Daily Self Love

Today, I want to share with you a poem that was shared with me by my Vedanta teacher in India, Swami Parthasarathy, and the poem is “The Daffodils” by William Wordsworth.

It goes like this...

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Al…

When we take on a task like loving ourselves unconditionally, especially if it's coming after years of struggle with self-abuse or self-criticism and things like that, this can seem like an insurmountable task. And one of the funny things that we do with an insurmountable task is we sometimes look for failures to prove to ourselves that it's not worth the effort, or it couldn't possibly work.

We look for things that will support the story of it being insurmountable. Now we want to be able to …

Today I want to share one of my favorite poems. It's by James Henry Leigh Hunt, and i was introduced to it in a book by Swami Parthasarathy called Select English poems. The poem:

Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)
Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,
And saw, within the moonlight in his room,
Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,
An angel writing in a book of gold:—
Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,
And to the presence in the room he said,
"What writest thou?"—The vision ra…

It’s interesting that when Adam and Eve committed the original sin and became self aware, the first thing they did was to cover themselves up. It seems that shame was right there at the dawn of consciousness. This presents some interesting philosophical topics, and maybe we’ll take those up some other time. 

In a practical way, it’s important to understand that shame is something that runs deep. It’s a powerful primal force that pulls us into darkness. Hiding away and hoping to not be seen fo…

Today we have more wisdom from The Great British Bakeoff.

In the beginning, you just have to not be the worst one. It’s something you hear a lot of the contestants say. I just didn’t want to be the first one to go.

They’re focused on not making too many mistakes. Stretching themselves just enough to keep up and stay in the game, but not beyond that. Not taking too many risks.

However, as the level increases, a transition must be made from “not losing” to “winning”

That’s the difference bet…

When I was in marching band, we had a saying, “hurry up and wait.” I’ve heard military folks say this too. 

One of the things many people crave is consistency and stability. We want to know what’s coming. No unwelcome  surprises. 

And want a good flow in our lives and want it to pretty much stay the same, or within certain parameters. We want “balance.” 

But your life is not an automated assembly line. And we don’t see that kind of rigid consistency anywhere in nature. 

There are seasons i…

How many times have you hear people say, "It always gets worse before it gets better."

How many times have you said that yourself?

Is that so?

Does it NEED to?

Always?

See, I'm not even sure this is accurate. I think it's more accurate to say that things SEEM to get worse before they get better.

For example, health is the natural state. In order to move from illness to health, you don't infuse more health, you remove illness and disease.

But in the process of doing that, you start to fi…

By some accounts of metaphysicians, the human race is as much as 18,000 years behind on the evolution schedule. The evolution schedule is basically the idea that we are evolving or meant to evolve in sync with the universe itself.

Now whether you buy into these numbers or not, it's safe to say that our internal evolution has not kept pace with our technological evolution. Otherwise we wouldn't be seeing the epidemics of stress and anxiety along with the breakdown of our physical health after j…

I was up early and it was completely dark, I started to hear the birds sing and it reminded me of this quote that I learned from my Vedanta teacher.

It says, “Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the Dawn is still dark.” And to me, this is the essence of real faith.

The bird knows beyond knowing that the sun is coming up before there is even a hint of light. And in ourselves, it is sometimes easy to get into a place of, ‘prove it’. We have a ‘prove it’ kind of attitude.

You…

We all encounter obstacles in our life. It's how we meet them that make all the difference in the world.

When things aren't going our way and obstacles are showing up, it starts a story in our heads. ‘The universe is working against me’, or ‘I must be doing it wrong. What's wrong with me?’ ‘I must be broken’. It gets to be very stressful very fast and what we're doing is actually over-potentializing the problem, which is basically giving it far too much energy and attention. When you do that…