Tag: truth

Beasties

“The truth is simple. If it were complicated everyone would understand it.” – Unknown

I don’t need to form an opinion nor explanation about the above quote. It’s simple. Anything I would write, would complicate it.

This next quote was told to me years ago by a friend, who said that her grandmother would say it all of the time. I didn’t quite understand it, and I needed her to explain it to me:

“Snow does not fall to kill the world, but that every beasty shows its tracks.”

She said that it means that a lot of times what we think are “bad things” happening, happen only to suss the bad players out. So in that sense, “the bad things” are actually “good things”, or at the very least “good things” usually always come out of the “bad things.” And it is always wise to remember, when the “beasties” show us their tracks, this reminds us that the beasties are all around, and we should not follow them to our own detriment.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Here is the question of the day from 3000 Questions About Me:

2769. What childlike characteristics do you still retain?

The Emotional Body

In my morning readings today, two ideas really stuck out for me. The first idea is about “embracing the contradictions.” It is quite possible to feel opposite feelings about the same experience, all at the same time. This is particularly true during the major transition times in our lives which mark endings and new beginnings, such as graduations, weddings, births, moving houses, divorces, funerals, retirements, etc. We often stamp, “This is how I’m supposed to feel,” onto certain situations and then we sometimes feel shame if we feel some “relief” when we think we should only be “sad”, or we feel shame if we feel “fear”, when we think we should be “happy.” Contradictory feelings are messy. They bring about things like “happy tears” or “pride and melancholy.” Contradictory feelings are hard to sort, because perhaps, they are not really supposed to be sorted and ordered. We have a lot of volume available in our emotional bodies. We can feel all sorts of feelings all at once, and in no particular order. When we accept the normalcy of messy, contradictory feelings, we can remain the calm center of the storm. And we can let our experiences wash over us in every color and sensation which they are supposed to happen to us. We can experience what happens in our lives both fully and open-heartedly, knowing that we will be better and more evolved for doing so.

Similar to this thought, I read about the difference between the emotion generated by delusions versus emotions created by true perceptions. How many times have you gotten yourself into a angsty tangle because you believed a story that you created in your head about a person, or a situation, or an experience, which you later found out to be untrue? We do this all of the time. We have very good imaginations. “Our neighbor doesn’t like us.” “The house down the street is haunted.” “Someone stole my scissors.” And if we aren’t feeling all that imaginative, there are all sorts of “news sources” which can help us out, to spur on delusional thinking. And then we feel the same horrible emotions we would feel, as if the situations were actually true. Emotions require a great deal of energy. Emotions also have a tendency to spur on our minds to create more fearsome, troublesome stories, in order to support their ongoing turbulence. Emotions love to run hot and strong. Emotions love to be felt. Emotions love it when they even start to affect our physical bodies, with stomach aches and headaches, and other other aches and pains and chills. Bottom line, there is nothing wrong with feeling emotion. Just make sure that you are honest with yourself, by noticing if you are expending your emotional energy on the truth versus on falsehoods. Be as mindful where you put your thoughts and your emotions, as to where you put your other resources, such as your money and your time. Pay attention. Be in the moment. All of these things are what makes up the experience of daily life, which ultimately is the whole of your life.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Here is the question of the day from 3000 Questions About Me:

1429. What is standing between you and one of your biggest dreams?

Soul Sunday

This is how Joseph Fasano, poet who wrote the poem below, describes poetry:

Joseph Fasano gets to the heart of it here. The reason why so many of us avoid reading or writing poetry is because it is vulnerable. It is emotional. It is truthful. It lays things bare. When I come to the blog on Sundays (a day that I have devoted to poetry), I often think to myself, do I have it in me to write about what I am really feeling? Can my mind translate my heart today? Many times I just don’t want to “go there.” So I put an oven mitt over my heart, and I look for someone else’s poem to publish.

“Why speak of the use
of poetry? Poetry
is what uses us.” – Hayden Carruth

Is it possible that poetry is just the soul translated? Poetry is the noble attempt to put into words that which can never fully be explained. Poetry is our soul trying to speak to us about what really “speaks to us.” Write a poem today, using this prompt: “I am the translator. Soul, what are you trying to tell me?” Perhaps use your non-dominant hand to write your poem. I imagine that your inner poet has more to say to you, than you think.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Do Your Favorites Now

Friends, I don’t have it in me right now to do one of my traditionally frivolous Friday posts. I know that “the show must go on,” but I’m not a good faker. I never have been. We are on the brink of unexpectedly losing another extended family member and it’s a lot to bear right now.

The truth is, I love to play around with pretty things and fun products and to read excellent books and to get engaged in interesting movies, because I love life. Even in the tough times, I love the experience of being alive. I love the sensations of seeing beautiful things, hearing lovely music, smelling amazing scents, feeling all different sensations on my skin and tasting wonderful food. I make no apologies for being happy, and actively and fully loving my life and looking forward to each of my days and experiences. It’s what we’re supposed to do. I love Aliveness and it hurts to see people lose their gift of Aliveness, no matter what the state of their physical health. As we all know, it’s not really the things in life that matter. It’s the people whom we love, and the very act of being in love with life itself.

Today, this Friday, please do at least one of your favorite activities with at least one of your favorite people. Feel what it is like to be fully immersed in the feeling of love, and of joy and of awe, and of passion, for the experiences that you are having, living a life here on this overwhelmingly beautiful and abundant world. Have compassion. Be kind. Stay in the moment. Find serenity in your faith. Have the courage to feel your feelings fully. Make your own precious life your most absolute favorite possession, and decorate it and celebrate it and submerge yourself in it because one day, it will be gone. And all that matters in the end, is that you savored and favored your life when you had it.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Alchemization

“If you listen closely, when people give advice they’re actually talking to younger versions of themselves.” – Dr. Nicole LaPerla

One of my horoscopes today talked about using this month to turn “wounds into wisdom.” I think that this is what aging is all about. I believe that life is a constant cycle and process of turning wounds into wisdom. Sometimes we don’t reflect enough, or we aren’t honest enough with ourselves to do true introspection, and thus we just keep tearing apart at our wounds, making them bleed more and not allowing for the healing process. But we eventually, usually get it. And when we do “get it”, we are sad that our younger selves didn’t quite “get it” in what we deem to be a timely manner, so we at least try to save others, by spouting off advice.

It can be off-putting to get advice, especially unsolicited advice. Bernard Williams calls unsolicited advice, “the junk mail of life.”

“Wise people advice from experience. Wiser people, from experience, do not advice.” – Amit Kalantri

That’s the thing, we get most of our deepest wisdoms from our experiences. And so we desperately try to save others from having similar tough experiences that we’ve had, yet it is those very experiences which gave us our own deepest, best wisdom. What a Catch-22!

I’m guilty of spouting off too much advice, and I do it all of the time. I do it to my kids, my husband, my friends, my pets (“Trip don’t provoke Ralphie, you know where this leads . . . .), strangers I meet on the street. Hell, I do it here on the blog all of the time. Please forgive me. It doesn’t come from my wisest self. My advice comes from my desire to “save (“control”) the world.” (or if I am honest, like Nicole LaPerla says, my advice is my desire to prove to my younger self that I’ve learned and I’ve grown. Perhaps trying to save others from my own mistakes, is a gift that I am trying to give to my own younger self for putting her through a lot of tough experiences, that often took a long, long while to alchemize into wisdom.)

Mantra for the day: Self, I forgive you. Self, I appreciate you. Self, your experiences were worth the gold of your wisdom. Self, let go and trust this process of turning experience into wisdom, for your own self going forward, and for all whom you love.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Your Spirit

I always tell my family that none of us are even leaving this life with our bodies. And they groan, “Mom, you’re so morbid.” But I think that this is an important concept to fully understand and to grasp, in order to best savor your life. I love my stuff, but I get that what I really love, is the experiencing of “my stuff.” I love to play around with clothes and fashion and shoes and make-up, and I love to drive around in my car with the convertible top down, but I do these things with the full understanding that it is the experience of playing around with my stuff which actually enthralls me. Life is the experience for the spirit to enjoy. My body is the vehicle to get my spirit to all sorts of experiences. My physical home is a place that protects my body and comforts my spirit. But none of this is mine. My spirit (which is my peaceful awareness of all that it is experiencing) is the only eternal part of me, and the memories of all that my spirit has experienced in this life, is the only thing that I’ll be taking with me, when I leave this Mother Earth and journey on. I hope that I am collecting an incredible treasure trove of memories to take with me, because that is the only treasure I have amassed which truly has any real meaning and eternal value.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Truth

“You’ve gotta stop expecting honesty from those who lie to themselves. They can’t give you what they don’t give themselves.” – Inner Practioner, Twitter

The best liars whom I have ever known, I don’t think for the most part even mean to be malicious. I truly believe that these people believe most of the yarns that they spin. The best liars whom I have ever known tend to live in their own little worlds. Their fantasies are their realities. And they love the attention that their fantasies bring to them, like an audience to a magical show.

“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” This English proverb says it all. The people who lie to us want to believe their lies, because they, too, desperately want to believe their own lies. And we all get caught up in the excitement and the drama of it all. It’s fun to fall into the wardrobe and enjoy a little bit of Narnia fantasy world where everything is perfect and exactly how we all want it to be. But coming back to reality, can be a hard fall for those of us who face truths, live in the truth, and who want to make the most of the “what’s what” in life.

In today’s world, it is hard to know what to believe. There is so much information coming at us, at every level, and all of it seems to be tainted and slanted by opinions and perceptions and agendas. I was a marketing major in college and it was always preached to us, that when it comes to marketing and selling anything, “Perception is reality.” That is why there are often beautiful people in car commercials. Our perception becomes that if we drive “such and such” car, we become one of the beautiful people.

It is really hard to drive in the truth to someone who has no desire to hear it. This is always a frustrating experience, isn’t it? And even more upsetting experiences, are those “a-ha” moments when you realize a truth about something or someone that you have been denying to yourself. When you finally face how something is, versus how you want it to be, this is nothing short of a gut punch. But then you are liberated. It is the pure truth, that the truth will set you free. When you face the truth, the decisions you make become based in the reality of a situation, and therefore you can get concrete results and answers, versus more tied up and tangled into the never-ending, ever-growing ball of yarn of lies and deceit. When you start living the truth, you trust yourself. You become your own best friend and mentor and then you are able to steer clear of other people’s fantasies. Or at the very least, you are able to admit to yourself that you are indulging in a little bit of delusion for a moment, which deep in your core, you know is in fact, a fantasy or even an out-and-out a lie.

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Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.