“There isn’t any hell or heaven except for how we relate to our world. Hell is just resistance to life.” ~Pema Chodron, The Wisdom of No Escape. When I am in hell, I need to write. The part that is screwed up (of course!) is that I resist writing, as well. When I am in […]
How easily I have fallen back into my old slacker habits! The up side to this is that I spend a good portion of every day in prayer. I have to. I go around feeling bad. I think about Anthony Bourdain’s recent suicide and I understand too clearly how deceptive appearances can be. I am […]
As much as I tell myself I want to heal my life, I find that I regularly slip into avoidance behavior. It is the home of addiction. It is hell, and even though I “know” that the path to healing it is to face it, it is the great battle of my life. I fritter […]
As a child, I remember rehearsing my defense. In my imagination, I was being attacked and I needed to lay out arguments to ward off the assault. These days, I don’t spend a lot of time running through such scenarios in my head, although when something or someone is really getting to me, I still […]
When I was in my thirties, I returned to college and got my degree through an independent study program. During my first semester, I delved into women’s studies and in the course of those studies, I read Clarissa Pinkola Este’s Women Who Run with the Wolves. The one story that I remember above all others […]
What if I were able to see the perfection in everything? It’s a tantalizing question and one that begs me to release the frustration I presently feel over the perform issues of doing anything on my website on the day when, for the first time in three weeks I am endeavoring to write. In our […]
I am clawing my way back to certainty. As human as I am, I too often believe my own illusions – act as if they are somehow apart from me and that I had nothing to do with them. I find myself eternally grateful for my Tuesday night ACIM group because no matter how far […]
“Resistance is Hell, for it places man in a ‘state of torment.” –Florence Scovel Shinn, The Game of Life and How to Play it After several weeks of being mired in resistance, I have at last come home to God. There is something disheartening about trying to manage things myself, about allowing ego to take […]
Pronoia: it was the word of the night. A few in the group had never heard the term before and so we had to stop and define it. We read Wikipedia’s definition: “Pronoia is a neologism that is defined as the opposite state of mind to paranoia: having the sense that there is a conspiracy that […]
I obviously have been out of sync lately since my writing has been sparse. This “feels” like a problem. Appearances tell me this, and yet as I contemplate today’s daily lesson (“Let me recognize my problems have been solved.”), I know that in truth what I think of as “problems” are really just ego’s feeble […]
Lisa Natoli The Observer’s Voice Susan with Pearls Miracles Each Day Miracle Distribution Center Pam Grout Circle of Atonement That’s Another Story