- What if we raised a generation so that they learned to be “conflict literate?”
- What if we students in business, management, law, and even medicine learned how to turn conflict from a liability into an asset?
- What if all of us at diverse faith-based schools taught about other systems of belief?
- What if we created in every community a public space designed for dialogue?
- What if we developed news media that were a laboratory for negotiation and dialogue?
- What if those of us in education learned and applied the tools of the Mediator?
- What if we voters supported political candidates who ran campaigns that strengthened communities rather than dividing them to get the most votes?
- What if we encouraged the U.S. Congress and other national legislatures to have an Office of Facilitation?
Spirituality
The quality of your life depends on the seeds you water.
Your mind is like a piece of land planted with many different kinds of seeds: seeds of joy, peace, mindfulness, understanding, and love; seeds of craving, anger, fear, hate, and forgetfulness. These wholesome and unwholesome seeds are always there, sleeping in the soil of your mind. The quality of your life depends on the seeds you water.
Whatever Transformative Experience , Questions emerge often clamoring for Attention
“We are like a chick, afraid to break through
the ever-so-thin shell of the
already outgrown and painfully confining egg.”
Whatever Transformative Experience , Questions emerge often clamoring for Attention:
Who am I beyond the functions I’ve served?
Where have my past habits of body and mind, enacted throughout the decades of my life, led me in terms of peace and happiness?
Who am I when the habits of a lifetime are stripped away?
Who am I beyond the persona I’ve presented to the world and to myself? Who am I, bare?
What really matters at this point in my life?
Letting Go – Guided Meditation
The Art of Transforming Suffering
Releasing the Arrow
by Thich Nhat Hanh from No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering
There is a Buddhist teaching found in the Sallatha Sutta, known as The Arrow. It says if an arrow hits you, you will feel pain in that part of your body where the arrow hit; and then if a second arrow comes and strikes exactly at the same spot, the pain will not be only double, it will become at least ten times more intense.
The unwelcome things that sometimes happen in life—being rejected, losing a valuable object, failing a test, getting injured in an accident—are analogous to the first arrow. They cause some pain. The second arrow, fired by our own selves, is our reaction, our storyline, and our anxiety. All these things magnify the suffering. Many times, the ultimate disaster we’re ruminating upon hasn’t even happened. We may worry, for example, that we have cancer and that we’re going to die soon. We don’t know, and our fear of the unknown makes the pain grow even bigger.
The second arrow may take the form of judgment (“how could I have been so stupid?”), fear (“what if the pain doesn’t go away?”), or anger (“I hate that I’m in pain. I don’t deserve this!”). We can quickly conjure up a hell realm of negativity in our minds that multiplies the stress of the actual event, by ten times or even more. Part of the art of suffering well is learning not to magnify our pain by getting carried away in fear, anger, and despair. We build and maintain our energy reserves to handle the big sufferings; the little sufferings we can let go.
The path to well-being is the path out of ill-being…..
Living our life fully and deeply requires courage. If we cannot be happy, right here and right now, we need to ask ourselves why. If we’re having difficulty touching peace and the wonders of the cosmos in our daily life, there must be something getting in the way. We need to find out what it is. What’s weighing us down or pulling us away from the present moment? Continue reading
Achieving Higher Frequency in Energy
WE NOW ASK YOU TO SEE BEFORE YOU A LADDER. AND it is a wooden ladder and it is very, very straight. And you stand at the base of the ladder and you look up and you cannot see the top of the ladder because it goes so high into the clouds. And we ask you now to place your hands on the rungs of the ladder. And you feel them in your hands as wood, as smooth, as solid, and as supporting you clearly and capably in their firmness. And you put one hand above the other and you begin to rise up the ladder, one rung at a time. And as you do, your frequency begins to lift and you begin to move higher and higher in frequency as you rise up on this ladder in energy.
Thought of the Week – 16th December 2019
Light Reveals
Lord Acton has said: “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” No, that is not right. Power never corrupts, it only brings corruption out. How can power corrupt?
The Latifa is an ancient Sufi prayer meant to connect us with the essence of our being
I exist
I desire
I hope
I believe and I trust
I let go and Just be
I love and give my heart a chance to speak
I am prepared.
ONE TUSK 