We've launched AOL Healthy Living as a one-stop shop that will inform, enlighten, engage, and inspire you to make more educated decisions about your health. READ MORE Dear Class of 2011: Good Luck... You're Really Going to Need It!: Despite commencement speeches they'll hear, for many of the graduates spilling into the job market throughout the nation, there isn't going to be much to commence. Economically at least, this is an especially rough time to be graduating from college. READ MORE Friday morning, I gave the commencement address at Sarah Lawrence College. Here is the video:
If you want to know what your values are, just look at your own life. Your life looks like your values. A lot of us think we have higher or spiritual values, but those values are not necessarily reflected in our so-called personal lives.
I want a dream to take us deeper, to see everything as a gauzy display of images. Dreams help me see through ordinary experiences to their underlying narratives and images and mysteries.
The power of love to dissolve negativity cannot be underestimated. This power becomes our closest ally in removing the emotional blocks that keep us isolated from our love source.
Living by deliberation means intentionally aligning your thoughts, behaviors, and choices with who you really are, and the outcomes you're trying to achieve.
There are two ways that you can experience the intoxicating joy, profound peace and ecstatic wakefulness of the Ground of Being: spontaneously or through effort.
Not all contemplative paths kindle the same doubts or present the same liabilities. There are, in fact, many methods of meditation and "spiritual" inquiry that can greatly enhance our mental health while offering no affront to the intellect.
How does perception of another individual become so skewed that we are shocked when we learn of their mortal shortfalls? And why does seeing the dark side of a teacher hurt so much more than if the corner grocer or local barista does the same thing?
We just carve out a few minutes of our day to take long, deep, fluid inhalations and long, deep, fluid exhalations -- taking our bodies out of "fight or flight" mode -- and if we notice thoughts arising to consciousness we simply guide our attention back to our breaths. This is basic meditation.
I am left with a mind dashing from this era of my life to that era, the dozens of moves and job changes, being made to feel weak and un-fun. Though I now know that these labels were and are not true, thirty years of hearing them have taken their toll.
How might I ripple and radiate out from the closest, most interior circles to the nether regions of the universe as an ever more welcoming, beaming, and loving presence?
"Society" is a creation of the minds of those who inhabit it; it always has been and always will be. Thus, we have always been and will always be empowered to change society for the better.
My father had never apologized to me. I am certain that my grandfather had never apologized to my father. Was there some wise tradition of not apologizing that I was supposed to know?
My lack of integrity was preventing me from holding the energy necessary to manifest my vision. Like a house that lacks structural integrity and collapses under its own weight, my inner house was divided and could not stand.
Daylight is fading, eyelids are drooping -- a gentle goodnight seems natural. On the other hand, there is the "simple task" of getting a child to bed, tucking them in, and finally going to take care of "grown-up stuff." How difficult it is to preserve this escapable sacred experience.
The false idea that we must wait for something or someone to change before we can step into our vision is a core reason we get stuck and feel like a victim.
