A nice thought on love from Richard Carlson

An excellent way to practice love is to set your attention on seeing beyond someone's behavior or personality. Try to realize that beneath the surface insecurity, negative thinking, and poor behavior, everyone is connected to God. Just as you wouldn't get angry at someone simply because he or she is in a wheelchair, you need not be angry because a person hasn't yet opened his heart to the nourishment of his Soul. When people act in unloving ways, it only means that they are out of touch with their Souls and aren't feeling spiritually nourished. When that happens, there is no need to panic. The best we can do for ourselves is nourish our own Soul by looking beyond the behavior we don't care for, thus practicing the art of love.       Richard Carlson

Some Nice Thoughts on Love from Stephen Levine

We use the word "love" but we have no more understanding of love than we do of anger or fear or jealousy or even joy, because we have seldom investigated what that state of mind is.  What are the feelings we so quickly label as love?  For many what is called love is not lovely at all but is a tangle of needs and desires, of momentary ecstasies and bewilderment.  Moments of unity, of intense feelings of closeness, occur in a mind so fragile that the least squint or sideways glance shatters its oneness into a dozen ghostly paranoias.

When we say love we usually mean some emotion, some deep feeling for an object or person, that momentarily allows us to open to another.  But in such emotional love, self-protection is never very far away.  Still there is "business" to the relationship:  clouds of jealousy, possessiveness, guilt, intentional and unintentional manipulation, separateness, and the shadow of all previous "loves" darkens the light of oneness.

But what I mean by love is not an emotion, it is a state of being.  True love has no object.  Many speak of their unconditional love for another.  Unconditional love is the experience of being; there is no "I" and "other," and anyone or anything it touches is experienced in love.  You cannot unconditionally love someone.  You can only be unconditional love.  It is not a dualistic emotion.  It is a sense of oneness with all that is.  The experience of love arises when we surrender our separateness into the universal.  It is a feeling of unity.  You don't love another, you are another.  There is no fear because there is no separation.

Stephen Levine

Some nice thoughts on work

There are four stenographers in my office and each of us is assigned to take letters from several men.  Once in a while we get jammed up in these assignments.  One day, when an assistant department head insisted that I do a long letter over, I started to rebel.  I tried to point out to him that the letter could be corrected without being retyped--and he retorted that if I didn't do it over, he would find someone else who would!  I was absolutely fuming!

But as I started to retype this letter, it suddenly occurred to me that there were a lot of other people who would jump at the chance to do the work I was doing.  Also, that I was being paid a salary to do just that work.  I began to feel better.  I suddenly made up my mind to do my work as if I actually enjoyed it--even though I despised it.  Then I made this important discovery:  If I do my work as if I really enjoy it, then I do enjoy it to some extent.  I also found I can work faster when I enjoy my work.  So there is seldom any need now for me to work overtime.

This new attitude of mine gained me the reputation of being a good worker.  And when one of the department superintendents needed a private secretary, he asked for me for the job--because, he said, I was willing to do the extra work without being sulky!  This matter of the power of a changed mental attitude has been a tremendously important discovery to me.  It has worked wonders!

Vallie G. Golden



Sick Days

I'm home sick today.  If you knew me, you'd know how rare a thing that is.  Some sort of stomach or intestinal virus has me in its grasp, and it would have been a bad idea all the way around to try to make it through a whole school day--I think just about everyone can understand why.

The interesting thing about this sick day is how long it took me to decide to take it.  While my instinct told me that I needed to stay home and my logic agreed with my instinct, there was still a huge part of me that kept coming up with reasons that I shouldn't stay home.  That's the hyper-responsible part of me that just doesn't want to do things like take sick days, the part of me that was developed as I grew up in a family situation that tends to breed either hyper-responsible people or completely irresponsible people.  I became one of the former.

Now that I have decided to stay home sick, I feel good about the decision.  This is a chance for me to recover and rest, to spend a day trying to get better.  Being at school might have been possible, but I know for sure that it wouldn't have helped the healing process along.

There are times when we just have to take heed of what our bodies are telling us and obey their messages.  I'm a person that pretty much never calls in sick--this is the third sick day I've used in the last six years--and it's hard for me to take the hint and stay home.  My sense of responsibility tells me that I need to be there, but I know that I don't--the school day will progress very well without my presence.  The students will be fine, and the other teachers will be fine, and the administrators will be fine.  And someone who can probably use the money will have a chance to earn a bit more.  And I can get well--I can recover more and allow my body to heal or to fight off the bug or whatever it is that's affecting me.

Some days we just have to follow the hints that life is giving us and give our logic and rationality a rest, too.  Now that I am at home, resting, trying to get well, I have to admit that all of my logic that told me that I could and should be at work today was flawed--and I almost listened to it, almost obeyed it.  I'm very glad I didn't.

For Whose Benefit?

I'm always impressed when I see people forgive others, especially when I see that the forgiveness is sincere and unconditional.  Most of us aren't often in the position to be able to forgive others for dramatic or egregious wrongs, because most of the time people are pretty cool to each other.  When we are in a position in which we have to decide whether to forgive someone else or not, it's important that we ask ourselves just who will benefit from our forgiveness.  Do we forgive in order to make the other person feel better, or do we forgive because our forgiveness raises the quality of our own lives?

Since I brought up the question, it's probably pretty obvious that I would choose the latter answer as the correct one.  I would say that the most important reason for forgiving someone is to bring our own minds and spirits to peace, for holding on to resentment and anger is one of the most common and destructive reasons for not having peace.  And when we don't have peace, we affect our entire being--mind, body, and spirit--in very negative ways.  Our stress levels go up, often causing physical problems like headaches or poor digestion or even higher blood pressure, depending on how long we hold on to the negative feelings.  And as long as we're focusing on the negative aspects of what's happened, our spirits and our minds can't be free to soar and to enjoy life because the negative feelings drag our spirits down into the dirt, where there isn't a whole lot of soaring going on.

Forgiveness can be a great boon to the people being forgiven, especially if they sincerely regret something that they've done, mistakes that they've made.  But there comes a point at which even the most contrite person will say, "Forget it--if you're too stubborn to forgive me, then I don't want to have anything to do with you."  How many relationships have been ruined not by a careless action or a grave mistake, but by someone's unwillingness to forgive that action or error?  It's an incredible waste of human energy to bear a grudge.

Is there someone in your life who could use your unconditional forgiveness?  Then forgive them, now.  You'll be doing a great thing for that other person or those other people, but more importantly you'll be doing something very important for yourself.
 

Quotes and passages on forgiveness



Co-Operation

As a basketball coach, I have a slightly different perspective on the game than many other coaches.  Mostly what I hear when I listen to people talk about basketball is just how competitive a sport it is, just how important the competition is.  There are five players out there going all out against five other players, and it's important to rise up to the level of competition.

Personally, though, I see basketball as a sport that's based on co-operation.  I see the game as five players working together to try to score and to try to stop the other team from scoring.  And yes, that does imply a certain level of competition, but to me the fact remains that unless those five players cooperate together well, nothing about competition really matters at all.  If there's no cooperation, a team simply will do poorly all the time.

Cooperation is probably one of the most important concepts that members of the human race can embrace and celebrate.  When we work together to achieve goals and to try to accomplish things, then there really are no barriers to what human beings can accomplish.  That's one of the reasons why it's so incredibly sad to me to see what political parties are trying to do to us--trying to fragment us and tear us apart, focusing on our differences rather than on our similarities, all in the hopes of gaining a few votes come election time.

How can you cooperate with other human beings today to accomplish something truly important?  What can you do today with someone else that will leave a mark, no matter how small that mark may be?  What can you and someone else give to the world that will make the world a better place?  We're limited only by our own thinking, by our own judgments and personal prejudices.  I would love to be remembered someday as someone who put cooperation above all else, someone who taught others the value of working together with other human beings to accomplish truly important goals.  Just as I hope my basketball team reaches success through cooperation, I hope that I myself can find some small successes by cooperating with other people to make life better for someone, somewhere.
 
 

What Do I Stand for?

I believe that it’s true that we have to decide over and over just what we stand for in life.  I believe we have to decide constantly because what we think, what we believe, and what we feel changes as we grow older and learn more about life and more about ourselves.  It seems to me as I meet and get to know more older people, I learn how important it is to trust ourselves, to trust our hearts, and to trust our intuition.  And these parts of ourselves can help us to learn just what we stand for in life.

Do we stand for honesty?  Integrity?  Fairness?  Kindness?  All of the above?  None of the above?  We all have certain areas that affect us more strongly than others, certain topics that make us feel more strongly, that arouse our passions, much more than other areas do.  When we learn to recognize what they are and to trust our feelings about them, then we can start to learn what we stand for in life.

It’s hard to conceive of someone standing for the same things at 80 as he or she stood for at 20.  I know that in my life, my thoughts and ideas and passions have changed considerably over the last few decades.  There are certain things that I considered to be extremely important years ago that no longer feel so urgent to me, and other things that are much more pressing.  For example, the tendency to encourage other people was very weak in me when I was younger because I didn’t think that anyone would be affected by my encouragement back then.  Now, though, I realize that it’s important to encourage others because I have no idea at all what will affect them and what won’t.  And there’s a good chance, I’ve learned, that my encouragement will be not only heard, but helpful.

Many people prefer not to stand for anything, choosing instead to allow life to go on without thinking about their own contribution to it all.  And because they never really consider the contributions that they’re making–or could be making–they often end up not contributing at all.  Taking, probably, but contributing, no.

I hope that when the end of my life here on this planet rolls around, I can look back and say that I really stood for something, that I tried to teach others about something very important.  And it won’t matter if what I stood for at 20 was the same as what I stood for in my 60’s–as long as I’ve examined my heart and my conscience and trusted what they had to tell me about where I should stand and what I should do.