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Joy & Acceptance (Part 2)

An online friend of mine, James, shared these two wonderful excerpts with me. First:

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like a flame,
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. Nothing is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

I love the line ‘Just keep going. Nothing is final.’ – it makes it easier to accept what I cannot understand and more importantly, to keep moving. Not frantically or out of fear, but to just keep watching as things unfold. Nothing is final – my evaluation of the past keeps constantly changing with whatever new understanding I gain in the present, and the present moment itself keeps changing.

Then there’s this:

“Pain in life is inevitable but suffering is not. Pain is what the world does to you, suffering is what you do to yourself. Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.”
- a commentary on the Noble Eightfold Path

I definitely agree with this. I’m learning to accept pain and negative thoughts as inevitable but most importantly I’m learning to let them go.

And I was just reading an excerpt from Rob Brezny’s ‘Pronoia’, when this really stood out to me:

“So I’m curious, my fellow creators. Since you and I are in charge of making a New Earth — not just breaking down the dying culture — where do we begin? What stories do we want at the heart of our experiments? What questions will be our oracles?

Here’s what I say: In the New Earth we’re creating, we will ridicule the cult of doom and gloom, and embrace the cause of zoom and boom. We will laugh at the stupidity of evil and hate; we will summon the brilliance to praise and create.

No matter how upside down it all may appear, we will have no fear, because we know this big secret: All of creation is conspiring to shower us with blessings. Life is crazily in love with us — brazenly and innocently in love with us.

The universe always gives us exactly what we need, exactly when we need it.”

Joy & Acceptance (Part 1)

“I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me.  It is a splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”
- G.B. Shaw (via this excellent article by Jonathan Fields)

My definition of joy is high activity – sometimes classified as ‘hard work’. I don’t like the term ‘hard work’ however, because it implies that you’re forcing yourself to do something. I think work should be  a natural outpouring of wanting to be fully involved and engaged in life. Yes, it is hard sometimes – like everything else in life.

A brief Twitter exchange with @JoshuaGuffey the other night was pretty illuminating – he mentioned that according to Shinzen Young ”suffering = resistance TIMES pain”.

I accept the present moment as it is – I see no need to change it. However unpleasant the emotion I am experiencing is, I choose to observe it, to be with it and to understand it. Sometimes this understanding only comes much later. Acceptance is easier now that I have more faith in life itself and it’s ability to support me. For a long time I believed that I had to fight it to get what I want. No longer. I now try to remember that everything happens in its own time. I try to have patience.

So, I’ve been a lot less stressed out this week than I was last week. Work was a lot easier this week and I feel like I’m actually making progress and finally getting up to speed with things.

Wrap-up of 1: Gratitude & Giving

I feel like I’ve learned to see the world more in terms of how I can add to it as opposed to my conditioned thought patterns of what I can take. In one of the first few posts I made, someone on Facebook commented that it’s really the focus on taking which leads us to feeling drained. I have to say that I agree with this. I think about giving now, and how good it makes me feel – especially how it makes me feel more connected to others. The fear of giving more than I can doesn’t seem to be grounded in reality.

I also always pause to enjoy whatever is around me – no matter how small. Even if it’s just the fact that I love this neighbourhood that I’m currently staying in, or the fact that trees in winter are beautiful.

This week: Joy & Acceptance

I want to experience joy in everything that I do (especially work!). I want to enjoy the process of things rather than always be focussed on the result. I want to enjoy life as I’m living it and not just postpone all my enjoyment for the future. I want to be inspired here and now.

I also want to be able to accept the events and circumstances that I cannot change. I’m tired of fighting against life and it’s time now to just go with the flow and have faith in the momentum that I’ve built up – even if what’s going on in the moment is unpleasant. Not everything is within my control anyway, and I want to let go of always having such a strong expectation for the world to make sense or to conform to thinking and perception. The world is as it is and it’s not always exactly what I want it to be. Maybe if I stop and listen I can gain new understanding, instead of constantly forging ahead.

I really want to live fully – in full appreciation of everything as it is around me.

Gratitude & Giving (part 5)

Today I’ve been feeling rather split in half. Part of me is under extreme pressure and the other part is ready to just fly free – to fly completely free like never before. I wonder if breakthroughs generally come from feeling so caught between two huge, opposing influences. I hope so, because I feel like I’m on the precipice of something major.

This focus on personal development has slowed my thought process down quite a lot – I’m more aware of my thoughts now, which is sometimes scary because I realize I’m repeatedly thinking a lot of things that are not good or that downright make me feel bad. Every time I encounter such a thought, I’m reminded of something Louise L. Hay keeps repeating in her excellent book You Can Heal Your Life: “It’s only a thought, and thoughts can be changed.” And when your thoughts change, so does your life.

My resolve is stronger, I think, also because I’m in a situation where I really have no choice but to make it past a major blockage that has been around for quite a while now. I know that I will get through this no matter how difficult it is. I also keep reminding myself that whatever discomfort I experience is only temporary.

Being grateful now also encompasses self-love and self-appreciation. I keep noticing and affirming the positive changes in myself. I also try to accept my negative traits – naturally, being in this world we can’t be perfect. I don’t want to even try to be perfect anymore because it’s such a huge waste of time. I just want to be. Maybe I am approaching being able to finally really love myself – because I see that this love is not a result of being perfect or being outstanding. It’s just a simple caring for myself, seeing the good and fully accepting the bad. Again I’m reminded of Louise L. Hay as she mentions that every single person on this planet deals with self-hatred in some form or another.

Found this quote on a MetroCard the other night:

“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.”
- Arthur Schopenhauer

I do feel that true gratitude is simply being able to see the world as it truly is – a miracle.

Gratitude & Giving (part 4)

Honestly, I feel like it’s a pretty huge jump in thinking and acting to shift one’s focus from caring only about taking what I need from the world to focussing on what I’m adding to it. It felt really, really difficult the first half of the week but now that I’m in the second half it’s getting better. Today I realized there was a certain joy in just participating and giving unconditionally – just to be in that flow of energy rather than constantly feeling blocked.

Everything flowed better today, I felt more creative and more inspired and I’m sure that this has something to do with shifting my focus.

I feel like I’m undoing a lot of subconscious patterning that I have no use for anymore (namely the constant focus on lack and scarcity). As a result I’m finally feeling substantially less pressured and stressed out today than I have been the first few days that I started this project.

Gratitude & Giving (part 3)

At a diner this morning, my horoscope came on TV for a bit and it was strangely apt: ‘Don’t worry about the details and instead focus on helping others.’

I don’t want to deny that I’ve been facing difficulty – I try to keep my mind trained on who I want to be and there are several competing thoughts in my head that want to prove me wrong. Memories of being limited in the past as well as negative comments by people who (obviously not very happy with themselves) seem to delight in the fear or unhappiness of others.

To keep my focus I find that it helps to focus on things that make me feel love (a piece of music, somebody I care about) or experience beauty. I wonder what it is for other people – but for me the focus on beauty (and the love that I naturally feel as a result of appreciating beauty) always relaxes and reorients me.

Gratitude & Giving: Day 2

I keep stopping myself to remind myself where I am.

The here and now is perfect. I have no problems that are not abstractions or ‘what ifs’. I keep bringing myself back to the here and now: This beautiful neighbourhood. Experiencing snowstorms for the first time in my life (after 25 years of summer in Singapore).

I keep reminding myself that I’m in North America, the United States, New York City. Where I’ve always wanted to be. I’ve made it this far and I am here now. Somehow that makes things easier. I am very grateful for my circumstances and I have come closer to seeing that whatever difficulties I have to undergo are also opportunities for growth.

I try to focus a little more on my mood and on little things to make myself happy (instead of just forging ahead with projects/work/life stuff regardless).

Gratitude & Giving: Day 1

I’ve always been afraid to give because I’m afraid I will have nothing left for myself. I’m afraid that I will give more than I am able to and exhaust my own resources. Today I found myself wondering whether this whole idea of ’scarcity’ (the constant, nagging belief that you never have ‘enough’ and always need to acquire more) really is true or if it’s just a paranoid thinking pattern that we learn somewhere along the way.

Very early in life I felt intuitively that our needs are naturally somehow always provided for. This was just a belief that made sense to me in a very natural way and I’m not sure where it came from. Sometimes I still feel the resonance of that belief and it makes me feel really good.

Today I found myself considering this: What if my ability to give to others could in actuality never be exhausted? This is a way of thinking I’m actually very interested to experiment with. Imagine if I could focus simply on giving unconditionally and let everything else take care of itself… I think it might be possible. You know, I actually want to give it a go.

Chrysalis is an ongoing weekly personal development project and practice that I’m starting today, 25th February 2010.

The idea for this project came to me yesterday while I was feeling extremely grateful for my current life circumstances. I also had been thinking quite a lot recently about the power of training the mind to focus on the positive aspects of life. Although my life circumstances are certainly improving, I am also facing new stresses and so I’m constantly looking for ways I can better deal with stress, worry and negative emotions/states in general.

“You aren’t broken, and you don’t need fixing.”
(@stevepavlina)

It seems like most of us are trained to always look at the negative and are constantly trying to ‘fix’ our problems. In recent years I’ve seriously doubted (and in certain moments, outright railed against) this mindset. In my experience, focussing on the negative in life only brings more of the negative. Whereas focus on the positive brings more good!

“What we see is mainly what we look for.”
(via @tinybuddha)

The basic idea of Chrysalis is simple: Instead of trying to ‘fix’ my problems (and thus having a constant focus on the ‘negative’ aspects of my personality/self) and constantly worrying, I’m going to consciously choose to focus on developing a new positive trait every week starting on Thursday. Every day I will post something (no matter how small) related to the topic and at the end of the week I will write about what I’ve learned and anything new or interesting that I’ve experienced during the week.

I’m choosing to do this online for the reasons of personal accountability (so I’ll be motivated to follow through with this since I think people are watching, hehe!) – but also, I wonder if anyone else would like to do this with me? It’s open if you’d like to and have a blog of some sort. If you have any experiences you’d like to share please do so in the comment section or email me or if you blog about it, please leave your link in the comment section! I would love to hear from you, especially if you gain new perspectives or notice any changes in yourself while in the process of doing this.

For this first week I’m choosing to focus on Gratitude & Giving.

The main reason I’m choosing to do this is because I want to focus on my most excellent luck in New York City so far. While there is also a lot of fear (as there usually is when one experiments with one’s life!) about possible negative outcomes, I would rather focus on the great things that have happened so far (and that continue to happen) for no other reason than that it makes me feel wonderful and get excited about life. I just want to feel excellent, happy, motivated and creative all of the time (or as often as possible) because I like how it feels. Being grateful and choosing to focus on good and/or beautiful things usually helps me stay motivated and hopeful.

It sounds like such a simple thing but doing something like a gratitude list every day is actually very powerful. I kept a gratitude journal after scoffing at the idea for years during a rather dark period of my life. It totally worked in helping me shift my focus from always looking at what wasn’t working to what actually was. Eventually your mind gets into the habit and what you can experience is something close to magic – you become automatically trained to look for solutions. You feel creative, you feel powerful – but in a beautiful, quiet way. I would say that you actually become aware of your own power, adaptability and ability for creative thought and action. You gain a deep self-confidence that will carry you through most difficult things in life.

“The right idea has the power to overcome any challenge. We can always find that idea.”
- Ray Kurzweil

Regarding giving, I am at the point where I’m starting to realize that I really want to add value to the lives of others. I have spent most of my life being very angry at what I’ve perceived are injustices and imperfections in the world, which kind of caused me to lose faith in humanity for a period of time. However, my response to the cumulation of my negative experiences now is that I really want to be able to take every opportunity to be kind to others as much as is possible. Simply because it feels good and my ultimate goal in life is to be able to love and give unconditionally.

I think that giving is also very powerful, somehow we actually gain more in giving than in simply taking or focussing on what we should get. I believe also that there is a balance and that it’s important to receive with grace too, though. However, right now, I think it’s important that I focus on giving because I want to make a major paradigm shift in how I interact with the world – I want to truly add value in my work and see how that pans out. Instead of always focussing on what I can get out of a situation, I want to focus on what I can contribute. I want to be an agent for positive change in the world. I really honestly do want things to be better and to experience more love in daily life.

“If you send out goodness from yourself, or if you share that which is happy or good within you, it will all come back to you multiplied ten thousand times. In the kingdom of love there is no competition; there is no possessiveness or control. The more love you give away, the more love you will have.”
- John O’Donohue (via galadarling.com)

So – I’m going to make a post every day for till next Thursday regarding Gratitude & Giving. I’m not sure of the exact form these posts are going to take, so let’s see how this goes The idea is to give daily focus and energy in the direction of developing my abilities to be thankful and to give for 7 days while noting the effects of this experiment on my personality and self.