The Highest Vibration in the Universe

Healing, Joy, Life, Love, Trials 0

Dogs and cats can love you. Nature can love you. Music that sounds like you’ve heard it your whole life can love you. Art can love you. Beauty can love you. Whenever you deliver yourself to the experiences, sights, and sounds that make you feel loved, your experience will change. Your problems won’t be instantly solved, but in the arms of love, they will start to feel different. You will feel different. Instead of being in the foreground, your difficulties will recede into the background and your experience of your catastrophe will be transformed. That’s because Love is the highest vibration in the universe, and when you can feel it for even a nanosecond, everything else in your life will fall into its proper — and lesser — place.

Of course, we don’t want love just in the abstract and in general. We want it to be personal and particular. That is, we want to feel and share love with real people in our lives. As you’re going through this extremely difficult time, therefore, lean on the people who love you. Run, walk, or hopscotch, take a train, a plane, or a bus, to the people who can give you some love. They are your family, your friends, your neighbors and colleagues. Sometimes they’re even strangers. Whoever they are, you’ll know them by how they make you feel. With them, you feel happy and whole. They are the people who recognize your spirit, who touch your sensivity, who nourish and enliven your body, who make you laugh, who “speak your language,” who share your interests, who ask how you’re doing, who call to see if you got the job, won the case, could get the car fixed for less than six thousand dollars.

They are the ones who will say the words that will carry you through.

— Daphne Rose Kingma, The Ten Things to Do When Your Life Falls Apart, p. 175-176

A Great Gift

Forgiveness, Joy 0

Perhaps forgiveness is really a confluence of these things. It is a growing empathy for the shared humanity of the offender, a growing understanding that the decision itself will also release us, and a growing enlightenment as to the power and need of forgiveness in the world and in our hearts.

Like any gift, forgiveness can bring joy to both the giver and the receiver, and the one who gives pays the highest price. But perhaps the extreme costliness of this particular gift imbues forgiveness, of all human actions, with the greatest potential to image forth the divine.

— Catherine Claire Larson, As We Forgive: Stories of Reconciliation from Rwanda, p. 92

Shine

Core Value, Growth, Joy 0

Step out into the cool night air. Look at the stars. See how they shine. Know that it is okay for you to shine, too.

Who told you you had to hold back? Who told you your gifts, your talents, your beauty — your natural, beautiful, loving, delightful self — was wrong? Who told you not to be all you could be? Maybe, as some suggest, we’ve gotten too comfortable focusing on our flaws, our errors, our dark side. Perhaps it’s not our dark side we fear. Perhaps we’re really afraid of our gifts, our brilliance, our light.

Now is a time of light. It’s a time for us to shine. We’ve worked hard on ourselves, dealt with our issues, gone back to the past. We’ve learned our lessons well. The reasons to hold back and hide away are no longer there. Enjoy the fruits of your labors.

Be all you can be, and enjoy being that. Don’t hold back. Use your gifts with joy. Use your talents. Let your light shine for all the world to see.

— Melody Beattie, Journey to the Heart, p. 227

Whether to be Bitter

Forgiveness, Growth, Healing, Humor, Joy, Life 0

There is a time in our lives, usually in mid-life, when a woman has to make a decision — possibly the most important decision of her future life — and that is, whether to be bitter or not. Women often come to this in their late thirties or early forties. They are at the point where they are full up to their ears with everything and they’ve “had it” and “the last straw has broken the camel’s back” and they’re “pissed off and pooped out.” Their dreams of their twenties may be lying in a crumple. There may be broken hearts, broken marriages, broken promises.

A body who has lived a long time accumulates debris. It cannot be avoided. But if a woman will return to the instinctual nature instead of sinking into bitterness, she will be revivified, reborn. Wolf pups are born each year. Usually they are these little mewling, sleepy-eyed, dark-furred creatures covered in dirt and straw, but they are immediately awake, playful, and loving, wanting to be close and comforted. They want to play, want to grow. The woman who returns to the instinctual and creative nature will come back to life. She will want to play. She will still want to grow, both wide and deep. But first, there has to be a cleansing.

— Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD, Women Who Run With the Wolves, p. 394-395

Being Happy

Growth, Joy, Life 0

When you can recognize the feeling of happiness when it’s there, you will realize that this feeling is what you have been looking for all along. The feeling isn’t leading somewhere else — it’s the goal, not the means to a goal. If the bride-to-be understands that her happiness comes first from within, she can make the decision to marry or not to marry from a place of wisdom, not from a place of lack. If she is already happy, the marriage will also be happy. If the couple then decides to have children, the children will grow up in a happy environment without the pressure of being someone’s source of happiness. The same will be true throughout the life of any happy person. Happiness breeds a happy existence and a joyous way of looking at life….

Happiness is right now. Your life is not a dress rehearsal for some later date — it is right here, right now. The invisible quality of happiness we have all been looking for is right here in a feeling.

— Richard Carlson, PhD, You Can Be Happy No Matter What, p. 127, 129

Happiness and Desire

Growth, Joy 0

Sometimes you might feel a moment or two of happiness right after getting something you want. Contrary to popular opinion, however, this is not because your desire was fulfilled, but because you took your attention off what you didn’t have. The moment you switch gears and return your focus of attention to something else you want, or don’t have, you will lose your sense of well-being and feel discontent. Your mind will again begin searching for something outside itself to gain satisfaction — perpetuating the cycle of unhappiness.

If obtaining a desire — any desire — could be the cause of a feeling of happiness, we would all be happy already. But remember the countless times you have received what you wanted, yet didn’t remain happy. I am not speaking of avoiding goals or desires. Happiness must come first. Anything that develops out of this happiness is wonderful, but fulfilled desire alone does not create happiness.

— Richard Carlson, PhD, You Can Be Happy No Matter What, p. 124

Contentment

Gratitude, Joy, Life 0

The secret of contentment, as I’ve come at last to know, is not in getting what I want. It’s not about being in the perfect place or having just the right sort of life. Contentment and grace may just be two sides of the same coin. And they are both mine whenever I remember to stop, look around, and appreciate where I already am and what I already have.

— Katrina Kenison, The Gift of an Ordinary Day, p. 269

Lower Your Tolerance to Stress

Joy, Life, Peace, Trials 0

Surprisingly, the solution to stress is to begin to lower our tolerance to stress. This is the opposite of what most of us have been taught, but it is the truth. Lowering our tolerance to stress is based on the simple principle that our level of internal stress will always be exactly equal to our current tolerance. This is why people who can handle lots of stress always have to do just that.

People with extremely high levels of stress tolerance might end up with a stress-related heart attack before they begin to pay attention to what the stress is telling them. Others may end their marriage or find themselves in a recovery center for alcohol or drugs. People with lower tolerance might begin paying attention to their stress earlier, when their job first begins to seem overwhelming or when they find themselves snapping at their children. Still others, who can’t tolerate stress at all, sense that it’s time to slow down and regain perspective when they start merely having negative thoughts about their friends or family.

The lower our tolerance is for stress, the better off we are psychologically. When our goal is to feel our stress as early as possible, we can “nip stress in the bud” earlier, and return more quickly to a positive feeling state. We have choices; in fact, we have a series of “choice points,” in any situation. The longer we wait to disregard the stressful thoughts, the more difficult it becomes to bring ourselves back to our natural state of mind. Eventually, with practice, any of us can get to the point where we are aware of our negative thoughts before they pull us off track.

— Richard Carlson, PhD, You Can Be Happy No Matter What, p. 105