Spirituality, Self-Knowledge and The Art of Living

What do you need in order to be fulfilled and have a sense of order and continuity? It may be not what you think…of course, food, shelter, heat,water, sanitation, but what of meaning, belonging, emotional balance, adaptability and a sense of humour.What of community, communication and understanding of how nature is the bedrock on which all of us live.

The natural world dwells deep with your emotional and psychological nature, within your body, intellect, instinctual awareness and all your habits, for every tree that is wantonly cut down in the wild so is a little part of us all. Diminish nature and its resources and so mankind is diminished. Nature is the underlying foundation of all our aspects of our well being, you and nature are the same experience.

In uncertain times you need to know what is necesary for your emotional and spiritual growth so that you can build both your vitality and integrity, thereby empowering your self-discipline. As things change rapidly around you you need to look at the qualities of your emotional strength and resilience and improve those areas that are in need of growth. In times such as these, have money, wealth or secured resources is not enough, having mental clarity, emotional balance, good health and psychological resilience are those invaluable tools that will enable you to know true stability and enduring prosperity, for we think prosperity is linked to wealth and money, it has being made to be like this since the late 18th century, but this model is flimsy: true prosperity comes from knowing who you are and what you can do with what you have when everyone else has lost their balance, money or previous lifestyle  or is having less, for in the case of human growth, individually and socially, less is more, if you have the clarity to know and express it.

As your life changes, day by day, hour by hour, month by year, what do you notice or see in the experiences that make your life? are there shadows of the past feeling as it they were having hold of you right now? Or are you thinking of the future, a better place to be than where you are now? Look and breathe in the patterns of your life, how have the moments being coloured by your relationship to the life experiences thast you have had? Are you part of a community, jammed in a crowd, on an emotionally powered desert island? As your life changes, where will you be?

There dwells within your life and every life, the prayer cycle. It is that process of  consciousness that occupies everything we are, do and feel, hate, love and are bored with.

Even without us knowing it, the prayer cycle continues, the prayer cycle is wordless has no sound, does not praise any god or humankind, but actualises itself through the experiences that make us who we are and gives the gift of dissatisfaction and the desire for knowing. If you stop for a time, you can feel the prayer cycle going on within you and all living beings, some slower, some faster, some louder some so quiet as you think nothing is there, but the prayer cycle is everywhere and everything.

all the the elements

that make you

move in waves

short impulses

long undulating

spirals,waves

that heave and sign

and by their action

generate the stuff of matter

squeezing out the essence of gravity

spreading out the strands of light

that illuminate us to think

be, free and content

to understand the

human impulse of dissatisfaction

there is

only

one word

that can express all that you can be

regardless of where you have come from and imagine that you are going to be

and that is:

love

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when sitting still

in the tidal flow of your breath

pause in the pause between the breath

and there

the inner quake is ready to be released

if you will to know stillness

you must first know the storm

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there is a

path to your

Self

it is not straight

but winding

for it occupies

acts of randomness

and a myriad of thoughts

but if you look

gently but constantly

you can see the path

its edges covered by the

overgrowth of life

and then once you know it is there

it clears and shows you the way