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Detachment doesn’t show indifference. It shows that you really don’t want negativity to stick to you.
Every emotion is valid in some way or another. But when you add the ingredient of self-judgment, any emotion can be damaging.
I place a high value on sympathy. If you can look at yourself and say, “It’s all right. I understand,” you are doing two things at once. You are taking the judgment out of your emotions, and you are giving yourself permission to be who you are. Sympathy is an emotion we tend to direct outward. We forget to grant it to ourselves. I
The word ‘compassion’ means to suffer with. That’s where one must draw the line. Your sympathy will be ill-spent if it exhausts you. It must not overwhelm you or cause you to feel as bad as the one you sympathize with,”
Dispelling the demons of the past Healing old wounds Expecting the best and highest for yourself Adopting realistic ideals Giving of yourself Being generous, especially with your spirit Seeing through your fears Learning self-acceptance Communicating with God or your higher self
wholeness always overcomes separation. If you see the world in terms of good versus evil, you have missed the cosmic joke.
When you see yourself as separate, words seem to matter much more than being. After all, being is passive, something we take for granted, while words run our lives, fill our heads, bring people together, and drive them apart. Yet all these words couldn’t exist without the silent intelligence inside every cell. The power that holds your body together, coordinating an infinite number of biological actions per second among hundreds of billions of cells, is more primal than thinking and using words.
In the midst of constant activity, there is a stable foundation (known as homeostasis).
rhythm with activity. Your core self, which is calm and at peace, won’t be disturbed in the midst of activity.
As your situation changes, you will adapt and remain resilient. At the first signs that stress is throwing you out of your comfort zone, you will notice and respond. You will value your well-being over any individual experience. I’ve couched these points in general terms, but consider how differently two people would live if one chose wholeness and the other didn’t.
See your source as a point while your whole world is an expanding circle. The more you see, understand, and experience, the bigger the circle gets. Yet it is always expanding from the source. What this means is that the source is never far away. It’s a constant.
You don’t have to conquer every aspect of yourself that is tinged with darkness (which would be impossible in any case). Become who you really are, and from that moment
on darkness is no longer anything you can identify with.
You are at peace. You cannot be shaken from your center.
You are not in the world. The world is in you.
Your desires manifest easily, without friction or struggle.
You can perform intense action with detachment. You are not personally invested in any outcome.
The best possible time is the present.
The only ones who conquer the shadow don’t fight it; they transcend it. When you transcend, you go beyond.
the level of the problem is never the level of the solution.
Every war fought in the name of God depends on an illusion, because the other side relies on God just as much.
wish that the word “transcend” didn’t come loaded with mystical connotations. When you realize that you can “go beyond” in any situation, transcending comes down to earth. Conflict is the nature of duality.
When you aren’t just black or white, good or bad, light or dark, but both sides at once, conflict melts away. The first step is the most important. Shift your allegiance away from duality. Quit labeling, blaming, and judging.
The conflict between love and fear.
The conflict between acceptance and rejection.
Your core self is stable and permanent; therefore it has nothing to fear from change. The unknown is necessary for change. When you make peace with that fact, the world will transform itself from a place of constant risk to the playground of the unexpected.
Bliss is dynamic—it moves and changes. Bliss is evolutionary—it grows. Bliss is pervasive—it wants to enter everything. Bliss is desirous—it seeks fulfillment. Bliss is inspiring—it increases by creating new forms to inhabit. Bliss is unifying—it shatters boundaries of separation.
“Stop looking for the right one. Be the right one.”
What does it take to be the right one, which means to find love within? It takes the absence of fear. Love doesn’t need seeking.
The fog of illusion creates fear. Remove the fear, and what remains is
Choiceless awareness.
More often, two people are stuck because they can’t communicate. At one extreme is psychological compulsion, such as phobias (“I’m too afraid to do X”) and obsessions (“I can’t get my mind off Y”).
Each of them is trapped between desire and necessity. The result is also the same: they are no longer free to choose.
choice, you give up taking sides. We need to be clear: choiceless awareness isn’t about giving up on what you want. It’s about shifting your allegiance away from what the ego wants to what the universe wants. In choiceless awareness you let consciousness make all the decisions.
You can’t satisfy your ego by giving it everything it wants, because the ego’s whole reason for existence is to accumulate.
Spiritually, you cannot be rejected unless you reject yourself.
The most important ally you have is awareness.
The shadow is a thing of denial, resistance, hidden fears, and repressed hopes.
The great Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung tells us that our shadow is the person we would rather not be. The shadow can be seen in the person in our family whom we judge the most, the public official whose behavior
we condemn, the celebrity who causes us to shake our head in disgust. If we understand this correctly, we come to the startling and sometimes sobering realization that our shadow is everything that annoys, horrifies, or disgusts us about other people or about ourselves.
Our shadow is made up of the thoughts, emotions, and impulses that we find too painful, embarrassing, or distasteful to accept. So instead of dealing with them, we repress them—seal them away in some part of our psyche, so we won’t have to feel the burden and shame they carry with them.
Poet and author Robert Bly describes the shadow as an invisible bag that each of us carries around on our back. As we’re growing up, we put in the bag every aspect of ourselves that is not acceptable to our families and friends. Bly believes we spend the first few decades of our life filling up our bag, and then the rest of our life trying to retrieve everything we’ve hidden away.
Our shadow, filled with rhetoric and a hypocritical set of rules that we can never adhere to, leads us to gl...
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It began with the teacher who called us stupid, the bully who taunted us, or the first love who ever abandoned us. We have all hidden away and repressed pain-filled, shame-filled moments, an...
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Unbeknownst to us, the shadow is the author of a prewritten script that springs into action in times of fear, pain, or conflict or when we are just going about our business on autopilot.
To do this, we must uncover what we’ve hidden and befriend the very impulses and characteristics that we abhor.
Ching tells us, “It is only when we have the courage to face things exactly as they are, without any self-deception or illusion, that a light will develop out of events, by which the path to success may be recognized.”
We cannot journey into the dark side for a quick dip or an afternoon liaison. To understand our shadow completely takes a willingness to let go of what we think we know.
With each rejection, we created more and more internal separation, building thicker and thicker invisible walls to protect our tender and sensitive heart.
Unknowingly we are the ones who have typecast ourselves to play some version of the same character year after year and rarely—if ever—do we allow ourselves to venture into a role that we aren’t familiar with or a level of self-expression we don’t yet know.
