Sometimes I feel like I’m in heaven now. It comes in small doses: a tender kiss from my wife, a rapturous laugh with my whole family, a soft and pillowy snowfall, a moment of epiphany. Time stands still and you catch a glimpse – if only for a moment – of what it is like to be in wonder. It’s hard to believe it’s happening when it happens. Heaven is never what you thought or hoped it was going to be. It catches you by surprise.
Jesus said, “the Kingdom has come near/is at hand,” but ...
All of life is a steady, rhythmed breathing in and out. That process occurs without any thought or intent on your part, and yet, it is the thing that keeps you alive. Your whole life, you oscillate between utter breathlessness and lungs full of air, aching to be pushed out. Life happens because of the movement from one to the other and back.
Our lives are made up of the coming and going between two poles on many dimensions. Everyday, you wake up and move forward with the day’s activities. Then ...
The words contained here are nothing. They are merely a static representation of the way the writer interfaced with the world at a given point in time and attempted to relate that back to the reader. The words on the page are a crystallized take on reality at one specific moment in time, but not the end. That’s the beauty of dialogue. You work and re-work the words until you have said what you needed to say and it has been heard the way you mean it to be heard. You get as many chances as you ...
Once you have experienced your first big grief, you live your whole life looking back on that thing. You also spend it looking forward to the rest of life’s losses that will eventually occur. That is why the feeling of anxious anticipation – waiting for the other shoe to drop – is so normal. Life balances itself out. The sum always returns to zero. If things are going swimmingly at the moment, you can be sure a time of want is coming. Don’t worry – once you learn how to grieve, you ...
What you are experiencing today is just the aggregate of all the days and experiences you have had up until this moment. Your body is a recorder for every experience, no matter how minute, so nothing is lost. You might think you can avoid, neutralize, or forget the ones you are not sure what to do with, but you have assimilated all of them in some way. You are just a container for all the things that have happened and how you have metabolized them. This might make you feel helpless, but nothing ...
It’s good if you can find one good person you can trust. That is how you build a secure attachment, and it is how you become aware there is good in the world. But I have also been around a lot of people who have not had good attachments – people who have experienced mostly pain in their caregiver relationships, but are able to reach deep down inside themselves and find love and care for themselves and others despite. It is amazing. The world will try to diminish and extinguish the fire ...
These things that you feel like are killing you are just here to usher in the next phase of your life. Yes, it will feel like you are going to die or something you hold very dearly is going to slip through your grasp (or both), but those things to which you cling and believe essential to who you are were meant to be released.
You have already reinvented yourself many times before. That is what life is here to do – wrest from your grasp the things that are not yours, and are not who you are – ...
If you are not truly listening to another and tuning into the reality and depth of their inner experience, you will become abusive. Then the other person is merely an object to you, simply there to meet whatever you express as your needs. They are no longer human – someone you can be discovering and learning to love. That is why knowing self – discovering the universe inside yourself – is so important. Carefully examining your own interiority with grace, you will undoubtedly find things ...