Thinks I find along the way
Our longing is to realize and embody loving presence, yet we each have deeply conditioned habits that bind our hearts. This talk reflects on these habits, and explores how we can free ourselves by bringing a mindful, compassionate attention to places where we are most trapped in feeling separate, fearful and unworthy…
Part 1…
Part 2…
“Feed your soul rather than putting energy into force and pulling the other person along. If you let go of dragging them to you, having your way and instead spend time doing what makes you happy, I promise you’ll feel a positive difference.” Get more here: Take the Difficulty Out of Your Relationships.
Complete the past…
Happy New Year! This is a guided visualization and meditation that will support you in completing 2013 and creating 2014. In this twelve minute journey, I guide you through identifying the lessons and blessings from the last year so that you can clearly envision and begin creating what you’d like to experience in the coming year. This is especially great to listen to around the New Year but you can listen to it anytime of year to complete your past, focus on your present and create your future.
Set some time aside to gift yourself with this process.
Sending you love for a prosperous and joyful New Year.
Here is the meditation…
This talk examines how we get stuck in identifying as a separate, deficient self, and the way that a deep attention frees us from trance.
via Awakening from Virtual Reality from Tara Brach on podbay: open podcasting.
Leo Babauta writes:
“A surprising number of people fear being alone. Maybe just about all of us do to some extent.
We fear being without a partner, or friends and family. We fear traveling alone in strange places, lost without anyone to ask for help. We fear taking on life without help, for fear of failure.
This is natural, this fear of being alone. We’ve all felt it, deep within us, though we try desperately to avoid this fear.
And this is the cause of our misery: to avoid this fear of being alone, we will socialize endlessly, including on social networks and email. To avoid being alone, we’ll end up with someone who isn’t really good for us, just to have someone to cling to, someone to rely on. We’ll eat junk food or shop to comfort ourselves, because these things are replacements for love.
But here’s the secret: being alone is empowering. The quiet of being alone is joyful.
We tend to see aloneness as bleak, depressing, scary. But it can be seen as freeing, as an opportunity for growth, an opportunity to get to know yourself.
This is something I’ve been learning the hard way. I had the fear of aloneness for many years, but learning emotional self-sufficiency is one of the best things I’ve done.
Sit quietly for a minute, now, and turn inward. Who are you? What are you capable of? What do you think about?
Can you accept yourself, when you look closely at yourself?
Can you see the beauty in yourself, as you learn something new? As you contemplate life?
This is nothing to fear, but to celebrate. Aloneness is beauty.”
Get the rest of the article here: The Fear of Being Alone.
Me? I think there’s a profound difference between being lonely and alone. Lonely is when I have no choice in the matter. When I feel as if I’ve been abandoned. Alone is when I CHOOSE to be by myself. How about you?
Gavin Aung Than of the website Zen Pencils writes:
Bill Watterson is the artist and creator of (in my humble opinion) the greatest comic strip of all time, Calvin and Hobbes. I was a bit too young to appreciate it while it was originally published from 1985-1995, but I started devouring the book collections soon after. I think my brother had a few of the treasury collections and I must have read those dozens of times. I was hooked, and I remember copying Watterson’s drawings relentlessly as a kid (Calvin’s hair was always the hardest to get right).
To me, Calvin and Hobbes is cartooning perfection – that rare strip that has both exquisite writing AND gorgeous artwork. A strip that managed to convey the joy of childhood, absurdity of humanity and power of imagination all through the relationship between a boy and his stuffed tiger. And most importantly, a strip that was consistently laugh-out-loud funny. I flick through my Calvin and Hobbes books a few times a year, not to read them cover to cover anymore, but just to get lost in Calvin’s world for awhile and to remind myself what comics are capable of.
Me? If you follow this blog, you won’t be surprised to hear me admit that I think Calvin [and therefore Bill Watterson] is one of the great philosophers of our generation. Here is his story…
Touching. Inspiring. Real. Craig stops making jokes (nearly) and gets personal, and kind.
via Craig Ferguson: an Alcoholic Christmas. | elephant journal.
Interesting data:
The Barna Group, an evangelical market research organization, has been issuing a steady stream of books and white papers documenting the erosion of support for evangelicalism, especially among young people. Contributions from worshippers 55 and older now account for almost two-thirds of evangelical churches’ income in the United States. A mere three percent of non-Christian Americans under 30 have a positive impression of evangelical Christianity, according to David Kinnaman, the Barna Group’s president. That’s down from 25 percent of baby boomers at a similar age. At present rates of attrition, two-thirds of evangelicals in their 20s will abandon church before they turn 30. “It’s the melting of the icebergs,” Kinnaman told me. Young people’s most common complaint, he said, is that churches are too focused on sexual issues and preoccupied with their own institutional development — in other words, he explained, “Christianity no longer looks like Jesus.”
Go to the source: The American Scholar: Where Are the People? – Jim Hinch.
h/t to David Kanigan and Philip Lima
This one goes out to my dad who is celebrating his 77th birthday today and while he refused to sign one of these waivers, he becomes a better father every day…
Remembering Love (from IMCW Spring Retreat) – The habit of self-judgment not only causes emotional pain, it creates a trance that obscures the purity and vastness of our Being. This talk explores how a wakeful and forgiving heart can heal and free us…
Tara Brach : Remembering Love (Retreat Talk).
I’m looking forward to the week AFTER Christmas — the quiet period when I focus on my business and preparing for the year to come. If you’re like me, then Michael Hyatt has a video series that might be interesting to you…
You can find the other two videos in this new ‘series’ at his microsite Best Year Ever. Also, in the past I have used this book as well…
What are some of your favorite resources? What do you do to prepare for the new year?
There are many excellent tributes to Madiba in every corner of the internet today. Here’s one of them from a man who knew Nelson Mandela as a boy and delivered a TED talk moments after learning of his death…
Joshua Fields Millburn writes:
No, I don’t expect, or even want, anyone to walk around asking themselves What would Joshua do? Please don’t. At least not aloud. Rather, it’s a question I should ask myself: What would the best version of me do in this situation? Likewise, what would the best version of you do? What would Chris do? What would Katie do? Would would your best self do?
Would the best version of me put off writing until tomorrow? Would the best version of you sleep an extra hour and avoid the gym? Would the best version of me eat the frosted donut on the other side of the pastry counter’s glass? Would the best version of you lie to your boss? Would the best version of me procrastinate or buy things I don’t need or ignore a friend in need?
Gp to the source: WWJD: What Would Joshua Do? | The Minimalists.
Today, many people in these United States will be feasting on thoughts of gratitude. I have already been filled by these thoughts from teacher Tara Brach…
Namaste and Happy Thanksgiving!
A rare spotting of an endangered species; the Algoma police car (at City of Algoma)
The day that Gemma Stone’s TEDx talk would appear in my feed reader. Today’s the day…
I’ve been blessed to work with quite a few TED talkers and I have watched a lot of great TED talks as well but there are few TED talkers or TED talks that I have enjoyed more than Gemma and her message…
Bright, shiny objects! 
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