Self-Care

Acceptance, Beauty, Core Value, Joy, Life, Love 0

When we are caring for ourselves, we discover that there is actually plenty of time and energy to care for others and the world too. It is not negatively “selfish” to care for yourself brilliantly and exquisitely. In fact, as you fill your own well from the inside and tend to yourself with great love, it will naturally and effortlessly “spill over” for others to appreciate and utilize.

When you see someone who radiantly glows from within, you are seeing a self-caring soul. This kind of self-care is a living example to be inspired by, so that you can live that way also.

— SARK, Glad No Matter What, p. 56

Colorful and Exciting

Beauty, Creativity, God, Joy, Life 0

What if we believe in a benevolent and expansive force? What if we consider the idea that our dreams come from God and that God has the power to accomplish them? What if our “grandiose” schemes are actually God’s will for us? What if God’s will is expansive and colorful and exciting? What if turning our will and our life over to God is an invitation to adventure and not to drudgery? What if God is for us and not against us?

For most of us, it is radical to consider the idea of a God that is actually on our side. We hope, at best, for a God who will turn a blind eye to our strivings and not nip them in the bud. We tend to think that if we call God’s attention to our adventures and agendas, God will disapprove. We think of God as a spoilsport, a wet blanket. We ignore the evidence of the natural world that plainly shows us an exuberant intelligence committed to diversity.

— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 137

Wholehearted Revolution

Acceptance, Beauty, Core Value, Joy, Letting Go, Life 0

Despite where this book will be shelved in your local bookstore, I’m not at all sure that this work is about self-help. I think of it as an invitation to join a Wholehearted revolution. A small, quiet, grassroots movement that starts with each of us saying, “My story matters because I matter.” A movement where we can take to the streets with our messy, imperfect, wild, stretch-marked, wonderful, heartbreaking, grace-filled, and joyful lives. A movement fueled by the freedom that comes when we stop pretending that everything is okay when it isn’t. A call that rises up from our bellies when we find the courage to celebrate those intensely joyful moments even though we’ve convinced ourselves that savoring happiness is inviting disaster.

Revolution might sound a little dramatic, but in this world, choosing authenticity and worthiness is an absolute act of resistance. Choosing to live and love with our whole hearts is an act of defiance. You’re going to confuse, piss off, and terrify lots of people — including yourself. One minute you’ll pray that the transformation stops, and the next minute you’ll pray that it never ends. You’ll also wonder how you can feel so brave and so afraid at the same time. At least that’s how I feel most of the time . . . brave, afraid, and very, very alive.

— Brene Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection, p. 126

Dance in Our DNA

Beauty, Children, Joy 0

There’s no question that some people are more musically inclined or coordinated than others, but I’m starting to believe that dance is in our DNA. Not super-hip and cool dancing, or line dancing, or Dancing with the Stars dancing — but a strong pull toward rhythm and movement. You can see this desire to move in children. Until we teach our children that they need to be concerned with how they look and with what other people think, they dance. They even dance naked. Not always gracefully or with the beat, but always with joy and pleasure.

— Brene Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection, p. 120

God’s Colorful Will

Beauty, God, Guidance, Joy, Life 0

“Thy will be done” is not the mantra of a joyless life. We are not signing up for a life that boils down to one long tour of duty. “Thy will be done” has more color in it than that. God’s will has a great deal of color in it. Looking at the natural world, this diversity and color should not surprise us — and yet it does. Our idea of God is shockingly drab and colorless. We act as if The Creator has only a few colors on his emotional palette and that they fall into the sensible range — dull grays, browns, maybe olive drabs.

What if God is more colorful than that? What if we look at the natural world and begin to consider the actual power and diversity of what we are dealing with. What if we begin to see that “Thy will be done” is an expansive and not a constrictive concept, what if we start to realize that God’s will for us is that we get larger, not smaller?

— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 136

Discover Joy

Beauty, Gratitude, Joy 0

I know there is poor and hideous suffering, and I’ve seen the hungry and the guns that go to war. I have lived pain, and my life can tell: I only deepen the wound of the world when I neglect to give thanks for early light dappled through leaves and the heavy perfume of wild roses in early July and the song of crickets on humid nights and the rivers that run and the stars that rise and the rain that falls and all the good things that a good God gives. Why would the world need more anger, more outrage? How does it save the world to reject unabashed joy when it is joy that saves us? Rejecting joy to stand in solidarity with the suffering doesn’t rescue the suffering. The converse does. The brave who focus on all things good and all things beautiful and all things true, even in the small, who give thanks for it and discover joy even in the here and now, they are the change agents who bring fullest Light to all the world. When we lay the soil of our hard lives open to the rain of grace and let joy penetrate our cracked and dry places, let joy soak into our broken skin and deep crevices, life grows. How can this not be the best thing for the world? For us? The clouds open when we mouth thanks.

— Ann Voskamp, One Thousand Gifts, p. 58

Caring for Ourselves

Beauty, Growth, Joy, Love 0

When we are caring for ourselves, we discover that there is actually plenty of time and energy to care for others and the world too. It is not negatively “selfish” to care for yourself brilliantly and exquisitely. In fact, as you fill your own well from the inside and tend to your self with great love, it will naturally and effortlessly “spill over” for others to appreciate and utilize.

When you see someone who radiantly glows from within, you are seeing a self-caring soul. This kind of self-care is a living example to be inspired by, so that you can live that way also.

— SARK, Glad No Matter What, p. 56

Spirals and Layers

Acceptance, Beauty, Growth, Healing, Life, Trials, Waiting 0

I’ve seen and experienced over and over that grief and loss are ALWAYS

Doorways to Transformation.

My experiences with both have showed me that we can more actively work with time as we process grief and loss, instead of just waiting for time to pass. We really can consciously practice integrating loss and grief and living with them more fully and beautifully.

I know now that this healing happens in spirals and layers and NOT in steps like a ladder.

We cycle back around and start over, get stuck in the middle, and sometimes get to what feels like the end quickly.

We can weave all these experiences together into an eventual elegant tapestry. I’ve been speaking with lots of people about the subjects of loss and grief, and it’s clear that in every case, whatever has been lost — job, savings, home, health, money, life — has tremendous gifts and opportunities to offer

IF

We do our transformational work.

— SARK, Glad No Matter What: Transforming Loss and Change Into Gift and Opportunity, p. 19-20

Better For It

Beauty, Growth, Healing, Trials 0

We can choose to ascribe meaning to what happened to us, even after the fact. We do that by taking pride in the people we have become. You have gained new skills out of your hardship. You know things about yourself now that you would never have known if you had not been put to the test. And it is not unusual, in my experience, for the skills and confidence forged in the fire of trauma to become the things about ourselves that give us the most pride.

You would not have chosen to get better and smarter and stronger in this way. But this thing happened to you — and you are better and smarter and stronger for it.

— Alicia Salzer, Back to Life, p. 30

Possibilities and Limits

Beauty, Books, Life 0

We read books to widen and to deepen our own repertoire, because the performances of others (including fictive others) shed light on our own possibilities and limits. About those possibilities and limits — the self taking form, the figure achieving shape, the shape finally dissolving — we are otherwise, as I’ve said, strangely in the dark, since our education in school seems oddly outward-directed and generic in nature, anonymous even, unattuned to the outgoing private voyage we are making every minute. (The dazed look of students around the globe confirms this: whatever is happening in the classroom, whatever the subject, is distinctly not-me.) In the dark also because of natural incarceration, we are all landlocked creatures, stuck in particular minds and bodies, marooned in our specific time and place; and no matter how much information may come our way by dint of the electronic revolution that puts the world seemingly at our fingertips, only a click away, the austere fact of life is that we live and die within our own shell, doomed to our own perceptual equipment. Our eye can gauge much, but it cannot take the measure of “I.”

Literature is the great bridge that enables us to exit our precincts, that enables other places and other lives to come to us, asking us to “try it on,” “try it out.” Facts, statistics, theorems, and discursive argument address only our reasoning powers. Art operates differently; it is a beckoning mirror. It is, in the poet Baudelaire’s terms, an invitation au voyage. Put differently, literature grows us, and I am especially drawn to the unfurling organic processes in play here: not just the evolution of “characters” but our own move through time and — no less central — our move into the mirror, into the precious virtuality of art. . . . Only the work of art treats us to that richer, pulsating, lived experience of what it might feel like to be there, to have been there, whether coming or going or both.

Art is our second life.

— Arnold Weinstein, Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life’s Stages Through Books, p. 7-8