- Foreward
- Introduction
- My Journey
- Adversity
- Anger
- Body Wisdom
- Love Knocks
- Money Tree
- HealthLoveWealth
- Simplicity
- Generosity
- Shock! Treatment
- Responsibility
- Grateful
- Growth Notes
Transform struggles
Frequently I struggle with myself or with those I love. I want the problems and pain to go away. Struggle and pain contain the seeds of ease and pleasure. Today I can make those seeds grow, transforming my struggles into ease, my pain into pleasure.
Strong for today
Today I handle with poise and confidence whatever problems arise. By keeping balanced, knowing that no situation has power to destroy my peace of mind, I tap the source of strength needed to face this day.
Find Light in Dark Times
Chapter 2:
Adversity as Opening
(sample excerpts)
Find Light in Dark Times gives you philosophical and spiritual tools to help you recover from
losses of all kinds, then emerge into the light. These are sample sections from Chapter 2.
Many spiritual people—monks, priests, nuns, devotees of most religions—create special places where they pray, worship or cultivate spiritual consciousness. Churches, monasteries and synagogues offer tranquil refuge from a troubled world. They provide safe places to study spirituality as a path. Yet while tranquility calms the mind and the heart, adversity offers far greater opportunity to accelerate deeper spiritual awareness. Though adversity tests you in many ways, sometimes breaking you or wrecking large portions of your life, you can grow from it if you adopt an open perspective.
Strong emotion holds potential to carry you into new spiritual frontiers. Loss, conflict, illness, injury, death, war, jealousy, fear: all these charged experiences send you on emotional roller-coaster rides that feel awful while you are on them but can bear spiritual harvests that could otherwise take years or decades.
When a falling tree nearly took my life, as described in Chapter 1, the fear and subsequent relief sent me profoundly deeper into my soul and propelled me into the present moment. This deepening occurred suddenly even though I had meditated for more than 30 years. Adversity can provide leaps of spiritual growth.
Meditation coaxes you into the present little by little. Normally you generate a perpetual stream of thoughts, worries, plans, reveries about the past. All this clutter clouds your consciousness and keeps you from living in the present. Meditation slows down thoughts and occasionally allows them to stop temporarily. Each stop brings a brief opportunity to be fully present in awareness.
Danger snaps you into the present. Massive grief from losing a parent, friend or relative can push you into focused present consciousness. Near-death experiences force you to reckon with your mortality. Every moment becomes precious because you know how easily all your moments can be lost.
. . . (Humorous Light section)
No matter how grim and awful a situation becomes, there is always room for lightness. Life is weird. People are odd. Death is strange. Humor frequently emerges from bizarre juxtapositions.
Not all people generate humor easily. But if you have the gift of a lighter side, expand into this realm. By placing awful predicaments into a humorous light, you create a form of grace between you and everyone around you. You fertilize the ground for others to grow faster.
Telling prefabricated jokes doesn’t usually work and may offend others who feel discouraged. The most potent humor bubbles out of darkness and feels loving, gentle, sensitive. A fun spirit bridges between people as it reminds all of us that we share this world full of dreadful as well as wonderful times. We are in this together, and humor is a godsend. Watch for it. Humor dwells everywhere. Can you find it in darkness?
When you laugh at yourself, a part of you floats away from the rest of yourself. A similar phenomenon happens during meditation; you watch yourself breathe and think. The part of you that can laugh at the rest is the part full of light. What silly creatures we all are! How full of foibles we all are!
Some people laugh so hard that they cry. Laughter and crying connect at the core of your being. The moment you recognize such a connection, lightness can pour into your tears. Your laughter contains all the sadness of all the losses of yourself and others. Think of a Buddha chortling heartily, shaking with mirth. Tears spill from her eyes. She chuckles at the quirky universe where gorgeous beds down with horrific, love waltzes with hatred.
Humor runs deep into the soul’s dwelling. Humor cries at the human condition. Let it shake your belly. Let its lightness flood into every cell.
