C. Paul Schroeder's Blog, page 2

February 8, 2018

The Universe Responds to Invitations

2nd Degree Black Belt Promotion Test, January 2017. Pictured: Chris Anderson and Paul Schroeder "Hey, look at that," my wife said, glancing at her phone. "There's an open house for a new taekwondo studio not too far from here."My attention was immediately aroused. Just a couple of weeks earlier, I had been working on my invitation list for 2018. An invitation list is a short list of activities or opportunities I want to intentionally invite into my life (you can read more about invitation lis...
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Published on February 08, 2018 11:39

February 1, 2018

Popping the cork on something new...

At this time last year, I was in the last stages of completing my book. I had reached 44,137 words, and I finally called it finished after nearly two years of work. And then something curious happened: I stopped writing. For a long time, the creative juices just seemed to have stopped flowing. Throughout 2017, I didn't add many words, I mostly subtracted them. I pruned a little here, trimmed a little there, shaping and refining the book until it reached its final form.If Hemingway's advice to...
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Published on February 01, 2018 17:57

January 23, 2018

The One Little Change That Saved My Book

While I was writing my book Practice Makes PURPOSE: Six Spiritual Practices That Will Change Your Life and Transform Your Community, I used to go to a weekly writer's group and read passages that I was working on. At first, I got terrible feedback. The other writers in the group gave me very tough criticism. People told me they felt judged, and a few folks got visibly upset by what I had written. I used to leave the group feeling hurt and misunderstood, like no one was getting what I was tryi...
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Published on January 23, 2018 11:30

January 16, 2018

Spirituality, Money and Acceptance

Of all the things I wrote in my book Practice Makes PURPOSE, one of the lines that seems to give people the most trouble is the mantra for the spiritual practice of Compassionate Seeing: "I accept everything I see." In one way or another, people have often asked me, "Do I really have to accept everything?" I understand the difficulty people have with this mantra, because I had difficulty with it myself at first, and still do sometimes.I want to share a story from my own life that may help cla...
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Published on January 16, 2018 19:08

January 12, 2018

The Difference between Compassion and Mercy

Is there a difference between compassion and mercy? I don't mean this as a purely theoretical distinction. To me, it's a very practical question. Compassion, as I define it in my book, means making a conscious effort to put oneself in another person's place, to see the world through someone else's eyes. Mercy, on the other hand, means letting someone off the hook, choosing to forgo one's claim against another person.Let me give you an example of what I mean. Let's say I am a small landlord wi...
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Published on January 12, 2018 07:05

December 31, 2017

Instead of Resolutions, Try Making an Invitation List

(The following is an excerpt from the book Practice Makes PURPOSE on the spiritual practice of Intentional Welcoming, "the ability to say no and mean it so we can say yes to the things that matter most.")When we want to start practicing Intentional Welcoming, we must begin by clearly defining our priorities. In order to become more intentional about what we are welcoming into our life, we first need to clarify what really matters to us. Here’s a simple exercise that I use to help me focus on...
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Published on December 31, 2017 18:11

December 25, 2017

The Elder's Gift

(Excerpted from Part Four of Practice Makes PURPOSE: Six Spiritual Practices That Will Change Your Life and Transform Your Community)There was once a monk who kept a book of great value on display in his room. It was written on parchment and bound in gold, and it contained a complete copy of the scriptures—a great rarity in those days. One day, another brother asked if he could borrow the book for a time in order to copy some sections. The first monk picked up the book with a smile and loving...
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Published on December 25, 2017 10:18

December 7, 2017

Cooperative Building: Leaning into Conflict and Tension as a Spiritual Practice

(this is a partial transcript of remarks given at a lunchtime mini-seminar on October 27, 2017)I want to draw on this image of tension and the power that can be generated through tension with a simple, mundane example that comes from my own life. My wife and I are parents of a three-year-old daughter and three-month-old twins. Our daughter Lucy is just beginning to take her first steps on the perilous tightrope from dependence to autonomy. That comes with frustration and with lots of big emot...
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Published on December 07, 2017 09:52

December 4, 2017

The Wish List

Here’s a simple exercise adapted from the Practice Makes PURPOSE Workbook that can help you enter more deeply into the spirit of the season. It’s based on a simple but powerful spiritual principle: we receive whatever we give.First, come up with a short “wish list” of items you’d like to receive from others. The list could include material things like warm socks, decadent chocolates, or a good book. But it could also include more intangible items like understanding, respect, support, or appre...
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Published on December 04, 2017 19:28

November 19, 2017

The Secret of Happiness

 The following is an excerpt from Part Five of Practice Makes PURPOSE: Six Spiritual Practices that Will Change Your Life and Transform Your Community.Once there was a spiritual community of brothers who lived together in the desert and shared a common life. They all ate the same food, wore the same robes, and slept on the same kind of straw mattress.Among these brothers, there was one who was always complaining. He complained about the food, about the clothing, about the living quarters. Not...
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Published on November 19, 2017 19:06