Hello,
and welcome to today! We're glad that you've
made it through all of
your trials and challenges in life to get to this
day so that you can share it
with us--your resilience is certainly an important
part of who you are.
Taking an interest in what others are thinking and doing is
often
a much more powerful form of encouragement than praise.
-
Robert Martin
Silences
make the real conversations between
friends. Not the
saying but the never
needing to say is what counts. -
Margaret
Lee Runbeck
Enlightenment
is not about becoming divine. Instead it's about
becoming more fully human. . . It is the end of ignorance.
-
Lama
Surya Das
Forgiveness is the answer to the child's
dream of a miracle
by which what
is broken is made whole
again,
what is soiled is again made clean. -
Dag Hammarskjold
A thermometer is a long, thin glass tube filled
with mercury--a simple device designed to give a
reading of the temperature of its surrounding
environment. When the environment becomes
warmed, the mercury rises. When it become
cooler, the mercury descends. At a glance
you can know how warm or cold the air is around
the thermometer. Some thermometers can
tell you whether your body is functioning at a
normal temperature, and others indicate if your
good has been properly cooked.
Unfortunately, many people operate like a
thermometer. Instead of mercury, their
self-esteem may rise and fall according to the
"temperature" of other people's
opinions of them. When others think highly
of them, these people tend to feel good about
themselves. When they are criticized,
their opinion of themselves may drop to a low,
cold level. Eleanor Roosevelt, former
first lady in the United States, stated an
important truth to remember: "No one
can make you feel inferior without your
consent." Think carefully about these
words. You are under no obligation to let
the world decide how you are going to feel about
yourself. You have the right and the
opportunity to discern the events in your life
and judge yourself. Criticism may take on
many forms, the majority of which seem petty and
trivial. And criticism, whether directed
toward us or coming from us, can be a deterrent
to progress and may lead us into discord and
trouble. By feeling confident and
enhancing the positive qualities in others we
may actually be revealing our own fine
qualities.
Many
of us may have been raised giving others a great
deal of control over our feelings. But, as
we grow, it's important to learn that how we
feel about ourselves, in spite of the opinions
of others, can be an essential ingredient of a
happy life. If you allow people the power
to set or adjust the thermostat of your
self-esteem, you may find yourself at the mercy
of their opinions. Your happiness could
then seem to depend on many conditions over
which you have no healthy inner control.
How you feel about yourself can determine, to a
large extent, your experience of life. You
cannot afford to surrender control of your
feelings to the whims of others. If you
know persons who seem to be going through life
constantly miserable, and for no apparent
reason, it may be likely that they have
relinquished power over their feelings.
Like a thermometer, they simply reflect the
world's opinions. They have handed over to
others the power to judge themselves, and this
state of powerlessness often creates a high
level of tension and anxiety.
Unlike the thermometer, you can take your own
"temperature." You can feel good
about yourself and your life, despite what
others think. No one knows you or your
capabilities as well as you do. Therefore,
it is important that you be in charge of how you
feel about yourself.
Be open enough to learn from others, but make a
commitment to stay in control of your feelings
about yourself and your estimate of your
worth. What works wonderfully well for a
thermometer can prove to be disastrous for
you. If you find that you have put someone
else in charge of your self-esteem, begin making
a simple statement like the following to set you
free: "Today, I feel good about
myself despite what others say, think, or
do. I am the master of my feelings and
hold that authority in my life today!"
Self-knowledge may be difficult to attain
because the tendency to self-protection may seem
so great. But it is in looking squarely at
our own feelings and possible shortcomings that
we may be able to see the work that needs to be
done to bring about transformation in our
lives. Once the decision is made about a
"weak spot"--whether it be a
"short-fuse" temper, feelings of
unworthiness, feelings of being inferior, or
whatever--we can engage our desire to curb
feelings of inferiority, think about the
desirability of a pleasant disposition and
feeling confident of the spirit within
you. You can give your thoughts and
feelings a new direction.
When you live from the center of your own being,
life can become much more productive and joyful
at the circumference.
This ain't comin' from no
prophet
Just an ordinary man
When I close my eyes I see
The way this world shall be
When we all walk hand in hand
When the last child cries for a crust of bread
When the last man dies for just words that he said
When there's a shelter over the poorest head
We shall be free
When the last thing we notice is the color of skin
And the first thing we look for is the beauty within
When the skies and the oceans are clean again
Then we shall be free
We shall be free
We shall be free
Stand straight, walk proud
'Cause we shall be free
When we're free to love anyone we choose
When this world's big enough for all different views
When we all can worship from our own kind of pew
Then we shall be free
We shall be free
We shall be free
Have a little faith
Hold out
'Cause we shall be free
And when money talks for the very last time
And nobody walks a step behind
When there's only one race and that's mankind
Then we shall be free
We shall be free
We shall be free
Stand straight, walk proud, have a little faith, hold
out
We shall be free
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It took me several decades of living to realize that
nothing is perfect in life except everything. Allow
me to explain. For many years I suffered from what I
call dyslexic logic, getting cause and effect
reversed. Actually I've come to realize that there
is no such thing as a cause, but that's for another
time. For a long time I used to think, like so many
people do, that I had to behave in a certain way or
achieve certain levels of success in order to gain
self-worth. I believed that, to stave off some
nagging sense of inferiority or imperfection, I simply
must make perfect choices and behave in perfect
ways. At best, self-worth would be the temporary
byproduct of these perfect acts. The chase was
on! Of course, the degree of success was
frustratingly inconsistent, only feeding the awareness of
leaky self-worth and fueling the pursuit this much more.
After years of enduring this chase for worth; anguished
wrestling with my self; and much solution-seeking from
friends, books, and professionals, I experienced what
might be considered an epiphany. I came to realize
that my worth actually preceded my any and every thought
and deed. Well, this changed everything. Now I
reconfigured countless beliefs about myself, life, and
others. Not a paradigm shift, a paradigm
expansion. An awareness expansion as though a veil
obscuring my awareness had been lifted. Knowing that
my worth precedes my thoughts and deeds removes the need
for perfection as I, you, and everyone is already fine
from the beginning of life. I do wish I'd known this
long ago. I imagine many different life choices, and
yet, knowing and experiencing this pre-existing self-worth
now, softens regret as well.
As an analogy of self-worth always being present, consider
the moon up in the night sky. One night you look up
in the starry sky and see only a sliver of a moon.
Another week you look up in the night sky and see perhaps
a half moon lit up and eventually a full moon shining down
on you. Now if you did not know any better, you'd
swear that the moon shrinks and expands through the
month. But you know full well that the moon remains
the same size night after night after night. The
part of the moon that is illuminated varies, but the moon
remains the same. It is the same situation with you
and your worth. The only thing that changes is your
awareness of it.
I am not and no human being is perfect, yet we were made
perfectly. Our very being stems from and is made up
of worthiness. We could not exist otherwise.
Knowing this, feeling this, and confirming this daily
reminds me that I retain a constant and irrevocable
worth. I can use it however I choose, with no risk
to my worth. So many, if not all of life choice
errors, dishonoring of self and others stem from the
belief that we can lose or have already lost our
worth. Verifying self-worth before taking any action
naturally leads to positive constructive choices. I
came to realize that I, you, every tree and every blade of
grass and every rain drop and snowflake are already
exactly perfect, as is.
* * * *
Paraphrased from the unpublished manuscript, The Myth
of Original Sin: Remembering Aboriginal Unity.
Living
Life Fully, the e-zine
exists to try to provide for visitors of the world wide web a
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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.
Forgiveness of self is where
all forgiveness starts. If I am unable
to forgive myself, it is impossible for me to truly forgive others.
And I must forgive others. What I give out is what I receive.
If I want forgiveness, I have to give forgiveness.
One of the fun parts about
running, for me, is that whenever a race comes along, I get to see
how I'm doing in my training. I race only
semi-seriously: I enjoy pushing myself to try to improve,
but after the race is over I usually don't care that much what the
result was, as long as I gave it my best. After all, when
all is said and done, it's just for fun.
Sometimes, though, races don't go as planned. A race that I
went to this weekend was like that. Many people go to these
fun runs year after year to try to improve their times--they know
they've been working hard at it, and it feels good to be able to
say that they were a minute faster this year than they were last
year. Unfortunately, though, Saturday dawned a windy day,
and things were going to be different this year!
All of the people who hoped to gauge their improvement over the
last year by running this race were in for a huge
disappointment--because of the wind, the times this year were much
slower than they were last year. People who regularly run
well under seven minutes per mile ran well over seven.
Someone who ran more than 45 seconds per mile slower than she ran
last year actually went from 12th to 7th place! The time I
got in my race would have been good for 5th place last year, but
this year it got me 2nd.
You may encounter many defeats, but you must
not be defeated. In fact,
it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can
know who you
are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of
it.
The race got me
to thinking about how many times we try to figure
out just how much we've improved in some area of our
lives, only to be sabotaged by forces completely out
of our control. The problem is, if we don't
recognize what's going on, it can be very easy to
get discouraged and tell ourselves that we haven't
improved at all.
I see this a lot as a college teacher--I get
students who have been getting "A's" all
throughout high school on their writing, only to get
to college and start getting "C's" or even
lower. And the change doesn't have to be from
high school to college--it can happen just by
getting a new teacher who grades in different
ways. While a student might have improved
greatly in his or her writing, the grades coming
back seem to indicate otherwise.
In some ways, this is a natural tendency.
After all, as we get better at something, we often
try to challenge ourselves by moving up to another
level. After I become an intermediate chess
player, for example, I'm hopefully going to start
playing against people who are much better than my
old opponents. And I'm going to start losing,
even though I used to win a lot. And that's a
very good thing, if I accept it as such--after many
losses, I am going to start winning at the new level
eventually.
There are not so many
lessons in glad times.
Adversity is by far the better
teacher.
Adversity will be part of almost all our lives.
So it is not in escaping adversity,
but in answering it, that our
character is defined.
Christopher Warren
I think that we
have to be careful of the criteria we use to judge
ourselves. Anyone who judges themselves
harshly based on Saturday's run is going to be
discouraged and frustrated--when there's absolutely
no reason to be so. Nobody could have done
anything about the wind, and the slower times across
the board show quite clearly that the wind had a
major effect on almost everyone. It was one of
those days that you chalk up to experience and that
you count as a training run, and then you move
on. Without beating yourself up for your slow
time.
So often we need to adopt this attitude in life,
too. We need to move on without beating
ourselves up for not meeting some sort of goal or
standard, especially if there were other factors
involved over which we had no control. We need
to accept the fact that we're not always going to
shine in all that we do, and allow for the
fickleness of life to sometimes lead us into moments
in which we don't shine as we'd like to.
Adversity can be one of our best teachers--I took a
lot from that run, especially after I found out that
other people had been affected even worse than I
was. Before I discovered that fact, though,
I'll admit that I was a little frustrated.
Knowing that everyone was slowed down by the wind,
though, took away all the frustration because I knew
that I did the very best I could under the
circumstances that the day offered me.
The
difficulties, hardships, and trials of life, the obstacles
one encounters on
the road to fortune, are positive
blessings. They knit
the muscles more firmly,
and teach
self-reliance. Peril is the element in which
power is developed.
William Matthews
Sometimes we
all have some sort of wind blowing against us as we
try to run our fastest. And our fastest
against the wind will not be an accurate
representation of just how fast we actually
are. And that's okay. It's important
that we realize what's going on, take a deep breath,
and accept the situation as it is. A better
day will come--a day when we can see more clearly
just how much we've grown and improved. Just
because it didn't happen today doesn't mean that we
haven't grown--it just means that we don't see how
much we've grown on this particular day. And
that's okay.
It
is not that you must be free from
fear. The moment you try
to free
yourself from fear, you create a resistance
against
fear. Resistance, in any form,
does not end fear. What
is needed, rather
than running away or controlling or
suppressing
or any other resistance, is understanding fear; that means, watch
it,
learn about it, come directly into contact
with it. We
are to learn about fear,
not how to escape from it, not how to
resist it through courage and so on.
J.
Krishnamurti
Listening
When I ask you to listen to me and you start giving me advice,
you have not done what I asked.
When I ask you to listen to me and you begin to tell me why I
shouldn't feel that way, you are trampling on my feelings.
When I ask you to listen to me and you feel you have to do
something to solve my problems, you have failed me, strange as
that may seem.
Listen! All I asked was that you listen, not talk or do. .
. just hear me.
And I can do for myself. I'm not helpless. Maybe
discouraged and faltering, but not helpless.
When you do something for me that I can and need to do for
myself, you contribute to my fear and inadequacy.
But when you accept as a simple fact that I do feel what I feel,
no matter how irrational, then I can quit trying to convince you
and can get about this business of understanding what's behind
this irrational feeling.
And when that's clear, the answers are obvious and I don't need
advice. Irrational feelings make sense when we understand
what's behind them.
Perhaps that's why prayer works, sometimes, for some people. . .
because God is mute and doesn't give advice or try to fix
things.
God just listens and lets you work it out for yourself.
So please listen and just hear me.
And if you want to talk, wait a minute for your turn. . . and
I'll listen to you.
unattributed
Whatever
we are waiting for--peace of mind, contentment, grace,
the inner awareness of simple abundance--it will surely
come to us,
but only when we are ready to receive
it with
an open and grateful heart.
Yes, life
can be mysterious and confusing--but there's much of life that's
actually rather dependable and reliable. Some principles apply
to life in so many different contexts that they can truly be called
universal--and learning what they are and how to approach them and use
them can teach us some of the most important lessons that we've ever
learned.
My doctorate is in Teaching and Learning. I use it a lot when I
teach at school, but I also do my best to apply what I've learned to
the life I'm living, and to observe how others live their lives.
What makes them happy or unhappy, stressed or peaceful, selfish or
generous, compassionate or arrogant? In this book, I've done my
best to pass on to you what I've learned from people in my life,
writers whose works I've read, and stories that I've heard.
Perhaps these principles can be a positive part of your life, too! Universal Principles of Living Life Fully. Awareness of
these principles can explain a lot and take much of the frustration
out of the lives we lead.
Explore all of our
quotations pages--these links will take you to the first page of each
topic, and those pages will contain links to any additional pages on
the same topic (there are five pages on adversity, for example).
™
