You are good enough this very moment to be loved and accepted and healed. Believing this is a matter of deciding to adopt the healthy response to mistakes and failings -- to forgive, be kind and helpful. When you do, you decide you don't need to do anything else to be OK.
My own search for a daily spiritual practice that doesn't shrink from reality but offers a link to the best in life and spirit has led me to create a simple prayer to center my days.
When we approach everything with kindness, it all gets a little easier to bear -- the good, the bad and ugly.
This is the inspiring lesson of Beethoven's Opus 131: It mirrors the nonstop demand of life to have us make music of what we're given, not knowing what will happen. Inevitably, having to play seven movements without pause, the instruments will go out of tune.
There are, I think, two dilemmas that complicate the reconciliation of wanting what we have and having what we want. Let's refer to them as the "night on call" conundrum and the "wrinkle in time" fallacy.
If you listen to the contents of your internal dialogue, it is often a running description of the experience that you are actually living now. That is to say, you are continually telling yourself the story of your life, even though you are the one supposedly living it.
Forgiveness applies to all the big as well as all the small wrongs you experience -- whether real or imagined. Doing it on a regular basis frees up your energy again and gets you back on track.
As a psychotherapist and coach, I'm in the unique position to hear from both men and women what they hate and love about online dating. I hear about red flags, things that work, and things that freak people out.
Every one of us has the exact same power within to transform our lives at any moment. Each of us has available every single day the exact same magic formula.
Life changes when you make it okay to fail. To me, the only true failure is not making an effort toward what brings you joy, and the only way you can do this is by making it okay to fail.
My vacation was mostly great, but I made one mistake. My hope is that I catch you before you leave for your vacations and help you design them, so you maximize relaxing and having fun with your loved ones. This is an important area of life.
To be resilient we have to be connected to that voice inside of us that says stop and notice what is in front of you and all around you that is good and beautiful and pure.
The act of taking one small action will help you feel like you're moving, because YOU ARE! Don't let the fact that you're working at a job you hate keep you from taking action. Make a list of little things you can do to move forward and start doing them every day!
To find out more about the competitors' motivations, I went to the source: four yoga asana champions. After my experience at the internationals, I wasn't surprised that their words spoke to personal growth and camaraderie, and not oneupmanship. You be the judge.
We talk about not "sweating the small stuff" and "going with the flow," but how many of us really practice this in our lives? I don't know why any of us has to have a near death experience to chill the eff out -- it doesn't have to be that way, does it?
Too many things are left unsaid, like "I love you" or "I appreciate you" or "I admit it, Toy Story 3 made me cry." I've decided to jot down some notes that way if something awful happens to me in the near future, my girls will get at least some sense of who I am, who I strive to be and what I value in life.
Nate Holzapfel, 2013.18.06
Tony Endelman, 2013.18.06