The dawn of each new year reminds us of our freedom to release the baggage of the past, to make new choices, and to embrace in a new way whatever comes. It’s a time to set our intentions for what we want our lives to look like, and to work toward creating the best life we can envision. At the same, it’s wise to acknowledge that, ultimately, we are not in control. One thing we know for sure is…..
“The only safe place in existence is the now. We create time which is a jail. Everything that is not perfectly still is inside the jail of time. We are all one in the now. We are either frozen in time or eternally now, timeless. We are living either from paradigm or from presence, in the past or now. “As soon as you are localized, you receive the karma package. When you are now, everything passes right through. The more…..
The temples we visited in India are infused with centuries of ritual—prayers, mantras, and fire ceremonies–performed by holy people. The power generated through continuous repetition of the rituals was palpable as we entered these sacred spaces. But we don’t have to go anywhere to access the benefit of ritual in our daily lives. Creating a personal altar is one way. Although our home altars have not been blessed by centuries of ceremonies, we can infuse them, on a daily basis,…..
What if you could change the past? A movie I watched recently, About Time, is the story of a man who happens to have the ability to travel back in time by imagining some situation from the past. He is then able to re-live the situation, changing the parts that didn’t go well, recreating his life the way he wants. He uses his power to help others as well as himself. As his life progresses, though, he finds there are…..
Recently, I happened to watch two inspiring documentaries. The first followed the extraordinary journey of three men who climbed to the summit of Meru, a mountain in the Himalayas. All previous attempts had failed, and the summit had been considered unreachable. The second film documented the nine-month voyage of six women who, incredibly, rowed eight thousand miles across the Pacific Ocean. Both extreme adventures required overcoming impossible obstacles, facing the ultimate physical and mental challenges that presented real confrontations with…..
Our lives appear to be a journey through time and space from birth to death. It seems we came from somewhere and are going somewhere as we live out the archetype of the pilgrim, the sojourner here on Earth. The strange thing is most of us don’t know where we came from, how and why we got here, or where we’re going. The spiritual quest starts as a search for answers to these fundamental questions. This quest is often referred…..
My first semester in college, I signed up for a philosophy class. The professor was short and stocky, had long hair and an attitude of defiance, even anger, which, I guess, was a sign of the times—it was 1968 and colleges were filled with defiant, angry people. I still remember the sound of his cowboy boots as he stomped up the aisle to the chalk board. I was already intimidated. “Who are you?” he wrote, the chalk clicking loudly against…..
Once during a weekly staff meeting at hospice, we were asked what we must let go of when facing death. Mary, one of the other therapists answered, “Well, for starters, we have to drop our idea of who we are.” I don’t know what the other therapists thought of what she said, but her answer resonated with me. I had been attending courses at an ashram in India on my vacations from work, and this was exactly what we were…..
My cousin Lynda died a few years ago after a short illness. We had been close throughout our childhoods and her early and unexpected death was a shock. I was working at hospice at the time, an experience that invited me to reflect on the impermanence of life and the importance of living here and now. And Lynda’s death was a profound wake-up call. It was one thing to work with clients at hospice, but when death hit close to…..
Sitting in the sand one Saturday at Mesa Lane Beach, looking out over the ocean, I reflected on my work at hospice. I thought about how some things—the heartbreaks, the losses, our deepest wounds—can’t always be faced or felt directly. Sometimes we need to get at them sideways through the cracks in our surface lives. But we need to access them one way or another in order to heal and grow. Otherwise, our unfelt pain traps our life energy, our…..
