Renewed Vitality

Faith, Growth, Joy, Life 0

Faith is attractive. Far from having the joyless, resigned quality that we may fear from it, faith brings to the believer a renewed vitality, a sense of camaraderie and adventure. Seen through the eyes of faith, the world is a safe place. Life is a great unfolding adventure. Strangers are friends that we have not yet met. Optimism prevails. Seen through the eyes of faith, there is nothing to fear in this world. When challenges arise, we will have the inner strength to meet them. Walking through the valley of shadows, we will have the confidence in our God’s benevolent protection. We will not, perhaps, be shielded from all harm, but we will be given the wherewithal to meet any adversity.

— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 47

God’s Agenda

God, Growth, Letting Go, Life, Trials, Waiting 0

It is one of the ironies of the spiritual life that so much can be seen in retrospect as having been designed in our own best interest. When something finally does come to pass, it is often all we can do to manage it. “Why, if this had happened any sooner, I wouldn’t have been ready,” we catch ourselves thinking. “I needed every instant of preparation for this that I have had.” Many times we ask God for help with securing a certain agenda, then rage because God does not cooperate, only to have God’s agenda revealed later as far better.

It is in seeking to cooperate with God’s agenda for our life that we come to some sense of peace. Is it too much to think that God has an agenda for each of us? I don’t think so. Again, a look at the natural world tells us of the exquisite particularity of God’s care. The daffodil is given just what it needs to grow and we are asked only to cooperate. We must be willing to be either the daffodil or the violet, according to God’s will for us. We so often do not see the lineaments of our own character being formed. We have an idea of ourselves that may be counter to what God’s idea for our self is. I am in the midst of discovering this for myself right now.

— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 23-24

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

Asking to be Surprised

God, Growth, Life, Waiting 0

I have a good friend who says to me that we tend to think we can second-guess God. We say, “God’s will will be A, B, or C — only to have the answer be God’s will is H, heliotrope, which never occurred to me.”

When we believe in God and put our faith in God, we are asking to be surprised. God is all-powerful and works on our life from all corners. We may think “Now is the time to focus on my career,” only to find that God has decided “Now is the time for me to find a fulfilling personal relationship.” We may decide “Now is the time for me to find a personal relationship,” only to discover that God has decided to stabilize our career. God’s version of what is good for us is far more far-seeing than our own. We can seek to cooperate with God, but we do well not to argue too hard with God’s sense of timing.

Few things create more misery than a fight with God about the seasons of our life. When we hold out, stubbornly insisting on a certain blessing that we feel God is withholding, we miss the many blessings that God is in the process of bestowing. When we are saying, “I want this now,” we miss that that may be coming to us instead. We may be asking God for a romantic relationship in a period when God is focused on building up our grid of nonromantic friendships. We may be yearning for a special someone to make us feel more special while God is working on giving us that feeling for ourselves, independent of our romantic status. We may be asking God, demanding of God, that we be given someone to make us feel less lonely when God is in the process of teaching us how to be comfortable on our own.

— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 21-22

The Process of Integration

Growth, Healing, Life, Trials 0

Crisis cajoles us to move toward integration, to expand, to accept more. This process of acceptance is not incidental to a challenging time; it is one of its intended purposes. That is because, while our human nature prefers distinction, separation, and confusion, our spiritual nature seeks wholeness, inclusion, and union. Since we are ultimately spiritual in nature, life keeps pointing us in the direction of this growth. Like the kaleidoscope, it keeps offering us the pieces that we must put together.

Integration can arrive in an instant, when, through the free fall of surrender, you finally accept each one of the parts of your existence, even the ugly ones, even the irritating ones, even the ones you want to negate, destroy, and disown. Or it can come more slowly, as day by day, episode by episode, you gradually come to accept what has happened. When you do, you become whole. You become whole not because you have finally gotten rid of the painful or offensive item, not because you have escaped, but because you have embraced it. This is the process of integration in ourselves, in others, in the world. When we have achieved full integration, we know that there is only wholeness, which is enlightenment itself.

Moving toward integration, to the space in yourself where you can see the wholeness of life, gives you a sense of hope. It also brings great peace because you know that your life, even in this crisis, and your soul, for all eternity, are nestled in the blanket of wholeness where everything, even this very difficult time, has its perfect place.

— Daphne Rose Kingma, The Ten Things to Do When Your Life Falls Apart, p. 138-139

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

Practice

Growth, Letting Go, Life 0

We can have all the knowledge in the universe, and it comes down to one thing: practice. It comes down to going home and step-by-step implementing what we know. As often as necessary, and for as long as possible, or forever, whichever comes first. It is very reassuring to know that when one is in a burgeoning rage one knows precisely and with the skill of a craftswoman what to do about it: wait it out, release illusions, take it for a climb on the mountain, speak with it, respect it as a teacher.

— Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD, Women Who Run With the Wolves, p. 388

Emotional Maturity

Growth, Life 0

God wants us to be emotionally mature with emotionally full lives. Becoming emotionally mature is not, as many teach, about becoming emotionally controlled. It is about becoming emotionally adept, emotionally wise, and emotionally skilled. It is about having lives that are chockful of wonder and feeling — and then having the ability and practiced skill to live well and wisely in a richly emotional world.

— Matthew Elliott, Feel, p. 151