How To Get Bigger

Expansion is simple. It begins with thinking about what you love most about your life, what you most appreciate. As you notice what's good right now, feel what arises - in your chest, in your stomach, in your hands. Let the thoughts slip away and allow the feelings to expand. Let the sensation fill your body. Now send it beyond the boundaries your body to fill the room, to fill the house. Let those sensations expand to encompass the city, the state, the country. Imagine those sensations wrapping around the world and filling it up.

Feel how big you are?

For You Are Bigger Than You Know

Don't fear the unknown. Walking through the unknown will show you to yourself. It will show you where you are strong and where you need help. It will show you how to ask for help. It will show you where you must have faith in yourself, faith in others, and faith in the road you've chosen. But all you fear is that lack of knowledge, and the only way to know the road is to walk the road. Don't fear the untrod path, whether it's one you missed or one you hope to take one day. All paths are leading you precisely where you need to go. Yes, you can choose the rocky side path rather than the scenic high road. Yes, that path might trip you with unseen branches and fling you into the mud. Another path might take you the long way, through the fields and past a desolate lake. But you will always get where you've chosen to go. It may take so long that you forgot where you were aiming. It might take far less time than you dreamed was possible. But you will get there. Just keep walking.

Don't fear change. Change signifies growth. Change signifies a tearing down for a more stable rebuild. Change is at the very heart of the human experience and it pumps the blood that keeps it healthy. Don't fear the things you can't see, don't fear the untapped future or the pained past.

Expand yourself to hold all of it - the fear, the unknown, the future, the past, the trust, the long winding road, and those who will help you along the way. You are greater than you can know, and you can hold everything that has or will come. Embrace what's coming now. And know that you can hold it, for you can hold the world. 

Homework For a New Age

We are all here for a reason. We all want to help. We all want to be seen and heard. But not everyone has the tools. Those who do have the tools can share them. Those who have felt seen and heard can open up to hearing and seeing others. Those who have been helped can help others. But those who have received little and can open up to others and see in them what they would like to see in themselves are to be admired. To see without feeling seen is to evolve. To hear without feeling heard is to step into something greater. To show others the way we have found without believing it’s the only way is an act of courage.

Finding your reason, finding your way to help, finding your way to see and hear and feel for those who are like you and who are not at all like you - on the surface - is the best way you can spend your time.

Here is the value of stories - of books, of television, of radio, of any means that humans can begin to understand one another. We understand the other as we understand ourselves - because very little separates us.

All that separates us is our belief that we are separate. We see others as we see ourselves, we hear others as we hear ourselves. That’s why the greatest job any human has is to listen to their own quiet voice, their own deep desires, the space where they have pain. To investigate where they lock that pain away - with walls, with substances, with fear.

The farther we can each dive into our own pain, our own fear, and realize that it does not own us, that it is not us, that it is only one piece of this experience - a piece that can lead us to other experiences - that is how we can begin to shift everyone forward.

As you shift, everyone shifts. As you move, everyone moves. As you evolve, everyone evolves. Because as you begin to see yourself as the bright flame that you are, you begin to see others the same way. As you begin to see your own potential, you begin to see the potential in others. As you see your own value and beauty, you see the beauty and value in others.

See yourself. Hear yourself. Know yourself. You have complete power over the being that you are. Realizing your own evolution and potential will help us all rise into something greater.

When Bad Days Strike

When bad days hit, it's easy to wish them away. To wish them into oblivion, into the nearest deep cave, to any place but the one you're currently occupying. But bad days are part of the wholeness of life. When we're in the wholeness of life, we experience everything fully - the good, the bad, the indifferent, the annoying.

Bad days can show us where we judge. Where we judge one situation as better than another, that person as better than this one, this aspect of ourselves as better than another - judgments that rarely serve us.

Days are sometimes seen as bad because we need to process something painful to move forward. Maybe we need clarity around a certain situation, maybe we need a blow up to clear the air. Maybe we need a bad day to show us where we aren't taking care of ourselves. Maybe a bad day is precisely what we need, even if we can't yet see it.

When a bad day shows up out of the blue, ask it what it needs. Ask yourself what you need. Ask those in your life what they need. Taking care of needs - first your needs, then the needs of others - is one of the best ways to realign with what you truly want. If that feels too daunting, ask what the house needs. Sometimes doing the dishes or tidying clutter will bring the answers to you.

Don't worry about the bad days. Don't let your cunning little brain use it as proof that you're doing things wrong. You're doing nothing wrong. Don't let yourself veer into the dark and tangled weeds. Or if you do, sit in the weeds for awhile. Revel in it. Roll around. Wonder about it. Ask yourself why you're in the weeds, ask yourself what you need to get out of them, ask yourself why you like it there and why you're staying.

Curiosity is the first step. Finding the joy in the situation is the second.

Maybe if you're in the weeds for awhile, you can get some time to yourself. Maybe if you stay in the weeds when your brain is telling you that you need to fix this toilet and finish that work spreadsheet, you'll emerge from those weeds with better ways of solving and doing and being.

Trust yourself in the bad days. Trust yourself to keep putting one foot in front of the other, trust yourself to keep moving forward. Or trust yourself to sit quietly, let the bad day flow around you, and stop labeling it as better or worse than any other day. Sometimes the worst days are what is needed to get us where we want to go. Sometimes the worst days draw us closer together. Sometimes the worst days point you toward what you've been longing for.

Sometimes a bad day is just a bad day. And that's okay.

What To Do With Worry

Some days, worries creep in to tug at you. Some days, worries bop you insistently over the head from the moment you awake. Some days, worries feel easy to blow up and send away.

If today is the former, remember that you always have the power to offer up your worries and let them be taken from you. You always have the option to expand those worries out like a great bubble so that the still exist but they aren’t knocking around inside your skull. (Sometimes, letting go of worries completely doesn’t feel like a good idea so you resist it. But you can always push out the boundaries so that they don’t impede the joy of your day.)

Worry is something we feel we need to cling to for protection. We all know that worries do nothing but ruin an otherwise lovely rainy morning, but our hearts and our soft animal innards are not so easily convinced. So play with worry. Approach it like a friend. A friend who sometimes annoys you, but only has your best interests at heart. (But, like most friends, worry doesn’t know you the way you know yourself. So its version of your best interest may be understandably skewed.)

Play with worry. Collect all your worries into a ball and hurl them into the atmosphere. Approach each worry separately and light it up like a firework and let it surprise you with the great exploding dragons and balls of colorful flame in the sky. Imagine a great church, thousands of years old, where you can walk through the vestry under that high arching ceiling and lay your worries down on the altar, knowing that when you walk back out the door, your worries will be cared for and won’t follow you.

Worry is simply a protective mechanism designed to keep us safe and then left running in the background long after our software has been upgraded and what was designed in the past is no longer necessary. Now it’s just eating up space and memory.

Delete the program, play with it in new ways, allow it space and give it love. Worry can be another way to know yourself in a deeper and more intuitive way, if you approach it like something that can be loved rather than a dark monster intent on ruining your day.