Do Good Anyway

People are often unreasonable and self-centered. Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, people may accuse you of ulterior motives. Be kind anyway.
If you are honest, people may cheat you. Be honest anyway.
IF you find happiness, people may be jealous. Be happy anyway.
The good you do today may be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway.
Give the world you best you have and it may never be enough. Give your best anyway.
For you see, in the end, it is between you and God.
It was never between you and them anyway.

Mother Teresa and/or Dr. Kent Keith
(Some discrepancy on the exact quote and author!)

Dogs Know...

I just read a book by the wonderful author, Alice Hoffman. It's her newest book called "The Museum of Extraordinary Things."  I thought the following excerpt was  a concise and beautiful way to express the amazing creatures that dogs are as well as a life lesson for us all:

Now Mitts (the dog) trotted briskly beside him on their journey downtown, clearly happy to be alive, with no thought of the future or the past.  For this Eddie envied Mitts as well, how light his burden was, how clear his purpose.  He was to be his master's companion and in doing so he became himself, the essence of a dog.

The Four Agreements

The book "The Four Agreements" by Don Miguel Ruiz has been around for a long time, but I just discovered it.  These are the agreements you make with yourself:

Be impeccable with your word.
Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using the word o speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love.

Don't take anything personally.
 Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. when you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won't be the victim of needless suffering.

Don't make assumptions.
Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness and drama. With just this one agreement you can completely transform your life.

Always do your best.
Your best is going to change from moment to moment; it will be different when you are healthy as opposed to sick. Under any circumstances, simply do your best, and you will void self-judgment, self-abuse and regret.

Surrender

The concept of surrendering to anything brings to mind a weakness. It has a negative connotation to most of us. But surrendering to love, to truth, to forgiveness, in order to find peace and happiness may be one of the strongest, boldest things you can do in your life.

Think about how much we believe ourselves to be right in every situation, every relationship, every opinion. We may be right, but we may also cause ourselves great anxiety by fighting what we cannot change. We are the ones that suffer. We lose spiritual peace with the world around us. Just look at our Congress as an example. They are unproductive and weak because every has to be right.

I remember a time in my life when this phrase had a great impact on me - Do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?

Some thoughts from A Return to Love by Marianne Williamson:

Surrender means, by definition, giving up attachment to results. When we surrender to God, we let go our attachment to how things happen on the outside and we become more concerned with what happens on the inside.

Our only job in every situation is to merely let go of our resistance to love.

To relax, to feel the love in your heart and keep to that as your focus in every situation - that's the meaning of spiritual surrender. It changes us. We become deeper, more attractive people.

Surrender means the decision to stop fighting the world and start loving it instead.

Musings on the Spiritual Life

So I continue the journey and I am fascinated by the common threads that have run through all my listening and reading so far - whether it is an Episcopal priest, a Buddhist monk, an Indian doctor or a scholar of miracles...

They are:

To be still and allow God to talk to you. The busier you are the more you need the stillness.

To pray to be in contact with God, to reach new levels of awareness to learn who you are beside a physical body (through meditation and prayer).

To live in the present moment. We do not have the past - it is gone. We do not have the future either. All we really have is now. 

To seek happiness because then you send it out into the world.

There is good and bad and Satan, or evil, stems from our ego. 

Ego is the enemy and it is inside of us. 

Today I Choose Happiness

by Marianne Williamson
from "A Year of Miracles"

The circumstances of my life may go up and down, for the mortal world is changeable.  The immortal world, however, is changeless, for there there is only love.  I build my house on the rock of the immortal world. Today I choose only immortal thoughts.

I extend my perception beyond what my senses perceive, to what my heart knows is true. I withdraw my belief that I need anyone or anything to be other than what they are, in order for me to be secure.  I know that whenever fear expresses itself, love will ultimately prevail.  Therefore, I need not fear, nor cry, nor despair. To the extent to which I see what is truly true, I see only cause for happiness.

Happiness is the choice I make today. It does not rest on circumstances, but on my frame of mind.  I surrender to God any emotional habits that lead me down the path of unhappiness. and pray for guidance in shifting my thoughts. In cultivating the habits of happiness, I attract more people and situations that match its frequency. I smile more often, give praise more often, give thanks more often, and am glad more often. For such is my choice today.

COEXIST in 2014

My only resolution, the one I have felt called to at the beginning of 2014 is to use this blog only for good.  I have tried to do that for many years but I have also included politics and my opinions. No one needs to hear more opinions and certainly not more political rhetoric. So I resolve to be only inspirational.

For the past 8-10 months I have been on a spiritual journey. I believe I am on a path of enlightenment. I am at a turning point. I am seeing things in new ways.  I want to share that journey because if others had not shared their insights I would not have them to begin with.

 I will include the wisdom and teachings of others, not necessarily myself. I hope you will join me. I am still a Christian but as I read spiritual teachings I find that non-Christians use plenty of references to Christ and to Christian teachings - I believe all are worthy of thought and consideration.

Thich Nhat Hnah is a Buddist monk. These are four mantras or sacred words to be repeated, that I am incorporating into my daily life.

Four Mantras of Thich Nhat Hanh

1. Darling I am here for you.   When you love someone the best thing you can offer him or her is your presence. How can you love if you are not there? You offer him or her your true presence. You are there for your beloved one.

1. Darling, I know you are there.   I am so happy because you are truly there. You recognize the presence of your beloved one as something very precious and you use your mindfulness to recognize that and embrace your beloved one with mindfulness and she will bloom like a flower.  To be loved means to be recognized as existing and those two mantras bring happiness right away. Even if your beloved one is not there you can use the telephone to practice your mantra.

1. Darling, I know you suffer. That is why I am here for you. Before you do something to help him, to help her, your presence already can bring some relief.

1. Darling, I suffer. Please help me.  When you suffer and you believe your suffering has been caused by your beloved one and you suffer so deeply. you prefer to go to your room, shut the door and suffer alone. You get hurt and you want to punish him or her for making you suffer.  You go to him, you go to her and practice that and you suffer less right away.

Follow Your Bliss

I never knew where the phrase - Follow Your Bliss - came from until one Sunday morning I stumbled on the Oprah network. The show was called Super Soul Sunday and the topics are all of a spiritual nature.  Our spiritual nature as human beings is something that always fascinates me.  I believe that every human being has this gift but I observe many fellow humans that don't appear to know it.

I am not referring to religion, especially organized religion. Although I've spent my life in church I completely get why churches are repellant to many people. Full of rules and shame, misinterpretations and hypocritical thinking in the name of God.

But spirit is something that lives inside of us. A part of us that is not in this world. A knowledge, perhaps, of something greater than ourselves. It's something that is easily ignored in this world of distractions and noise.

On Oprah's show I heard three young people in their 30's talking about a spiritual revelation of sorts. They are encouraging young people through their writings and appearances to acknowledge spirituality in order to enjoy a more fulfilling life. A life of gratitude, love and charity to other human beings.

On this show Joseph Campbell was discussed. He coined the term "Follow Your Bliss"decades ago. Who was this guy? Why had I never read his writings?  At a certain time in my life when everything imploded and I was a lost soul I read as many philosophical and self-help books as I could. I absorbed it all (my favorite being "The Road Less Traveled" by Scott Peck).

What does follow your bliss mean?  You must ask yourself :
When am I happiest?
When does time fly?
What feeds my spirit?
What do I have to offer?
What are my strongest talents and gifts?
What talents can offer something to the world?
How can I love others better?

I was shocked to discover at my age I still needed to purposefully ask myself these questions and ponder the answers to get  back on track in my life. To begin to feel true joy again. To feel that I am offering something to the world. I think we need to ask ourselves these questions throughout our lives because we do change and grow and have more to offer the older we get.

I realized that I feel closest to God when I am singing. It makes me happiest. And I have not been singing so I joined a new chorale.  This blog was also one of my ways to offer something, however small, to the world. Ask yourself those questions and you may be surprised to discover that the answers may not be what they once were.
Thanks for reading.

On Having It All

Delia Ephron has a new book called "Sister Mother Husband Dog" and this is an excerpt from it about "having it all".

It might be a fleeting moment - drinking a cup of coffee on a Sunday morning when the light is especially bright. It might also be a few undisturbed hours with a novel I'm in love with, a three-hour lunch with my best friend, reading "Goodnight Moon" to a child, watching a Nadal-Federer match. Having it all definitely involves an ability to seize the moment, especially when it comes to sports. It can be eating in bed when you're living on your own for the first time or the first weeks of a new job when everything is new, uncertain and a bit scary. It's when your senses are engaged. It's when you feel at peace with someone you love. And that isn't often.  Loving someone and being at peace with him (or her) are two different things.  Having it all are moments in life when you suspend judgment. It's when I attain that elusive thing called peace of mind. 

Not particularly American, unquantifiable, unidentifiable, different for everyone, but you know it when you have it.

...I have it all. And not only that, I can have more.

Black Dress

The black dress had a singular sound and feel,
the Audrey Hepburn dress, the clerk said, and it was sold.

A wide décolleté draped with a wavy collar framed my cleavage.
It wrapped around my ribcage like a baby's swaddling

pulled me in tight and feminine, the swishing skirt flared
to my calves with the urgency to twirl.

The rhinestones on the cuffs and swinging from my earlobes
matched the ones on my shoes and around my neck.

I opened my handbag to check on the two cotton handkerchiefs
I had been given, then I momentarily put my carefully made-up face

in my hands, but caught the tears before they marred my visage.
I moved down the aisle in a happy trance and sat down

to watch my son begin the life I had always dreamed for him.

Quotes of Cheer

In this continuing bleak midwinter I thought I'd share a few uplifting quotes.

We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same.
Anne frank

Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.
Abraham Lincoln

The grand essentials for happiness are: something to do, something to love, and sonething to hope for.
Allan K. Chalmers

When we feel love and kindness towards others, it not only makes others feel loved and cared for, but it helps us also to develop inner happiness and peace.
Dalai Lama

When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.
Helen Keller