When you're having a bad day, a bad month, or a shitty year

This is an important lesson to remember when you're having a bad day, a bad month, or a shitty year.  Things will change: you won't feel this way forever.  And anyway, sometimes the hardest lessons to learn are the ones your soul needs most.  I believe you can't feel real joy unless you've felt heartache.  You can't have a sense of victory unless you know what it means to fail.  You can't know what it's like to feel holy until you know what's it like to feel really fucking evil....This was when I learned...that sometimes you need to let go of everything you're clinging to and start over, whether because you've outgrown it or because it's not working anymore, or because it was wrong for you in the first place. ~ From, If You Have to Cry, Go Outside: And Other Things Your Mother Never Told You, by Kelly Cutrone

Teaching Recovery, Rather Than Treating Addiction

I have often wondered if a more personalized, human approach to addiction recovery would be better than shaming people into giving up their addictions. Here is an article on how just that kind of program is having positive results. See it here: Viewpoint: Teaching Recovery

Reinvent Yourself

"The biggest intellectual breakthrough in the life of the great poet William Butler Yeats came when he realized that happiness and growth are one and the same.  They could not be separated.  You can notice this for yourself: you are happy when you are growing.  And no growth you have ever made has been effortless.

Watch the nature film of the butterfly struggling to push through the cocoon.  You will see the effort.  You will be moved.  You will see the animating force within living beings.  It’s the force of personal reinvention.  Watch the movie Rocky.  You will see the hidden connection between effort and joy.  Pay attention to your reactions to certain scenes in movies.  Pay attention to your goose bumps and your tears.  They come in response to courage and effort.  They don’t come in response to a scene in which someone is being comfortable.  Pay attention to why you are chocked up.  It is your potential self trying to tell you something." ~ From the book, Reinvent Yourself: How to Become the Person You've Always Wanted to Be, by Steve Chandler

Change is Good (Really!)

We all get comfortable in our routines, our marriages and relationships, our work, our health. We often fail to plan for change. Here is a brief article to help us be better prepared for the unexpected things in life, or those things we know may be coming, but we simply disregard them. See it here: Change is Good

How We Learn to Know Ourselves

In the main it is not by introspection but by reflecting on our living in common with others that we come to know ourselves. What is revealed? It is an original creation. Freely the subject makes himself what he is, never in this life is the making finished, always it is in process, always it is a precarious achievement that can slip and fall and shatter.  —Bernard Lonergan, Jesuit 

Destiny Can Be Directed

One discovers that destiny can be directed, that one does not have to remain in bondage to the first wax imprint made in childhood. One need not be branded by the first pattern. Once the deforming mirror is smashed, there is a possibility of wholeness; there is a possibility of joy.-- Anais Nin