I cannot take another step.  I cannot continue to live like “this.”  I feel tired and hopeless and cannot see any way out of this mess.  Nevertheless, as I lay down to sleep, I remembered Job and didn’t want to complain as he did and express my frustration with God.  As long as I remained awake, I repeated my mantra: “I praise God.  I thank God.”

When I awoke, I felt like meditating.  I love my meditation room and feel so blessed to have it.  As I sat this morning, I left outside my worries about the mortgage, very much needed repairs, financial concerns, and other life challenges.  Right this very moment, the walls have not fallen.  I can walk, kneel, bow, praise, and be thankful.  I can sit and feel the infinite magnificence of the Eternal.

I had a wonderful meditation.  I was focused.  My mind wandered very little.  I felt that I went deeper than I had in months.  I felt joy.  I felt connection.  I saw the trees of Sequoia again, not visually, not in physical form, but with a seeing that was through some other type of eyes.

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Don’t Be a Hamster

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If you make the acquisition and retention of goods or status your aim in life, this is a way to anxiety and sorrow.  Muso Kokushi

Once we started to urbanize, we put ourselves on this treadmill.  We traded away stability for growth.  And growth requires change.  Geoffrey West

Get off the treadmill of consumption, replication, and mediocrity.  Begin lifting the weights of creativity, originality, and success.   Ryan Lilly

The problem with working, I mean not self-employed, is that you have to get up and routinely do something that you do not want to do, plus you get talked down to, ordered around by twats you know you are better than.  In reality, you are no better than a hamster running on a wheel.  You could say the hamster likes to run on the wheel, the hamster runs on the wheel by choice.  But do not forget, the hamster is always in a cage and will never be anything else but a hamster running on a wheel inside a cage – unless it escapes the cage.   Robert Black

Do not go where the path may lead. Instead, go where there is no path and leave a trail.  Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you want to fly, give up everything that weighs you down.  Toni Morrison

I must be a mermaid.  I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.  Anais Nin

An empowered life begins with serious personal questions about oneself. Those answers bare the seeds of success.”  Steve Maraboli

Are You on a Treadmill?

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Sometimes we get on a treadmill and can’t imagine how to get off.  We don’t even know that we should get off.  A lot of it has to do with our family/religious/societal conditioning.  Most of us are not living according to our own true nature.  We have incorporated time-honored tenets into our day-to-day living:

  • “You don’t get anything worth having without struggle and hard work.”
  • “You always need to be busy and productive.  Doing nothing is unproductive and will lead to ruin and disaster.”
  • “Taking time for and giving to yourself is selfish.  You must always be doing something that gives to others and puts something back into society.”

Most of us have never been taught to look within and discover ourselves, to discover our needs and desires separate from those imposed upon us by our parents, our neighborhood and community, our ethnicity, our church, and any other status external to our own individualized inner being, which is the essence of who and what we are.

At a very young age, we are given a plan that is responsive to entities outside of ourselves: go to school, mind (or kiss up to) the teacher, and make good grades in order to go to college and get a good job.  The instinctual reliance by children on their intuition and on their feelings is gradually replaced by the need to please, to fit in, or to accomplish.  Always becoming, never just being.  Knowledge is for the purpose of becoming a lawyer, a doctor, something more than the parents, something to give the child the “advantages” of life.

Knowledge is not advocated simply for the sake of knowing and learning to be more aware of where and what you are right now.  Knowledge is not taught as a way to productively and consciously manipulate a universe that consistently responds to our every nuance.

Societal circumstances cause many adults to relinquish their dreams and give into a conditioned reality.  It becomes too hard to “fight the power.”  Many parents are trying to grow up themselves.  Not being taught to search within for answers, some turn to alcohol, drugs, sex, work, and dependencies on other people to find solace and satisfaction.  This behavior is then passed on to the next generation until someone decides to stop the cycle and find another way.

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Look Around in Awareness

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You are a living magnet, constantly drawing to you the things, people, and circumstances that are in accord with your thoughts.   Dennis Kimbro

You are what you think about most of the time.  Dennis Kimbro

Let us not look back in anger or forward in fear, but around in awareness.  James Thurber

What is going on inside you now is predictive of your future.  So it is wise to notice your thoughts and change them if necessary.  The Dalai Lama

There is only one true religion, and that is the religion of the heart.  God never named it Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, etc.  Man gave the titles, and that is what separates and divides us.  My dream is to one day see a world that comes together to fight for one cause – the human cause.  Muhammad Ali

It is not that Spirit produces or heals or corrects matter or the physical universe, but that we rise higher in consciousness to where there is less matter and, therefore, less discord, inharmony, disease, or lack.   Joel Goldsmith

Whatever we choose to focus on is what we will see manifested in our lives.  Joel Osteen

We Are All Responsible

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One morning during meditation, I was feeling bad about all of the pain in the world and asked “Why?”  What did Native Americans do to deserve such annihilation?  What did Africans do to become slaves and colonized?  What was the cause of such pain and degradation of peace-loving, Spirit-loving people?

Of course, there are numerous hypotheses, the main one possibly being that the cause is human nature.  From the very beginning, humans have killed one another for power, control, possessions, retribution, punishment, emotions, and survival.  Nevertheless, as we presumably evolve away from our animalistic characteristics, can we become consciously aware of ways in which we contribute to nurturing the very base level of our existence?

It came to me that we create devastation in our world and contribute to it every day by our thoughts and behavior.  Unchecked anger, hatred, bigotry, jealousy, resentment, worry, anxiety and other unproductive energies contribute to a force that feeds from and integrates with beings and systems with like vibrations.

In an episode of the Star Trek television series, the crew attempted to get rid of Jack the Ripper, who was thought to have died centuries earlier.  They discovered that “he” was actually a universal force that received its energy from the negative thoughts of everyone on the Enterprise.  The force would enter a body and make it perform harmful acts.  When others reacted in fear, anxiety, and anger, the force became more powerful.  Ultimately, the crew realized what was giving the force its strength.  They began to focus on happy thoughts.  Laughter drove the force away from the ship and into space.  Unable to find an entity like itself to which it could attach, the force dissipated.

My meditation was interrupted by a handyman hired by my apartment complex.  When I opened the door, the man spoke to me while looking at certain parts of my body.  He never looked me in the eye.  When I resumed my meditation, all I could think of was my anger towards this man.  It took quite a while for me to return to my meditative state.

Calming myself, I saw that the same way I allowed myself to be taken away from my meditative peace was the way that I allow myself to become uncentered throughout each day and throughout my life.  I start out on one path and, then, allow people and events to detract me, to spoil my day, to make me ungrateful, angry, resentful, or irritated.  I realized how easily negative thoughts come to my mind and how, instead of passing them through, I nurture, revisit, and build upon them.  I was able to see how I then attract certain energies to me, not necessarily the energies upon which I am focusing, but the type of energies in various forms.  A small hole can be just enough to let in a flood.

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Growing Into Your Potential

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Whatever makes you uncomfortable is your biggest opportunity for growth.  Bryant McGill

Everyone wants to live on top of the mountain, but all the happiness and growth occurs while you’re climbing it.  Andy Rooney

If it’s challenging you, testing you, and pushing you, it’s helping you become more of who you’re meant to be.  Mandy Hale

We are not trapped or locked up in these bones.  No, no.  We are free to change.  And love changes us.  And if we can love one another, we can break open the sky.  Walter Mosely

Often, it’s not about becoming a new person, but becoming the person you were meant to be and already are, but don’t know how to be.   Heath L. Buckmaster

Growth demands a temporary surrender of security.  Gail Sheehy

You will either step forward into growth or you will step backward into safety.  Abraham Maslow

Spiritual growth is like learning to walk.  We stand up, fall, stand up, fall, take a step, fall, take a couple of steps, fall, walk a little better, wobble a bit, fall, run, and finally, eventually fly.  Geri Larkin

Growth Periods

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Everything happens for a reason.  It may be better to call crises “growth periods” because, when we get through them, we will surely have learned something about ourselves, our relationships with others and to the Universe.  Deepak Chopra, in his Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, states that every single problem in life is the seed for an opportunity for some greater benefit.

Looking back, I can see the lessons.  I can see the growth.  Sometimes, looking forward, all I can see are circumstances that will cause me to experience extreme anxiety.  Is it possible that I manifest in my life that which I fear the most?

Part of a poem by Henry Van Dyke reminds me that, despite all signs to the contrary, I am in control of my future:

We build our future, thought by thought
For good or ill, we know not
Thought is another name for fate
Choose then thy destiny and wait

 

The more quickly we learn the lesson of our present “growth period,” the sooner we will move on to our next stage of evolution.  The trick is to discover what the lesson is. Catastrophic losses of health, wealth, and loved ones are external phenomena that can point to something within that needs to be explored.  Perhaps your life needs to change.

We always have the opportunity to change, but don’t for whatever reason.  So life takes matters into its own hands.  It can stop us cold and say, “Will you look at me now or do you need something more drastic?”  It will keep trying to get our attention until we take the time to complete this point in our schooling and graduate to the next level.

What will it take for you?  The loss of everything in a fire or earthquake, the abandonment of friends and family, financial destitution, cancer, loss of physical mobility?  Some people go through intense trauma and still don’t advance to a higher potential.  The Universe is patient.  It has time for you to stay in that class for eons if that is your desire.

Each and every one of us has a cross to bear.  What looks good on paper or on smiling faces or inside of a gleaming Mercedes-Benz or silk dresses or three-piece suits does not always express the true story within.  Many have material things and great health, but are not balanced spiritually.  They aren’t in tune with their inner selves.  Each of us has personalized learning lessons, some of which can be experienced with material success and health and others without.

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