Posts tagged with “wisdom”

Why Creativity Is the Path to Mindfulness, Happiness, and Peace
âMindful and creative, a child who has neither a past, nor examples to follow, nor value judgments, simply lives, speaks and plays in freedom.â ~Arnaud Desjardins
No human being lives without experiencing the duality of life.
Good and bad. Love and hate. Life and death. Acceptance and rejection. Success and failure. Joy and jealousy. Compassion and judgment.
So why do we spend so much time trying to pretend that itâs bad to experience all of it, the good, the bad, and the ugly?
Even our weather men and women tell us itâs a going to be a bad day because …

Maybe This Is What Happiness Is
With a lift of his chin and a bit of a grin,
Without any doubting or quiddit,
He started to sing as tackled the thing
That couldnât be done and he did it.
âEdgar Guest
Iâve always believed in the adage âactions speak louder than words.â Iâve never been one to seek guidance from commercial catch phrases, trending tweets, or song lyrics. But Guestâs poem did make me smile. Whether it was the playfulness of the verse or just the simplicity of the message, it spoke volumes to me.
Easy, right? Well, maybe for Edgar, but not so much …

Life Is Better When We Focus on What We Appreciate, Not Whatâs Lacking
âWisdom is merely the movement from fighting life to embracing it.â ~Rasheed Ogunlaru
Recently a friend told me a story about taking her seven-year-old to the circus. It was a wonderful mother-daughter outing. Just the two of them, no pesky brothers or dad tagging along and getting in the way.
They had the best time. They watched acrobats and clowns and all manner of brand new delights, gasping at one another gleefully at every new feat. They bathed in each otherâs company without interruption, laughing and having fun. Literally all the things.
After this magical afternoon, as the two of …

Itâs Okay to âFailâ on Your Way to Finding What You Want to Do
âLife isnât about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.â ~George Bernard Shaw
I would say itâs a safe assumption that most people arenât quite sure what theyâre doing.
What do I mean? I mean that most individualsâwhether they look polished and presentable or haphazardly have their life thrown togetherâare generally playing a game called âlife.â And theyâre trying the best they can.
In other words, weâre all capable and have all experienced the highs and lows of what life has to offer. Unfortunately, thatâs just part of the human experience. To try to ride the highs while avoiding the …

We Canât Do Everything, But We Can Do More Than We Think
âThere are plenty of obstacles in your path. Donât allow yourself to become one of them.â ~Ralph Marston
I was sitting in a self-improvement course listening to the facilitatorâs instructions. âI want you to come up with a Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal,â she announced. âThis needs to be a stretch, something where you really put skin in the game. You have seven weeks to reach this goal.â
The rest of her instructions trailed off as I thought about which area of my life I wanted to improve. I overheard a few of my classmates talking to each other about …

Freeing Yourself from Problems and Habits by Seeing That You’re Already Free
âLetting go gives us freedom, and freedom is the only condition for happiness. If, in our heart, we still cling to anythingâanger, anxiety, or possessionsâwe cannot be free.â ~Thich Nhat Hanh
Imagine there is a river running through you.
Your entire experience of life flows through you, down that river. Everything you think, feel, and do passes through, powered by the current of the river.
Your emotions, your opinions, your sense of identity ⊠your habits, diagnoses, and choices ⊠they arenât still or solid, sitting somewhere. They are brought to life, felt, and then they drift away. They …

The Most Compassionate Words and How They Heal
âLove and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive.â ~Dalai Lama.
It wasnât until my mother died that I was able to feel her love and have that mother-daughter relationship that Iâd been craving all my life. It was not until she died that I was able to learn, and truly feel, compassionâfor her and for me.
Iâve always known that compassion for others is a nice thing. We all know that. But it wasnât until I truly felt it that I was able to create a deep sense of healing.
My mum and I always had …

How I Transformed My Anxiety and What to Do If You Feel Emotionally Stuck
âThere is still vitality under the snow, even though to the casual eye it seems to be dead.â ~Agnes Sligh Turnbull
For as long as I can recall, I have always been a fretful and anxious person. Mine was a low-key anxiety thatâs always colored the background of my life, a constant companion of ambiguous dread and imminent doom (just around the corner!)
The annoying part was that I never quite knew why the anxiety hung around. There werenât any real situations in my life that evoked this constant, nagging fear.
I have tried various techniques to manage my anxiety. …