Crossposted from futurehealth.org
Jonathan Swift
We all have veins of gold-- fantastic riches-- in our lives, every one of us.
William James (1842 - 1910)
Some of these veins of gold we know about, we can easily access
them. Some we must still discover and some, which we know about, we need to learn how to reliably access more often.
These "veins of gold" include:
- connection with God,
- Courage,
- ability to express and feel strong emotions,
- Exercise
- Dreams
- Imagination
- Creativity
- Work
- Writing
- Love
- Meditation
- Learning
- knowledge
- Quiet
- Kindness
- Friends
- Athletic performance being in the zone
- Family
- Arts
- Music
- Appreciation
- Awareness of....
- Naievete, or new or beginner's mind
There are even some "veins" which may not appear to be positive, but which are worth knowing, because of what we learn from them and what they show us which we would not otherwise see, such as:
- Pain
It is not enough to know of, or, even better, to know how to access these veins of gold. We must know how to maximize their roles in our lives.
We want to be living in our veins of gold as much as we are able..
Madame Swetchine
For many of these, there are different levels of access, to different intensities and depths. There are things you can do to enhance your access to and
experience of these veins of gold, and there are ways that we block or inhibit ourselves from making the most of them.
Ways we can enhance the amount of time we spend enjoying our veins of gold, or the level of access, intensity or depth include:
- learning
- Ritual
- Practice
- Meditation
- Self talk
- Mindfulness
- Relaxation
- scheduling
- Setting priorities
- sharing
Ways we can block our access to, or decrease the time we spend enjoying and benefiting from our veins of gold:
- Ignorance
- Inhibition (feelings, imagination)
- Workaholism
- hurry
- Not setting, or ignoring priorities
- Fixing our attention on the trees rather than the forest
- Over or under-reacting
- stress
Meister Eckhart
I've spent much of my life working in different fields that empower people to find their and their world's veins of gold:
- biofeedback, self regulation and consciousness exploration training; teaching people to learn new ways to take control of their body, mind and life
- Story- the art, science and application-- stories define who we are, where we come from and where we are going.
- OpEdNews and New Media; empowering people to participate in the media, in the web, to wake others up to cast light where there is darkness, to reach people with the ideas and tools they believe in
In researching this article and idea, I discovered that perhaps more than any other writer, Thoreau wrote about and probably lived a "vein of gold" life. I've assembled a collection of his relevant quotations here. Quotations By Thoreau on Finding the Best Within Ourselves and Living It
Here are a few, to tease you to read the whole collection.
Thoreau, Walden, Chapter 1
Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)
Thoreau, Journal, July 19, 1851 (he lived to be 45)
Henry David Thoreau
"Walden," "Conclusion," 1854.