Good
day, and welcome to today! We're well past the
halfway point of the year,
and life keeps on keeping on. We hope that
you're truly enjoying the year that
you're living through, and that you're able to make
extraordinary the last half!
About thirty years ago, I was enjoying a silent
retreat in the hermitage at our Sweet Potato Community in
northern France, in a forest called la Foret d'Othe.
I liked sitting and walking in the woods. One very
beautiful day, I decided to spend the whole day in the
woods, so I brought along a bowl of rice, some sesame
seeds, a bottle of water, and off I went. I planned
to stay out the whole day, but around three in the
afternoon, black clouds began to gather in the sky.
Before leaving the hermitage that morning, I had opened
the door and all the windows so the sunshine and fresh air
could come in. But soon the wind began to blow hard,
and I knew I had to go back and take care of the
hermitage.
On arriving home, I found the hermitage in a terrible
state of disarray. Strong gusts of wind had strewn
the papers from my desk all over the place. It felt
miserably cold and dark. The very first thing I did
was close the door and all the windows so the wind
couldn't continue to wreak havoc. Then I made a fire
in the fireplace and, as the fire started to come alive, I
began to collect all the sheets of paper from the floor,
gathered them on the table, placed a little brick on top,
and tried to make the hermitage tidy and in order.
Soon the fire had made everything warm, pleasant, and
cozy. I sat down by the fire, toasted my fingers,
and enjoyed listening to the wind and the rain outside.
There are
days when you feel it's just not your day, and that
everything is going wrong. The more you try, the
worse the situation becomes. Everyone has days like
that. That's when it's time to stop everything, go
home, and to take refuge in yourself. The first
thing to do is to close the doors and windows. The
eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and mind are the six
windows you close when everything feels like a mess.
Our six sense are windows to the mind. Close
everything in order to prevent the strong wind from
blowing in and making you miserable.
Shut the windows, shut the door, and make a fire.
Create a feeing of warmth, coziness, and comfort by
practicing mindful breathing. Rearrange
everything--your feelings, your perceptions, your
emotions--they're all scattered everywhere; it's a mess
inside. Recognize and embrace each emotion.
Collect them the way I collected all the sheets of paper
that were scattered all over the hermitage. Practice
mindfulness and concentration, and tidy up everything
within yourself. This will help you restore your
calm and peace.
If we only rely on external conditions, we will get
lost. We need a refuge we can always rely on, and
that is the island of self. Firmly established on
our inner island, we're very safe. We can take time
to recover and restore ourselves, and become stronger,
until we're ready to go out again and engage.
Even if you are very young, you can find that island
within yourself. Every time you suffer badly, and
nothing seems to be going right, stop everything and go to
that island right away. Take refuge in your inner
island for as long as you need. It may be five, ten,
fifteen minutes, or half an hour. You will feel
stronger and much better within.
I
was searching, I was looking for meaning
I was wandering, desperately trying
Only to see I have nothing missing
Who said, who said I have to find who I am?
Who said, who said that I am lost to begin with?
I am already enough, everything I need is within me
Each morning when I wake up
I'm grateful for the beauty around me
Life is a gift; I want to enjoy it
Always proving my worth only destroys it
I am already enough, everything I need is within me
My motivation can't be validation
I'd always be starving for more affection
the wrong attention
Only to feel like I am nothing
Who said, who said I have to find who I am?
Who said, who said that I am lost to begin with?
I am already enough, everything I need is within me
Each morning when I wake up
I'm grateful for the beauty around me
Life is a gift; I want to enjoy it
Always proving my worth only destroys it
I am already enough, everything I need is within me
I have nothing to find and everything to feel
Only I can define what is meaningful to me
Even when I am feeling so breakable
I tell myself to believe I am valuable
I am already enough, everything I need is within me
Each morning when I wake up
I'm grateful for the beauty around me
Life is a gift; I want to enjoy it
Always proving my worth only destroys it
I am already enough, everything I need is within me
We
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It's
intrinsic. It is part of your nature. I'm speaking
about your desire to want to improve, to want to do better.
Vocational theorists and psychological research tell us that
people want to do their bests in tasks that are meaningful to
them. Use your own experience to validate this point.
For example, if
you love to play golf, I'm sure you do not need a pro to tell you
to play your best, although you will want the pro to tell you how
to play your best. If you love to cook, I'm sure you try to
make the dish as tasty as possible, although you may need a recipe
book and a few cooking lessons to satisfy your taste buds.
The problem is
that, for many of us, our desire to improve is stifled by the
criticisms we receive. Why? Because most of the
criticisms we receive (or give) place a strong emphasis on the
negatives (if you have a negative appraisal of criticism).
The criticized behavior is usually defined as irrevocable.
The recipient is told what he did, thus placing the action in the
past; any chance of change for the better is precluded.
Since there seems to be little chance for improvement, the
recipient, in order to protect his self-esteem, defends his
actions rather than looking for ways to improve. The
criticism loses its positive power.
Furthermore, whether
or not one feels that people lack an inherent wish to improve, the
fact remains that a constant barrage of negative criticism will
undermine any recipient's confidence, making it difficult for her
to believe she can do the job.
Interest is diminished.
Many educators and much educational research testify to the point
that negative criticism (emphasizing the negatives) given to a
child in a particular subject will not only turn her off to that
specific subject but will also turn her off to trying to master
and explore other areas.
Similarly, the
sales manager who, after observing three presentations of the new
sales recruit, only emphasizes the negatives of each of her
presentations, is doing a good job of convincing the new recruit
that she is in the wrong line of work. Her apathy will soon
become apparent and, of course, will draw more negative criticism
from her manager. This is a bit ironic considering the fact
that the history of criticism tells us that one of criticism's
most important functions is to help one improve.
Do you--and those
you work with--emphasize the negatives when it comes to
criticism? Just think about the last three times you were
the giver or the taker of criticism. If you find that the
negatives are continually emphasized, then you can help yourself,
those you work with, and your organization become more productive
by making your criticisms improvement-oriented.
Making criticism
improvement-oriented creates the mental set of using criticism as
a teaching and educational tool. The task becomes to figure
out, "How can she do it better? How can I help her
improve?" You begin to formulate specific ways in which
you can help the recipient. You become solution-oriented.
One way to make
criticism improvement-oriented is to move the criticism forward,
into the future. Emphasize what the recipient is doing or
can do, not what he did. Instead of telling your new
recruit, "You did a poor job in presenting the data,"
which is sure to prompt recipient defensiveness, try, "In
your next presentation, use better overheads to show the
data. It will help clarify your points."
The latter
improvement-oriented criticism not only offers a helpful action to
take but focuses on the fact that your new recruit is going to get
another chance; you communicate the confidence- building message,
"I trust you to succeed."
Change becomes
possible because you stress how the recipient can do it better
next time. And this lets the recipient feel secure in
knowing she will get another chance. She can also feel
confident because her critic believes she has the ability to do
the job. With this in mind, your trainee can begin to focus
her energy on improving her future performance rather than on
defending past results. Criticism becomes a put-up instead
of a put-down.
Living
Life Fully, the e-zine
exists to try to provide for visitors of the world wide web a
place
of growth, peace, inspiration, and encouragement. Our
articles
are presented as thoughts of the authors--by no means do
we
mean to present them as ways that anyone has to live
life. Take
from them what you will, and disagree with
whatever you disagree
with--just know that they'll be here for you
each week.
Matthew Fox
We must work on our souls, enlarging
and expanding them. We do
so by experiencing all of life--the beauty and the joy as well as
the grief and
pain. Soul work requires paying attention to life,
to the laughter and the sorrow,
the enlightening and the
frightening,
the inspiring and the silly.
Sometimes
It's Best to Take a Nap
Sometimes
things just pile up on me. All sorts of
different tasks need to be done, some for work, some
for family, some for maintaining the house or other
property, some for the community I live in, and some
just because. Generally speaking, I'm pretty
good at maintaining a balance so that I'm able to
take care of the tasks when they come up--sometimes
even in an order that makes sense and that doesn't
cause me more work! There are those times,
though, when I'm not ready for certain tasks, when I
feel overwhelmed by all that's piling up and I'm not
able to figure out a logical way to approach all
that's laying there before me, waiting to be done.
Sometimes, the best thing that I can do in such a
situation is to lay down on the couch and take a
nap. Naps are wonderful for me--they help me
to re-energize, to re-focus, and to relax.
Often, if I continue to struggle with things that
are difficult, that struggle gets very negative and
things get even more stressful for me. In
those times, I often feel a sense of urgency, a
sense that things have to be taken care of well, and
they have to be taken care of now. That
urgency, though, only adds to the stress--and it's
usually pretty inaccurate. It's an urgency
that I've assigned to the task or the problem or the
job, not one that is necessarily true. I may
need to get something done, but I do have time to do
so.
So if I have three hours to get something done, it
could be that forging ahead and working on it
without stopping is the best. Or it could be
that taking a nap for 30 minutes or so is going to
clear my mind and refresh me so that I can do a much
better job on the task at hand.
I always tell my students in my writing classes that
if they're going to spend five hours on a paper,
they shouldn't just wear themselves out by working
five hours straight. Instead, it makes sense
to work for two hours and then take a nice break for
half an hour or so to let their brains settle and to
gather their thoughts so that they can apply them to
the paper, and then to get back to writing.
Our brains and our bodies both need breaks now and
then, and it makes sense to break up major tasks
into chunks sometimes.
Of course, if I have a deadline three hours from
now, I'm not going to spend the next hour sleeping
(unless I really, really need sleep!). If I'm
working on the yard and I want to finish the job
today, a nap may not be in order. Sometimes it
is better to keep working on a task until it's
done. But I find that most people never even
consider taking a break, for whatever reason, and
they burn themselves out and end up with a mediocre
product because of their lack of breaks. I
think that the most important thing that we can do,
though, is similar to many other situations:
when we find ourselves working very hard, it's
important that we at least entertain the notion
of taking a nap or taking a significant break from
our work.
A nap isn't a sin. In fact, it may be the most
important ten, twenty, or thirty minutes of our
day. Those few minutes can help us to improve
almost everything that we do during the rest of the
day. And if we can't nap, it's important that
we at least entertain the notion of taking a
short walk, reading a short passage from a book that
uplifts us, or even watching a short video that can
help our brains to calm down, slow down, and clear
themselves out.
What I've learned in life is that it's important
that we take a break regularly from what is keeping
us busy, stressed, and worried. I've learned
this from watching many, many people who refuse to
take breaks or who refuse to take naps who are
constantly stressed and constantly busy, but who
don't even do all that good of a job at what they
do, even though they think that by running
themselves ragged, they're doing great work.
But work doesn't work that way. Our best work
requires us to be ready to work, ready to face
challenges, ready to overcome obstacles, and we are
not in our best state for doing so when we're not
rested and relaxed.
Some corporations even allow people to take short
naps while on the job, and it's a practice that has
found quite a bit of success in many places.
So think about it; entertain the notion.
Perhaps now is a good time for a nap--unless you're
at work, of course--or something similar. When
we allow ourselves to calm down and relax, our work
naturally improves, and we feel much better about it
and about ourselves. Working ourselves to
death or to extreme anxiety isn't good for anyone,
and we need to take care of ourselves if we're to
contribute well to the world and the people in
it. I've learned that sometimes a nap is the
best thing that we can do when faced with a bunch of
choices, for it allows me to approach my work and my
relationships and my challenges with more equanimity
and a great sense of perspective.
If
I had a formula for bypassing
trouble, I would not pass it round.
Trouble creates a capacity to handle
it. I don't embrace trouble; that's
as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say meet it as a friend, for
you'll see a lot of it and had better
be on speaking terms with it.
Oliver
Wendell Holmes
I have a friend, a chemotherapy
nurse in a children's cancer ward, whose job it is to pry
for any available vein in an often emaciated arm to give
infusions of chemicals that sometimes last as long as
twelve hours and which are often quite discomforting to
the child. He is probably the greatest pain-giver
the children meet in their stay at the hospital.
Because he has worked so much with his own pain, his heart
is very open. He works with his responsibilities in
the hospital as a "laying on of hands with love and
acceptance." There is little in him that causes
him to withdraw, that reinforces the painfulness of the
experience for the children. He is a warm, open
space which encourages them to trust whatever they
feel. And it is he whom the children most often ask
for at the time they are dying. Although he is the
main pain-giver, he is also the main love-giver.
unattributed
Every thought
which enters the mind, every word we
utter, every deed we perform,
makes
its impression
upon the inmost fiber of our being and the result of
these
impressions
is our character. The study of
books, of music, or of
the fine arts is not essential
to a lofty character. It rests with
the worker whether
a rude piece of marble shall be squared into a
horse-block
or carved into an Apollo, a Psyche, or a Venus di Milo. It is yours, if you choose, to develop
a spiritual form
more beautiful
than any of these, instinct with
immortal life,
refulgent with all the
glory of character.
True strength
does not magnify others' weaknesses. It makes others
stronger.
If someone's strength makes others feel weaker, it
is merely
domination, and that is no strength at all.
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.
Explore all of our
quotations pages--these links will take you to the first page of each
topic, and those pages will contain links to any additional pages on
the same topic (there are five pages on adversity, for example).
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