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How to care for the soul & embody your spirit
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Monday 15 Sep 2008
Not sure…
“Living is a form of not being sure,not knowing what next or how.The moment you know how,you begin to die a little.”By Agnes De Mille
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News, Soul Sharing
Thursday 26 Jun 2008
Soulful relationship
An excerpt of the book “Soul Mates” by Thomas MooreA soulful relationship offers two difficult challenges: one, to come to know oneself – the ancient oracle of Apollo; and two, to get to know the deep, often subtle richness in the soul of the other. As you get to know the other deeply, you will discover much about yourself. Especially in moments of conflict and maybe even despair, being open to the demands of a relationship can provide an extraordinary opportunity for self-knowledge. It provides an occasion to glimpse your own soul and notice its longings and its fears. And as you get to know yourself, you can be more accepting and understanding of the other’s depth of soul.It isn’t easy to expose your soul to another, to risk such vulnerability, hoping that the other person will be able to tolerate your own irrationality. It may also be difficult, no matter how open-minded you are, to be receptive as another reveals her soul to you. Yet this mutual vulnerability is one of the great gifts of love: giving the other sufficient emotional space in which to live and express her soul, with its reasonable and unreasonable ways, and then to risk revealing your own soul, complete with its own absurdities.The idea of a soulful relationship is not a sentimental one, nor is it easy to put into practice. The courage required to open one’s soul to express itself or to receive another is infinitely more demanding than the effort we put into avoidance of intimacy. The stretching of the soul is like the painful opening of the body in birth. It is so painful in the doing that we often will attempt to avoid it, even though such opening is ultimately full of pleasure and reward.What I am suggesting about intimacy in relationship here is a particular aspect of the general need to respect the soul’s wide range of mood, fantasy, emotion, and behavior. Most of us contain ourselves fairly well, but eventually some type of irrationality may come to the surface. We all have skeletons in our closets and monsters in our hearts. It can be taken as an axiom: the person who displays his or her sanity and morality most dramatically is likely to be the very person who finds it difficult to be sane and moral.Being in a soulful relationship is to some extent frightening because by nature such a relationship asks that we show our soul, complete with its fears and follies. In “In Praise of Folly”, the Renaissance humanist Erasmus says that it is precisely in their foolishness that people can become friends and intimates. “For that the greatest part of mankind are fools,… and friendship, you know, is seldom made but amongst equals.” The soul, as our dreams reveal, is not terribly lofty. We may present a high-minded image to the world, but the soul finds its fertility in its irrationalities. Maybe this is a hint as to why great artists appear mad, or at least eccentric, and why, in times of strong emotion and difficult decision-making, we so often act foolishly. More than one person in therapy has confessed to me that the most difficult part of an intense episode of jealousy was the fear of being made a fool by their partner – a sign to me that soul was trying hard to enter their lives in the dress of the fool.Oddly, then, the most intimate relationships may be the very ones that appear foolish. The couple madly in love are “fools for love”. The most unpredictable couplings sometimes make the best marriages. A person who appears quite ordered and logical at work may engage in outrageously irrational behavior at home. Some of the most tightly knit families don’t hide their battles and jealousies. In short, when a relationship is soulful, the soul’s irrationality will be revealed for all to see.
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News, Book Excerpts about Soul Tending
Tuesday 24 Jun 2008
Welcoming the Unknown
The following is a description of a talkthat will be held at the Sufi Conference in Californiaon October 19th 2008 by Llewellyn Vaughan-LeeWhen your heart sees Reality,Then every atom of creation is a window of His house.The mystical path is a journey into the unknown. Through the grace of the tradition we give ourselves to this mystery: we welcome both the darkness and the light, and learn to live with the vulnerability of the heart. And from the depths of the unknown, the beauty and power of the divine is born within ourselves and within the world.
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News, Prayers - All Faiths
Tuesday 10 Jun 2008
Connections
The following excerpt is by Gabrielle Roth from her book “Connections”:When you are not resisting, when you simply relax into the flow of your energy, you short-circuit your ego and create a space for your soul to emerge from the dark mysterious quiet within. However, if your surface persona is anxious, tightly wound, or filled with turbulence, your soul will retreat and remain in hiding, leaving the field wide open for an ego invasion.The ego is the force that gets us into global messes as well as personal ones. It sees the world in black and white, good and evil, left and right. It has to be pro or con. It can never be with. It has to be for or against. It can never be part of it all. It can never just be. It always has to create tension and conflict. It can never let you relax and let go.… You need a way to access the part of you that is connected to the whole, to find a proactive way to create peace in your piece of the world. You can’t have one part of you struggling against the rest of you or the many parts of you struggling against each other if you want to be fluid and free. Freedom comes when you are receptive to the voices of the oppressed, whether they be your hip, your mother, or downtrodden people. Through deep listening comes right action.
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News, Soul Sharing, Book Excerpts about Soul Tending
Wednesday 14 May 2008
Private Sanctuary
An excerpt of the book “To love and be loved” by Sam Keen:“Men and women have made war on each other for so longthat much of what is most precious now hides itself.Wild and tender things have retreated into the forest and willreveal themselves only to those who respect their shyness.Each of us lives within a private sanctuary into which we inviteonly those who pay full attention to us and who wait patientlyuntil we open the door from the inside and welcome them.”
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News, Soul Sharing, Book Excerpts about Soul Tending
Monday 12 May 2008
Heart’s desire
By Petra PrenskyMy heart’s desire is and has been to find a friend,someone I can drop all social masks, all playing cooland simply be.My heart’s desire is and has been to find a placeI feel safe, a home away from home, with peopleI can be comfortable with.My heart’s desire is and has been to find someonewho touches me just right, so that my body canheal, relax and expand.This is my heart’s desire. Yesterday, I opened upto finally receiving it, today that door has closedand it hurts.It does not work if my heaven on earth is yourhell….
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News, Soul Food Poetry
Thursday 08 May 2008
Can You Become a Creature of New Habits?
FROM THE BUSINESS SECTION OF THE NEW YORK TIMES…THERE IS VALIDATION FOR OUR WORK EVERYWHERE!May 4, 2008UnboxedCan You Become a Creature of New Habits?By JANET RAE-DUPREEHABITS are a funny thing. We reach for them mindlessly, setting our brains on auto-pilot and relaxing into the unconscious comfort of familiar routine. “Not choice, but habit rules the unreflecting herd,” William Wordsworth said in the 19th century. In the ever-changing 21st century, even the word “habit” carries a negative connotation.So it seems antithetical to talk about habits in the same context as creativity and innovation. But brain researchers have discovered that when we consciously develop new habits, we create parallel synaptic paths, and even entirely new brain cells, that can jump our trains of thought onto new, innovative tracks.Rather than dismissing ourselves as unchangeable creatures of habit, we can instead direct our own change by consciously developing new habits. In fact, the more new things we try — the more we step outside our comfort zone — the more inherently creative we become, both in the workplace and in our personal lives.But don’t bother trying to kill off old habits; once those ruts of procedure are worn into the hippocampus, they’re there to stay. Instead, the new habits we deliberately ingrain into ourselves create parallel pathways that can bypass those old roads.“The first thing needed for innovation is a fascination with wonder,” says Dawna Markova, author of “The Open Mind” and an executive change consultant for Professional Thinking Partners. “But we are taught instead to ‘decide,’ just as our president calls himself ‘the Decider.’ ” She adds, however, that “to decide is to kill off all possibilities but one. A good innovational thinker is always exploring the many other possibilities.”All of us work through problems in ways of which we’re unaware, she says. Researchers in the late 1960s discovered that humans are born with the capacity to approach challenges in four primary ways: analytically, procedurally, relationally (or collaboratively) and innovatively. At puberty, however, the brain shuts down half of that capacity, preserving only those modes of thought that have seemed most valuable during the first decade or so of life.The current emphasis on standardized testing highlights analysis and procedure, meaning that few of us inherently use our innovative and collaborative modes of thought. “This breaks the major rule in the American belief system — that anyone can do anything,” explains M. J. Ryan, author of the 2006 book “This Year I Will…” and Ms. Markova’s business partner. “That’s a lie that we have perpetuated, and it fosters mediocrity. Knowing what you’re good at and doing even more of it creates excellence.”This is where developing new habits comes in. If you’re an analytical or procedural thinker, you learn in different ways than someone who is inherently innovative or collaborative. Figure out what has worked for you when you’ve learned in the past, and you can draw your own map for developing additional skills and behaviors for the future.“I apprentice myself to someone when I want to learn something new or develop a new habit,” Ms. Ryan says. “Other people read a book about it or take a course. If you have a pathway to learning, use it because that’s going to be easier than creating an entirely new pathway in your brain.”Ms. Ryan and Ms. Markova have found what they call three zones of existence: comfort, stretch and stress. Comfort is the realm of existing habit. Stress occurs when a challenge is so far beyond current experience as to be overwhelming. It’s that stretch zone in the middle — activities that feel a bit awkward and unfamiliar — where true change occurs.“Getting into the stretch zone is good for you,” Ms. Ryan says in “This Year I Will… .” “It helps keep your brain healthy. It turns out that unless we continue to learn new things, which challenges our brains to create new pathways, they literally begin to atrophy, which may result in dementia, Alzheimer’s and other brain diseases. Continuously stretching ourselves will even help us lose weight, according to one study. Researchers who asked folks to do something different every day — listen to a new radio station, for instance — found that they lost and kept off weight. No one is sure why, but scientists speculate that getting out of routines makes us more aware in general.”She recommends practicing a Japanese technique called kaizen, which calls for tiny, continuous improvements.“Whenever we initiate change, even a positive one, we activate fear in our emotional brain,” Ms. Ryan notes in her book. “If the fear is big enough, the fight-or-flight response will go off and we’ll run from what we’re trying to do. The small steps in kaizen don’t set off fight or flight, but rather keep us in the thinking brain, where we have access to our creativity and playfulness.”Simultaneously, take a look at how colleagues approach challenges, Ms. Markova suggests. We tend to believe that those who think the way we do are smarter than those who don’t. That can be fatal in business, particularly for executives who surround themselves with like-thinkers. If seniority and promotion are based on similarity to those at the top, chances are strong that the company lacks intellectual diversity.“Try lacing your hands together,” Ms. Markova says. “You habitually do it one way. Now try doing it with the other thumb on top. Feels awkward, doesn’t it? That’s the valuable moment we call confusion, when we fuse the old with the new.”AFTER the churn of confusion, she says, the brain begins organizing the new input, ultimately creating new synaptic connections if the process is repeated enough.But if, during creation of that new habit, the “Great Decider” steps in to protest against taking the unfamiliar path, “you get convergence and we keep doing the same thing over and over again,” she says.“You cannot have innovation,” she adds, “unless you are willing and able to move through the unknown and go from curiosity to wonder.”Janet Rae-Dupree writes about science and emerging technology in Silicon Valley.Dawna Markova has been a leading figure in education for many years, specifically around different learning styles/sensory orientations.
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News, What is Soul Tending?
Tuesday 06 May 2008
An Ode to Roses
By Petra PrenskyThere is an abandoned rose bush on the land.It is overgrown by Tahitian Spinach.The tree, which shaded it, got cut down.Logs fell on its branches, they stayed there.Yet the rose bush sent out new shoots.And after years produced the first rose.My husband found it and put it in a vase on my dresser.It was red with jagged edges, its fragrance sweet and gentle.I enjoyed it for a week, before it left my room.Yesterday, my husband cut a second rose for me.The Chinese rose beetles ate holes in its leaves,I close my eyes, inhale its scent; it is beautiful to me.Thank you rose bush for living and blossoming.Those two red roses touched me through their unexpected presence.Their existence surprised, inspired and moved me.They are real roses: jagged, wild and smelling deliciously.
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News, Soul Food Poetry
Wednesday 16 Apr 2008
Compassionate self-discipline
From the book: “Making a Change for Good: A guide to compassionate self-discipline” by Cheri Huber“Make a commitment to meditation or anything else, follow through, have something come up to interfere, break your commitment, and commit again! When we’re simply present to the whole process, “failure” and ‘lack of self-discipline” are beside the point. Letting yourself down is beside the point. Being dissapointed is beside the point. Feeling discouraged is beside the point. Those reactions are designed to stop you. RECOMMITING is the point.”
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News
Monday 14 Apr 2008
Lenny Kravitz says:
“If you dance, dance love.If you paint, paint love.If you speak, speak love.Got the vibe?”
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News
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