Never Ever Give Up

This morning I was feeling a little weary from the tasks that lay ahead, namely my senior paper. I usually love to write, but this time...I don't know...I guess I have what is called writers block. The words just don't seem to want to come. Last night I finally gave up and went to bed very discouraged. I spent most of the night laying awake disheartened and trying to figure out what I am going to do...I have less then a week 15 pages to write and a 15 minute video to edit.



This morning when I got up I started watching some of the videos I have favorited because...well, they inspire me. While watching I came across one that I hadn't seen before. In it had this picture. Here a stork is trying to eat a frog and the frog is having none of it. He is going to fight with every breathe that is left in him.

Water, Consciousness, and Intent

A Leader

If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.
John Quincy Adams (1767-1848)

My Stroke of Insight

One of the greatest lessons I learned was how to feel the physical component of emotion. Joy was a feeling in my body. Peace was a feeling in my body. I thought it was interesting that I could feel when a new emotion was triggered. I could feel new emotions flood through me and then release me. I had to learn new words to label these "feeling" experiences, and most remarkably, I learned that I had the power to choose whether to hook into a feeling and prolong its presence in my body, or just let it quickly flow right out of me.

I made my decisions based upon how things felt inside. There were certain emotions like anger, frustration, or fear that felt uncomfortable when they surged through my body. So I told my brain that I didn't like that feeling and didn't want to hook into those neural loops. I learned that I could use my left mind, through language, to talk directly to my brain and tell it what I wanted and what I didn't want. Upon this realization, I knew I would never return to the personality I had been before. I suddenly had much more to say about how I felt and for how long, and I was adamantly opposed to reactivating old painful emotional circuits.

Paying attention to what emotions feel like in my body has completely shaped my recovery. I spent eight years watching my mind analyze everything that was going on in my brain. Each day brought new challenges and insights. The more I recovered my old files, the more my old emotional baggage surfaced, and the more I needed to evaluate the usefulness of preserving its underlying neural circuitry.

Emotional healing was a tediously slow process but well worth the effort. As my left brain became stronger, it seemed natural for me to want to "blame" other people or external events for my feelings or circumstances. But realistically, I knew that no one had the power to make me feel anything, except for me and my brain. Nothing external to me had the power to take away my peace of heart and mind. That was completely up to me. I may not be in total control of what happens to my life, but I certainly am in charge of how I choose to perceive my experience.

--Jill Bolte Taylor, from "My Stroke of Insight"
www.ijourney.org

Be With the Storms

How to free yourself from the grip of storms? This is the only basic problem in this universe. The first thing is to become aware of it and stop regretting it. Like waves come and go, storms in your life too will subside. No one storm can be there for ever. One storm comes and subsides, another comes and subsides and it goes on. As the storm subsides, you experience that inner cool, soft, delicate aspect of yourself. In that space of calm, all the anxiety, fear, feverishness lose their grip on you and you become yourself again. Love dawns.

When you stop resisting the storms of life and start accepting them with open arms, they will subside on their own. That is the purpose of all spiritual practices, or sadhana, and meditation. When you realise that somebody really cares for you, you feel at rest and all fears and insecurities drop off.

You keep running away from small things -- your feelings, sensations, desires -- and this leads to more feverishness. Realize that like the ocean cannot be there without the waves, storms are inevitable in your life. Every storm touches you somewhere and makes you grow stronger. A storm pulls you out of your likes and dislikes and purifies you. So accept all that comes with both arms open. [...] Even when the storms come, you are still the same ocean, as deep as ever.

This realization is the culmination of knowledge. When this knowledge dawns, you rise above events; you grow out of them. Everybody in the world goes through crises, insecurities, confusions. It's like drowning in the ocean of life. But the person with the life jacket can survive even the worst turmoil. So keep your life jacket of knowledge handy.


[...] Do not be in a hurry to get rid of the storms, be with them. Looking for perfection creates imperfection inside you. If you are peaceful, everything around you becomes peaceful. You are the center of this universe. Wherever you go, you carry your own mind, and wherever you go, you will create your own storms. It may appear to be calm and quiet for sometime but the storm will surface sooner or later. Unless you realize this, nothing will hold. There is no other permanent solution. Don't resist the storms, instead see them as an amazing play of your personality.

--Sri Sri Ravishankar
www.ijourney.org

My Choice

Just what I needed to watch...

An Uncommon Way

Excellence is to do a common thing in an uncommon way. ~ Booker T. Washington (1856-1915)

Excellence is a matter of the stand we are and the stand we take—a stand that allows for performance that surpasses what was previously possible, performance that defies old limits and maps new territory.