The Best Attitude

Gratitude, Life, Love 0

Giving up judgmental attitudes requires that we replace them with some other attitude.  Our minds will not remain idle.  The best attitude to cultivate and the one that changes everything and everyone — you and all of the people you formerly judged — is gratitude.  Having an attitude of gratitude is what allows us to see everyone in our path as necessary and an opportunity for us to express unconditional love.  You see, judgment and love cannot coexist, and we’re expressing one or the other almost all the time.  Seldom are we indifferent to our experiences, to the people we are sharing those experiences with, and to the set of expectations we have created around those experiences.  Becoming more loving, attempting to develop the attitude of unconditional love, in fact, is the real assignment we have been given in this life.  No one can do the work for us.  No one can prevent us from doing the work.  And everyone benefits every time any one of us makes even a tiny effort to grow in our willingness to love rather than judge.

— Karen Casey, Change Your Mind and Your Life Will Follow, p. 53-54

Angry or Joyful

Joy, Letting Go, Life, Peace 0

Starting arguments, blaming others, or internalizing anger is not the way to go through life.  Treat the problem knowing that you will get through it, and you will be a better person because of it.  Remember, you can spend your life being angry or joyful.  You control only one thing: your thoughts.  So find the serenity within yourself.  Or as my wife says, “Never go to bed mad.  Stay up and fight.”  Keep your sense of humor, express your feelings, and recognize your power, and you will spend more time at peace than at war.

— Bernie Siegal, M.D., Love, Magic & Mudpies, p. 186

Clutter Steals Our Space

Letting Go, Life 0

Repeat after me:  I only have the space I have.  It comes back to living in the present.  You need space to live a happy, fruitful life.  If you fill up that space with stuff for “the next house,” your present life suffers.  Stop claiming your house is too small.  The amount of space you have cannot be changed — the amount of stuff you have can. . . .  Hoarding for “someday” is never worth it.  If you’re really going to be that much richer, you’ll be able to afford the stuff you need when you need it.

— Peter Walsh, It’s All Too Much:  An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff, p. 40

Up to Us

Joy, Life 0

It’s up to us to determine our happiness.   No one else is in charge.  No one else is to blame.  No one else gets the credit.  Our happiness is tied to our willingness to be responsible for our own moods.  That’s a certainty — one of few in this life.  It’s also a certainty that any happiness we feel in the company of others is not the result of their attention, their happiness or good fortune, or their commitment to us.  It’s the result of our commitment to ourselves.  Let’s be grateful for that!  Accepting this, accepting that we are responsible for ourselves and ourselves alone, is the key to allowing the rest of our lives to unfold as they were meant to do.

— Karen Casey, Change Your Mind and Your Life Will Follow, p. 51

Our Own Journey

Letting Go, Life, Relationships 0

Minding other people’s business simply isn’t the work we are here to do, regardless of how seductive the idea may be.  We each must make our own journey, and even when it appears that someone we love is making a poor decision about an important matter, unless we are asked for advice, it’s not our place to offer it.  Besides, minding your own business will keep you as busy as you would ever need to be.

— Karen Casey, Change Your Mind and Your Life Will Follow, p. 45

What Now?

Joy, Life 0

Writing a novel and living a life are very much the same thing.  The secret is finding the balance between going out to get what you want and being open to the thing that actually winds up coming your way.  What now is not just a panic-stricken question tossed out into a dark unknown.  What now can also be our joy.  It is a declaration of possibility, of promise, of chance.  It acknowledges that our future is open, that we may well do more than anyone expected of us, that at every point in our development we are still striving to grow.  There’s a time in our lives when we all crave the answers.  It seems terrifying not to know what’s coming next.  But there is another time, a better time, when we see our lives as a series of choices, and What now represents our excitement and our future, the very vitality of life.  It’s up to you to choose a life that will keep expanding.  It takes discipline to remain curious; it takes work to be open to the world — but oh my friends, what noble and glorious work it is.

— Ann Patchett, What Now? p. 76-78

Choose to Change Your Thinking

Growth, Life 0

If you don’t like what you are thinking, particularly if it is harmful to you or others, you can change it!  What a simple idea.  But is it really possible?  Indeed it is.  And it doesn’t mean living in a state of denial about “reality.”  It means only that we don’t have to harbor any thought, bad or good….

Once I got over the initial resistance, a resistance that was fueled by fears of new behavior, I began to see that this knowledge — that we choose our thoughts and always have, even those hideously mean-spirited ones — can be very empowering.  For instance, it means that no one can put us down and hold us there.  It means that no one can make us a failure at anything we try.  It means that we are as smart as our willingness to do the footwork.  It means that we can change any experience we might be having in the middle of it!  All we have to do is change what is in our mind….

The fact is, we can free ourselves from the past and from any thought that hasn’t comforted us.  When your thoughts no longer fit your reality, change them!  You may have to keep working at it, keep challenging your thoughts and ensuring that they’re not holding you hostage to some outdated picture of the world, but the choice is always yours.  In every moment, we get to choose.

— Karen Casey, Change Your Mind and Your Life Will Follow, p. 33-37

A Journey to God

God, Growth, Life 1

Once you buy the evangelical born-again “Jesus saves” mantra, the idea that salvation is a journey goes out the window.  You’re living in the realm of a magical formula.  It seems to me that the Orthodox idea of a slow journey to God, wherein no one is altogether instantly “saved” or “lost” and nothing is completely resolved in this life (and perhaps not in the next), mirrors the reality of how life works, at least as I’ve experienced it.

— Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God, p. 390

Reading the Bible in Community

Community, God, Life, Love 0

Reading the Bible with others does not mean only that we read together in a small group, or that we read commentaries to benefit from the wisdom of great teachers, or that we listen to the Bible read and reflected on in worship or other gatherings.  It also means reading the Bible through the lens of others’ experiences, in the knowledge of others’ stories, in the midst of immersion in others’ lives.  For all this is in the service of loving God and loving one another.  It is not to make us more knowledgeable about the Bible’s text, although that is helpful.  It is not to make us more culturally sophisticated, although that is a benefit.  It is to plunge us deeper into life with God, and therefore deeper into life with one another, that we might take one more step toward the beloved, all-inclusive community centered in Christ.

— Richard J. Foster, Life with God, p. 105-106

Changing Your Story

Growth, Life, Story, Truth 0

Although we may be beginning to understand that our Story is just a Story and not the Truth, it still can feel a little risky to be tampering with it.  Adaptive beings that we are, we’ve figured out how to tolerate the limiting story.  We know our way around that territory, and we know what to expect from it.  When we open ourselves up to a new possibility, a new Story, we often fear we’re opening ourselves up to false hope.  What if nothing changes?  Then we will have to face disappointment which we could have avoided by sticking with the old Story.  I agree that it’s risky.  It takes courage to move toward what you want, to come out of the cultural trance and wholeheartedly go after what matters to you. . . .

When we orient our lives around what we most care about, we see new ways of being that we were blind to when we were focused on eradicating the problem.  I invite you to refrain from attending to something that needs to be fixed.  Instead, try looking at what you care about and what you really want.

The bottom line:  It’s All Story.  Abundance is a Story.  Scarcity is a Story.  Yes, there are facts supporting both of them, but remember that it isn’t the facts that shape our lives — it’s our Stories.

— Victoria Castle, The Trance of Scarcity, p. 44-46