A source of unending power....

My favourite tools for staying awake in life are meditation for development of a quiet mind; 
psychological inquiry for the unveiling of a fearless heart; 
and prayer for the cultivation of faith. 

These tools are like shovels we can use to dig for the gifts buried in the jumble of our lives. 

But perhaps the most profound of all the tools we have at our disposal is the simple act of telling our stories to other human travellers
—in a circle around the fire, at the back fence with a neighbour, or 
at a kitchen table with family and friends. 

Since the beginning of history we have gathered together, talking and crying, laughing and praising, trying to make sense of the puzzling nature of our lives. 

By sharing our most human traits, we begin to feel less odd, less lonely, and less pessimistic. 

And to our surprise, at the core of each story
—each personal myth
—we uncover a splendid treasure, a source of unending power and sweetness: 
The shining soul of each wayfarer.

ps/smoh

Make the world within beautiful and peaceful and the world without will express and manifest that reality.

If there is a person in your life that keeps acting out in the same ways over and over again, it is your decision how you will choose to interact with.

You do not need to judge in how they are acting. You simply decide how you will be. 

If a person is acting in such a way that is repeatedly offensive to you why allow the action of another to affect our well being. 

It is their act, not ours. 

Love that person for who they are, and do not judge for what they do. 

So be honest in your own actions, and know that it is simply you getting clear with what you choose to have in your life.

We are good at living our life from the perceptions of what another may have said to us, but it does not hold true within our hearts. 

It is time to drop the ideas we have been carrying of what another may have said about us allowing Love to guide us in our way.

The road may appear that we are all alone on our journey, but you can rest assure we are never alone in our path.


The Presence of Life is always with us.

I sit here with so many thoughts floating through my mind. I am not paying too much attention to the thoughts because I know what they are capable of. 

So, I just let them go where they please without any conflict. 

As I sit here I know I am resting with the Grace of God feeling the blessings of Life with my every breath. I love these moments as I experience the endless demonstrations of God’s Love for me. 

Within my Sacred Heart my love grows and expands as I continuously surrender my will to God’s. 

I give my loving thanks for all I am and have shared in God’s Love just for me.





ps/smoh

It is in the silence you begin to hear the most...

.......that inner voice that you need to hear and listen ALWAYS.

In my own time, and in my own way, I am creating a meaningful and fulfilling life.

Sometimes life can force us to make a full stop -- stop all the talking, stop all the doing, just stop. 

When you stop, you are forced to listen closely, to pay attention and to really hear what's going on around you.

I believe the simple act of caring -- for ourselves and for others -- can transform our lives and change the world. It can melt the hardest of hearts and knock down the tallest of walls.

It has certainly done that for me.

It’s amazing what happens when you just stop and listen, 

- you can hear your own heart beat, 

- you can hear your own inner voice guiding the way and 

- you can hear your family and friends and feel their true love and genuine concern.

Listening, like caring, can transform our lives.

Today, pretend for five minutes that you can't talk and just practice listening. You might be transformed by what you hear.

Share your story, report your life:

Has life ever presented you with an opportunity to stop and listen?

What did you learn from listening?

ps/smoh

Something bigger IS calling us to change.

The great loneliness—like the loneliness a caterpillar endures, when she wraps herself in a silky shroud, and begins the long transformation from chrysalis to butterfly.

It seems that we too must go through such a time of great loneliness, when life as we have known it is over—when being a caterpillar feels somehow false, and yet, we don’t know who we are supposed to become. 

All we know is that something bigger is calling us to change. 

And though we must make the journey alone, and even if suffering is our only companion, soon enough we will become a butterfly, soon enough we will taste the rapture of being alive.

Conscious of it or not, we each have a deep inner “migratory force” or drive within us which wants to move us toward wholeness and full actualization of our potential. 

Another way of talking about this inner drive is the experience of “entelechy”, a Greek word meaning the dynamic purpose that drives us toward realizing our essential self.

Barbara Max Hubbard states in her book Emergence:

“Our entelechy is the oak pressing against the acorn to become a mighty tree. It is the power of the delicate green shoot breaking through the frozen ground in Spring. It is the butterfly silently self-organizing while hidden in the disintegrating caterpillar.” 

Jean Houston says: 

“it is the entelechy of an acorn to be an oak tree. It is the entelechy of a popcorn kernel to be a fully popped entity. And it is the entelechy of a human being to be God knows what!”.

Similarly, poet/writer David Whyte (Crossing the Unknown Sea – Work as a Pilgrimage of identity) speaks of a "migratory force".
He says:: 

“Our work is to make ourselves visible in the world. This is the soul’s individual journey, and the soul would much rather fail at its own life than succeed at someone else’s. We go through most workdays forgetting that this grand migratory force exists within us.” 

I passionately believe that we humans do have within ourselves a “grand migratory force” or as Ken Wilber writes in A Brief History of Everything,
his synthesis of spiritual and scientific thought,
“Evolution always transcends and includes, incorporates and goes beyond.”

Wilber uses the evolutionary concept of
“transcend and include”
to refer to the personal and societal movement toward wholeness.

Yes, something bigger IS calling us to change.

ps/smoh

What is moral?

When faced with a scenario or set of choices how do we know what is moral?

It’s about to get deep, real deep.

There might even be some grotesque over- analysed of thought patterns and over detailed wording of ideas like “broad vs. specific behaviour of humans”.

I think one of the best ways to hit this topic right is to scope through some examples and bring up moral dilemmas, in doing so we can peruse the dynamics of the human beings decision making apparatus.

So let’s figure out what is moral.

One major attribute we must keep looking for is justification. This basically amounts to the “why” of a situation.

Then we need to analyse the context of the actions and scenario. The reason why these things matter is because of several human qualities, human drive for self fulfilment, ability to suffer, and the combination of the two.

Human beings always possess a drive and an ability to suffer; because of these two qualities we have morals.

These two qualities are in a constant struggle both within the human and externally between humans.

Morals come into the picture when we place our self fulfilment above the suffering of others.

If you begin analyzing a multitude of situations you will find that selfishness for one’s own fulfilment is the root of moral problems.

In order to improve yourself and become a better person you would have to critically analyse your own thoughts and figure out if yourself fulfilment dramatically caused suffering in another. 

Now we have to be able to understand suffering in others which leads us to an interesting human attribute, empathy.

Empathy is the ability to understand existence from another person’s perspective. This takes a super deep understanding of you. 

This segues into understanding others if you apply what you have learned about yourself toward others. 

When we are empathetic we can feel others joys and sorrows. 

When we can understand and feel others we can then figure out where our self fulfilment should be and where not to overextend it.

We have to work at increasing our own analytical skills and self-reflection to help us determine what is moral.

No moral system, no dogma, no one person is going to create a system to improve things and lay down what is moral and what is not.

The world is just too complex and there are too many scenarios. What can help is individual empowerment of the mind.

This is why logical and critical thinking so much because it teaches the individual to step out and test their own mind and the minds of others.

With logic and critical thinking a human being can better find truth and assess complex situations to better find morality.

Finding morality is your responsibility and yours alone on an individual level, yet it is all of our responsibility to find it individually and then educate ourselves such that we can express what we have learned to others.

An individual burden on every shoulder, truly then on the shoulders of all humanity.

ps/smoh

“To love. 
To be loved. 
To never forget your own insignificance. 
To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. 
To seek joy in the saddest places. 
To pursue beauty to its lair. 
To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. 
To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. 
To try and understand. 
To never look away. 
And never, never to forget.” 

Take a challenge or concern you have, not earthshaking.

Fact Finding - visualize it with everything you know about it. Watch to see who or what is involved and when, where, how and why it is happening. Let the pictures flow through your mind.

Problem-Finding - now daydream a scenario as to how you like the situation to look. If you could wave a magic wand and alter it any way- how would you imagine it.

Idea-finding - change some details of the picture as it currently is to more what like your daydream portrayed. Change the original picture a bit at time--magnifying some parts, minifying others- rearranging parts.

Solution-finding, live in it and see how you feel in it. Jump into the skins of other involved and see how they react.

Acceptance - finding. Keeping all those reactions in mind, see what you would do to make it more workable.

Piece together the best image of yourself dealing effectively with the original challenge or concern.

Try for as much detail as you can.

Then make notes of the plan and put it up on the wall showing its stages of development. If you wish, make a timetable of the plan.

Remember what Michelangelo said while examining a piece of marble:

"there is an angel imprisoned in it and I must set it free."

In a similar way we can say,

"There is a solution frozen up in our minds, and we must melt it down and let it flow out."

What you think you can do, or dream you can, begin it!

Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.

Awesome truth?????

One of the great tragedies of religious history occurred when the physical body was falsely accused for the sins of mankind, and was rooted out of religious traditions. 

The idea that our most basic bodily functions, our sexual passion, and our sensual pleasure are unclean and unholy is not only a regrettable belief system, it’s also a profoundly ignorant one. 

Deep spirituality is not an out-of-body experience; it’s an in-body experience. 

How could it be otherwise? 

Here on earth we live in our bodies, and our bodies are as sacred and miraculous as any part of God’s creation. 

The physical creations exalted by saints and poets -- stars and gemstones, milk and honey, the waters of life and the flowers of the fields --share our own elemental make-up.

We are not spiritual beings trapped in a carnal existence. 

Spirit is dancing in our molecular structure, and flowing in our blood stream. 

Physical form is the way we experience spiritual reality on earth. 

Our thoughts are electrical impulses; our emotions are fueled by chemistry and biology; our organs pump and breath in rhythm with the pulse of the tides and the dance of the cosmos. 

There is nothing in physical creation that is inherently more sacred than anything else. 

This holds true for nature as it does for space as it does for the human body.

ps/smoh