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| 1683646681
| 9781683646686
| 1683646681
| 4.15
| 11,756
| Jul 06, 2021
| Jul 06, 2021
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it was amazing
| Notes: + 4 basic goals of IFS 1. Liberate parts from the roles they’ve been forced into, so they can be who they’re designed to be 2. Restore trust in th Notes: + 4 basic goals of IFS 1. Liberate parts from the roles they’ve been forced into, so they can be who they’re designed to be 2. Restore trust in the Self and Self-leadership 3. Reharmonize the inner system 4. Become more Self-led in your interactions with the world + C’s and P’s of Self Calm Clear Confident Courageous Creative Compassionate Curious Connected Patience Persistence Presence Perspective Playfulness + Laws of Inner Physics - Whenever a part agrees not to overwhelm, it won’t overwhelm (All we need to do is ask a part not to overwhelm; if it agrees not to, it won’t) - There’s nothing inside of you that has any power if you are in Self and not afraid of it Potent Quotables: Giving a troubled person a psychiatric diagnosis and seeing that as the sole or main cause of their symptoms [is] unnecessarily limiting, pathologizing, and [can] become self-reinforcing. When you tell a person they are sick and ignore the larger context in which their symptoms make sense, not only do you miss leverage points that could lead to transformation, but you also produce a passive patient who feels defective. Fortunately, more people in the field are beginning to view psychiatric diagnosis as unhelpful and unscientific. There’s a rule in this work that nothing can hurt you if you’re not afraid of it, so see if the scared parts can go to a safe waiting room so we can get to know this [target part]. It’s the protectors who often convince you to medicate. Medications often have a disembodying effect, which is why they can reduce certain symptoms… It’s always valuable (and often surprising) to inquire among your parts as to whether a medication or meditation is more or less embodying of your Self. Are you using it to promote healing or to bypass your exiles? ...more |
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Apr 18, 2024
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Apr 18, 2024
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| 1462541461
| 9781462541461
| 1462541461
| 4.36
| 1,257
| 1994
| Sep 23, 2019
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it was amazing
| Notes: Finding A Target Part: Start With Protectors 1. What brings you to therapy? 2. Can we talk about parts? 3. Find a target part, preferably a manage Notes: Finding A Target Part: Start With Protectors 1. What brings you to therapy? 2. Can we talk about parts? 3. Find a target part, preferably a manager, or focus on a polarity between two protective parts 4. If an exile comes up first, ask it to let the client’s Self negotiate first with protectors then return to locating a protector who will be the target part 5. Get permission from all other parts to talk to target part 6. Ask the target part about its job 7. Ask the target part about its fears 8. Offer to introduce the target part to the client’s Self 9. Ask for permission to help the exile 10. If the target part agrees, check to see if any other parts object. If yes, go through the same steps with those parts. If no, proceed to the exile 6 F’s for Protective Parts 1. Find 2. Focus on 3. Flesh out 4. Feel toward 5. beFriend 6. explore Fears Some Initial Direct Access Questions For the Target Part - What do you say or do to [person]? - Why do you say or do that to [person]? - What do you make [person] think or do? - What do you do for [person]? - Who do you see when you look at [person]? - How do you think [person] feels toward you? - What are you afraid would happen if you stopped doing this to [person]? - How old do you think [person] is? - How old are you? Common Manager Fears 1. Firefighters are dangerous 2. Exiles overwhelm 3. This will be too much for the therapist 4. The therapist will disappear when the Self shows up 5. This isn’t safe 6. Something bad could happen 7. I will be eliminated 8. Exiles are their burdens 9. Unblending will reveal that [person] is empty and has no Self 10. I will be judged for the damage I have done 11. Change will destabilize the system and evoke grief Witnessing And Unburdening: Exiles As Target Parts 1. The exile meets the client’s Self 2. The exile tells the Self what it needs 3. The Self witnesses the exile’s burdening experiences 4. The exile lets its burdens go 5. The exile invites in the qualities it will need going forward, in place of burdens 6. The Self checks back with protectors and invites them to find new roles The Unburdening Process 1. Witnessing: the Self witnesses whatever the exile wants the Self to know about its experience. The client may or may not want to share this with the therapist. Either way is fine 2. Do-Over: if the exile wants help in the past, the Self enters the scene with the exile and does or says whatever the exile needed someone to do at the time to rescript the experience 3. Retrieval: the Self takes the exile out of the past and brings it to the present or to somewhere safe 4. Unburdening: the exile decides how it wants to let go of burdens (sensations, chronic or extreme feeling states, toxic beliefs) and then proceeds to let go of them, releasing anything that doesn’t belong to it 5. Invitation : the exile invites in new qualities that it wants for the future 6. Integration: the Self invites protector parts to notice the exile has unburdened and feels healed, then asks if they are ready to find new jobs/roles and helps with this if they need help 7. Ongoing follow up: the Self checks in daily with the exile to consolidate healing and maintain unburdening When Unburdening Unsticks 1. The part was not fully witnessed 2. The part felt abandoned by the Self in the days following the unburdening 3. Protectors were threatened by the unburdening and brought the burden back 4. Other parts may carry the same burden and need an opportunity to be witnessed and unburdened too 5. Something scary happened shortly after the unburdening and the part wanted to return to the familiar, or else other parts attributed that fright to the unburdening and brought the burden back 6. A legacy burden remains, absorbed from one or more ancestors ...more |
Notes are private!
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Oct 30, 2023
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Apr 24, 2024
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Oct 30, 2023
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Hardcover
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| 1683644239
| 9781683644231
| B0BHBRG1RV
| 4.44
| 1,879
| Jan 01, 2008
| May 09, 2023
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it was amazing
| Notes: + Exiling projects 1. Try to get our partner to exile the parts of them that threaten us 2. Work to exile the parts of us that we think they don’t Notes: + Exiling projects 1. Try to get our partner to exile the parts of them that threaten us 2. Work to exile the parts of us that we think they don’t like 3. Exile the parts of us that are attached to them Quotes: Partners are cut off from their Selves by being raised in a society that is so concerned with external appearances that authentic inner desires are ignored and feared. Into this nearly impossible arrangement is poured the expectation that your partner should make you happy and that if they don’t, something is very wrong. The myth of the monolithic personality is one of the greatest causes of distance in and dissolution of intimate relationships and awareness of our natural multiplicity is the greatest antidote. When your partner chronically acts in ways that bother you, you tend to: (1) assume that behavior represents a core personality trait that you’re stuck with and (2) attribute a selfish or pathological motive to the behavior. Because of these monolithic attributions, you will be critical or contemptuous of your partner, and they will respond in kind. Because you can love all kinds of parts of you, you can love your partner even when they’re acting like those parts. It’s all connected—how you relate internally directly translates into how you relate externally and vice versa. What is toxic are the emotions and beliefs the exiles carry—their burdens—not the exiled parts themselves. On the contrary, those parts are the vulnerability, sensitivity, playfulness, creativity, and spontaneity that are the heart of intimacy. These exiles, when they are hurt by something that happens in our lives, have the power to pull us into their despair. We become them, suddenly swallowed up by their pain and shame in terrifying ways. Human infants are high-maintenance organisms. They require constant attention and effort, remaining dependent on caregivers for an extraordinary period relative to other animals. For some, disapproval can equal death or extreme suffering. Unlovability and its associated survival terror and drive for redemption are powerful creators of the relationship hells we find ourselves trapped in. To deal with the burden of unlovability, our culture offers two doors: (1) find a redeemer to prove the unlovability wrong or (2) find activities or substances to distract from it (medication, TV, internet, work, shopping, drugs and alcohol, or other addictive behavior). Neither choice ever really works. The irony is that the effective door leads inside to the exiled childlike part that can be retrieved from the past hell in which it is stuck and shown by you that it never was unlovable in the first place. If you don’t open your heart to your partner because you fear they will leave, they are much more likely to leave than if you did open to them. Once they do leave, your exile’s belief is further confirmed, and you are more likely to create the same dynamic in your next relationship. Whether or not you experience something your partner does as an attachment reinjury has less to do with the nature of the act and more to do with how much it reactivates the preexisting burdens of your exiles. The reason couples do their best to avoid talking about attachment reinjuries is because the emotions surrounding such events have been so explosive in the past. The hurt partner feels so upset about the incident that their protective parts erupt in ways that, to an outside observer, often look like an extreme overreaction. The culpable partner becomes scared and defensive, minimizing the impact of their actions and focusing instead on the other’s inability to get over it, which further enrages them, and so on. An attachment reinjury often sets in motion a process in which the injured partner repeatedly gets further wounded, and the perpetrator feels that they will never be forgiven. Unlike the parts you exiled when young, neo-exiles once had a great deal of power. They aren’t used to being excluded, and they continue to have loud voices in your inner family despite their loss of influence. If, because of how you interact with your partner, there continues to be no room in your life for them, they can sabotage the relationship… There are many different versions of this neo-exiling dance, all fueled by one or both partners’ abandonment anxiety, which in turn is driven by a sense of worthlessness. Some partners try to exile their anxiety and become dominated by protectors that don’t let them care deeply about the other or invest much in the relationship. “So what if they leave? I’ll be okay!” With that approach, you won’t wind up in the detective/controller role, and you’ll likely have more power in the relationship because of the rule of least investment: the one who is less invested in the continuation of the relationship can control the terms of it… By acting as though you care less than your partner, you can constantly stir their anxiety and keep them in line. The downside to this strategy is that you wind up numb, cut off from your heart and from your partner’s love, so you’re constantly dissatisfied—which, of course, only increases your partner’s anxiety. And your partner resents your implicit threats. Too often we succumb to the temptation to clip our partner’s wings so they won’t fly away from us. It is only when you are able to calm your abandonment anxiety by caring for the parts that carry it that you can truly love your partner because you can put their growth above your need for security. I call this courageous love. It is rare because Western culture, including many psychotherapies and spiritual paths, encourages us to exile, rather than embrace, those scared parts. When you become the one your parts trust and look to, you can have courageous love for everyone. At the level of your Selves, you are not different because you are drops of the same divine ocean or sparks of the same eternal flame, part and parcel of the wider Self. It is this realization of connectedness that allows you to give your partner the freedom to grow. If your exiles trust that even if you lose your partner, they will have you to help them with the pain of the loss and to care for them in general, your protectors will open the gate. If that isn’t the case, they won’t allow the gate to open, and your prospects for real intimacy will be limited. The challenge is to do both—to love someone intensely and with abandon while simultaneously fostering their growth, even if it’s away from you, and accepting their parts. Not many people can do that. Improving relationships is not so much about bringing new skills or information into them as it is about healing the wounds that keep hearts encrusted and calloused. A heart, once opened and reenergized, already knows how to be loving and respectful. The trick is getting to the point where each partner feels safe to do that. It is possible to become the primary caretaker of your own exiles so that your partner is freed up to be their secondary caretaker. Everything improves once this has been achieved. To get there, however, both partners need to be willing to do a U-turn [You-turn] in their focus—from outside themselves to inside—and move from viewing themselves as having a unitary personality to the multiplicity perspective. Then you each can use the inevitable triggers that arise in your relationship as trailheads to follow inside and help the protectors and exiles you find there You can just ask exiles not to overwhelm your internal system with the emotion they hold as you approach them. Parts can control the degree to which they blend their feelings with a person. Like prisoners in a castle, exiles try to rebel whenever cracks open in their captor’s fortress. They don’t think there’s any other way to get help. But when they trust that we’re coming to help them, they don’t have to overwhelm and can allow people to get quite close without totally blending. Then clients will be able to feel exiled emotions but not to the extent that doing so threatens the system. This process of identifying and releasing the extreme emotion or belief that a part carries is called unburdening; in IFS, it is equivalent to healing the part. This is because once parts unburden, they often immediately transform into their naturally valuable states, as if released from a spell. When exiles unburden, they become far less vulnerable, so their designated protectors can drop their guard and find new jobs. If the witness accepts and offers love to the revealer, the revealer feels tremendous relief and delight at having something shameful accepted and feels grateful to the witness. The witness feels greater empathy for the revealer and feels privileged to be allowed into the revealer’s inner sanctum. The goal of maintaining Self-leadership with someone who provokes you is not to get that person to change, although that is often a fortunate side effect because your Self may elicit their Self. Instead, you interact from your Self for its own sake—for the growth that comes from showing your parts that they can trust you. By getting your parts to relax and trust you to speak for them, you become an empty vessel that can collide with other people without making them feel demeaned, competitive, pushed, repulsed, or otherwise protective. You have emptied your boat of egoistic parts, but calling it empty is misleading because your emptied vessel becomes filled with Self energy. Self energy has a soothing effect on any parts it touches, whether they are in you or in another person. When you begin to fight, each of you can: (1) pause, (2) focus inside and find the parts that are triggered, (3) ask those parts to relax and let you speak for them, (4) tell your partner about what you found inside (speak for your parts), and (5) listen to your partner from your open-hearted Self. In most cases, when one partner has the courage to reveal the vulnerability that drives their protectiveness, the atmosphere immediately softens and the couple shifts toward Self-to-Self communication. We don’t expect a protector to change until the exile it protects has been healed so that the person is in less need of protection. The problem with fights is that extreme protectors of each partner tend to terrorize the exiles of the other, adding to the pool of burdens in each person and to the perception of the other as dangerous. If, soon after the fight, each partner can enter Self-leadership, allow the other to speak about the effect of the fight on their exiles, and then deliver a heartfelt apology to those hurting parts, neither walks away with additional burdens. Generally, what your partner provokes in you is what you need to heal. If, when they hurt you, you can focus inside and go behind the protectors to the exiles they protect, you have a map that will lead you directly to a kind of buried treasure. You can use your relationship to access parts that might take years of therapy to reach—your attachment injuries—that is, the exiles that were burdened when you were young and that are looking for redemption. Healing those parts will enrich your life enormously, regardless of what happens in your relationship. And if both of you do this, your relationship becomes a container for tremendous intimacy… The question is whether we will use the relationship to illuminate dark dungeons we need to clear out or avoid looking in those dungeons by focusing instead on the partner. Continue to ask [the protective part] what it’s afraid would happen if it didn’t say or do those things, or why those things bother it so much. At some point, the protector will begin to tell you more about why it’s so upset, and you will likely learn about how: (1) it feels exiled by your partner, (2) it protects a part that has been hurt before your partner entered the scene or a part that feels exiled by your partner, or (3) it is polarized with another part of you that it is afraid will take over and dominate your relationship. The goal is not to talk only when my partner is Self-led. This is because I believe that it is my responsibility to try to hold Self-leadership even when my partner has lost it. If I can do that, often my partner’s Self returns, and my parts gain confidence in my leadership because I showed them that I could handle my partner’s toughest fighters. Challenging discussions are (1) opportunities to demonstrate to my parts that they can trust me even in the face of serious threat and (2) ways to access, and later heal, key exiles. While in a conflict, trying to be your partner’s parts detector is a good way to fan the flames. When people are upset, most don’t appreciate being told what they are doing wrong, I have a part that felt it had to make sure all the facts were correct, as if there were some permanent record of my life somewhere that would be tarnished if I didn’t constantly clarify distortions. What [our partners] really want is for their exiles to be witnessed by you—to trust that you understand that you hurt them and regret having done that. Unfortunately, most people’s protectors elicit the opposite of what they really want. Your job is to see through their walls and cannonballs to the wounded and terrified childlike exiles they heroically try to protect. Actually, words matter much less than your energy. Your Self will find a way to convey how sorry you are that your partner is suffering. What your partner wants is the same thing that exiles in general want. It involves three steps—for you to: 1. compassionately witness what happened from their perspective and appreciate how much they were hurt; 2. sincerely express your empathy for that pain and regret for your role in creating it (no matter how inadvertent); and 3. describe the steps you will take to prevent it from happening again. If it becomes clear that I have done something hurtful, that doesn’t mean that I am bad, that she’ll abandon me, or that I have to suffer. It simply means I need to make a repair. Each of these four forms of intimacy—describing parts to each other, Self-to-Self relating, part-to-part relating, and secondary caretaking (a.k.a. Self-to-part relating)—is powerful by itself. When all four are available in a relationship, it takes on a vitality that allows both partners to rest because they know they are home. ...more |
Notes are private!
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not set
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Oct 14, 2023
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Oct 16, 2023
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Kindle Edition
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| 1648481655
| 9781648481659
| B0B6NQMRY7
| 4.20
| 767
| 2009
| Jun 01, 2023
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really liked it
| Notes: + Principles for relationships - Love and pain are intimate dance partners; they go hand-in-hand - You can’t always get what you want - There’s no Notes: + Principles for relationships - Love and pain are intimate dance partners; they go hand-in-hand - You can’t always get what you want - There’s no such thing as the perfect partner - Complex issues don’t have simple answers - You can’t control your partner; but you can control your own behavior and use it to constructively influence your partner - The carrot is more effective than the stick - Conflict is inevitable, but good communication, assertiveness, making repairs, and being compassionate will make it much less destructive - Feelings of love come and go; actions of love can be taken in any moment. + DRAIN Disconnection Reactivity Avoidance Inside your mind Neglecting values + Psychological smog - The Should Layer - The No Point Trying Layer - The If Only Layer - The Painful Past Layer - The Scary Future Layer - The Reason-Giving Layer - The Judgment Layer - The I Know Why Layer - The Deep-Seated Fears Layer + TAME - Take note: notice and name what’s showing up in your body - Allow: give your feeling permission to be there; “let it be” - Make room: open up around this feeling, and let it freely flow through you; let it come and stay and go in its own good time - Expand awareness: continue to acknowledge your feeling, while broadening your focus to include the world around you Quotes: Whereas the feelings of love are fleeting and largely out of your control, you can take the actions of love anytime and anyplace for the whole rest of your life. Indeed, this truth applies to all human feelings. For example, you can feel angry but act calmly. You can feel anxious but act confidently. And this ability leads us to one of the key themes in ACT: stop trying to control how you feel, and instead take control of what you do. The more importance we place on avoiding unpleasant feelings in life, the more our life tends to go downhill. What you do to try to control your partner might sometimes work in the short run to get your needs met, but often in the long run it ruins your relationship. A healthy relationship is like two towering mountains with a magnificent valley between them through which the river of life flows strong and fast and free. Neither mountain needs the other—and yet their connection to one another gives rise to a lush valley. What sort of partner are you? What sort of partner do you want to be? Is there a gap between who you want to be and the way you are acting right now? Values are about opening your heart and doing what is truly meaningful, so they give you a sense of lightness, openness, and expansiveness. Rules generally have a sense of heaviness about them, a sense of obligation, duty, or burden. There are limitless ways of acting on any value, whereas a rule massively restricts your available options. It is uncommon that couples have conflicting values. Far more common, both partners have the same values, but they have different rules about how to act on them. “In this room, I will never argue with you about what is true or false. What we are interested in is something far more important than true or false: we’re interested in what works best for your relationship… Regardless of whether it’s true or not—what effect does it have on your attitude and your behavior?” Your psychological smog is a potent, toxic blend of unhelpful thoughts, scary predictions, rigid attitudes, harsh judgments, and painful memories. Over the years, they have built up, layer upon layer, into a thick black cloud that suffocates and smothers you, and prevents you from living the life that you truly want… It is not your thoughts themselves that create the smog. They only turn into smog if you hold on to them! There are only two types of couples: those who have a wonderful relationship, and those whom you know really well. A wealth of scientific research shows that the more effort we expend on avoiding unpleasant feelings, the worse our life tends to get… When we spend too much time in the comfort zone, we feel stuck, weighed down, despondent. We should call it “the stagnant zone” or the “missing-out- on-life zone.” “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” H. L. Mencken ...more |
Notes are private!
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Oct 09, 2023
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May 08, 2024
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Oct 09, 2023
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Kindle Edition
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| 1633899853
| 9781633899858
| 1633899853
| 4.20
| 52,773
| Oct 04, 2016
| Oct 04, 2016
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liked it
| Notes: + Wounding messages for… - Ones “You have to be ‘good’ and do things ‘right.’ Mistakes are unacceptable. People and things are either perfect or w Notes: + Wounding messages for… - Ones “You have to be ‘good’ and do things ‘right.’ Mistakes are unacceptable. People and things are either perfect or wrong. Period.” - Twos “Having or expressing your own needs will lead to humiliation and rejection.” - Threes “You are what you do.” - Fours “There’s something off about you. No one understands you, and you’ll never belong.” - Fives “You’re not capable of handling the demands of life and relationships. To survive you’ll need to emotionally detach and hide.” - Sixes “The world isn’t safe and the adults in charge can’t always be trusted.” - Sevens “You’re on your own. No one’s here to support or take care of you.” - Eights “The world is a hostile place where only the strong survive, and the weak or innocent get emotionally beaten up or betrayed. So put on your armor and never let them see your soft side.” - Nines “Your wants, opinions, desires and presence don’t matter much.” + Deadly sin of… - One: Anger - Two: Pride - Three: Deceit - Four: Envy - Five: Avarice - Six: Fear - Seven: Gluttony - Eight: Lust - Nine: Sloth + Healing messages for… - Ones “You’re imperfect and you’re wired for struggle, but you are worthy of love and belonging… Mistakes are just part of the process of learning and growing.” “You don’t have to be perfect to be good. You’re fully loved despite your imperfection.” - Twos “You’re wanted.” “Your giving doesn’t determine your worth. You’re wanted and loved just as you are.” - Threes “You are loved just for who you are.” “Success and upward mobility will never give you peace. Your worth is found in who you are, not what you do.” - Fours “There’s nothing missing… We see you. You’re beautiful. Don’t be ashamed.” “You aren’t missing anything. Don’t be ashamed. We see you. We love you.” - Fives “You have enough.” “You will never find capital-l Life by detaching from reality. Don’t run from the present. God has given you everything you need to live fully in this moment.” - Sixes “You are ultimately safe. Even if everything doesn’t work out as planned, things will be all right.” “Nothing is outside of God’s grasp. Everything will be okay. You are safe.” - Sevens “God will take care of you.” “You have everything you need. You don’t need to manufacture peace and joy. They are already inside of you. Rest, and be.” - Eights “There are lots of trustworthy people in the world, and though the risk of betrayal is always real, love and connection will forever elude you unless you welcome and reconnect to the innocent, less defended child you once were.” “Wearing an armor of toughness to avoid emotional intimacy isn’t courageous. It’s cowardly. To find true strength, you must take a chance on vulnerability.” - Nines “We see you and your life matters. God didn’t invite you to this party to live someone else’s life. We need you here!” “The absence of conflict is not the presence of peace. Your presence matters. Your voice has value.” + Ten Paths to Transformation for… - Ones 1. To awaken self-compassion, try to capture in a journal the typical things your inner critic says to you and then read them aloud. When your inner critic activates, smile and tell it you hear it and appreciate how it’s trying to help you improve or avoid making mistakes, but you’re taking a new path to self-acceptance in life. Resist the urge to give other people to-do lists or to redo their tasks if you think they haven’t met your standards. Instead, catch the people you love doing things right—and tell them how much you appreciate them for it. When you are ready to dive right in to correct an injustice or right a wrong, first ask yourself whether the passion you feel for that issue is really misplaced anger about something else. Let your Seven and Nine friends help you learn how to relax and have fun. The work will still be there tomorrow. If you find yourself procrastinating, think about the reason why. Are you reluctant to get going on a task or project because you’re afraid you won’t be able to accomplish it perfectly? Pick up a hobby you enjoy but are not especially good at doing—and just do it for the love of it. Forgive yourself and others for mistakes. Everyone makes them. See whether you can catch yourself measuring yourself against others to see who does a better job, works harder or meets your definition of success. Be aware of how you receive criticism from others, and try to accept it without being defensive. - Twos 1. Rather than hinting at your needs or leaving it to others to figure them out, try telling them directly. 2. Internally take a deep breath and start over when you catch yourself trying too hard to present a likable image or flattering others to win their approval. 3. Don’t reflexively say yes to everything. When someone asks for your help, say you’ll get back to them with an answer once you’ve had time to think about it. Or just experiment with saying the word no. It’s a complete sentence. 4. When the urge to rescue or help overwhelms you, ask yourself, Is this mine to do? If you’re not sure, talk it over with a trusted friend. 5. When you realize you’ve fallen back into the typical behaviors of your number, gently ask yourself, What would I have to feel if I wasn’t flattering or meeting this person’s needs right now? 6. Whenever possible, perform acts of anonymous service. 7. Twos toggle back and forth between having overly inflated and overly deflated views of themselves and their value to others. Remind yourself you’re neither the best nor the worst. Just you. 8. Don’t push away feelings of resentment or entitlement when they arise. Instead, view them as invitations to look inwardly with kindness and ask, What most needs attention in my life right now? 9. Don’t beat yourself up when you catch yourself moving too aggressively toward others or overwhelming them with your emotions. Congratulate yourself for spotting it, and dial it back. 10. Two or three times a day, ask yourself, What am I feeling right now? and What do I need right now? Don’t worry if you can’t supply an answer. It takes time to develop self-care muscles. - Threes 1. It’s important for every number to develop a practice of silence, solitude and meditation, but it’s particularly essential for Threes since you place such high value on activity and productivity. 2. Find a spiritual director to accompany you on your journey to reclaim your authentic self. It’s hard to walk the path alone. 3. Challenge your definition of success, and craft a new one based on your feelings, desires and values, not those inherited from family or culture. 4. Don’t wait until you have an affair, become an alcoholic or are the youngest person in your family to have a heart attack before you ask the question, “Who am I if I’m not my persona?” Do it now. 5. Material success and being real are not mutually exclusive. Success is great if the person responsible for it is the real you. 6. Take an inventory of who and what gets sacrificed while you’re frantically racing to cross the finish line first—spouse, kids, health, friendships. 7. Take a vacation and do not bring work with you. 8. Try being just another bozo on the bus. Resist the temptation to take the leadership rein or to be the center of attention. Instead, try being a collaborative team member who wants to help others shine and succeed. 9. Have at least one close friend with whom you can be real and vulnerable. As a Three, you probably have a lot of friends, but make sure some of them are people who can love you when you’re a complete disaster, not just when you’re projecting an image of success. 10. Read Richard Rohr’s books Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life and Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self. - Fours 1. Beware of self-absorption. Listen to others when they share stories about their own suffering, and realize it’s not just you. 2. Watch out you don’t instigate a drama or crisis with family or friends when your emotions start to feel run of the mill. All the world is not a stage, and you’re not Shakespeare. 3. Go out of your way to find and express appreciation for what’s present and unique in the people you love rather than always focusing on what’s missing. 4. Offer yourself the gift of unconditional self-friendship as you work to unwind lifelong feelings of shame and inferiority. Never give up on yourself! 5. Don’t wallow in suffering, but figure out what’s causing it and do what you can to heal it. 6. Keep an eye out for envy! You never come out ahead when you compare yourself to other people. 7. Stop fantasizing about the ideal relationship, career or community and getting stuck in longing for it. Instead, work hard for what’s possible and see it through to completion. 8. Don’t look for beauty and meaning only in the extraordinary or unusual but in the ordinary and simple as well. 9. When the past calls, let it go to voicemail. It has nothing new to say to you. 10. Don’t embellish and get swept up in your feelings. In the words of Jack Kornfield, “No emotion is final.” - Fives 1. Allow your feelings to arise naturally and experience them in the present moment, and then you can let them go. 2. Recognize when you’re succumbing to a scarcity mentality by hoarding affection, privacy, knowledge, time, love, money, material possessions or thoughts. 3. When something occurs that seems to elicit emotions in other people, try to feel with them in the moment rather than saving those feelings to process later. 4. Try sharing more of your life with others, trusting they won’t misuse that information. 5. Venture out of your comfort zone and share more of who you are and what you have with others. 6. Try to remember that you don’t have to have the answers for everything. You won’t look foolish, just human. 7. Call a friend and offer to hang out, for no reason at all other than to enjoy each other’s company. 8. Allow yourself some material and experiential luxuries. Buy a new mattress! Travel! 9. Take up yoga or another activity that will connect you with your body. Overcoming the disconnect between your body and head will be life changing. 10. Even when you’re unsure of yourself, jump into a conversation rather than withdrawing from it. - Sixes 1. A regular centering prayer or meditation practice is vital for every number, but particularly for Sixes. Your mind never stops working. It’s filled with voices expressing vacillating opinions, doubts about other people’s trustworthiness, imagined worst-case scenarios and questions about your own ability to make good decisions. 2. Be alert for unhealthy tendencies in your relationship with authority. Are you blindly following or reflexively rebelling? You’ll want to find a more nuanced and conscious middle way. 3. To develop self-confidence and trust in your inner guidance system, keep a record in your journal of those times when you made and enjoyed the fruit of good decisions or survived the fallout of bad ones. Either way, you’re still here! 4. Practice accepting compliments without deflecting them or being suspicious of the motivations behind the praise. 5. When playing the role of devil’s advocate and pointing out the potential flaws in other people’s ideas and plans, be sure to acknowledge the positive dimensions of it as well. You don’t want to develop a reputation for being a wet blanket. 6. Limit your exposure to the twenty-four-hour news cycle or to books and films that unnecessarily reinforce your anxious or pessimistic view of life. (Frankly, let’s all do this.) 7. Be alert in the early days of a relationship to see whether doubtful thoughts and feelings arise about your partner’s commitment to you. What’s causing you to alternately question or cling to them? 8. Learn to recognize the difference between legitimate fear and free-floating anxiety, and ascribe different values to them. 9. Memorize and repeat Julian of Norwich’s beautiful prayer, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” 10. The contrary virtue to the deadly sin of fear isn’t courage but faith, which is a gift. Pray for it. - Sevens 1. Practice restraint and moderation. Get off the treadmill that tells you more is always better. 2. You suffer from “monkey mind.” Develop a daily practice of meditation to free yourself from your tendency to jump from one idea, topic or project to the next. 3. Develop and practice the spiritual discipline of solitude on a regular basis. 4. Unflinchingly reflect on the past and make a list of the people who have hurt you or whom you have hurt; then forgive them and yourself. Make amends where necessary. 5. Give yourself a pat on the back whenever you allow yourself to feel negative emotions like anxiety, sadness, frustration, envy or disappointment without letting yourself run away to escape them. It’s a sign you’re starting to grow up! 6. Bring yourself back to the present moment whenever you begin fantasizing about the future or making too many plans for it. 7. Exercise daily to burn off excess energy. 8. You don’t like being told you have potential because it means you’ll feel pressure to buckle down and commit to cultivating a specific talent, which will inevitably limit your options. But you do have potential, so what career or life path would you like to commit yourself to for the long haul? Take concrete steps to make good on the gifts God has given you. 9. Get a journal and record your answers to questions like “What does my life mean? What memories or feelings am I running from? Where’s the depth I yearn to have that will complement my intelligence?” Don’t abandon this exercise until it’s finished. 10. Make a commitment that when a friend or partner is hurting, you will try to simply be present for them while they are in pain without trying to artificially cheer them up. - Eights 1. Too often, your intensity and lust for life runs the show. Give a friend permission to tell you when you’re going overboard or exhibiting extreme behaviors. Remember, “Moderation, moderation, moderation.” 2. To recover a piece of your natural childhood innocence, tend and befriend your inner child. I know, you don’t have time for this sort of crap, but it helps. 3. Watch out for and avoid black-and-white thinking. Gray is an actual color. 4. Broaden your definition of strength and courage to include vulnerability. Risk sharing your heart at deeper levels with someone in your life. 5. Remember, your tendency is to act impulsively. It’s “Ready, Aim, Fire!” not “Fire, Aim, Ready!” 6. You don’t have a corner on the truth market. In the heat of battle, stop and ask yourself, What if I’m wrong? Say that a hundred times a day. 7. Your personality is twice as big and intense as you think it is, and what feels like passion to you often feels like intimidation to others. Offer an unqualified apology when people tell you that you ran over them. 8. Don’t always play the part of the rebel, and try not to pit yourself against appropriate authority figures. They’re not all bad people. 9. When you power up and get angry, stop and ask yourself whether you’re trying to hide or deny a vulnerable feeling. What feeling is it? How do you use aggression as a way to hide it or defend against it? 10. Don’t judge yourself or others as weak for sharing tender feelings. It takes courage to drop your guard and expose your inner child. (I know, you still hate that phrase.) - Nines 1. Journal on the question “What is my calling or life’s program? Am I pursuing it or postponing it to keep the peace?” 2. Ask someone to help you find a task-management or to-do system to help you stay on task. There are lots of great apps out there just for this purpose. 3. Practice saying no when someone asks you to do something you don’t want to. 4. Be aware of the numbing strategies you use to avoid having to deal with life, whether that’s a glass of wine or shopping or Girl Scout cookies. 5. Don’t be afraid to have opinions and express them. You can start with small things and build up to important ones. 6. Resist the urge to fall back on passive-aggressive behaviors like procrastination and avoidance. If you feel angry, be honest and open. 7. Understand how important and unique your voice is. People deserve to hear what you think, not have their own views mirrored back to them. 8. Remember that what feels like intense, terrible conflict to you might just be a typical disagreement for someone else. Take a breath and engage. 9. Realize that your tendency to merge with others can be a beautiful gift if directed toward God. Other types envy this spiritual advantage you have. But don’t fuse with another person and miss out on the chance to become your own person. 10. When you feel paralyzed in the face of a decision, consult someone who won’t tell you what to do but rather will help you tease out what you want to do—then do it! Quotes: “The ultimate goal of detachment is engagement.” David Benner ...more |
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really liked it
| typo p. 226: “know that far the most” should be “know that by far the most” Quotes: At depth humanity is differentiated into the sick in soul, those bei typo p. 226: “know that far the most” should be “know that by far the most” Quotes: At depth humanity is differentiated into the sick in soul, those being treated and those cured. “For it is necessary actually to be still to know God.” St. Gregory the Theologian A contrite heart prays unceasingly to God. It does not despair but hopes in God’s great love for man. So it is marked by hope. St. Symeon the New Theologian, an experienced spiritual physician, recognized that excessive and untimely contrition of heart “darkens and troubles the mind,” it banishes pure prayer and compunction from the soul and creates pain in the heart which results in hardness and extreme callousness. This is how the demons bring about despair. The nous is the eye of the soul, while the mind makes sensory and noetic things thinkable… It is not the mind but the nous which knows the heavenly treasures. The mind simply makes thinkable the things which man’s nous lives experientially. God allows us throughout our life to be fought by the devil in order to make us humble. The members of the Church are not divided into good and bad or moral and immoral, making human ethics the criterion, but into the sick in soul, those being cured, and those cured. Precisely these three categories correspond to the three degrees of knowledge. Those whose soul is sick are people of bodily, worldly knowledge, those being cured are the ones who in different degrees are acquiring the soul’s wisdom and knowledge, and those cured are the saints of God, who possess spiritual knowledge, true knowledge of God. ...more |
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| 4.34
| 6,653
| 1996
| Oct 20, 2010
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it was amazing
| Potent Quotables: Often love is offered to you, but you do not recognize it. You discard it because you are fixed on receiving it from the same person Potent Quotables: Often love is offered to you, but you do not recognize it. You discard it because you are fixed on receiving it from the same person to whom you gave it. The great challenge is living your wounds through instead of thinking them through. It is better to cry than to worry, better to feel your wounds deeply than to understand them, better to let them enter into your silence than to talk about them. ...more |
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| Oct 06, 2010
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it was amazing
| Potent Quotables: The intense pressure of suffering that night must have forced my consciousness to withdraw from its identification with the unhappy a Potent Quotables: The intense pressure of suffering that night must have forced my consciousness to withdraw from its identification with the unhappy and deeply fearful self, which is ultimately a fiction of the mind. This withdrawal must have been so complete that this false, suffering self immediately collapsed, just as if a plug had been pulled out of an inflatable toy. What was left then was my true nature as the ever-present I am: consciousness in its pure state prior to identification with form. Since every person carries the seed of enlightenment within, I often address myself to the knower in you who dwells behind the thinker, the deeper self that immediately recognizes spiritual truth, resonates with it, and gains strength from it. I cannot tell you any spiritual truth that deep within you don’t know already. All I can do is remind you of what you have forgotten. Those who have not found their true wealth, which is the radiant joy of Being and the deep, unshakable peace that comes with it, are beggars, even if they have great material wealth. They are looking outside for scraps of pleasure or fulfillment, for validation, security, or love, while they have a treasure within that not only includes all those things but is infinitely greater than anything the world can offer. Being is not only beyond but also deep within every form as its innermost invisible and indestructible essence. Neither God nor Being nor any other word can define or explain the ineffable reality behind the word, so the only important question is whether the word is a help or a hindrance in enabling you to experience That toward which it points. Does it point beyond itself to that transcendental reality, or does it lend itself too easily to becoming no more than an idea in your head that you believe in, a mental idol? The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly — you usually don’t use it at all. It uses you. This is the disease. You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion. The instrument has taken you over… It’s almost as if you were possessed without knowing it, and so you take the possessing entity to be yourself. The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not the possessing entity — the thinker. The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated. You then begin to realize that there is a vast realm of intelligence beyond thought, that thought is only a tiny aspect of that intelligence. You also realize that all the things that truly matter — beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace — arise from beyond the mind. Take any routine activity that normally is only a means to an end and give it your fullest attention, so that it becomes an end in itself. The single most vital step on your journey toward enlightenment is this: learn to disidentify from your mind. One day you may catch yourself smiling at the voice in your head, as you would smile at the antics of a child. This means that you no longer take the content of your mind all that seriously, as your sense of self does not depend on it. One of the main tasks of the mind is to fight or remove that emotional pain, which is one of the reasons for its incessant activity, but all it can ever achieve is to cover it up temporarily. In fact, the harder the mind struggles to get rid of the pain, the greater the pain. Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within. The very thing that gives you pleasure today will give you pain tomorrow, or it will leave you, so its absence will give you pain. And what is often referred to as love may be pleasurable and exciting for a while, but it is an addictive clinging, an extremely needy condition that can turn into its opposite at the flick of a switch. Many “love” relationships, after the initial euphoria has passed, actually oscillate between “love” and hate, attraction and attack. Real love doesn’t make you suffer. How could it? It doesn’t suddenly turn into hate, nor does real joy turn into pain. All cravings are the mind seeking salvation or fulfillment in external things and in the future as a substitute for the joy of Being. You can always cope with the present moment, but you cannot cope with something that is only a mind projection — you cannot cope with the future. Once you have disidentified from your mind, whether you are right or wrong makes no difference to your sense of self at all, so the forcefully compulsive and deeply unconscious need to be right, which is a form of violence, will no longer be there. Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry — all forms of fear — are caused by too much future, and not enough presence. Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of nonforgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now. Then accept the consequences. No excuses. No negativity. No psychic pollution. Keep your inner space clear. [We] journey from unconscious perfection, through apparent imperfection and “evil” to conscious perfection. When you focus within and feel the inner body, you immediately become still and present as you are withdrawing consciousness from the mind. If a response is required in that situation, it will come up from this deeper level. Just as the sun is infinitely brighter than a candle flame, there is infinitely more intelligence in Being than in your mind. Most human relationships consist mainly of minds interacting with each other, not of human beings communicating, being in communion. No relationship can thrive in that way, and that is why there is so much conflict in relationships. You feel it as a deep sense of peace somewhere in the background, a stillness that never leaves you, no matter what happens out here. You become a bridge between the Unmanifested and the manifested, between God and the world. Your task is not to search for love but to find a portal through which love can enter. If you remain in conscious connection with the Unmanifested, you value, love, and deeply respect the manifested and every life form in it as an expression of the One Life beyond form. You also know that every form is destined to dissolve again and that ultimately nothing out here matters all that much. When space and time are realized within as the Unmanifested — no-mind and presence — external space and time continue to exist for you, but they become much less important. Every addiction arises from an unconscious refusal to face and move through your own pain. You cannot truly forgive yourself or others as long as you derive your sense of self from the past. Only through accessing the power of the Now, which is your own power, can there be true forgiveness. This renders the past powerless, and you realize deeply that nothing you ever did or that was ever done to you could touch even in the slightest the radiant essence of who you are. ...more |
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| 4.51
| 598
| Oct 01, 2019
| Oct 01, 2019
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it was amazing
| Potent Quotables: You want to have a nice relationship, get rid of your stuff… Make it so that it’s exciting how the other person is. You’re getting to Potent Quotables: You want to have a nice relationship, get rid of your stuff… Make it so that it’s exciting how the other person is. You’re getting to know somebody, you’re getting to see something different than you… Then it’s a beautiful experience… But if you expect that other person to be the puzzle piece that somehow matches this garbage that you stored inside of you - that’s blocking you - it’s not going to happen. I want to teach you how to be you, while the emotions go through their natural changes, so you can stay seated in the seat of self while these different shifts are taking place… The emotions can change, you notice them changing, but you don’t go anywhere. You’re the one who notices this, who hears the thoughts. * The mind is a place the soul goes to hide from the heart. I’m not talking against human love, I just want you to understand there’s stuff way higher than that… People who say “that experience of that connection is the meaning of life” are wrong. That’s like saying food or sex are the meaning of life. These are beautiful experiences, but they aren’t the meaning of life. If you want to leave, of course it will be somewhat difficult, but I’m not losing the love, because I didn’t get the love from you. I didn’t need you to get me around my samskaras, I did my work on myself. When you move from the human heart to the spiritual heart, you will start to feel love as a natural thing within itself: not love for somebody, just love itself feeding you inside. God is in your heart; this tremendously beautiful energy is feeding you once you open your heart to that level. Surrender the impulse to go with your stuff: “I choose to be me. That’s not me, therefore I’m not going to let it run my life.” Your choices are not just expression or suppression. All suppression does is build up, pent up, and blow up. Expression isn’t useful either, those energies don't know what they’re doing, they’re just the result of all these blockages you stored inside of you and they’re just finding a way to try and release themselves. There’s no logic, goodness, divinity, or social value to that, it’s just your garbage expressing itself… The third option is transmuting and releasing so the energy can rise up higher, past where the energy seems blocked. ...more |
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| 1647469643
| 9781647469641
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| Mar 22, 2022
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it was amazing
| Quotes: I came to realize that needs are not shameful. They are a beautiful and necessary part of the human experience representing avenues of connecti Quotes: I came to realize that needs are not shameful. They are a beautiful and necessary part of the human experience representing avenues of connection, love, and healing. Accepting them as such is key to seeing ourselves as worthy of having needs and graciously receiving. Friend, you are worthy of healing and love… You are not a burden. You are loved. You are human, and humans have messy, beautiful needs. It wasn’t about me desperately holding onto hope, it was knowing that in the middle of loss and devastation, I am the one being held. Hope holds me. You won’t ever be able to outrun the thing you fear most. It is the monster of the future. You are a citizen of this moment. Your mind can wander into the “what-ifs” of the future, but your body can only be in this present moment where Love meets and holds you. When you abide in the certainty of this Love, and you release what you hold dear knowing it also abides in Love, you will find a place of rest. Hope isn’t something you must desperately try to secure. Hope secures you. Hope isn’t about what you lose or keep. It is having eyes to see the reality of what you already possess and cannot be taken away. It wasn’t the moment that was so unbearable. It was the weight of the unknown and trying to predict the future that was taking me under. How often have I walked hastily through life with a goal in mind and missed out on the simple yet profound gifts that were mine for the taking? ...more |
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| Apr 05, 2022
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really liked it
| Potent Quotables: “Every thing that you love, you will eventually lose. But in the end, love will return in a different form.” Franz Kafka “Like everyth Potent Quotables: “Every thing that you love, you will eventually lose. But in the end, love will return in a different form.” Franz Kafka “Like everything that is created, love has a dual nature, positive and negative, masculine and feminine. The masculine side of love is “I love you.” Love’s feminine quality is, “I am waiting for you; I am longing for you.” For the mystic it is the feminine side of love, the longing, the cup waiting to be filled, that takes us back to God. Longing is a highly dynamic state and yet at the same time, it is a state of receptivity. Because our culture has for so long rejected the feminine we have lost touch with the potency of longing. Many people feel this pain of the heart and do not know its value; they do not know that it is their innermost connection to love.” Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee “Longing itself is Divine. Longing for worldly things makes you inert. Longing for Infinity fills you with life. When longing dies, inertia sets in. But longing also brings along a sense of pain. To avoid the pain, you try to push away the longing. The skill is to bear the pain of longing and move on. Don't try to find a shortcut to overcome longing. Don't make the longing short - that's why it's called loooonging. True longing in itself brings up spurts of bliss.” Sri Sri Ravi Shankar ...more |
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| May 10, 2022
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really liked it
| Notes: + Two types of thoughts 1. Willful 2. Automatic Typo p. 24: “... you have made a really big deal out the moment in front of you…” Potent Quotables: Y Notes: + Two types of thoughts 1. Willful 2. Automatic Typo p. 24: “... you have made a really big deal out the moment in front of you…” Potent Quotables: You get to the point where you realize all you’re ever doing in there is trying to be okay. First you think about what will make you okay, then you go out and try to make it happen. One of the most amazing things you will ever realize is that the moment in front of you is not bothering you - you are bothering yourself about the moment in front of you. It’s not personal - you are making it personal. When Self focuses one-pointedly on a single object, one experiences the nature of Self - total peace, contentment, and overwhelming bliss. This is available to us at any time if we can just learn to enter the undistracted state of one-pointed consciousness. You have just made life a lose-lose situation. If anything reminds you of what bothered you before, you lose. If you are not getting to reexperience what you liked before, you lose. The mind is great; it’s just not supposed to be used for storing all your personal preferences and then thinking the whole world is supposed to match what you stored. All your preferences exist because you stored experiences from the past inside your personal mind. This makes it difficult to live in there, but instead of fixing it, you double down and try to satisfy your preferences. The foundational choice we have in life is either constantly control life to compensate for our blockages or devote our lives to getting rid of our blockages. A wise person realizes that the world is not going to unfold the way they want it to because it’s not supposed to. No two of us agree how it’s supposed to unfold, yet there’s only one world out there… The world in front of you has the power of reality behind it. It is unfolding in accordance to the influences that made it be the way it is, and there are billions of influences going back billions of years. In contrast, you’re just making up how it’s supposed to be based on the impressions you held inside from your past. Suffering is caused by the contrast between what you mentally decided you wanted and the reality unfolding in front of you. To whatever degree they don’t match, you suffer. What’s going on in the heart ends up in the mind as thoughts. The samskaras you stored are trying to release their energy from the heart, and that is causing the mind to get active. The roots of the samskaras are stored in your heart. That is where the patterns you shoved out of your mind went. They did not dissipate. They went down further into the source of your energy flow, which is in your heart… Your mind is telling your heart, “It’s okay, I’ll take care of it.” You’re simply directing your awareness to your mind, so you don’t have to feel the difficult emotions emanating from your heart… The mind becomes a place the soul goes to hide from the heart. As long as the other person’s presence helps your heart open, you feel love for them. If their presence stops opening your heart, you start looking elsewhere. This is why human relationships are so difficult. We project the source of love outside, instead of realizing it is always inside. The heart is a very sophisticated instrument that few people know how to play. If the heart opens, they try to possess the things that helped it open. If the heart closes, they try to protect themselves from the things that caused it to close. If you can point to a reason why your heart is open, be careful - it will change. If you can point to a reason why your heart is closed, don’t worry - it will change. You’re using thoughts to see how different choices will shift the flow of your energy through your blockages. The problem is you have so many conflicting blockages stored in there that what to do is not clear. Of course it’s not clear; you’re consulting your inner mess and expecting a clear response. All the while, you are noticing that thoughts and emotions keep shifting inside. What you pay attention to determines your experiences in life. You should have the right to consciously decide what to pay attention to. Until you learn to back away from the mind, you have no choice; you pay attention to whatever your mind says. Suppression blocks inner energy; unchanneled expression wastes its power. The highest use of the energy is transmutation. You have physical limitations. But inside you have no such limitations because there is no physical aspect to the Self. You are pure consciousness, and your will has complete dominion over mind and emotions. You fall completely in love with the spiritual energy flow. Once you’re being fed by the inner flow, your outer life will be fine. Before you cleared the blockages, you needed the world to be a certain way for you to be okay. This created a struggle with life on a daily basis. When you let go enough to clear the inner energy flow, the struggling ceases. You realize through direct experience that everything you ever wanted is flowing inside you, and the battle will pretty much be over. A spiritual life is not about adhering to a given set of rules - it’s about never acting based on your personal energy. ...more |
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| 1611808685
| 4.36
| 3,572
| Oct 08, 2019
| Oct 13, 2020
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really liked it
| Potent Quotables: We all have tremendous potential and yet we stay closed in a very small, fearful world, based on wanting to avoid the unpleasant, th Potent Quotables: We all have tremendous potential and yet we stay closed in a very small, fearful world, based on wanting to avoid the unpleasant, the painful, the insecure, the unpredictable. There is vast, limitless richness and wonder we could experience if we fully accustomed our nervous systems to the open-ended, uncertain reality of how things are. When we inhale and open ourselves up to our own unwanted feelings and those of others - when we welcome the unwelcome - we discover greater spaciousness in our hearts and minds. We feel relieved to be no longer fighting off each unpleasant experience that arises. When we exhale, we can send this spaciousness and relief to others who are similarly struggling against their feelings. Whatever inner freedom and contentment we’ve gained through our practice of non-rejection we can offer to all other people and living beings that need these qualities just as much as we do. Our neurotic habits and dysfunctional patterns will begin to heal on their own if we just stay present with them instead of indulging or running away. Do your best to come from a place of shared humanity and then experiment by saying something. In that way, we can gradually learn what works and what doesn’t. The more we get the hang of emptiness, the more delight we are open to. As we start to experience things as they really are, beyond labels and imputations, we discover a joyous freedom from our illusions. As we get to know and appreciate the open, groundless state of shunyata (emptiness), we realize it is far more enjoyable than the fictitious “reality” we struggle so hard to maintain and improve. And discovering this leads to our having compassion for all who are engaged in that continual struggle. If we continue to venture out of our comfort zone and increase our tolerance for such feelings, our lives will change. Instead of feeling like we have to wear armor to defend ourselves as we go through our days, it will feel more as if we’re watching a movie. One of the great results of practicing this way is that we feel like we have nothing to lose. You can do the same habitual thing umpteen times, you can even blow it completely, but there’s no end to the number of fresh starts you get. There’s no fixed “you” doomed to stay in the same rut forever. In this way, the death that happens every moment is a great blessing. Although it is embarrassing and painful, it is very healing to stop hiding from yourself. It is healing to know all the ways that you’re sneaky, all the ways that you hide out, criticize people, all the ways that you shut down, deny, close off, all your weird little ways. You can know all that with some sense of humor and kindness. By knowing yourself, you’re coming to know humanness altogether. We are all up against these things. We are all in this together. ...more |
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| 0393652491
| 9780393652499
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| 3.74
| 5,376
| 2019
| Sep 03, 2019
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liked it
| Potent Quotables: When faced with a setback, we should treat it as a test of our resilience and resourcefulness, devised and administered by [God]. His Potent Quotables: When faced with a setback, we should treat it as a test of our resilience and resourcefulness, devised and administered by [God]. His goal in throwing these curveballs our way is to make our days not harder but better. The framing effect: How we mentally characterize a situation has a profound impact on how we respond to it emotionally. We should be flattered if we encounter setbacks. Paradoxically, it is evidence that we have caught the attention of God - indeed, that he regards us as a candidate for achieving human excellence. ...more |
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| 9780679645047
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really liked it
| Notes: + 4 big crises in present culture 1. Loneliness 2. Distrust 3. Meaning 4. Tribalism + Four big commitments over the course of our lives 1. Vocation 2. Notes: + 4 big crises in present culture 1. Loneliness 2. Distrust 3. Meaning 4. Tribalism + Four big commitments over the course of our lives 1. Vocation 2. Spouse and family 3. Philosophy or faith 4. Community + Six layers of desire 1. Material pleasure. Having nice food, a nice car, a nice house. 2. Ego pleasure. Becoming well-known or rich and successful. Winning victories and recognition. 3. Intellectual pleasure. Learning about things. Understanding the world around us. 4. Generativity. The pleasure we get in giving back to others and serving our communities. 5. Fulfilled love. Receiving and giving love. The rapturous union of souls. 6. Transcendence. The feeling we get when living in accordance with some ideal. + 4 barriers to faith 1. Siege mentality: us vs. them 2. Bad listening 3. Invasive care 4. Intellectual mediocrity + Vocab - Acedia: spiritual or mental sloth; apathy. Potent Quotables: On the first mountain, we all have to perform certain life tasks: establish an identity, separate from our parents, cultivate our talents, build a secure ego, and try to make a mark in the world. People climbing that first mountain spend a lot of time thinking about reputation management. They are always keeping score. How do I measure up? Where do I rank? As the psychologist James Hollis puts it, at that stage we have a tendency to think, I am what the world says I am. There is a fundamental ability to care, a yearning to transcend the self and care for others. And when [we] have encountered this yearning, [we] are ready to become a whole person. Seasons of suffering have a way of exposing the deepest parts of ourselves and reminding us that we’re not the people we thought we were. People in the valley have been broken open. They have been reminded that they are not just the parts of themselves that they put on display. There is another layer to them they have been neglecting, a substrate where the dark wounds, and most powerful yearnings live… People who are made larger by suffering go on to stage two small rebellions. First, they rebel against their ego ideal. When they were on their first mountain, their ego had some vision of what it was shooting for—some vision of prominence, pleasure, and success. Down in the valley they lose interest in their ego ideal. Second, they rebel against the mainstream culture… They are not interested in what other people tell them to want. If the first mountain is about building up the ego and defining the self, the second mountain is about shedding the ego and losing the self. If the first mountain is about acquisition, the second mountain is about contribution. If the first mountain is elitist—moving up—the second mountain is egalitarian—planting yourself amid those who need, and walking arm in arm with them… You conquer your first mountain. You identify the summit, and you claw your way toward it. You are conquered by your second mountain. You surrender to some summons… On the first mountain you tend to be ambitious, strategic, and independent. On the second mountain you tend to be relational, intimate, and relentless. When a whole society is built around self-preoccupation, its members become separated from one another, divided and alienated. And that is what has happened to us. We are down in the valley. The rot we see in our politics is caused by a rot in our moral and cultural foundations—in the way we relate to one another, in the way we see ourselves as separable from one another, in the individualistic values that have become the water in which we swim. Joy tends to involve some transcendence of self. It’s when the skin barrier between you and some other person or entity fades away and you feel fused together. A life of commitment means saying a thousand noes for the sake of a few precious yeses. When you’re living in diversion you’re not actually deeply interested in things; you’re just bored at a more frenetic pace. Political freedom is great. But personal, social, and emotional freedom—when it becomes an ultimate end—absolutely sucks. It leads to a random, busy life with no discernible direction, no firm foundation. “Character” is no longer a moral quality oriented around love, service, and care, but a set of workplace traits organized around grit, productivity, and self-discipline. The meritocracy defines “community” as a mass of talented individuals competing with one another. People generally go through a familiar process before they can acknowledge how comprehensive their problem is. First, they deny that there’s something wrong with their life. Then they intensify their efforts to follow the old failing plan. Then they try to treat themselves with some new thrill: They have an affair, drink more, or start doing drugs. Only when all this fails do they admit that they need to change the way they think about life. This is a telos crisis. A telos crisis is defined by the fact that people in it don’t know what their purpose is. Reciprocity is gone, and people feel detached from their neighbors and disgusted by the institutions of public life. Tribalism is community for lonely narcissists. Many bad things happen in life, and it’s a mistake to try to sentimentalize these moments away by saying that they must be happening to serve some higher good. But sometimes, when suffering can be connected to a larger narrative of change and redemption, we can suffer our way to wisdom. This is the kind of wisdom you can’t learn from books; you have to experience it yourself. Sometimes you experience your first taste of nobility in the way you respond to suffering. After seasons of suffering, we see that the desires of the ego are very small desires, and certainly not the ones we should organize our lives around. Suffering that is not transformed is transmitted. Real listening, whether to others or yourself, involves that unexpected extra round of questions, stretching the asking beyond what feels natural. Socrates said that the purpose of life is the perfection of our souls—to realize the goodness that the soul longs for. Everyone I’ve ever met wants to lead a good and meaningful life. People feel bereft when they don’t experience purpose and meaning in their lives. Even criminals and sociopaths come up with rationalizations to explain why the bad things they did were good or at least excusable because nobody can live with the idea that they are thoroughly bad. If the heart yearns for fusion with another person or a cause, the soul yearns for righteousness, for fusion with the good. The things we had thought were most important—achievement, affirmation, intelligence—are actually less important, and the things we had undervalued—heart and soul—are actually most important. Individualism says, Shoot for personal happiness, but the person on the second mountain says, No, I shoot for meaning and moral joy. That individualism says, Celebrate independence, but the second-mountain hero says, I will celebrate interdependence. The most complete definition of a commitment is this: falling in love with something and then building a structure of behavior around it for those moments when love falters. You have to chain yourself to a certain set of virtuous habits so you don’t become slave to your destructive desires—the desire for alcohol, the desire for approval, the desire to lie in bed all day. As the theologian Tim Keller puts it, real freedom “is not so much the absence of restrictions as finding the right ones.” The concept of altruism was invented only in the eighteenth century. Once people decided that human nature is essentially egoist and selfish, then it was necessary to invent a word for when people weren’t driven by selfish desires. But before that, what we call altruism—living for relationships—was just how people lived. It wasn’t heroic or special. Truth without love is harshness. Love without truth is sentimentality. The career questions—What do I want from life? What can I do to make myself happy?—are not the proper questions. The real question is, What is life asking of me? The summons to vocation is a very holy thing. It feels mystical, like a call from deep to deep. But then the messy way it happens in actual lives doesn’t feel holy at all; just confusing and screwed up. The way to discover what you were put on earth for is to go back into your past, list the times you felt most fulfilled, and then see if you can draw a line through them. We think we want ease and comfort, and of course we do from time to time, but there is something inside us that longs for some calling that requires dedication and sacrifice. For many, the big choices in life often aren’t really choices; they are quicksand. You just sink into the place you happen to be standing. “Intuition” is a fancy word for pattern recognition. It can be trusted only in domains in which you have a lot of experience, in which the mind has time to master the various patterns. But when you are making a transformational choice, you are leaping into an unknown territory. You don’t know the patterns there. Intuition can’t tell you. It’s just guessing. Apply the 10-10-10 rule. How will this decision feel in 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years? That will help you put the short-term emotional pain of any decision in the context of long-term consequences. Interest multiplies talent and is in most cases more important than talent. Ultimately, people become strangers to their own desires. José Ortega y Gasset believed that most people devote themselves to avoiding that genuine self, to silencing the daemon and refusing to hear it. We bury the faint crackling of our inner fire underneath other, safer noises, and settle for a false life. “If two spouses each say, ‘I’m going to treat my self-centeredness as the main problem in the marriage,’ you have the prospect of a truly great marriage.” Timothy and Kathy Keller Sometimes the disagreements are deep and moral or philosophical. But some of the most troublesome ones can be superficial but devastating. Sometimes it is time (he’s prompt, she’s late), or money (she’s thrifty, he’s profligate), or neatness (she’s neat, he’s sloppy), or sex (he likes it every day, she likes it every week), or communication (he’s a bottler, she’s a spiller), but it’s going to surface. Society is a massive conspiracy to distract you from the important choices of life in order to help you fixate on the unimportant ones. We are social animals, and a lot of our thinking is in pursuit of bonding, not truth seeking. The hard part of intellectual life is separating what is true from what will get you liked. Be watchful over what you love, because you become what you desire. Ultimately joy is found not in satisfying your desires but in changing your desires so you have the best desires. [This is the] inverse logic of faith: The broken heart is the healed heart. The contrite spirit is the rejoicing spirit. The repenting soul is the victorious soul. Life in my death. Joy in my sorrow. Grace in my sin. Riches in my poverty. Glory in my valley. God is not a big guy in the sky with a beard but a caring moral presence that pervades all reality, a flowing love that gives life its warmth, existence its meaning. By the lake, I had the sensation that life is not just a random collection of molecules that happen to have come together in space. Our lives play out within a certain moral order. God really does tailor himself to you. For those of us with a sense of not belonging, of being sojourners, He gives membership, acceptance and participation. There’s a worldly story to follow, as people move closer or further from their worldly ambitions. But there’s also a sacred story to follow, as souls move closer or further from their home, which is God. Thomas Merton once wrote that “trying to solve the problem of God is like trying to see your own eyeballs.” God is what you see and feel with and through. Commitment to faith, then, is persistence in faith through doubt; it is persistence in faith through suffering and anxiety; it is persistence in faith through struggle and persistence in faith through all the idiots and immoral cretins who speak for faith. It is persistence in faith despite the occasional idiocy of the synagogues, mosques, or churches that are supposed to be the homes of faith. God doesn’t seem to want the elimination of the will; He seems to want the training and transformation of it. He doesn’t want a lack of will, but a merger between the will of the person and the will of God. Adult life is about making promises to others and being faithful to those promises. The beautiful life is found in the mutual giving of unconditional gifts. Division is healed not mostly by solving the bad, but by overwhelming the bad with the good. If you can maximize the number of good interactions between people, then the disagreements will rest in a bed of loving care, and the bad will have a tendency to take care of itself. When trust is restored, the heartbeat relaxes, people are joyful together. Joy is found on the far side of sacrificial service. It is found in giving yourself away. ...more |
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Mar 06, 2022
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| Nov 30, 2021
| Feb 14, 2022
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really liked it
| Notes: + Connection is the energy that exists between people when they feel seen, heard, and valued; when they can give and receive without judgment; a Notes: + Connection is the energy that exists between people when they feel seen, heard, and valued; when they can give and receive without judgment; and when they derive sustenance and strength from the relationship. 1. Developing grounded confidence 2. Practicing the courage to walk alongside 3. Practicing story stewardship + We cannot accurately recognize emotions in other people; we have to ask them what they are feeling and believe them Potent Quotables: Like it or not, I’m probably going to check the lanes next to me. But what I do next is up to me. If you want to know what’s likely to trigger shame for you, just fill in this sentence stem: It’s really important for me not to be perceived as ______ . “You are afraid to surrender because you don’t want to lose control. But you never had control; all you had was anxiety.” Elizabeth Gilbert Your lack of work is not making me resentful, my lack of rest is making me resentful… Now when I start to feel resentful, instead of thinking, “what is that person doing wrong,” I think “what do I need but am too afraid to ask for?” “Boredom is your imagination calling to you.” Sherry Turkle “The paradox is one of our most valuable spiritual possessions… only the paradox comes anywhere near to comprehending the fullness of life.” Carl Jung Perfectionism is self-destructive simply because there is no such thing as perfection. Perfection is an unattainable goal. Additionally, perfectionism is more about perception - we want to be perceived as perfect. Again, this is unattainable - there is no way to control perception, regardless of how much time and energy we spend trying. True belonging doesn’t require us to change who we are; it requires us to be who we are. Self-security is the “open and nonjudgmental acceptance of one’s own weaknesses.” Alice Huang and Howard Berenbaum “To grow into adulthood for a social species, including humans, is not to become autonomous and solitary, it’s to become the one on whom others can depend. Whether we know it or not, our brain and biology have been shaped to favor this outcome.” John Cacioppo Of course we’re a social species. That’s why connection matters. It’s why shame is so painful and debilitating. It’s why we’re wired for belonging. Loneliness tells us that we need social connection - something as critical to our wellbeing as food and water. “Denying you feel lonely makes no more sense than denying you feel hungry.” John Cacioppo The brokenhearted are the bravest among us - they dared to love. Anger is a catalyst. Holding on to it will make us exhausted and sick. Internalizing anger will take away our joy and spirit; externalizing anger will make us less effective in our attempts to create change and forge connection. It’s an emotion that we need to transform into something life-giving: courage, love, change, compassion, justice. “Help is the sunny side of control.” Anne Lamott The issues most of us struggle with are being the knower, advice-giving, and problem-solving. Problem-solving is tough because some people do want help. The best story stewardship in these moments is just to say, “I’m grateful that you’re sharing this with me. What does support look like? I can listen and be with you, I can help problem-solve, or whatever else you need. You tell me.” ...more |
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Mar 06, 2022
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| 0310362563
| 9780310362562
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| 3.97
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| Oct 05, 2021
| Oct 05, 2021
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really liked it
| Potent Quotables: [paraphrase]: Don't be a dictator or a doormat, get creative. Unsatisfying sex may not be the problem; far more often, it’s the sympto Potent Quotables: [paraphrase]: Don't be a dictator or a doormat, get creative. Unsatisfying sex may not be the problem; far more often, it’s the symptom. “When wives push away their husbands, what amazes me is how much the wives are missing out. How do you not want to have that release? It feels so good, you sleep better and the way it brings you closer to your husband that night and the very next day - well I suspect they’re just not having an orgasm, because I don’t know why a woman would turn that down.” Survey respondent If you find yourself regularly experiencing pain during sex, facing an ongoing lack of sexual desire, or coping with an inability to reach orgasm, there are often both physiological and psychological issues that need to be understood and addressed. He can be more and do more as a sexually satisfied man. Sex within marriage… allows a man to have more energy, more zest for life, more engagement, more zeal to serve God and to succeed in his vocation. “Being sexually desired means I’m accepted and appreciated and that someone wants me. The way my brain works, if my wife doesn’t want me sexually, then she doesn’t want me period. That makes me feel alone and rejected.” Survey respondent When she began to identify and then take ownership of her own negative beliefs about sex, she found that her desire for sex increased. Every time can’t be the best. If I can’t live with the ordinary, I’ll drive myself crazy. It’s hard to appreciate what is when you’re constantly comparing what is with what could be. For those of you who are married to men with a higher libido, the quantity of sexual activity has the potential to create either long-term gratitude or slow simmering resentment… Your husband has 2.5 times more brain space devoted to sex drive than you do… I once asked God to tamp down my desires, as if the desires themselves were the problem. I now think that prayer was sick, rather than healthy. I was looking at my sex drive and hormones, which God created, through the lens of the fall, as if they’d been engineered by satan for my downfall. But satan didn’t create my body, my sex hormones, or the influence my sex drive has on my brain - God did… My sex drive was God’s way of keeping me aware of my wife’s relational needs. The fact that our brains have so much more space devoted to sex drive motivates us men to pursue our wives on all levels, with loyalty, empathy, and love. God’s design is for men to be so sexually vulnerable to their wives that they don’t neglect them in other aspects of the relationship. There are legitimate moments when physically or emotionally you just can’t get there, but if these moments last for weeks instead of days, or become too common, we hope you will seek professional care, medically or psychologically, to deal with the underlying issue. In general, “not tonight, honey” is much easier to handle in the context of a caring relationship where such a response isn’t the norm. For many men, quantity is quality. Learn how to say no as an act of foreplay instead of as a rejection. Sex is just as much for women as it is for me… Sex is God’s gift to you at the end or beginning of a long, demanding day, as a way to fill you with pleasure, connection, and emotional intimacy. Not only that, but the chemicals that are released in your body during sex help you fight off negative emotions and offer significant benefits to your physical body as well. We get pleasure from our spouse’s pleasure, so when they focus on their own pleasure, they’re pleasuring us. When we make love to our wives, we get a huge hit of oxytocin. When the oxytocin is released, our wives become more attractive to us while other women become less attractive in comparison. At a banquet, nobody’s plate looks exactly the same. Learn what your spouse likes and enjoy the buffet that God has created you to enjoy. When you walk out of the oasis of En Gedi [sex], the desert will still be there, but you’ll be stronger and ready to face it anew. It’s not too big of a deal for a young husband to get a little bit of an erection and have to wait. He won’t explode, and if he’s spiritually healthy, he can spend his day thinking about how to please his wife instead of turning to pornography. Most theologians agree that, because of Jesus, we no longer follow the Levitical mandates that were set for the Israelites. We use them as lessons and principles that remind us of our unclean state because of sin, and ultimately point us to our need for a savior. So if you think it’s no longer a sin to wear linen and wool together, you have to see the reference to a woman’s menstrual period in the same light. In a survey of more than 1,000 married people, the majority of couples reported engaging in 0 to 30 minutes per week of quality conversation with their spouse. I assure you that there is absolutely no way healthy relationships are happening in the context of 0 to 30 minutes of communication per week. No matter how small or significant the unexpressed need may be, you’re responsible for being an active participant in sharing your needs and desires. Don’t mistake passivity for selflessness by keeping things to yourself. Instead, take a step toward your spouse by gently and graciously sharing what’s on your heart and mind. The truth, spoken in love, has the potential to bring profound healing to a relationship. If her husband is healthy, he’s enjoying the journey as much as she is. If he’s not healthy, learning to serve her sexually is making him healthier, so she shouldn’t get in God’s way of growing her husband by pretending she’s done when she’s not. Besides, trying to force herself to respond more quickly is certain to delay her satisfaction even further. Physiologically, the female body and brain can experience sustained and heightened sexual pleasure far more than a male can… Men require more recovery time. God designed wives' bodies in such a way that their pleasure can be greater for a longer period of time, and more frequently, than is true for their husbands. ...more |
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| Jan 01, 2009
| Apr 22, 2014
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really liked it
| Notes: + What is kaizen? - Using very small steps to improve a habit, a process, or product - Using very small moments to inspire new products and invent Notes: + What is kaizen? - Using very small steps to improve a habit, a process, or product - Using very small moments to inspire new products and inventions + Categories of kaizen 1. Asking small questions to dispel fear and inspire creativity - By asking small, gentle questions, we keep the fight-or-flight response in the “off” position. Kaizen questions such as “What’s the smallest step I can take to be more efficient?” or “What can I do in five minutes a day to reduce my credit-card debt?” or “How could I find one source of information about adult education classes in my city?” allow us to bypass our fears. - The mere act of posing the same question on a regular basis and waiting patiently for an answer mobilizes the cortex. - Ex: Assuming that your ideal man shares your interests, where would you like to meet him? - Ex: If I were guaranteed not to fail, what would I be doing differently? - Ex: Is there a person at work or in my personal life whose voice and input I haven’t heard in a long time? What small question could I ask this person? - Ex: Every day, ask yourself: What’s one good thing about this person? 2. Thinking small thoughts to develop new skills and habits—without moving a muscle - Decide how many seconds you’re willing to devote to mind sculpture for this task each day. Make sure you allot seconds, not minutes or hours; the time commitment should be so low that you can easily fulfill its requirements every single day… Increase the length and pace only when the previous stage of mind sculpture has become effortless. If you start making excuses for not practicing mind sculpture, or if you find yourself forgetting to do it, then you need to cut back on the amount of time. - Ask yourself: What is a tiny step I could make to achieve my goal? Let the question stew for a few days or weeks. When you have an answer, you can use mind sculpture to imagine yourself taking that step. - Ex: For people with recurring nightmares: I ask them to relive the dream, but with a happy ending. Dozens of my clients have used this technique, and for each one the nightmare or flashback has vanished within a matter of days. - Ex: What small, trivial step could you take that might improve the quality of your health? 3. Taking small actions that guarantee success solving small problems, even when you’re faced with an overwhelming crisis - Your first actions will be very small ones—so small that you might find them odd or even silly. That’s okay. It’s helpful to have a sense of humor when you’re trying to change your life. - This gradual buildup to a steady program is the exact opposite of the usual pattern, in which a person starts off with a burst of activity for a few weeks, but then returns to a comfortable spot on the couch. - Sometimes, despite your best planning, you’ll hit a wall of resistance. Don’t give up! Instead, try scaling back the size of your steps. Remember that your goal is to bypass fear—and to make the steps so small that you can barely notice an effort. - You’ll know that the step is small enough if you are as certain you can do it as you are that the sun will come up tomorrow… If you ever feel yourself dreading the activity or making excuses for not performing it, it’s time to cut back on the size of the step… You’ll know you’re ready for the next step when your current step becomes automatic, effortless, and even pleasurable. - Ex: Toss out the first bite of one fattening snack. - Ex: Save just one dollar per day. 4. Bestowing small rewards to yourself or others to produce the best results - The larger the external rewards, the greater the risk of inhibiting or stunting the native drive for excellence. - When you’re implementing a plan for change but find yourself bored, restless, and stuck, look around for hidden moments of delight. - Ex: Spend a minute or two each day writing a kind note to tuck into a loved one’s briefcase or a child’s lunchbox. 5. Recognizing the small but crucial moments that everyone else ignores - We are so accustomed to living with minor annoyances that it’s not always easy to identify them, let alone make corrections. But these annoyances have a way of acquiring mass and eventually blocking your path to change. By training yourself to spot and solve small problems, you can avoid undergoing much more painful remedies later. - “Confront the difficult while it is still easy; accomplish the great task by a series of small acts.” Tao Te Ching + Kaizen vs. innovation (radical and sudden change) - “I applaud innovation as a way to make changes . . . when it works. Turning our lives around on a dime can be a source of confidence and self-respect. But I have observed that many people are crippled by the belief that innovation is the only way to change.” - The small steps of kaizen and the giant leaps of innovation are not mutually exclusive; used together, they become a formidable weapon against even the most profound, complex, and apparently unsolvable problems. When people are up against a thorny problem they’ve been unable to resolve, I generally advise them to focus on kaizen first. Once they understand small steps, they find that they’ve developed an intuitive sense for when innovation is appropriate and how to mix the two. + Tidbits of trivia - A Mayo Clinic study revealed that going to the gym for an hour a day did not reduce the risks associated with sitting for six or more hours a day… The solution to the health risks posed by excessive sitting is not huge and unmanageable—i.e., a full hour at the gym each day—but rather small and doable: getting up from the desk every hour or so. - One of the most solid predictors of success in life is whether a person turns to another human for support in times of trouble or fear. Potent Quotables: The small steps of kaizen disarm the brain’s fear response, stimulating rational thought and creative play… Small actions (say, writing just three notes) satisfy your brain’s need to do something and soothe its distress. As the alarms die down, you’ll renew access to the cortex and get some of your creative juices flowing again. Many remarkable people preferred the word fear to stress or anxiety… Adults, I believe, assume that if they are living correctly, they can control the events around them. When fear does appear, it seems all wrong—so adults prefer to call it by the names for psychiatric disease. Fear becomes a disorder, something to put in a box with a tidy label of “stress” or “anxiety.” People who struggle with kaizen do so not because the steps are hard but because they are easy. They can’t overcome the cultural training that says change must always be instantaneous, it must always require steely self-discipline, and it must never be pleasurable. Kaizen asks us to be patient. It asks us to have faith that with small steps, we can better overcome the mind’s initial resistance to change. We do not have control of the timetable for our change—just as we cannot pinpoint the moment we achieved a goal such as learning to drive or ski or play the guitar. We simply have to trust that the mind will develop mastery and obey the instructions we are sending it. Isn’t slow change better than what I’ve experienced before, which is no change at all? Ask yourself: Do I need to learn to change anything based on this worry or regret of mine? If the answer is yes, then take a step toward that change. If the answer is no (and often it is), scan the room for an object or person that gives you the strongest sense of pleasure. Focus your thoughts on this item for thirty seconds. This process trains your brain to live in the moment. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Feb 10, 2022
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Feb 14, 2022
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Feb 10, 2022
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Kindle Edition
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| B0073M85XW
| 4.17
| 1,981
| Jan 23, 2012
| Jan 23, 2012
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really liked it
| Potent Quotables: The Creator himself is not spared from the assault of creation’s sorrow. Life without the full spectrum of human emotions is empty and Potent Quotables: The Creator himself is not spared from the assault of creation’s sorrow. Life without the full spectrum of human emotions is empty and dull. God made us to feel. But we are a generation scared to feel deeply. In spite of the massive cultural push to reduce anxiety and depression down to pure medical issues, nothing more than improper levels of serotonin, we all know emotional pain is not random… Another way to view depression is as a symptom. Something is wrong with your body, soul, spirit, brain, life, patterns, etc… If depression is a symptom, that changes everything. You are not a victim. If anything, you are the perpetrator of the crime. Don’t feel sorry for yourself. Don’t question God. Question yourself. Depression, like pain, can be a gift. Doctors tell us to listen to our bodies. The same is true of our souls. Slow down. Stop. Listen. Maybe God is telling you that something is not right. Some piece of your soul is out of rhythm, out of sync with God’s Spirit. Somewhere you got off track and are not living the way of Jesus. Confession and prayer are far more effective than Aspirin and caffeine in dealing with achy bones, tired bodies, and guilty souls. Here’s the stark reality: one of the primary causes of depression is sin, but it’s not always your sin [referring to abuse perpetrated on us by others]. That’s why the gospel is good news. Jesus promises to forgive and punish sin. All sin. For the repentant, sin was punished on the cross. You are forgiven. But for the unrepentant, sin will be punished when Jesus returns and judges humanity. Either way, justice will be done. Humans have no rights. Everything is a gift. Food, shelter, the clothes on our backs, the oxygen in our lungs—it’s all grace. The entire planet, the sky above us and the ground beneath our feet, is all on loan from the Creator God. We live under his roof, eat his food, and drink his water. We are guests. And we are blessed. Repentance is the path to life. It’s so easy to forget that God wants us joyful! The way of Jesus is the best possible way to live! Obedience is not a somber, heavy, religious duty. Obedience is like a mouthful of crisp, clean water or Alpine air. The way of Jesus is refreshing. In the scriptures, angels are always male. And the most common response from humans to an angelic visit is sheer terror. Most angel stories start off with the angel saying something like, “Do not fear…” That’s because they are actually terrifying in real life. One of the reasons there are so many bitter, disenfranchised people who are angry at the church is because of bad theology. It’s really, really important to separate your theology of the kingdom from the church. These are two separate, autonomous entities. Yes, there is overlap and the lines blur and bleed, but they are two different ideas… Most people erase or ignore the theology of the kingdom. In doing so, they pin all their hopes and dreams on the church. These unrealistic expectations are way too much to bear for the frail shoulders of God’s bride. She was never designed to bear the weight of changing the world, much less perfection. I hear people say things like, “The church is God’s plan to save the world.” No, it’s not. Jesus is God’s plan to save the world. He is bringing his kingdom crashing into this present age, and he is saving the world. “No man can have God as his father who does not have the church as his mother.” Cyprian Before my struggles, I read the Bible because I should. Now, I read the scriptures because I am dying to connect with the Living God and hear the Voice speak over me. When you get to a place of intimacy with God, prayer becomes as natural as breathing. Lots of people honestly believe that what’s going to happen is going to happen, with or without prayer. That kind of a twisted, lazy theology is what sucks the life out of people’s prayers. To pray in Jesus’ name is to pray in alignment with his heart, to pray in harmony with his desires and hopes and plans, to make requests you know are in line with God’s will. We are always asking the question, “How can I get out of this?” To be honest, we are asking the wrong question. The right query is, “What can I get out of this? The goal must be discipleship, not happiness. It’s not bad to want to be happy—that’s human. But we need to pursue something greater than our own happiness. We need to pursue Jesus. ...more |
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Feb 08, 2022
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Feb 10, 2022
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| 0824520645
| 9780824520649
| B011H5ISKA
| 4.24
| 14,351
| 1992
| Nov 01, 2014
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it was amazing
| I’m going to copy and paste my remark from the first Nouwen book I read, Spiritual Formation [https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...], because I fee I’m going to copy and paste my remark from the first Nouwen book I read, Spiritual Formation [https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...], because I feel the exact same way about this book, too: “The entire time I was reading this book I felt an abiding sense of peace. From this I conclude that Henri Nouwen must have been a spiritual giant filled with the love of God.” Potent Quotables: The greatest gift my friendship can give to you is the gift of your Belovedness. I can give that gift only insofar as I have claimed it for myself. Isn’t that what friendship is all about: giving to each other the gift of our Belovedness? When we have come to believe in the voices that call us worthless and unlovable, then success, popularity, and power are easily perceived as attractive solutions. The real trap, however, is self-rejection. Neurosis is often the psychic manifestation of a much deeper human darkness: the darkness of not feeling truly welcome in human existence. Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the “Beloved.” Being the Beloved expresses the core truth of our existence. To be chosen as the Beloved of God is something radically different. Instead of excluding others, it includes others. Instead of rejecting others as less valuable, it accepts others in their own uniqueness. It is not a competitive, but a compassionate choice. To give a blessing is to affirm, to say “yes” to a person’s Belovedness. And more than that: To give a blessing creates the reality of which it speaks. When we are thrown up and down by the little waves on the surface of our existence, we become easy victims of our manipulative world, but, when we continue to hear the deep gentle voice that blesses us, we can walk through life with a stable sense of well-being and true belonging. My own experience with anguish has been that facing it and living it through is the way to healing. But I cannot do that on my own. I need someone to keep me standing in it, to assure me that there is peace beyond the anguish, life beyond death, and love beyond fear. As mortal people, brokenness is a reality of our existence, and as we befriend it and place it under the blessing, we will discover how much we have to give—much more than we may ever have dreamed. Don’t you think that our desire to eat together is an expression of our even deeper desire to be food for one another? Don’t we sometimes say: “That was a very nurturing conversation. That was a refreshing time”? I think that our deepest human desire is to give ourselves to each other as a source of physical, emotional, and spiritual growth. The greatest gift I have to offer is my own joy of living, my own inner peace, my own silence and solitude, my own sense of well-being. We may be little, insignificant servants in the eyes of a world motivated by efficiency, control, and success. But when we realize that God has chosen us from all eternity, sent us into the world as the blessed ones, handed us over to suffering, can’t we, then, also trust that our little lives will multiply themselves and be able to fulfill the needs of countless people? This might sound pompous and self-aggrandizing, but, in truth, the trust in one’s fruitfulness emerges from a humble spirit. How different would our life be if we could but believe that every little act of faithfulness, every gesture of love, every word of forgiveness, every little bit of joy and peace will multiply and multiply as long as there are people to receive it… and that—even then—there will be leftovers! You and I would dance for joy were we to know truly that we, little people, are chosen, blessed, and broken to become the bread that will multiply itself in the giving. You and I would no longer fear death, but live toward it as the culmination of our desire to make all of ourselves a gift for others. There is stimulation, excitement, movement, and a lot to see, hear, taste, and enjoy. The world is evil only when you become its slave. I believe deeply that all the good things our world has to offer are yours to enjoy. But you can enjoy them truly only when you can acknowledge them as affirmations of the truth that you are the Beloved of God. That truth will set you free to receive the beauty of nature and culture in gratitude, as a sign of your Belovedness. That truth will allow you to receive the gifts you receive from your society and celebrate life. But that truth will also allow you to let go of what distracts you, confuses you, and puts in jeopardy the life of the Spirit within you. Eternal life is not some great surprise that comes unannounced at the end of our existence in time; it is, rather, the full revelation of what we have been and have lived all along. Nouwen believed that what is most personal is most universal. He wrote, “By giving words to these intimate experiences I can make my life available to others.” ...more |
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| 4.15
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it was amazing
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Apr 18, 2024
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Apr 18, 2024
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| 4.36
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it was amazing
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Apr 24, 2024
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Oct 30, 2023
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| 4.44
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it was amazing
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Oct 14, 2023
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Oct 16, 2023
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| 4.20
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really liked it
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May 08, 2024
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Oct 09, 2023
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| 4.20
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Jun 15, 2023
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Jun 15, 2023
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| 4.44
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really liked it
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Mar 04, 2023
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Feb 06, 2023
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| 4.34
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it was amazing
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Aug 25, 2022
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Aug 22, 2022
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| 4.15
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it was amazing
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Aug 22, 2022
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| 4.51
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it was amazing
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Oct 27, 2022
Aug 19, 2022
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| 4.64
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it was amazing
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Jul 09, 2022
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Jun 29, 2022
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| 3.97
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really liked it
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Jun 02, 2022
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Jun 06, 2022
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| 4.45
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really liked it
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May 16, 2022
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May 20, 2022
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| 4.36
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really liked it
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Apr 18, 2022
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Apr 03, 2022
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| 3.74
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liked it
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Mar 28, 2022
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Mar 31, 2022
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| 3.76
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really liked it
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Mar 13, 2022
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Mar 06, 2022
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| 4.32
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really liked it
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Apr 17, 2022
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Mar 06, 2022
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| 3.97
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really liked it
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Mar 06, 2022
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Mar 06, 2022
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| 4.01
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really liked it
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Feb 14, 2022
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Feb 10, 2022
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| 4.17
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really liked it
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Feb 08, 2022
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Feb 10, 2022
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| 4.24
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it was amazing
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Feb 03, 2022
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Feb 03, 2022
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