Balance of Love

Before you look for someone else to share your life with, whether its a close friend, partner, girl/boy-friend, or potential lover, it’s integral to ensure that you are comfortable with yourself. Not only ok with who you are, but able to love yourself.

I’m not saying you won’t ever make poor life decisions: those mistakes are what make us human. Instead, ensure that overall progress is happening. If you find yourself slipping, or not happy with how you are living your life, the only person you are accountable to is yourself. Don’t drag other people down with you.

This is not meant to discourage those already partnered up to drop their mates and to focus inwards, nor is a cry for them to be wholly selfish.. Instead, try to make sure that more than 50% of your energy is focused on looking after your own wellbeing. This will not only maintain integral balance in your own life, but also ensure that the time you spend caring for your friends and loved ones is a beneficial investment! Tilting these scales lower than 50% is inevitable. We’ve all had days when migraines plague us, we receive bad news at work or we even lose a loved one. This is called life, but again: ensure that, for the most part, you live your life on the positive side of the 50%.  Heck, after you have a bad day, crank it up an extra notch and lock yourself in the bathroom with a liberal dose of suds-filled bath! Pamper yourself!

Make sure you have enough to spare, before you commit to fully share!

Remember that while it feels great to get support from the other in your life, it should’t replace the love you feel for yourself, rather just bolster you when you are down. If you find this balance to be off more days than it’s on, then it’s time to re-evaluate how to bring it back on track. Whats more, if you can’t restore the balance on your own, then it’s of paramount importance to ask for help. Because when someone else asks, listening and lending a hand or ear is why we maintain the balance in the first place.. not only to help ourselves, but to help others

Logic vs Love-gic

Was reading Jes Lascasse’s blog here, and after a few messages back and forth with her, was really moved by her perspective on meditiation.. Basically, from what I’ve gleaned, she’s been struggling with keeping Zen, or “Empty Minded”, when trying to meditate.  She’s invested in this technique for around a year, and still finds it difficult to clear her mind space.. Realizing that this journey isn’t providing her with any tangible benefit, she has instead shifted the focus across to concentrating on those that she wishes love and blessings upon.  She visualises beams of love extending from her heart to theirs. By choosing this focus, she can easily clear all other thoughts, and lets her benefit from meditation.  While this defies the classic Zen perspective of a blank mind, aka embracing the Void (Śūnyatā [Chinese]/Kū[Japanese]), or the 5th element…

No, not this 5th Element!

For her, this is enough of a focus to seek benefits from the areas she wishes to draw from.  The reason this works for Jes, is because her primary philosophy relies on Love as a primary, if not *the* primary, emotion, or driving force.  And this is what led me to this post.

Its really tough to be 100% strict on whatever path we choose to follow.  We aren’t all Buddhist monks in a monastery somewhere in China (well, chances are, if you read this, you aren’t even remotely close). We all live everyday lives, with everyday jobs, and suffer everyday stresses. By transforming her logic into “love-gic”, Jes is able to “transcend”, and move past her obstacles.

For me, however, it isn’t so easy.  I strive to be as 100% authentic, accurate, and well, as anal retentive as possible!  This stems from my desire to stay as close to the pure ideal as possible.  When it comes to my previous drug addiction, its black or white.  I’m either clean or not.  I try to see that same for my Zen path.  This leads me to sabotage a great deal of my journey, as its next to impossible to not stray somewhat, especially based on the society within which I live. And there’s a good chance that you, dear reader, fall into the same culture and similar social structure as I do.

This dilemma doesn’t discourage me however.  It merely acts as a strict filter, a stalwart, unyielding companion, to the decisions I make. I’d love to combine logic with my emotional impulses, and be done with it, moving toward a unified pattern.  But the perfectionist in me doesn’t allow for such a combination.  Truly, I am jealous of Jes, and this breakthrough that she has attained, as not only is she happy with this result, this combination, but she is content that the progress she has made provides a new section on her foundation, another pillar that she can lean upon on her journey.

For me it merely serves as a lesson; an integral, powerful lesson.  Not everyone’s path is the same.  Not everyone needs to be rigid.  She has taught me that my path need not necessarily be black or white.  Instead, I can modify it to suit my own life, my own moral beliefs.  But really the primary lesson is that if I do end up changing anything from the black and white norm within which I see as ideal, that I have to be ok with this deviation.

Transcend...

Really, within this deviation is my salvation… it’s the next step to transcendence. And that is the goal of every path, no matter what name you assign it.

Cluttered Space, Cluttered Mind

This post verges on the edge of common sense, but hear me out.  As we go about our daily lives, its easy to build up clutter.  Not only leaving a towel on the bathroom floor, or a dirty dish in a sink, I’m talking about the casual way we treat our everyday “belongings”.  Use ’em casually, and leave ’em out. What would only take a few seconds to return to its home is ignored, as why bother? It takes no effort, I can take no effort some other time in the future.

Yet each of these joins another of its brethren, and we are left with what has suddenly become an unsurmountable task.  Where did this mountain come from? It wasn’t here last night!

Uhm, wait. Was this here before?

Originally this post was aimed to bring attention to the point that keeping things organized as we go eliminates clutter from even starting to build up, and to make a direct correlation to keeping a neat house = a neat mind, but there’s intrinsically something much more vital here.  A real eye opener for me.

If these small, inconsequential actions, that could be almost effortlessly completed as they happen, are the building blocks for these huge mountainous obstacles, couldn’t the same thing be said for massive goals that we wish to conquer?  By breaking each of these down into the smallest chunks, even what seemed impossible becomes am amost imperceptible effort every day.

Fill in the blanks

So pick your mountain, and start deconstructing it, piece by piece… And please remember to empty the trash!