self-care

Times like these . I feel alone and trapped with animal abuse and cruelty and I don't know what I can do to change things

Times like these . I feel alone and trapped with animal abuse and cruelty and I don't know what I can do to change things

The price of alignment is grief 💔 . Alignment demands the death of all unaligned realities. Finding the perfect job costs the one that’s good enough. Letting go of a partnership that isn’t quite right means mourning the future you imagined inhabiting together. Stopping a sport that you keep getting injured playing means realizing that joy is no longer available to you, and maybe hasn’t been for a while.

Many times we’re grieving not only the future dreams that won’t come to be, the present attachments that we’re releasing back to the void, but the past we now see was based on tolerating experiences rather than courageously pursuing the greatest good.

Yes, this grief is all based on stories made up in the mind. Even the idea of opportunity cost—what you could have been doing if you had realized this sooner, demands this moment’s realization, which only comes as a result of all the mistakes. That’s what learning is. You don’t walk without taking falls.

But that doesn’t make the grief any less real. Our thoughts are real. Our stories make life meaningful. We must be willing to grieve these in order to open to the possibility of new versions of ourselves, and therefore allow our lives to change. 

And I’ve never known grief that wasn’t built out of love. Grief is a gift that shows us our heart.

#TTT 

I can’t stop crying about food and groceries.

As we pulled into the grocery store the other night I went from laughing to weeping, knowing I was going to go into that store and get anything I wanted and spend any amount of money on it without thinking about it.

In truth, “not thinking about it” has never been a thing. I don’t have a tone of fear around spending money on groceries or anything else. I have no thoughts of “not-affording” or restricting money. But crying in the grocery store parking lot has been a feature of this prosperity practice since I began. I do think about it. I think about how easy it is, and it brings me to grief.

It is this grief the fear which used to rule me was coming in to mask. The grief of being in privilege and prosperity is so immense that many people of privilege and prosperity choose to stay in fear and scarcity so that they don’t have to face it. I know because I found myself in that practice, and shifting it showed me the roots.

I go in that store, and it is so easy for me. I get every single thing I want, and I KNOW the sorrows of the world, that it wasn’t that way for my parents, or friends I grew up with, and it’s a looming threat on thousands of American families now.

This is the knife-edge of privilege, to keep receiving, to stay ridiculously nourished, and to be OVERCOME with grief for the sorrows of the world, for every way I imagine someone else struggling or suffering in a way I would prefer not to.

I meet my sorrow with commitments to practical prosperity. I will get every single thing I want in the grocery store, and as I do I will know it feeds my community as well as myself. I stay grounded in the way I know I can show up in the world when I am fully nourished and overflowing.

I know, too, that I will stand in the gap so that anyone in my field of awareness gets what they want in the moment I am in the grocery store. I refuse to bear witness to another human in front of me being deprived of anything they want in the grocery store, and I can be the one to make sure they’re fed on my watch.

Prosperity is about feeling good, staying nourished, staying focused on positive and practical (aka existent) elements of nourishment, comfort, and ease. Prosperity is available exclusively *within* my locus of control.

The largest part of feeling good is accepting and allowing BAD feelings associated with all that I imagine which is not within my purview. How I meet that which violates my preferences and lies outside my locus of control will make or break my experience of the world.

I don’t expect that walking prosperity will feel good all the time, in a primary sense. It does not and will not feel good to Have while I acknowledge that others Lack. It does not and will not offer any nourishment whatsoever to others if I choose to starve along with the lacking.

It could not be wealth if I were able to look away from the human realities.

Wealth is concerned with distribution. It MUST allow that it HAS resources, and that others are in a position to receive of those resources. Wealth cradles the gulf between my personal Having and the wants of the world.

Practical Prosperity keeps me, efficient, effective, agile, of service; within my locus of control. Practical Prosperity wisely invests my resources and freely gives and receives of the gifts of grief.

The swollen coffers of capitalism are NOT wealth.

Wealth lives in sacred stewardship, in practical prosperity, in the actions which distribute love via various vehicles, dancing in the infinite flow.

From Brain into Body. When not knowing what to do next, rather then trying to logically figure it out with your brain, ask your body... 

what do you desire? 

See where it takes you

Musings: The World Is Overstilumated. I'm reflecting on my experience this summer spending 3 days in the dark. I was in Tangier, Morocco, in an apartment, and I had those garage door window shutters that would keep the entire apartment completely pitch black even in the middle of the day. I chose to spend 3 days in the darkness. Mostly sitting on the couch staring into darkness.

I wasn't aware of this experience having much impact until I started having phone calls with people from the darkness. I could hear everything in the silence. Beyond someone's voice, I could hear the Soul speaking. I'm pretty convinced we can communicate in Silence, and I love words.

I've been wondering about how overstimulated the world is. In this moment I'm watching the woman across the table from me scroll through her phone, going from Instagram to Spotify to texting to checking out concert tickets this weekend. Starting sentences and starting new ones mid sentence. I'm in love with how incongruent and disoriented we can appear as humans.

I wonder what it would be like for the world to take a day off from stimulus: food, cell phone, entertainment devices, etc. What if we had a collective pause? Sunlight, water, fresh air. Our collective nervous system could use a Parasympathetic Pause. I like this as an Emerging Probability and Planetary Potential. Feels like part of the emerging meta-model and protocol for The Wellbeing of Humanity.