Tian Dayton

Just because I cannot see or sense the movement of spirit does not mean it isn’t there. I will trust that it lies within all that I see, enlivening what seems motionless, giving beauty to what seems meaningless. Trust is built carefully over time. When I make the effort to notice spirit as it enters my day or tune in on it through quiet meditation, I am consciously building a trusting relationship with my own soul. I will not be fooled by appearances. The world around me is not hard, plastic and void of life – it is alive and filled with divine spirit.

There is life within what I see.

If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving, and for once could do nothing, perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves and of threatening ourselves with death. Perhaps the earth can teach us as when everything seems to be dead in winter and later proves to be alive.
Pablo Neruda

Today I refuse to beat myself up because I have in some way made an error. I needn’t fall apart on the inside. When I go on and on berating myself, one mistake becomes ten, and soon I have burrowed myself in so deep that I can’t get out. This time when I do something that I find upsetting, I will let the torment end there. Being thrown off once by a thing gone wrong is enough; repeating it over and over again is compulsive and self-destructive. There is just no reason to be so hard on myself – who will benefit from it? My refusal to allow myself to fall into an inward cycle of negativity over an outward error makes a healthy, self-affirming statement that I am ready to live in harmony with myself and keep my life on a positive track.

I am not hard on my own insides.

The greatest part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions and not on our circumstances.
Martha Washington

It is my fundamental nature to be always in a state of flux. My brain is elastic and ever young. I can and will tell myself a hundred times today that my brain has the ability to be ever flexible and open. Why should I atrophy, why should I decay psychologically? Life would be so much more pleasant if I felt young – not necessarily in years, but in spirit. I
can be new each day. I can be new no matter how old I become. Today I will affirm my inner newness and openness over and over. Rather than slowly close, I will open; rather than decay, I will grow into new ways of living, new levels of experience.

To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning.
Henry David Thoreau

“The great art of life is knowing how to turn the surplus life of the soul into life for the body.”
Henry David Thoreau

Today I understand that I was not able to claim my autonomy as a child in healthy ways. When I tried to put needed and healthy distance in my relationships with my parents, it bothered them, I suppose, because it made them feel rejected, activating their own abandonment issues, and because they thought I would never come back. Rather than support me in my journey away from them and toward myself, they rejected me for pushing them away. It made it so frightening for me to separate that I devised ways of only sort of separating. I reasoned out in my childlike mind that separation meant rejection and that I would lose the relationships I loved completely if I allowed myself to feel separate. I thought that to be close to someone I had to be like them.

I can allow myself to feel separate.

Every real object must cease to be what it seemed and none could ever be what the whole soul desired.
George Santayana

Though my movements may at times seem random and meaningless, I will trust that if I can tune into a force beyond me, my life will come to feel like a thousand meaningful coincidences with the deeper pulse of living. If I need scientific proof that all life is congruent and issues from one source, then that, too, is available. How much proof do I need to take the short step, the deep plunge into a life of soul awareness?

I look for and tune into a larger purpose.

Quantum physics brings us from the outskirts of reality to the center of the stage because we really do seem to play a fundamental role in the working of nature and this I find tremendously inspiring because it seems that my own individual life has more purpose; that the existence of mind and consciousness in the universe is in some sense meant to be. It’s actually interwoven into the nature of reality in a very fundamental way. So in some sense we’re not just a trivial add-on into the universe, not like extras that have stumbled onto the great cosmic set just by accident. We’re truly written into the script, we’re truly meant to be here.
Paul Davis