7 lessons learned the hard way Whatever practice resonates with you, do that. It’s not as if you could choose not to. Just don’t expect it to end suffering, not the worlds, nor yours. Damn those expectations. 😉 Practices are everywhere. They come in all shapes and forms, some you’d call a practice and …
Category Archives: Free will
The Last Domino to Fall
Inzicht Magazine, in the Netherlands, recently invited me to write an article for them. The article titled, The Last Domino to Fall, was in the May edition. If you are fluent in Dutch, you can read it there. If not, I am posting the English version. It is a bit longer than my normal pieces, but worth …
Question: Do you think reality is benevolent?
A friend sent me this question: Do you think reality is benevolent? My response may be of interest to many of you. From observation, I tend to experience it as benevolent, that it trends organically towards harmony. When life is left alone, let be as it is, it quite naturally wholes itself. That ‘leave it …
Authentic Love: Lessons from Jesus’ Teachings
I recently wrote about loving as Jesus did. It sounds yummy but it has a hitch in its get-along. You see, Jesus didn’t just love the easy ones, the ones who followed him, who thought like he did. He loved the tax collectors, the prostitutes, the Samaritans, the lepers, and he even loved those who …
The Mind Trap
Today has been an interesting day. While mowing an acre of grass, taking a hoe to the vegetable garden, and enjoying a three-mile walk with Sophia, I’ve been pondering life, this appearance of duality that is physically dubious and yet remarkably, manifests shamelessly as the material world. It is the veritable impossible dream. I’ve been …
Life’s Little Secret
I can pretty much guarantee that few will be interested in this little secret, because it is the rather large lie, the frustrating fallacy, the charlatan concept that is ardently guarded by riveting, nearly unconscious resistance. I used to encounter that same thing when I’d write about death. That little idea doesn’t seem to be …
Wildly Crazy
This world is wildly crazy, duplicitous it seems as well. Even when you are compassionate and caring, empathic, feeling the hurts and wounds of others, sometimes tending to your own tender heart means adding pain to another’s. I think that is why empaths stay so long in harmful relationships, or at least why I did. …
Life Has Always Been in Your Corner
It takes a lifetime (perhaps lifetimes) of stretching and expanding, ripping and tearing, just to move through one’s predispositions, to meet one’s inbred resistance and evolve to the grace of simple tolerance. During this precious part of the journey, it feels like you are taking the steps, are choosing right, left or straight ahead, that …
Life Is the Matrix
Even though we say we don’t, most of us are looking for an escape hatch. We call it all sorts of things: more money, a new guy or gal to call our own, a better higher paying or more meaningful job, your preferred President, the fulfillment of a death wish, enlightenment … basically anything we …
The Uncertainty Factor
It is beyond wondrous to live inside a paradox. We all do, whether we realize it or not. We feel real, seemingly separated from each other by time and space, and yet we aren’t. We are both and neither simultaneously, maybe that’s why we don’t like uncertainty, why we fight for answers, need to find …
Always Pointed at the Target
Life is an interactive simulation with a gazillion options. Do you want to play out the life of a successful businessperson? Yay. How about mister or miss popularity? Hoorah. Maybe a pilgrim on the spiritual path fits or even one who awakens. Are you playing the role of victim, the one who everyone abuses? Does …
The Cosmic Bubblegum Machine
What would your life be like if you knew that you couldn’t do anything other than what you are doing? That may include dithering back and forth, trying to make the best decision or being impulsive and taking no heed of consequences. It could encompass getting frustrated and filled with doubt or seemingly breezing effortlessly …
How Would You Know — It Hasn’t Happened Yet
Boy, if that happened to me, I’d … I remember saying that. If I was diagnosed with cancer, I wouldn’t go through all that. I’d rather die. I said that after my husband died, after watching him fight the good fight for five years. According to medical science he was a survivor. He’d made it …
If There’s a Why
Anything that can be experienced is part of the dream, a dream in the mind of God. Anything. States of bliss, immense grief, fits of burning anger, naked despondency, all of it is the dream. Ideas of awakening from the dream are part of the dream. Dimensional travel, astral planes, depths of hell are all …
Anarchy!
Sugar and spice and all things that are nice, that’s what little girls are made of. Snakes and snails and puppy dog tails, that’s what little boys are made of … or so said the poems from the early 1800s. Thank goodness we see more clearly now … or do we? What are you really …
Amaya Gayle 