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.
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.
We all have obstacles to overcome and dragons to slay, our path is often treacherous and challenging, and our destination is not always clear. But ultimately, the adventure of the hero is the adventure of being alive.
This is a story about serendipity and fortuitousness, luck and good fortune, beauty and love, and is restorative of an optimism that is too often dismissed in contemporary society.
I have to let the loudness of God take me away to wherever I need to be. I'll still go to seven different churches and read through the piles of religious of books I've hoarded in my room, but they can't tell me anything compared to what God can tell me.
I was working beneath the composting toilets, churning shit with a shovel, trying to turn it into food for the earth, when a voice rose up from the depths: I just have to tell people about this.
In crisis, the wrong question to ask is, "What have I done to deserve this?" The right one is, "What am I now being summoned to do?" Each of us has a task. Every life has a purpose. We can bear the pain of the past when we discover the future we are called on to make.
When we set aside the quality time and claim the psychic space for ceremony, when we assume the authority to do so, we are able to transform our perceptions, our perspectives, our experiences, and in the process, our reality.
We watch the stories of hoarders on television and feel sorry for them and we feel proud to not be one of them. But perhaps we have more in common than we realize.
