Worry - Chinese Proverb

"That the birds of worry and care fly over your head, this you cannot change, but that they build nests in your hair, this you can prevent."

- Chinese Proverb

Family Constellations - Quote from Mark Wolynn

Did you know that what we reject in our parents lives inside us? We can carry their emotions, behaviors, addictions and traumas as though they were our own. It’s our unconscious way of loving them. The more we distance from them, the more we are likely to suffer. Once we find our peace with our parents, it not only has a positive effect on us, but also on our children who often carry our heaviness for us.

Mark Wolynn - Family Constellations

My Friend's Divorce - Naomi Shihab Nye

I want her
To dig up
every plant
in her garden,
the pansies, the penta,
roses, rununculas,
thyme and the lilies,
the thing
nobody knows the name of,
unwind the morning glories
from the wire windows
of the fence,
take the blooming
and the almost-blooming
and the dormant,
especially the dormant,
and then
and then
plant them in her new yard
on the other side
of town
and see how
they breathe!

Relating - Molly Vass

The stuff of our lives doesn't change.

It is we who change in relation to it.

A Set of Inner Doors - Mark Nepo

Whatever our gifts or wounds or life situation - whether we have been married several times or have never been in love, whether we have plenty of money or are sorely in need of more - the core issues of our lives will not go away.

There exists for each life on Earth a set of inner doors that no one can go through for us.  We can change jobs or lovers, travel around the world, become a doctor or lawyer or expert mountain climber, or nobly put our life on hold to care for an ailing mother or father, and when we are done, though the worthy distraction could take years, the last threshold we didn't cross within will be there waiting.  There is no substitute for genuine risk.

Stranger still is how the very core issues we avoid return, sometimes with different faces, but still, we are brought full circle to them, again and again.  Regardless of how we may discover that no other threshold is possible until we use our courage to open the door before us.  Perhaps the oldest working truth of self-discovery is that the only way out is through.  That we are returned repeatedly to the same circumstance is not always a sign of avoidance, but can mean our work around a certain issue is not done.

In my own life, it is not by chance that struggling to adulthood with a domineering and critical mother, I have been thrust again and again into situations with dominant men and women, struggling painfully for their approval and fearing their rejection.  For years, I tried to manage the circumstance better, which was like sanding and varnishing the door without ever opening it.  I was destined to repeat the pain of rejection, no matter how skillfully I handled it, until I opened the door of self-worth.

Even my calling to be a poet became a distraction that lasted many years.  Feeling rejected and insecure at heart, I quietly made a mission of becoming a famous writer, only to find myself one day replaying the issues of approval and rejection a hundredfold at the mailbox, as I awaited word from countless critical strangers known as editors.  I was stunned and relieved to finally discover myself at the same threshold of loving myself that I had run from years before.  

The thresholds go nowhere.  It is we who, in our readiness and experience, keep coming back, because the soul knows only one way to fulfill itself, and that is to take in what is true.

* Meditate on an issue that keeps returning to you.

* Relate to it as a messenger and ask the messenger what door it is trying to open for you.

* How will your life change if you move through this threshold?

* How will your life be affected if you do not?

from The Book of Awakening  by Mark Nepo

what to remember when waking - David Whyte

In that first
hardly noticed
moment
in which you wake,
coming back
to this life
from the other
more secret,
moveable
and frighteningly
honest world
there is a small opening
into the new day
which closes
the moment
you begin
your plans.

What you can plan
is too small
for you to live.

What you can live
wholeheartedly
will make plans
enough
for the vitality
hidden in your sleep.

To be human
is to become visible
while carrying
what is hidden
as a gift to others.

To remember
the other world
in this world
is to live in your
true inheritance.

You are not
a troubled guest
on this earth,
you are not
an accident
amidst other accidents
you were invited
from another and greater
night
than the one
from which
you have just emerged.

Now, looking through
the slanting light
of the morning
window toward
the mountain
presence
of everything
that can be,
what urgency
calls you to your
one love? What shape
waits in the seed
of you to grow
and spread
its branches
against a future sky?

Is it waiting
in the fertile sea?
In the trees
beyond the house?
In the life
you can imagine
for yourself?
In the open
and lovely
white page
on the waiting desk?

~David Whyte, from
The House of Belonging