“Patience is the companion of Wisdom”St. Augustine ...
What will you choose? We live in a time when many people are hungry for connection to the divine. We don’t need to seek externally for that connection. Why? We are the divine. As we travel through our day, how we be, our choice of response to each situation, not just our words, but our attitude, the that we apply to each event, each relationship, that’s what brings our divinity into the physical world or blocks it from being experienced. What will you choose? Will you choose to respond from love? Will you choose to respond from one of the many faces of love? From kindness? From tolerance? From compassion?From Wisdom? From Grace? This takes a great deal of work. It sounds so simple when you read this. It sounds so easy. It seems to “make sense” to people. What they\’re missing is that it takes a great deal of ...
We live in a time when many are hungry for connection to the divine. We don’t need to seek externally for connection, although many of us do. We read books, we take workshops, we study with teachers, we meet in groups. All of this activity is helpful. But we truly don’t need to seek externally for the connection that we seek. We are the divine. We have inside of us the spark of the divine, the spark of the design, the spark of the divine that created us all. Remember in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy is speaking to the good witch of the East. The good witch tells her, “My dear, you have all along had everything you’ve needed to return home. All you need to do is click your heels and say, ‘There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home.’” ...
Flow like water. Life presents many opportunities for us, some of which create experiences that are joyous, that are happy, that are peaceful. Other times in life we experience situations that are painful, times that are tough, experiences that are rough and hurt and often cut to the quick. Life is full of all of that. Physical reality is full of a variety of experiences including chaos. If we seek peace, our job in this lifestream, as spirit in form, is to flow like water, to move through each experience taking what we need in order to grow and to leave as small a wake as possible. Experiences, we are told, shape us. It has been said that they form who we are. I beg to differ. It’s not what others do, it’s our response to situations that creates the energetic resonance that remains. Thus it’s critically important to put ...
Sitting with discomfort is indeed what many people on a spiritual path experience. While our ultimate quest and the work that we do is to be able to lead a life and live a life from peace, it’s an awful lot of work to get there. Part of what happens on the way to experiencing peace in a consistent way is we have times where our life feels anything other than peaceful. It’s not surprising. We are energy in form. The more we focus on our energetic being, bringing it to the forefront, asking our brain and our emotional state to support the intuitive leading the way, we’re bound to hit a few bumpy patches in the road. For me, there have been times when I felt unsure of myself where it just didn’t seem like I was getting along with anybody in my life. Misunderstandings, conversations gone awry, relationships ...
If I were to ask you where would you like your life to be, would you rather have a life that’s grounded from your interior world, or would you rather retain a life that’s grounded in physicality? You know physicality. It’s that world of being a human. It’s living in the physical world. A place that we all know is full of an awful lot of chaos. While we’ll always move in the physical world because we are in human form, we are energy in physicality and human form, we can choose a life that is grounded in our interior. What do I mean by that? I mean you have a choice. You can choose to visit your world of intuition, your spiritual, your soul, your world of connection to your spiritual values. You can choose that world by going to yoga, by meditating, taking a walk in the woods, ...
Very often when we look to make shifts in how we be or we want to add practices into our life or we want to reflect, we want to have the active practice of reflection and observation about how we’ve been in the world in order to make our life our practice, it always seems as if, for many people, that we have no time. “Finding the time” seems to be beyond the reach of many people. So, great intentions never get realized. Often, when people think about making shifts in their behavior, or simply looking to add time onto their day in order to reflect and add the practice of meditation to their day it seems as if there’s no time. I find in talking with students when we talk about putting a practice into their life or adding time to reflect on how they be in the world, ...
Making decisions for many people can be a very, very difficult task. In fact, some people get paralyzed making commitments. Other people, regard decision making, as quite simple or quite easy. I remember when I was a little girl, my grandfather, my mother’s father,Jack was from Poland. He was a tailor and he lived in the Bronx with my Grandma Lily. He was one of the wisest people I know. I absolutely loved him and he adored me. I remember once at some point when I was just about a teenager, asking my grandfather about making decisions. I had a decision to make an didn’t know how to do so. Although his name was Jack, I called him Grandpa Pop. I remember saying, “Grandpa Pop, I can’t figure this out. How do I make my choice?” My grandfather, in a way that only Grandpa Pop could do, took his cigar ...
Many students who come to practical spirituality are already on a path. They may be yoga teachers, people who meditate regularly, they’ve possibly worked with other spiritual teachers. They’ve gone to workshops. They’ve read lots of books on spirituality, on energy work, on Buddhism, on Taoism, on different practices. They’ve studied teachers like Caroline Myss and Eckhart Tolle. They’ve followed Deepak Chopra and possibly done silent retreats. What hasn’t happened for these dedicated students is that they haven’t moved what they know into their daily life. They haven’t integrated the knowledge so their life still yet is not a representation of their beliefs. They haven’t incorporated their values into how they be in their daily life. Students who have been studying for some time, who have done the work, incorporated their values quite a bit, and see their state has changed, may find themselves calmer. Upon reflection they realize they ...
The consistency of our time and attention when we approach practical spirituality is very, very important. The concept of practical spirituality is to approach our everyday life and to respond to the challenges, to our relationships, opportunities, events, from one of the many faces of love. This looks like, as things happen instead of getting lost inside the event we always keep an awareness that there is a response we can have in any situation that comes from love. As events arise, as challenges show up we train ourselves, to respond form love. This is a practice, we train ourselves to automatically say, “I see I’m having an opportunity here to not lose myself to my emotions” We use our emotions as an alarm clock and we say, “I have choice. What face of love shall I respond with?” Is it patience? Kindness? Grace? Tolerance? As you choose that face ...