25 March 2024         

   

Hello, and welcome to our first issue of this spring!  The Vernal Equinox has passed,
and we're now in the season of rebirth and renewal, of longer days and warmer air.
And for those of you in the southern hemisphere, enjoy your autumn and
the journey towards your winter months!

    

   

   

You Have to Be Strong Enough to Be Weak
an excerpt
Jon Kabat-Zinn

Mystery (an excerpt)
Rachel Naomi Remen

Not What They Seem
tom walsh

   

   

     
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Simple and Profound Thoughts
(from Simple and Profound)

People travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things.

Willa Cather

How many cares one loses when one decides
not to be something but to be someone.

Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel

It is important from time to time to slow down, to go away by yourself, and simply be.    -Eileen Caddy

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.    -Anaïs Nin

   

  
You Have to Be Strong Enough to Be Weak
an excerpt
Jon Kabat-Zinn

If you are a strong-willed and accomplished person, you may often give the impression that you are invulnerable to feeling inadequate or insecure or hurt.  This can be very isolating and ultimately cause you and others great pain.  Other people will be all too happy to take in that impression and to collude in propagating it by projecting a Rock of Gibraltar persona onto you which doesn't allow you to have any real feelings.  In fact, you can all too easily get out of touch with your own true feelings behind the intoxicating shield of image and aura.  This isolation happens a lot to fathers in the nuclear family and to people in positions of relative power everywhere.

Thinking of yourself as getting stronger through the meditation practice [or similar practices] can create a similar dilemma.  You can start believing in and acting out the part of the supremely invulnerable, correct meditator--one who has everything under control and is wise enough to deal with everything without being caught up in reactive emotions.  In the process, you can cleverly arrest your own development without even knowing it.  We all have an emotional life.  We wall ourselves off from it at our own peril.

So, when you notice yourself building up an image of invincibility, or strength, or special knowledge, or wisdom based on your experiences, thinking perhaps that you're getting somewhere in your practice, and you start talking a lot about your area of expertise in a way that is self-promotional and inflationary, it's a good idea to bring mindfulness to that mind-set and ask yourself whether you are running from your vulnerability, or perhaps from grief you may be carrying, or from fear of some sort.

If you are truly strong, there is little need to emphasize it to yourself or to others.  Best to take another tack entirely and direct your attention where you fear most to look.  You can do this by allowing yourself to feel, even to cry, to not have to have opinions about everything, to not appear invincible or unfeeling to others, but instead to be in touch with and appropriately open about your feelings.  What looks like weakness is actually where your strength lies.  And what looks like strength is often weakness, an attempt to cover up fear; this is an act or a facade, however convincing it might appear to others or even to yourself.

TRY:  Recognizing the ways in which you meet obstacles with harshness.  Experiment with being soft when your impulse is to be hard, generous when your impulse is to be withholding, open when your impulse is to close up or shut down emotionally.  When there is grief or sadness, try letting it be here.  Allow yourself to feel whatever you are feeling.

Notice any labels you attach to crying or feeling vulnerable.  Let go of the labels.  Just feel what you are feeling, all the while cultivating moment-to-moment awareness, riding the waves of "up" and "down," "good" and "bad," "weak" and "strong," until you see that they are all inadequate to fully describe your experience.  Be with the experience itself.  Trust in your deepest strength of all:  to be present, to be wakeful.

more on strength

   

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Mystery
an excerpt
Rachel Naomi Remen

The first time I heard the word Mystery I did not understand what it meant.  As an avid reader of mystery stories, I had the idea that something is a mystery only because its solution has not yet been found.  But mystery is different from Mystery.  By its very nature Mystery cannot be solved, can never be known.  It can only be lived.

We have not been raised to cultivate a sense of Mystery.  We may even se the unknown as an insult to our competence, a personal failing.  Seen this way, the unknown becomes a challenge to action.  But Mystery does not require action; Mystery requires our attention.  Mystery requires that we listen and become open.  When we meet with the unknown in this way, we can be touched by a wisdom that can transform our lives.

Mystery has great power.  In the many years I have worked with people with cancer, I have seen Mystery comfort people when nothing else can comfort them and offer hope when nothing else offers hope.  I have seen Mystery heal fear that is otherwise unhealable.  For years I have watched people in their confrontation with the unknown recover awe, wonder, joy, and aliveness.  They have remembered that life is holy, and they have reminded me as well.  In losing our sense of Mystery, we have become a nation of burned-out people.  People who wonder do not burn out.

Everything and everyone has a dimension of the unknown.  Mystery helps us to see ourselves and others from the largest possible perspective, as a unique and possibly endless process that may go on over lifetimes.  To be living is to be unfinished.  Nothing and no one is complete.  The world and everything in it is alive.

A sense of Mystery can take us beyond disappointment and judgment to a place of expectancy.  It opens in us an attitude of listening and respect.  If everyone has in them the dimension of the unknown, possibility is present at all times.  Wisdom is possible at all times.  The Mystery in anyone may speak to them and heal them in the grocery store.  It may speak to us and heal us too.  Knowing this enables us to listen to life from the place in us that is Mystery also.  Mystery requires that we relinquish an endless search for answers and become willing to not understand.  That we be open to witness.  Those who witness life may eventually know far more than anyone can understand.

Perhaps real wisdom lies in not seeking answers at all.  Any answer we find will not be true for long.  An answer is a place where we can fall asleep as life moves past us to its next question.  After all these years I have begun to wonder if the secret of living well is not in having all the answers but in pursuing unanswerable questions in good company.
  

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Everyday happiness means getting up in the morning,
and you can't wait to finish your breakfast.
You can't wait to do your exercises.
You can't wait to put on your clothes.
You can't wait to get out--
and you can't wait to come home, because the soup is hot.

George Burns

   

 

Not What They Seem

My wife and I were driving on a highway a couple of weeks ago when something interesting happened.  It was a two-lane highway, and it wasn't divided.  We ended up behind a truck that was moving rather slowly, so I was looking for an opportunity to pass it when I could.  Eventually, we ended up with a broken yellow line and no oncoming traffic, so I turned on my blinker and started moving into the other lane to pass.  Then something interesting happened--the truck moved halfway into the lane I was now in and blocked us from passing.  Of course, our original reaction was "What the heck is he doing?"

But a quarter of a mile later, it became clear that even though there had been a broken yellow line, that was not a safe place for passing.  We reached a spot where a third lane was painted in the middle of the road for a turn at an intersection, and while at that particular moment there were no other vehicles present, the potential for disaster was pretty great.  Also, the truck that we wanted to pass took a right turn there, so there was no real need to pass him at all.  What had looked like simply a rude driving tactic was actually the trucker's way of letting us know that we probably shouldn't have been passing there.

   

Great Spirit, help me never to judge another
until I have walked in his moccasins for two weeks.

Sioux Indian Prayer

   
It would have been very easy to get upset at the driver and feel angry.  After all, he prevented us from doing something that we wanted--and felt we needed--to do.  But when we held of just a bit in making a judgment about his action, we found out that our judgment would have been entirely inappropriate and quite simply wrong.

As a teacher, I find myself on the receiving end of such judgments pretty regularly, especially as far as grades are concerned.  While I would love to give everyone high grades, it simply makes no sense at all--if I know that a particular student really doesn't know the material that he or she is supposed to know, then there's no way I can pass that student on to the next level.  The grade that I assign is based on what I've seen of the student's knowledge and/or ability, yet I get judged as being unfair or even mean for assigning a low grade.  To the students, it seems as though I'm being unfair; my effort, though, is to be accurate and completely fair.

How often are we truly aware of the motives behind another person's actions or words?  How often do we judge another person as being rude or inconsiderate, when the truth is that the person is nervous or afraid?  Perhaps the other person didn't seem like he or she wanted to talk with us because that person is painfully shy, and isn't very good at social situations.
    

Whoever undertakes to set him or herself up as a judge of Truth
and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.

Albert Einstein

    
It's important that we not jump to conclusions if we want our lives to be happier and less stressful, especially if those conclusions are negative.  It doesn't help us a bit as human beings to feel anger or frustration at someone else, and it's even less helpful if those feelings are misplaced.  Since we can't really see into another person's heart, it's impossible for us to know what's going on in there, and as soon as we deign to judge another, we're showing a very simple lack of respect and we're putting ourselves onto a pedestal that we don't belong on.

Sometimes, though, we do need to be very careful and trust our instincts.  On the other side of this coin lies the fact that sometimes, it's important that we approach something in just the opposite way.  These are the times when someone is trying to manipulate us by being kind to us, to get something out of us by misrepresenting him- or herself.  While jumping to conclusions and accusing the person of something like lying is still inappropriate if there's no actual evidence of lying, we should be very careful and take plenty of time to make up our minds after searching out the evidence we need to either confirm or refute a person's words.

In these cases, too, things often aren't what they seem.  The person who's telling you how much money you'll earn if you'll just invest two hundred dollars is not telling you the whole truth, no matter how much you want to believe him or her.  The child with an elaborate explanation of how something got broken may be trying to get you to believe that it wasn't his or her fault, and is hoping that you'll believe the explanation rather than simple, straightforward evidence.

The man in the truck seemed to be doing something very negative when he cut me off and didn't allow me to pass, yet his action turned out to be a positive one; the person who's after your money is presenting a very pretty picture that soon will become very bleak if we take the story at face value.
   

It is very unfair to judge any body’s conduct, without
an intimate knowledge of their situation.

Jane Austen

   
We need to avoid jumping to judgments.  They can stress us out for no reason at all, or they can raise our hopes to incredibly high levels before we get let down with a huge crash.  We need to pay careful attention to the evidence that every situation offers us, and not limit ourselves to our emotional reactions, which are very often mistaken.  Of course, life isn't all black and white, and evidence can be misleading, but if we examine it carefully we can see when the evidence doesn't seem to add up to what it should add up to.

If we're not jumping to judgment, then we're making our own lives better, but we're also contributing something very important to the lives of others.  I affect someone a great deal if I turn around and say "What a rude person you are," but if I take the moment necessary to find out that the person made an honest and simple mistake, I show patience, love, and compassion.  And those are much better things to share with our fellow human beings than anger and stress and judgment.

   
More on judgment.

   
   

   

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For the rest of that day my mind was occupied with thoughts of simple pleasures. Those things which we often overlook or deny ourselves:  reading a good book, taking a walk by ourselves, holding hands, watching the summer sky for falling stars, writing a letter to a friend, stopping to enjoy a sunset, taking in the smells after a rainstorm, cuddling by the fire, watching birds play in the morning sun.

T.W. Winslow

  
I Believe
Brian Tracy

I believe every person has within themselves inexhaustible reserves of potential they have never even come close to realizing.

I believe each person has far more intelligence than they have ever used.

I believe each person is more creative than he or she has ever imagined.

I believe the greatest achievements of your life lie ahead of you.

I believe the happiest moments of your life are yet to come.

I believe the greatest successes you will ever attain are still waiting for you on the road ahead.

And, I believe through learning and application of what you learn, you can solve any problem, overcome any obstacle and achieve any goal that you can set for yourself.
   

  

Life is short and we never have enough time for gladdening the hearts
of those who travel the way with us.  O, be swift to love!
Make haste to be kind.

Henri Frédéric Amiel

    

  
  

Yes, life can be mysterious and confusing--but there's much of life that's actually rather dependable and reliable.  Some principles apply to life in so many different contexts that they can truly be called universal--and learning what they are and how to approach them and use them can teach us some of the most important lessons that we've ever learned.
My doctorate is in Teaching and Learning.  I use it a lot when I teach at school, but I also do my best to apply what I've learned to the life I'm living, and to observe how others live their lives.  What makes them happy or unhappy, stressed or peaceful, selfish or generous, compassionate or arrogant?  In this book, I've done my best to pass on to you what I've learned from people in my life, writers whose works I've read, and stories that I've heard.  Perhaps these principles can be a positive part of your life, too!
Universal Principles of Living Life Fully.  Awareness of these principles can explain a lot and take much of the frustration out of the lives we lead.