The Courage to Break Free from Worry
“Here is a new spiritual practice for you: don’t take your thoughts so seriously.” ~ Eckhart Tolle It takes courage to break free from worry. This may sound strange, but there is comfort in the fears that underly our mental fretting and catastrophizing. They are familiar, more familiar than we know, and they buffer us in insidious ways. For these reasons and more, we easily get stuck in fear and thus in worry. Many don’t associate worry with fear. They spend their minutes, hours and days worrying, often believing it’s a feeling—“I feel worried”—without considering that worry, like planning and analysis, is a state of mind. The thinking kind of mind. Fear, however, is clearly an emotion, and it’s the primary and primal one giving […]
Taking Time to Feel Authentic Forgiveness: Healing in a Culture of Quick-fix Solutions and Spiritual Bypassing
For more on forgiveness, please read the description for my ceremony, Temple of Holy Virtue. Otherwise, enjoy this article, as well as the related video at the bottom. Forgiving is a liberating act of love to self and others. It can free us from pain, resentment, from feeling separate from others and life. But forgiveness, if not felt deeply and given with enough rooted authenticity, can be a means of bypassing uncomfortable feelings (spiritual bypassing), the truth of one’s raw inner experience. Long held as a virtue in religious teachings, cultures and, more recently, in new age / personal growth circles, we have and continue to be taught and even expected to forgive; to let it go and move on, for it is the kind […]
Sinking into Truth. Resting in the Body ~ 6 Steps to Moving Beyond the Overwhelming Stories of the Mind and into Self-Compassion
“You cannot solve a problem from the same consciousness that created it. You must learn to see the world anew.” ~ Albert Einstein Sometimes it can feel like you are caught in a firestorm of overwhelming and uncontrollable thought. Concerns, doubts, “What if’s”, “Yes but’s” swirl through your mind pulling you into the fierce grip of anxiety. For the sake of simplicity, let’s call these swirling thoughts stories. If you pay close enough attention to your mind, you will see that it is a relentless and compelling storyteller. And sometimes it is difficult to know what is real and what is not. The bottomless pit of stories When your mind is bombarding you with images and thoughts that create anxiety, it may be tempting to […]
The Only Thing You Can Carry With You, And You Can Never Leave Behind
~ By Vince Gowmon It is not about what you have, don’t have, or the situations you find yourself in. It is not about your goals ambitions setbacks or milestones. These are all the little agendas in life that are transient and temporal. They are the gateways into the larger agenda- the agenda that really matters. This larger agenda lives in the present moment, and it holds the one thing, the only thing, that you can carry forward with you into 2015 and beyond; and the one thing that can never, ever be left behind. And that is your learning– the wisdom gained from your trials and triumphs, from your have’s and have-not’s. At the end of the day it is how you grow– who […]