Stopped to Ponder

Most people go through life believing that they are this story, believing that they are the thoughts they are thinking,
instead of the essence that is experiencing those thoughts

A funny thing happened on the way to therapy...

Imagine this scenario: you have been living your entire life shackled to an imaginary story of who you are. Your story tells you that you're this way and that way, with a fixed personality. And you believe so strongly that this story defines you, but in truth it has nothing whatsoever to do with reality -- it's simply a fanciful construct of the mind.

... for most of us this isn't just a wacky scenario, it's our everyday reality! And because of our constricted inner stories, we live lives of perpetual suffering.

Beach Chair Therapy

When I hear someone say, "stop living in the past."
I think to myself...but the music was so much better then.

From The Study...a conversation on possibility, Alfred Kazin

The other day … I suddenly realized, with a shudder almost … how easy it is to fall into the other-imposed trap of trying endlessly to correct and reform oneself, in accordance with this and that, one’s idea of the right person to be, when all the time, one is not merely “stuck” with oneself, as one is rightly enough, but one suffers from constrictedness, from reaction, from the million-and-one reasons, so boringly personified around one in one’s contemporaries and half-friends and stupid, genteel colleagues, who are always telling us over again that man is bad and sinful! Alfred Kazin,

The Art of Living

Violinists practicing scales and dancers repeating the same movements over decades are not simply warming up or mechanically training their muscles. They are learning how to attend unswervingly, moment by moment, to themselves and their art; learning to come into steady presence, free from the distractions of interest or boredom.

The Art of Living...

"Daughters are the only ones who can control their father."

The Art Of Living

“We dance for laughter, we dance for tears, we dance for madness, we dance for fears, we dance for hopes, we dance for screams, we are the dancers, we create the dreams.”― Albert Einstein

Stopped To Ponder

"We don't have to struggle to survive after all. We have already survived. We survive now; the struggle was just an extra complication that we added to our lives because we had lost our confidence in the way things are. We no longer need to manipulate things as they are into things as we would like them to be."

Beach Chair Therapy

"A portion of our ego is formed around what we think others think about us...when in reality, what others think about us, is not our business."

We have an inside and an outside—an interior landscape and an exterior landscape. Our interior landscape is our subjective experience of our authentic self, while our exterior landscape is a product of our worldview. The two together create a psychosocial dynamic, but that dynamic has only one reference point, leaving us balancing self- and other-perception.

Lessons From The Sane Asylum

“Searching is everything – going beyond what you know. And the test of the search is really in the things themselves, the things you seek to understand. What is important is not what you think about them, but how they enlarge you.” 

Lessons From The Sane Asylum...

 “To love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love,”  Thich Nhat Hahn 

The Art of Living

  “wholeness does not mean perfection: it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life,”

At any given moment you’re failing to see the way things actually are. The manifestation is that you’re failing to be kind. You’re anxious. You’re neurotic. I don’t think it’s so much about external things. I think you could be a very happy, high-functioning person and still note the moment-to-moment failures. George Saunders

Stopped To Ponder...

"A country is only as good… only as strong as the people who make it up and the country turns into what the people want it to become… I don’t believe any longer that we can afford to say that it is entirely out of our hands. We made the world we’re living in and we have to make it over." James Baldwin

From The Study...a conversation of possibility

The collision between one’s image of oneself and what one actually is is always very painful and there are two things you can do about it, you can meet the collision head-on and try and become what you really are or you can retreat and try to remain what you thought you were, which is a fantasy, in which you will certainly perish.

My morning walk...

As I walked the beach this morning, in the distance I observed a memorial service to a fallen soldier. I have seen weddings, family reunions, parties of every flavor, but my first for an ocean side memorial and burial. There are those moments that make us stand still, but few that give you the presence of silence...so is was this beautiful morning...just for you my friend and to those that have fallen...may we chose to honor one another...

A southeast wind blowing from the trades,
 The beauty of the azure sky as it kissed the ocean.
The waves gently rolling, just for you.

Four men dressed in blue and a brass bugle just for you
One woman clutching the flag in her arms,
The last moment to spend with you.

In her hands, a simple box,
Ashes...the presence of you.

Taps pierced the morning air,
A sound that has no compare,
Everyone stopped in silence just for you.

An honorable salute from the men in blue,
She carried your box and the presence of you

The children on the beach stopped their play,
No words were spoken
Only silence for you.

She kissed the box,
And shed a tear, just for you.

We all watched in silence,
As she released your soul to the sea.
Even the children shed a tear.

The presence of silence just for you...

A funny thing happened on the way to therapy...

My view of human nature is that all of us are just holding it together in various ways — and that’s okay, and we just need to go easy with one another, knowing that we’re all these incredibly fragile beings.

The Art Of Living

Cloths of Heaven

William Butler Yeats

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.