A few weeks ago, at our Living the Five Agreements group we were talking about gratitude from a Toltec Perspective. We read a paragraph from Sheri Rosenthal’s book The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Toltec Wisdom. One of the points she made was that from a Toltec perspective Warriors do not see experiences as good or bad, but instead as learning experiences. Her writing reminded me of a piece of wisdom my Bubby shared with me that I was to seek the blessing in all situations and circumstances. There is a lesson in every moment of life she would tell me. See the lesson. Who knew that my Bubby, who had never heard of Toltec wisdom, knew that this is what she was teaching me.
Read morePoultice of Self-Love
As many of you who follow us on a regular basis know, the next few years we are focusing on a different spiritual practice each month. September is the month of forgiveness. While I have always known it to be a spiritual practice, I did not realize that there days that were set aside to calm together as global bodies and practice forgiveness. For example, I just found out that August 5th was International Forgiveness Day, Global Forgiveness Day was August 27th and Regular Forgiveness Day was June 26th. While all these days are important, it is also important to remember that each day has the potential to be forgiveness day in our lives.
After our Living the Five Agreements group tonight, I decided to see what Toltec Wisdom said about forgiveness. In the Everything Toltec Wisdom book, it is written,
Read moreDon't Make Assumptions
My friend Jane, who I mention quite often in my gratitude journal and who inspired our affirmation card ministry, send me a funny story which is all about what happens when we make assumptions. This is her story.
Read moreMy friend, Ingrid, and I made these candleholders. We made 6 in total. They are put together like building blocks with glass vases, bowls, plates etc. to get the desired affect and then glued to stay in place. We’d been collecting glassware from second-hand shops for a while and it took nearly a whole day to make the 6.
We decided to give the three largest to Patience’s Mum, Sylvia, for Christmas, as they looked great in a cluster.
What story are you creating?
don Miguel Ruiz once said, "You know the word 'Toltec' means artist. When I talk about Toltec, I’m really talking about the entire humanity, because we all are artists. Even if we don’t have the awareness, we’re always creating. The biggest art that we humans create is a story – the story of ourselves, the story of our life. It looks so real, and we live in that story... We give a meaning to every single word that we use. We give our personal power to knowledge... and knowledge creates a massive piece also, which is the main character of our story. Which means it creates us, what believe we are..."
Read moreToday is a new day!
I was once taught that the most dangerous states to live in are the past and the present. Today is a new day! One thing so many people do is spend their entire lives beating themselves up for something, which they said or did or didn’t say or do years ago, but today is a new day. The past is the past and you cannot go back and change it. What you do have control over is today, so live it to its fullest, focusing on being the best you that you can be today.
Read moreT is for Toxins
There are two sources of spiritual toxins in our lives: internal and external. It is easy to understand how internal toxic cleanup is a process. We can understand that stalking, as I wrote about last week, is a process whereby our inner jaguar preys out the internal toxins, or parasites as don Miguel Ruiz would refer to them, and ruthlessly remove them. We then go back and seek to understand the roots of how that toxin came in and remove our attachment to it.
Read moreThe F word
My guess is when you hear somebody mention the F word; you assume they are using a word, which rhymes with duck, tuck, truck, and a whole other list of words, which end with _uck. So if you think this is going to be about that F word, I hate to disappoint you. It isn’t. Well, not directly. Although there have been moments in my life when I have experienced something which has made me want to use that particular F word. What helped me move away from that F word was another F word – forgiveness.
Some recent conversations with friends, clients, acquaintances, and even strangers at the grocery store have brought me to a place where I realize many of us choose not to forgive, have different motives for forgiving, or have not thought about how we benefit when we forgive.
Read moreDo your best!
These words are the last of the four agreements Don Miguel Ruiz discusses in this book The Four Agreements. Sounds simple right; just do your best! This is what I tell my students all the time. I remind those I am journeying with of this all the time. This past week I had to remind myself that I was doing my best. One of the things about doing your best is recognizing that your best varies from moment to moment. My best when I was not journeying with Zoë through her diagnosis and treatment for breast cancer has been different then before this was a part of our journey together. My best when I was not trying to advocate for the restoration of my para transit services is quite different then now that I am. Last week and this past weekend as we were preparing for Zoë’s surgery and the unknowns about what she would and would not be able to do afterwards consumed quite a bit of my time and energy.
Read moreYou Are Wiser Then You Think
So often, I hear people putting themselves down for their level of education, their intelligence, or their wisdom. The truth is that each of is much wiser then we give ourselves credit for. One of the questions I ask my students every semester is “how do you know what you know?” They struggle with that question all semester, usually thinking about this question in terms of how do they know what they know in terms of their personality, their likes, dislikes, values, etc. How do they know what they know about world, national, and local news? How do they know what they know about their families? Given the biases in the reporting of the news, textbooks, the media, and just about any other source of information in the world, how do we know what we know?
Read moreMastering Love
This month, I have been doing a lot of reflecting on love. In part, because of where I am in my own journey. In part, because of my discussions with people about don Miguel Ruiz’s book "The Mastery of Love." For those who have not read it, I strongly encourage you to do so. While he provides you with ideas and concepts, he also provides you with some realistic ways in which one can overcome the parasites of our socialization process and transcend to a reality where emotional pain, suffering, guilt, shame, fear, jealousy, and all the other tools of civilization no longer have power over us. He strips away the "blame game" and tells us we are each responsible for our emotional suffering. Mom is not responsible. Dad is not responsible. The jerk that just cut us off on the highway is not responsible. We inherited suffering through our "civilization" process and learned to fear instead of love.
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