good morning {03.16.12} | hello spring allergies by Lori Paquette

When all your desires are distilled
You will cast just two votes
To love more
And be happy.

Hafiz

There's this idea that enlightenment exists outside of "real life". That we can have so-called spiritual experiences, but inevitably we must return to the real world of work, family, relationships and all the struggles we face each day.

However, awakening to the truth of Who You Are doesn't mean you leave your life behind. It doesn't mean you move to a mountain top and exist in a perpetual state of selflessness. It simply means you walk the journey of your life with the realization of who you really are — your essential Self. Carrying that knowledge and that wisdom with you, even as you move through your daily chores and experiences.

Your essential Self is not found somewhere "out there". It's not something to strive for or work toward.

It's simply the You that exists closer than that which you can observe and label. Whatever you can observe or label, is not You. It is merely phenomena that You are witnessing. Closer than all that, is a space of pure Being, that which cannot be observed or labelled.

When you let go of all questions about yourself, all expectations, all labels that you or others have applied to you, you are left only with this subtle space of Being. A space of living presence.

What is this space, exactly?

I Am.

I Am is a constant flow of presence, an ever-blossoming newness. It's like a river, flowing continually into the Now.

No history or future, just Being.

It is an emptiness that is somehow overflowing with aliveness. Observing, flowing, arising. Being. Without expectation or remembrance, without worry or fear.

I Am just... is.

And what arises in the space of I Am? Joy. A sense of wholeness and completeness.

Lightness. Love.

Not the kind of love that attaches to someone or something, but an experience of Love radiating. It can't be described with words, really. It's kind of an experience of Oneness, a joyful feeling of Being and presence.

And yet it's not really a feeling at all.

It just is.

...Now What?

We can take the truth and beauty of I Am with us, even as we return to our mind, and all the experiences of living life.

Even as we go through our day and all its drama, we can remember the truth of I Am: We are not the drama. We are not our sadness, our anxiety, our worry, our fear. We are not the perceived flaws in our personality and our body. We are not the struggle. These are all ripples on the surface of the water — we are the Ocean Floor, observing all of this.

As you set aside the time to turn down the volume of your mind, your expectations, and your labels of Self, you become more attuned to the I Am that is always present and essential beyond them. More and more you can "return" to this space for clarity and perspective — yet you aren't really returning. You're simply experiencing the essential Self, that which always is. You, without labels and observations.

Let this be your practice. To know your true Self, to awaken to it. To know the transparency of all the dramas that unfold throughout your day, how fleeting and non-essential they are, and to walk in the freedom of I Am. Let this be your journey.

And realize that the I Am that exists in You, also exists in all others. It is our most fundamental connection. I Am is the Source that we all arise from and return to. In this, we are brothers and sisters. We are One.

May a sense of love, compassion and an intimate understanding of each other arise in You from this realization.

May you walk in freedom and joy.

And may your priorities be simply this: To love more, and be happy.

good morning {04.04.12} | under the dogwood tree by Lori Paquette

It's not who you are that holds you back, it's who you think you're not.

Author Unknown

How often we look outside ourselves in search of a sense of completion... Believing we are too much of this, not enough of that. Believing the praise of another to be a critique of ourselves. Believing we are defined by our shortcomings.

What if we shifted our focus away from all that we aren't, and began an intimate walk alongside the One that we are?

Nurturing, developing, and loving ourselves — wholly, sacredly — cultivating the kind of confidence that only comes from realizing and embodying our own unique brand of brilliance?

Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.

Albert Einstein

Consider this your freedom declaration:

You no longer have to make yourself small and civilized, in the hopes of seeming more palatable.

You no longer have to judge your weaknesses by the strengths of others.

You no longer have to embody every desire in your lover's mind.

You no longer have to have everything figured out.

You no longer have to walk in a straight line.

You no longer have to feel embarrassed about your weirdness.

You don't have to be everything to everyone... you don't even have to be everything to anyone. That isn't your mission.

You can make the choice, in this moment, to release yourself of that burden and accustom yourself to the unique light of You. The wild, untamed animal spirit of You. The strange, irrational, totally absurd and magnificent beauty of You.

Own it. Breathe deeply into it. Walk in it.

Choose confidence, even if it feels shaky at first. Confidence is a journey, and it is work. It is freedom and brilliance. This is yours.

And when you lean forward into it, you'll see that all those little things about yourself that you missed before, are actually pretty damn amazing. It's OK to like those little things, and even to love them. This is how you will shine like a radiant jewel.

So show me who you are. I promise that I will do the same. And we'll light up the Universe.

Seeds of intention by Debbie Friedrich

Act in a way that assumes + activates bigness in everybody around you. Including yourself.

Fabeku Fatunmise

Own: Acknowledge, admit, allow, avow, come clean, concede, confess, declare, disclose, grant, own up, recognize, tell the truth.

There's this myth in our consciousness that the closer we stay to the baseline of "normal", the better off we are.

When I was a young boy, I remember my teachers asking me wearily, "Why do you have to do everything differently from everyone else?"

In my early 20's, my work supervisors and co-workers implored me to "stop bucking the system" and "stop trying to change the way we do things".

The thing is, I never set out to do things differently or buck the system — I only did what made sense to me. I've been hardwired since birth, it seems, to embody a perspective of the world that is challenging, questioning, and perhaps a bit weird.

Sound familiar?

Glorious Day :: Sunshine and Floral Bits by Lori Paquette

The greatest day in your life and mine is when we take total responsibility for our attitudes. That's the day we truly grow up.

John Maxwell

In a sense, we each live in our own private Universe — a world uniquely experienced by us.

This unique perception of the world around us is a direct projection of our current state of consciousness.

If you find that life is constantly happening "to you" (and often in spite of you), this is a signal that you aren't taking responsibility for your experience of life. It can be more subtle than this, however. Do you complain a lot? Do you find yourself criticizing people and systems on a regular basis? These are also signals.

All of these signals essentially point to the same thing: victim mentality.

Neil Degrasse Tyson Vs Mr Piper - The Most Astounding Fact by James Piper

Life is beautiful, painful and surprising – it is so many things. Often we think we are too small for our own life – including the painful parts. But that doesn’t have to be the case. We can be big enough for our own life.

Elizabeth Mattis Namgyel

Sometimes the roads all disappear and the maps stop making sense. We find ourselves in the wilderness.

In the wilderness, we have a choice: We can focus on the oppression, the darkness, and the fear, or we can use the experience to know ourselves more profoundly.

Where is the intensity being felt? Where is the epicenter of it? What deeper pain is it re-awakening? There lies the wisdom. We find ourselves in the wilderness because something has triggered our own darkness to cry out, wanting to be known, wanting to be embraced, wanting to be healed.

A spot of sunshine for your happy mind by Debbie Friedrich

Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won't adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is to sign on as its accomplice. Instead of vowing to honor and obey, maybe we should swear to aid and abet. That would mean that security is out of the question. The words "make" and "stay" become inappropriate. My love for you has no strings attached. I love you for free.

Tom Robbins

Love can seem like a difficult thing. The expectations, the anticipation, the hopes, the vulnerability. All of these can be met with disappointment and disillusion, causing heartbreak.

This is the great misconception about love: That it entitles us to own someone — body, heart and mind. That isn't what love is. The pursuit of ownership over someone only creates suffering. Ultimately, it can even create a mental and emotional prison that persists long after the relationship is over.

Love isn't ownership.

The nature of love is to simply be, of its own accord. To radiate outward, to find connection, to be unconditional. To be free.

Dreamcatchers by Media123

If you took a blue spruce tree and planted it in the desert, it would obviously perish. How do we forget that we too are living systems, and each of us have unique environments, needs, and conditions within which we flourish or wither?

Dawna Markova

Creating a habit of gentleness toward yourself is not only a healthy, consciousness-raising practice for You — it also cultivates an authentic sense of gentleness toward others. Here are some of my favorite ways to recharge, refresh, renew and realign myself with gentleness:

Sun-set Bunting by Robyn Woolston

To live without the creative potential of our own destructiveness is to be a cardboard angel.

Sheldon B. Kopp

Your Shadow. A name for those unconscious aspects of yourself that you either deny, resist ownership of, or simply aren't aware of.

We all have one. And as long as we aren't taking ownership of it, our shadow is right there behind the scenes of our daily lives — directing our actions in ways that cause suffering and frustration in ourselves and others.

Beauty Freedom & Light by Daniel Collinsworth

No single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

There is a tendency in all of us to search for what we feel is missing in our sense of Self. Many of us have a concept of an idealized, perfected Self, which we set as our standard. We then spend our entire lives searching for ways to fill the emptiness of what is missing — searching for happiness because we aren't happy, searching for beauty because we aren't beautiful, searching for freedom because we aren't free.

Yet we keep coming up short – always flawed, always incomplete, never content with who we are.

Driftwood by Luke McGuff

The inner speech, your thoughts, can cause you to be rich or poor, loved or unloved, happy or unhappy, attractive or unattractive, powerful or weak.

Ralph Charell

Every day, all day long, there is a story unfolding in your mind. It's the story you're telling yourself about who you are, and what your world is all about.

What kind of person are you in this story of yours? If you were reading about this character in a book, what would you think about them? Would you like and respect them?

Silent Valley by Jule_Berlin

To transform the emptiness of loneliness, to the fullness of aloneness. Ah, that is the secret of life.

Sunita Khosla

I have known loneliness for most of my life.

For so many years, it consumed me like a wild fire. The more I reached out to others to quench my loneliness, the more intensely it burned. I didn't fit in. My words never came out quite right. My gestures went misunderstood. And love, for me, was always a confusing and unfulfilling thing.

Throughout my 20's I explored spirituality, subculture and relationships in an attempt to find that magic connection — the kind of connection that would make me complete. And yet my loneliness persisted in the midst of all of it.

It wasn't until I stopped pushing my loneliness away and sat with it that I began to understand its purpose, and began a different kind of journey.

main building peeling paint by Matt Johnson

We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Lately I've been exploring this idea of transformation as letting go. Letting go of what I no longer resonate with, and nurturing the deeper "me" underneath all that, instead of trying to patch myself up in an attempt to become something new and improved.

Scraping the layers of paint and dirt off of the mirror, so to speak.

I think we lose sight of who we are when we find ourselves identifying with the paint and the dirt. We think all those layers of "stuff" define us, and then we feel defective. So we try to become less of this, and more of that.

In this way, we continually create a distorted, unsatisfying sense of Self.

Waters Still by SusanG2

Within you there is a stillness and a sanctuary to which you can retreat at any time and be yourself.

Hermann Hesse

When the storms of life come, it’s easy to feel beaten down and defeated. Failed expectations, broken hearts, financial troubles. Perhaps you're dealing with something now, as you read this, that you're having a hard time with.

I know how disheartening the storms of life can be. The feelings of insecurity and worry, the fear. I was once like a boat on the ocean – happy and content with sunny skies and still waters. But whenever the storms came, my peace and joy would go overboard. My sense of self was completely tied to the stories my circumstances, and I didn’t know how to weather serious storms.

So when they did come, I'd just retreat into despair, depression and loneliness.

Now, when the storms are at my door, I go to that place called center. Like the eye of the storm, center is that place of stillness around which everything revolves. Perfect stillness is central to all that is.

So how do you get there?

Sunrise in Kanyakumari, Tamil Nadu, India by Mehul Antani

We are what we choose to be.

Daniel Collinsworth

This past Thanksgiving weekend, I got to spend some time with my family – my parents, my brother, and my sister-in-law, all of whom I love very much.

In the midst of the laughing and good times we had, I felt a heaviness bubbling up from deep within me. As it surfaced – slowly, cumbersomely – I felt an unshakeable sadness covering me. An old sadness, one that had been hibernating for years.

Old heartache and regret.

Paria Plateau view from Bryce Canyon National Park by Ed Coyle

Don't worry about what people think of you.
Think about what people experience through you.

Bridget Pilloud
{ Intuitive Bridge }

Have you ever noticed how much energy we spend attempting to show the world a puffed up, idealized version of ourselves?

Certainly, we have good reasons for doing this. Fear of rejection. Fear of losing. Fear of showing vulnerability or weakness. We build up these gigantic thoughtforms in order to justify our fears.

What if we shifted our energy from unconsciously supporting these thoughtforms, to consciously examining the growth potential that our fears are indicating?

Path That is Led by Light by Bruce Martin

I would like my life to be a statement of love and compassion – and where it isn't, that's where my work lies.

Ram Dass

We humans have this tendency of defining ourselves by our character flaws and failures.

We shine a harsh, critical light on ourselves when we succumb to triggers or temptations, doing things that aren't in line with our core principles.

What's worse, is the way we lie to ourselves afterwards. Thinking things like That wasn't me, how could I have done that? or That person brings out the worst in me, or the infamous I'm just not good enough.

Sunset Lough Swilly by Greg Clarke

Clouds come floating into my life,
No longer to carry rain or usher storm,
But to add color to my sunset sky.

Rabindranath Tagore

I know the heartache of love gone wrong.

Only once in my life have I really been "in love". Thrilling, terrifying, heart exploding love. The kind of love that renders the whole world quiet and says, This is the One.

It was a bloody disaster. I lost myself in it.

But I found something, too. Something precious and extraordinary. This is what I'd like to share with you today.

Fragile by Zygia

The day you realize yourself, your very being becomes love. It is no longer a relationship, it is no longer addressed to anyone in particular; it is simply overflowing in all directions and all dimensions. And it is not something on my part, that I am doing it. Love cannot be done.

Osho

Have you ever watched the branches and leaves of a tree swaying softly in the breeze? Perhaps you've observed its calming effect – the continuous, gentle movement resonating with the stillness in you. This stillness is at the center of all things, and is the essence and reality of all things. This stillness is love, and to interface with it is to know love. No attachment, no reasoning, no judging. Just love – being, radiating.