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31 August 2010 |
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| I
feel my heart break to see a nation ripped apart by
its own greatest strength--its diversity.
Melissa
Etheridge |
Diversity
is not about how we differ. Diversity is about embracing one another's uniqueness.
Ola
Joseph |
Human diversity makes tolerance more than
a virtue; it makes it a requirement for survival.
René DuBos |
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Kiss Your Life
Leo Buscaglia
I don't know about you, but I don't feel that
it's my vehicle that is essential. I don't know
about you, but I don't feel that it's my education
that is essential. I don't think what is essential
about me is my house or my car or my clothes.
What is essential about me? Well, I think what is
essential is that I live and embrace life right now,
wherever I am. I grab it in my arms! Don't
spend time crying about yesterday--yesterday is over
with! I forgive my past. I forgive the people
who've hurt me. I don't want to spend the rest of my
life blaming and pointing a finger. I get so sick
and tired of hearing people gripe about what their parents
did to them. You know what your parents did to
you? The best thing they could do. The
best thing they knew how, the only thing in many cases
that they knew how. Nobody has set out maliciously
to hurt their child, unless they were psychotic.
Can you forgive? Can you forget? Can you
say it's "OK"? Can you say, "They are
people, too"? and you take them in your arms and
embrace them? Then take your self in your
arms. Find out again that you are special,
that you are unique, that you are wondrous, that in
all the world there is only one of you. Hug
yourself, you sweet old thing! Sure you've
screwed up, and sometimes you do dumb things and you
forget that you are a human being, but the most wonderful
thing about you is that, no matter where you are, you have
potential to grow. You are just starting.
There is only this much of you now, and there is an
infinite amount to discover and to find! Don't spend
your time crying! Forgive others!
Forgive yourself. Forgive yourself for not
being perfect. And accept responsibility for your
own life.
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Nikos Kazantzakis says, "You have your brush, you
have your colors, you paint paradise, then in you
go." Do it!! Take orange and magenta and
blue and purple. . . and green, and yellow--and
paint your paradise. You can do that!
You can do it right now. It's your life that is
essential.
I don't know how many of you are acquainted with Arthur
Miller's wonderful play called "After the
Fall." It's probably one of the most underrated
works of American literature. He wrote it right
after the suicide of Marilyn Monroe, who had been his
wife, and he tried to ask the question I tried to ask
myself earlier, and that maybe many of you have asked
yourselves: What could I have done to have saved
someone in my life? This was a play that said,
"I have to learn to forgive. Others and
myself." In it he has a beautiful thing that
I'd like to share with you. One of the healthier
characters says this:
"I think it is a mistake to ever look for hope
outside of yourself.
One day the house smells like fresh bread, and the next,
smoke
and blood. One day you faint because the gardener
cuts his
finger. Within a week you're climbing over corpses
of children
bombed in subways. What hope can there be if that is
so?
"I tried to die near the end of the war. The
same dream returned
to me each night until I dared not go to sleep, and I grew
ill. I
dreamed I had a child. And even in the dream I felt
that the child
was my life, and it was an idiot, and I ran away from
it. But it always
kept climbing into my lap, and clutching at my clothes,
until I thought,
if I could kiss it, whatever was in it that was my own,
perhaps I
could sleep again. And I bent to its broken face,
and it was horrible.
But I kissed it. I think, Quentin, one must
finally take one's life into
one's own arms, and kiss it."
Fantastic statement. It doesn't matter who
you have hurt, if you've learned not to hurt again.
It doesn't matter what mistakes you've made as long as you
don't make them again. As long as you learn, as long
as you're willing to take your life in your own hands, and
kiss it and go on from there. Then there is
growth. Then there is life!
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Living, Loving, and
Learning
is a delightful collection of
Dr. Buscaglia's informative
and amusing lectures, which
were delivered worldwide
between 1970 and 1981.
This inspirational treasure is
for all those eager to accept
the challenge of life and to
profit from the wonder of love. |
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Living
Life Fully, the e-zine
exists to try to provide for visitors of the world wide web a
place
of growth, peace, inspiration, and encouragement. Our
articles
are presented as thoughts of the authors--by no means do
we
mean to present them as ways that anyone has to live
life. Take
from them what you will, and disagree with
whatever you disagree
with--just know that they'll be here for you
each week. |
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Filling
the Hole
Iyanla Vanzant
Somebody left you, and now there is a gaping hole in
the middle of your soul. The question is how
are you going to fill that hole? Are you going
to fill it with the painful memories of how you got
hurt or got left? Or are you going to fill the
hole with memories of the many moments of joy and
laughter you had together? Are you going to
fill the hole with anger, resentment, fear or shame
directed toward the one who left? Or are you
going to fill the hole with appreciation that you do
have an opportunity to choose how you are going to
fill the hole? Are you going to fill the hole
with the countless reasons why it should not have
happened to you? Or are you going to fill it
with the courage it will take to accept that it did
happen to you, in this way?
Are you going to fill the hole with at least one
ounce of confidence that you can handle this,
whatever it takes? Or are you going to fill
the hole with the self-defeating belief that you
can't or will not make it through or over this
hole? Are you going to empty all of your
self-value, self-worth, and self-esteem in to the
hole until it becomes a pit of self-pity,
self-doubt, and self-inflicted nonsense that keeps you
in a hole of despair? Are you going to throw
yourself into a hole and dare life to try and move
you?
You can cover the hole with love and prayer and
acceptance of your ability to step over or walk
around the hole. You can also step back, take
a little break and wait to see the Self that
emerges from the hole. The choice is yours!
Until today, you may have believed that you had to
stay in the painful hole of hurt caused by the loss
of a loved one. Just for today, make a
conscious effort and choice to cover the hole and
move on.
Today
I am devoted to covering the holes
and filling in all the gaps in my life!
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This
book of 365 daily devotionals supports the
time-honored adage, "Why put off until
tomorrow what you can do today?" The
charismatic spiritual leader Iyanla Vanzant
knows how easy it is to stay stuck in
"old sentiments, resentments, beliefs,
decisions, agreements, judgments, and ideas
that may have become habitual." Through
these devotions Vanzant hopes to show
readers that the easiest way to create
change is to simply shift your attitude--today. |
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The
finest gift you can give anyone is encouragement.
Yet, almost no one gets
the encouragement they need to grow to their full
potential. If everyone
received the encouragement they need to grow, the genius
in most everyone
would blossom and the world would produce abundance beyond
the
wildest dreams. We would have more than one
Einstein, Edison, Schweitzer,
Mother Theresa, Dr. Salk and other great minds in a
century.
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Eyes Wide Open
tom walsh
The Art of Acceptance
In this moment, right now, things are as they
are. And there's not a single thing we can do
about the way things are.
There really is no argument about this point.
We can look at a situation that we don't care
for--the dirty dishes are piled up on the sink, for
example--and do something about it for the future,
but right now, the dishes are there, no matter how
unpleasant we find that situation. I can
decide right now to wash them, but that will not
change the fact that they are there now.
And it's not until we accept the fact that the
dishes are there that we actually can do anything
about that fact.
Dishes are easy, of course. They're something
that almost all of us deal with, on one level or
another, all our lives, every day. Accepting
the fact that there are dishes that need to be
washed is simple for most of us--we see them sitting
there, and we know why they're there and what's
needed.
Of course, people who hate doing dishes and avoid
doing them at all costs practice a form of denial,
not allowing themselves to accept the fact that this
chore simply needs to be done.
But most of us practice this denial on other
levels. The way that we're treated at work is
terrible. Our spouse or significant other has
left us. We've been laid off. We're in
severe financial trouble. We're failing a
class. There are tons of things in all of our
lives that we don't want to face head-on, because
doing so, we think, will expose some sort of failure
of ours, some sort of shortcoming that might
humiliate or embarrass us.
And because we tend to practice denial instead of
acceptance, we find ourselves unable to deal with
these elements of our lives effectively, unable to
move on to better things in our lives because we're
still being held down and held back by those things
that we aren't able to accept for exactly what they
are.
I was among a large group of teachers who were laid
off for financial reasons a year and a half
ago. One of the things that made our situation
more bearable was that we got together as a group to
face our plight head-on. We accepted our
situation for what it was, and we talked about the
best ways to move on from where we were. And
while the following year and a half hasn't always
been completely positive, one thing that wasn't a
part of our lives was leftover pain and resentment
for our situation. We were let go, and we
accepted that and we moved from there to making
other plans and searching for other work.
If you come out of a restaurant and find that
someone has smashed into your car, it's very easy to
get caught up in the emotion of the moment and the
situation. But will being angry and wanting
revenge actually accomplish anything
productive? Usually not. What
accomplishes something is accepting the fact that
this terrible thing has happened, and then working
on your options for action from there on.
I know plenty of people who have a hard time
accepting things. Parents have a hard time
accepting that their kids think differently than
they do about things like sex and religion and
relationships and work. Spouses have a hard
time accepting that their husbands or wives are
interested in pursuing interests other than their
marriage. Acceptance is even harder when what
we're being asked to accept isn't physical, isn't
visible and tangible. It's easier for me to
accept a tree falling on my car than it is to accept
a friend borrowing my car and crashing it.
Acceptance doesn't mean passivity. It doesn't
mean being a victim. It simply means seeing
and recognizing how things are and realizing
that we need to decide what to do based on that, and
not on how we think things are, how we think things
should be, or how we wish things were.
And there really is no better reason to pursue
acceptance than the fact that accepting things
allows us to create a much more positive and
enjoyable life for ourselves. When we accept,
we don't spend time trying to make things other than
they are--instead, we search for the most effective
way of making what is a part of our lives. If
we don't like what is, then we can work to change
it--but in working to change it, we can't deny the
fact that what is, is. It's that denial that
holds us back; it's the acceptance that allows us to
move forward. |
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We
are here to feel, wonder and gaze in awe at the world.
Instead of just teaching our children how to use things
and do things, I suggest we nourish their sense of wonder.
Bernie
Siegel
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Happiness
Edward J. Lavin
Contentment is a balm, satisfaction is a friendly
embrace, but happiness is a warm glow and tingle
that arise from the health of both mind and body.
We all want to be happy, yet how many of us can with
certainty declare that we are? We all have
little happinesses that raise us up out of the mire
of our daily struggles. Perhaps we should be
content with these small gifts, for the quality of
perfect happiness is an uncommon state.
This little caution is a warning to those whose life
is a perpetual search for the perfect happiness--a
holy grail that requires an immense effort. It
is not found in a clean bathroom, although the TV
commercials want us to think so. Nor is it
found in money or health or friends or lovers or
travel or small packages. These may lead to
small happinesses, and blessings on them all.
Perfect happiness is a well-regulated hierarchy of
spirit, mind, and body. The order is
important, and anything that disturbs that order
ruffles the surface of the lake of happiness.
Unregulated desire, as the Buddha knew so well, is a
heavy stone dropped into the lake; equally
disturbing is the tendency to forget about the
spirit and to concentrate exclusively on the mind or
the body. Perfect happiness is not to be found
in the leaps of aerobic movement nor in the dense
concentration of scholarly research.
Yet we must not despair. Perfect happiness is
our birthright--it is only that we must work at it. |
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Wisdom
comes most easily to those who have the courage to embrace
life
without judgment and are willing to not know, sometimes
for a long time.
It requires us to be more fully and
simply alive than we have been taught to be.
It may
require us to suffer. But ultimately we will be more
than we were
when we began. There is the seed of a
greater wholeness in everyone.
Rachel
Naomi Remen |
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