The Buddha said, "in a battle, the winners and losers both lose". When we're engaged in conflict with a difficult person, our minds become very narrow and our hearts close. When we feel anger and hatred toward someone else...
Our need for love and compassion stems from our desire to be connected with others, to feel good about ourselves, and to receive and give appreciation. We all want to feel valued, understood, and respected—to be heard, seen, and believed.
Why repair attempts are even more powerful than saying sorry. Everyone messes up. Any relationship involves two imperfect communicators capable of hurt feelings, frustration, or loneliness.
We all have parts of ourselves that we prefer to remain hidden. We are all ashamed of certain things we have done or were done to us, or even feelings or thoughts we have had. We imagine that if people knew these things about us, they would not like us. We would be rejected, abandoned, judged or criticized.
There was a time in my life when if someone asked, Are you angry with me? I replied, No-o-o-o. Because I didn't like taking issue with a difficult situation involving a difficult person, we both missed an opportunity to grow together through the experience.
Are you so sure your mistakes are just mistakes? Or could they be building blocks to a success beyond any you imagined? Everything is part of something bigger, and mistakes are no exception. Every minus is half of a plus, waiting for a stroke of vertical awareness
Karma usually comes with no warning even though it is essence directed. It frequently comes like a freight train rounding the bend and coming down the tracks with inexorable speed. The train is upon you before you can run away.
No one can go through this life without making mistakes. The important thing is to learn from them and feel gratitude for the learning. Some of our mistakes are financial, some educational. Some mistakes are because our actions hurt another person.
'Our present thoughts and choices are the sole determiner of our present experience.' Because this statement is so foreign to how we usually approach life, I would like to give you an illustration from my own life.
As you forgive others, you are freeing yourself as well as them. As M. Scott Peck writes: 'The reason to forgive others is not for their sake .... The reason to forgive is for our own sake. For our own health. Because beyond that point needed for healing, if we hold on to our anger, we stop growing and our souls begin to shrivel.'
If you "grew up on Bible stories", you learned the "eye for an eye" concept. How is that to be put into effect in a spiritual practice that focuses on inner peace, forgiveness, and peaceful interactions with "all our relations"? Can "an eye for an eye" be interpreted in any way other than anger and revenge?
We can get side-tracked by our ego that wants to be right at any price. It doesn't care about lost friendships, or uncomfortable work relations, or families torn apart by pride -- it only cares about being right. How often do we let "being right" step into the way of peace...
Acceptance is a major theme of world religions. In modern life, however, acceptance is tension-filled and problematic. The urge to fix, change, and improve pops up at every turn. Reinhold Neibuhr summed up this tension in his Serenity Prayer, written in 1934: 'God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change...'
Albert Einstein said, “We can’t solve our problems with the same thinking that we used to create them.” I wonder what he would say today? My guess is that he would be shouting aloud while pointing to the life-threatening problems our old thinking has produced.
Each moment you cling to trauma or anger after it occurs, you cause the past to generate an entirely new sequence of thoughts, emotions, and actions. Until you can give up your attachment to the past incident, you are cursed to maintain and magnify the pain.
Many adults have a history of childhood abuse. As harmful as these early experiences can be to our psyche, an accompanying form of abuse frequently compounds them. This is the abuse we give ourselves. This form is even more widespread and affects most of us in one way or another.
Resistance not only creates physical stress but is also the determining factor in whether a person feels negative emotions. Experiencing anger, sadness, fear, guilt or grief is only possible if you resist something in your past, present or future.
In a piece on the television show 60 Minutes, Oprah Winfrey discussed childhood trauma — shining a public spotlight on the lasting effects of abuse and adversity in childhood. Oprah herself is a survivor of childhood abuse.
Years ago, I knew someone who used to say "Love is all there is". This was his "mantra" and he repeated it often to whoever was willing to listen. At the time, I was in my twenties and his statement would aggravate me to no end. After all, how could he say that "love s all there is" when there were wars, famine, murders, crimes of all kinds, etc. etc.
Our spiritual evolution depends heavily upon our recovery from our worst addiction -- our addiction to the victim archetype, which traps us in the past and saps our life energy.
"I like you, do you like me?" Isn't that how children approach one another, with total openness and acceptance? They have this pure, innocent way of expressing themselves, and have a completely disarming attitude like, "Hey, I want you to be my friend."
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