The one thing you got that money can't buy and the world can't rock,is your mindspace - fill it up with big visions of the feasts of love and life.
The hardest mantra to chant during times of conflict and famine:
"Focus on abundance, my life is abundant, full of love and joy."
The cynic within always tries to bat such thoughts away.
But even in hunger, bless the learning, bless the acute awareness of being alive, bless the resolve that builds inside you that ensures that this cycle is complete, and you have learned the lessons, and will apply them so that you can officially graduate to the next video game level.
Another point of reflection for the day:
"There is no loss, only the continuing movement and transformation of energy. The Buddha's secret of detachment - the half-smile of contentment through every season, through every physical need."
What is the easy way? Denial? Conflict? Anxiety? Depression? A pattern of habitual phrases and words repeated in the mind and out loud to friends about how much everything sucks and how there's never enough money - until the neat little hole of self-pity sucks me all the way in? Those well-worn paths always lead to the same place, a place I don't want to be. The only reason these paths seem "easy" is because their neural grooves are well-worn, so they seem least resistant to energy flowing that way.
My Baptist mother would say, "Pray. Lift your worries up to God."
The Buddha would say, "Why are you so attached to these things that bring you suffering?"
Advaita would say, "You and everything are completely the same. There is no wrong, right, fair or unfair - there is no duality. This is what is."
I sat in the garden and tried to syncretize, not forcing it, waiting for the wild feelings to settle.
Deep breaths, full and measured. Breathing in the full gratitude for my abundant blessings of love and sentience and compassion. Holding the big, bright, clear visions of my desires as a trajectory reaching far into the future and back through today. Breathing out, with intention, to offer my own life force as a commitment of my energy to this exercise of my will.
In the end, I have no answers - but what I have is such a firm sense of direction that despite all circumstances, my feet move me forward, one step after the other, guided by an inner compass, with my gaze pointed upward and onward. In the end, there is faith - invisible, untouchable, but real.
Dear Carmen,
I just stumbled on your blog, and I have to say, I love it! I've been working on positiv-izing my own thoughts lately, and I find a lot of wisdom in your writing!! You seem totally amazing, you are into many things I am into too (NLP, Parkour, hypnosis...) and seem to be a guru of some of them! I will definitely be checking up on your blog from now on, and will browse all your archives (as time allows)!! THANK YOU!!!
Posted by: S. Alexander | November 26, 2006 at 05:46 PM
Thank you for this post, Carmen. The art of un-complicating. Mutable reality. Calm on demand.
Posted by: Jennifer Fader | December 03, 2006 at 09:29 PM