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11 January 2022
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Your dream might change our planet.
Edward Lindaman
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The
way to free your feelings is to simply feel them.
Shaeri Richards
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Everything on
earth gives cause for fear,
and the only freedom from fear is to be found
in the renunciation of all desire.
Bharti-hari
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We
cannot change anything unless we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.
Carl
Jung
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Ask
Someone Who Can Give It to You!
an excerpt
Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen
Before you ask someone for something, make an
assessment of whether or not they will be able
to give it to you. If you're looking for
people to invest money in your project, ask them
if they are in a position to make an investment
before you spend an hour sharing your business
plan with others.
If you are asking someone to listen to your
problem and help you solve it, make sure they
have the emotional maturity and the ability to
help you.
If you are asking someone to love you
unconditionally, make sure they have the
capacity to do that before you demand the
impossible of them. Otherwise, you may end
up wasting many years of your life pushing
someone to give you what they are unable to
give.
It would be stupid to ask the receptionist at a
major corporation to make a
hundred-thousand-dollar buying decision.
It would be equally futile to ask your
three-year-old to always remember to pick up
after herself. It may also be just as
futile to ask your parents to love you and
accept you just the way you are.
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In our
workshops we will sometimes illustrate this principle by
having someone stand up and yell the following sentence at
the wall: "I want you to become a
car!" After a few minutes they get that they
can yell at the wall all day long, and it is never going
to become a car. There is nothing they can do to
make that wall into a car. It is always going to be
a wall.
Sometimes it is the same with people. They are
simply not going to change and give you what you
want. It simply isn't in them to do it. They
have no desire to do it. They are not skilled enough
to do it, or they are too wounded to do it. Now you
come up against some tough choices. You may need to
leave the company, team, unit or relationship in order to
get what you want. That is not always an easy thing
to admit. It may require taking some very
uncomfortable actions and risks. But it is better
than continuing to hope for something that is impossible
to get from the person you've been asking for it.
There
is a big difference between being unreasonable and
unrealistic. For instance, it is not unreasonable to
want your husband to understand your feelings, but if your
husband is an engineer who has never ventured into his
right hemisphere or emotions his entire life, it is just
unrealistic, meaning it is unlikely.
It's not that your feelings are not
worth being understood. It's just that he doesn't
have the capacity. He's strong in some other
area. So part of what you need to do is to direct
those needs to the people and the places that can satisfy
them, as opposed to just expecting one person or one
situation to take care of every need.
-Mark Goulstein
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New
Year's Requirements
W.R. Hunt
The sun is just rising on the morning of another day,
one of the first of a new year. What can I wish
that this day, this year, may bring to me?
Nothing that shall make the world of others poorer,
nothing at the expense of others; but just those
things which in their coming do not stop with me, but
touch me rather, as they pass and gather strength:
A few friends who understand me, and yet remain my
friends.
A work to do which has real value without which the
world would feel the poorer.
A return for such work small enough not to tax unduly
anyone who pays.
A mind unafraid to travel, even though the trail be
not blazed.
An understanding heart.
A sight of the eternal hills and unresting sea, and of
something beautiful the hand of humans has made.
A sense of humor and the power to laugh.
A few moments of quiet, silent meditation. The
sense of the presence of God.
. . . and the patience to wait for the coming of these
things, with the wisdom to know them when they come.
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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
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each week. |
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If all my
pain and all my tears,
And all that I have learned throughout the years
Could make one perfect song
To lift some fallen head
To light some darkened mind,
I should feel that not in vain
I served mankind.
Marguerite Few
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Dealing
with Division
Like it or not, we're
living in a world divided right now. Nothing that
we do as individuals can change that fact, so it's
important that we come up with some strategies for
dealing with this reality if we're not going to let it
overwhelm us. It's a difficult reality to come to
terms with, for it requires us to be accepting and even
to encourage others who believe things that we not only
don't believe ourselves, but that we can't imagine how
anyone could believe them.
And our division is mostly based on beliefs, as
divisions have been for probably as long as people have
been around. I believe that the government should
support Program A, while you believe that the program is
a waste of money and the government shouldn't be
involved in it. Even knowing facts and figures
doesn't seem to help our division--knowing that the
government spends so much on the program makes me say
that it's enough or it should be more, while you say
it's too much or it should be much less. Knowing
that so many people were helped by the program makes me
say that it's working and should continue, but it makes
you say that those people are being taught to depend on
the government and should instead be given the chance to
improve their situations themselves.
And here's the very hard part: usually, both of
our arguments are right, while both of our arguments are
wrong. Both of us see just the side of the picture
that makes sense to us, while leaving us blind to the
picture as a whole. Both of our perspectives have
elements of truth to them, and elements of
falsehood. Both of us make sense, while neither of
us make sense, no matter how clear the picture may seem
to us from our perspective.
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The only thing which
has to heal
is the illusion of being separate.
Wilfried Fink
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And therein lies the
challenge: being able to accept the fact that
people on the "other side" also have
perspectives that make complete sense to them, and
the fact that no matter what the issue, there will
always be people on both sides of that issue--or
even on four or five different sides. Our
first major task in dealing with a world that's
divided so strongly is to accept the fact that other
people see an issue differently than we do and not
to feel that they're "wrong" for seeing it
differently. It's when we ourselves put people
on the other side of the fence that the division
grows deeper and cooperation or even reconciliation
becomes much, much more difficult.
Don't get me wrong--there are definitely times and
situations in which I want to say something like,
"You're completely wrong!" But I
realize that once I say that, I'm invalidating the
other person's ability to think and reason, and I'm
not looking for any common ground at all.
Besides, how can I cooperate with you if I see you as being
completely wrong? How can we work together to
accomplish something important if I tell you that
your thinking is nothing but flawed? The
answer, of course, is that I can't cooperate with
you--it will take some apologizing first, and even
then, the relationship has been damaged.
Chances are that you'll be defensive, just waiting
for the next time that I insult you.
We need to be bridge-builders, not
wall-builders. We need to look for the
commonalities that all humans share--fears and hopes
and dreams and insecurities and loves--and build our
bridges using those, even if that bridge does pass
over an abyss of fear and anger and
disagreement. When those bridges are built, then
we can work on reconciliation and moving forward,
but not before.
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If
we could but recognize our common humanity,
that we do belong together,
that our destinies are bound up in one another's,
that we can be free only together,
that we can be human only together,
then a glorious world would come into being
where all of us lived harmoniously together
as members of one family, the human family.
Desmond Tutu
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The division that
we're experiencing are not unprecedented, nor are
the impossible to overcome. One of the
problems that we're facing, though, is that so few
people are willing to try to understand the other
side anymore, and therefore the division keeps
growing with fewer and fewer bridges being built to
help to repair it. If we don't have any more
peacekeepers or any more bridge-builders, then the
divides will keep growing greater and more difficult
to mend.
We must remember that mending a divide does not mean
that we get the other person to see the world as we
see it or to think in the ways that we think.
That would be simple manipulation. We can--and
we must--cooperate with people who disagree with us
and who think differently than we do, because we can
be sure that there are plenty of people out there
who think in the same ways as this other
person. Our cooperation to "fix"
problems always should fix them to benefit the
greatest number of people, not just the people who
agree with us.
Sometimes, of course, it's painful to take this
course. Sometimes the people who think
differently are unable to see the long-term problems
with a certain course of action, and therefore they
don't see any reason not to pursue that
course. Voting for a certain action may save
$1,000 in the first week, but actually cost $500
every week after that. If your opponent can
see only the $1,000 in savings, then rather than
insulting that person by telling them how wrong they
are, perhaps it's time to educate them on the true
cost of that action. Education goes much, much
further than insults or belittling.
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He drew a circle that shut me
out--
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flaunt.
But love and I had the wit to win;
We drew a circle and took him in.
Edward Markham
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And of course, there
will be those people who are so insecure that
they'll never change their minds, no matter how much
you try to educate them. In those cases, it's
important to move on to different actions rather
than continuing to beat your head against that brick
wall--the wall isn't going to give, no matter how
many times you smash your head into it! So
it's time to develop another strategy or take
another course to try to heal divisions, and that's
going to take creativity and energy--but it's
definitely possible. It may be an unfortunate
truth, though, that a person you wanted to be a part
of the healing refuses to budge, and then you'll
have to leave that person behind as you move on to
more positive actions.
The illusion of division is an extremely strong one,
an illusion that threatens to ruin all that we've
accomplished together and to sabotage our futures
with its focus on the negative and the
impossible. We have unlimited potential as
human beings, but only if we can work together, and
only if we can learn from people with perspectives
that are quite different from our own.
And if we want to deal effectively with the division
in our world, it must start with us. We cannot
be the people who say "You first!"
If we do that, it's never going to happen. We
know this from experience and from history. It
seems that everyone is waiting for everyone else to
cooperate and try to unify others, but if we keep on
waiting we can be sure that it will never
happen. Even though we may feel intimidated or
unsure of ourselves, we really do need to be the
ones who cause cooperation and working together to
start with us; we must be the people who put aside
our pride and egos in order to work with people who
disagree with us and who see the world in completely
different ways from us.
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More on oneness.
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It's
important to give yourself a gold star. Recognizing your
achievements--big and small--is an important part of honoring who you are.
Gold stars have
the powerful effect of undermining and dethroning all the critical
stuff
you've heard about yourself.
Leslie
Levine
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There
was a man who wanted to transcend his suffering so he
went to a Buddhist temple to find a Master to help
him. He went to the Master and asked,
"Master, if I meditate for four hours a day, how
long will it take me to transcend?"
The
Master looked at him and said, "If you meditate
four hours a day, perhaps you will transcend in ten
years."
Thinking
he could do better, the man then said, "Oh, Master,
what if I meditated eight hours a day, how long will it
take me to transcend?"
The
Master looked at him and said, "If you meditate
eight hours a day, perhaps you will transcend in twenty
years."
"But
why will it take me longer if I meditate more?" the
man asked.
The
Master replied, "You are not here to sacrifice your
joy or your life. You are here to live, to be
happy, and to love. If you can do your best in two
hours of meditation, but you spend eight hours instead,
you will only grow tired, miss the point, and you won't
enjoy your life. Do your best, and perhaps you
will learn that no matter how long you meditate, you can
live, love, and be happy."
Don
Miguel Ruiz
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Doing
is a quantum leap from imagining.
Thinking about swimming
isn’t much like actually getting in the water. Actually
getting in
the water can take your breath away. The defense force inside
us wants us to be cautious, to stay away from anything as intense
as a new kind of action. Its job is to protect us, and it categorically
avoids anything resembling danger. But
it’s often wrong.
Anything worth doing is worth doing too soon.
Barbara Sher
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