Today happens to also be my birthday so I wanted to mark the year end here. I leave you with these 3 spiritual memes from the channels I follow on IG.
Have fun 🎪, be lazy/do nothing, eat and be merry 🎂, want what you have to have what you want ✨, and if you are unsure what to do, do you, boo 😂
Happy New Year! 🥳 🥂
A girl with a pearl earring she is not. She is a perimenopausal woman in her mid 40s who gets up at dawn to apply cold estrogel to her thighs and dry it with a hairdryer before she goes to work.
Inspired by Vermeer’s work, this illustration rendered by AI provides a contemporary perspective on the realities of life for women of middle age.
Nothing is ever straightforward. Everything is a fucking paradox. Every question has not two but a multitude of answers.
Walking to the job of my dreams feels like being led to the gallows. I am not okay with a building being mismanaged, yet I pay to go to a country where they embrace decay. I felt soul dead in a prestigious job paying three times what I earn now, but I feel alive in this job where I am an essential worker, yet get treated like not.
An elderly patient is yelling at me because his constipation medication is not in stock, indignant with fear or helplessness, lost in aimless rage against nearing mortality, blocked physically and energetically — I can’t blame him because he is my karmic mirror, a reflection of me when I burn with anonymous anger. I used to be a walking emotional contagion. But now the buck stops with me.
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Continue readingYou are enough simply by being alive.
Thank you for living.
Thank you for resisting.
Thank you for creating.
Thank you for dreaming.
Thank you for resting.
I’ve been doing this practice lately where when I catch myself contracting — getting tense emotionally (the knot in the stomach) or hang up on something mentally (someone said something or acted somehow, and that triggered a reaction), I try to immediately let it go, relax the knot in my stomach and release the whatever mental story-drama begins unfolding.
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I love art by René Magritte. His Golconda (below) made me wonder how it would look like with a Buddhist twist and if it was staged in nature. I can’t paint but AI can, better than me anyway, so the above is as close to my idea as I got. Ignoring the weird AI additions (some monks have Buddha-like head knots), overall, I thought it came out quite well ☺️
Continue readingVideo source: TikTok
I release my parents
from the feeling that they failed me…
I release my children
from the need to bring me pride,
so they may carve their own paths
according to what their hearts constantly whisper in their ears.
I release my partner
from the obligation to complete me.
I lack nothing;
I learn from all beings all the time…
“Rather than seeing this emptiness as something to be feared or immediately filled, consider it an invitation to question and reimagine. It’s your soul’s way of saying that you’re ready for something more meaningful, more aligned, and more genuinely yours than the predetermined script you’ve been following. The discomfort of emptiness often precedes the most significant periods of growth and authentic self-discovery.”
— LonerWolf
A fascinating discussion on the state of modern psyche between two people who I really admire and respect. I found their thoughts on the loneliness epidemic and its relation to uncertainty particularly insightful.
With practice, we can see that our wounded child is not only us. Our wounded child may represent several generations.
Our mother may have suffered throughout her life. Our father may have suffered. Perhaps our parents weren’t able to look after the wounded child in themselves. So, when we’re embracing the wounded child in us, we’re embracing all the wounded children of our past generations. This practice is not a practice for ourselves alone but for numberless generations of ancestors and descendants.
Our ancestors may not have known how to care for their wounded child within, so they transmitted their wounded child to us. Our practice is to end this cycle. The people around us, our family and friends, may also have a severely wounded child inside. If we’ve managed to help ourselves, we can also help them. When we’ve healed ourselves, our relationships with others become much easier. There’s more peace and more love in us.
Source: How to Listen by Thich Nhat Hahn
My loneliness was shaped like absence.
I had not fear — but terror — of it,
Sobbing into a pillow every night,
Grasping at people, things and moments
To fill the void.
I felt alone in a large family in a small house,
Watching fireworks from a hospital window,
Holding my newborn son,
And during bathroom panic attacks,
Being crushed by the void.
The pursuit of happiness for its own sake is a fool’s errand. As a goal it is frivolous and unrealistic—frivolous because happiness is a transient state dependent on many conditions, and unrealistic because life is unpredictable and pain may arise at any time.
All suffering comes from wanting your own happiness.
Complete awakening arises from the intention to help others.
Therefore, exchange completely your happiness
For the suffering of others—this is the practice of a bodhisattva.Forget about being happy. Put it right out of your mind. When you say to yourself, “I want to be happy,” you are telling yourself that you are not happy, and you start looking for something that will make you feel happy… The harder you try to be happy, the more you reinforce that belief that you are not happy…
If you were to let go of the pursuit of happiness, what would you do? To put it a bit more dramatically, suppose you were told that no matter what you did, you would never be happy. Never. What would you do with your life?
You might pay more attention to others. You might accept them just as they are, rather than looking for ways to get them to conform to your idea of how they should be. You might start relating to life itself, rather than looking to what you get out of it. You might be more willing to engage with what life brings you, with all its ups and downs, rather than always wanting it to be other than it is.
Ken McLeod “Forget Happiness”
Success can only be measured
by the extent that you have inner peace and mental control
that enable you to be happy
in all circumstances.
— Yogananda
This talk was exactly what I needed to hear as I navigate a career change. My main takeaways are below, but the biggest learning is the quote above which I took liberty to turn into a poem.
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Nomad of the Universe 