Image from Mouse and More

The author of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Sogyal Rinpoche, relates a story of a lady who went to his (Sogyal’s) spiritual teacher during a crisis. She had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and was told she had a few months (might have been 3, I don’t remember) to live.

Sogyal’s teacher did not speak or understand English and thus needed Sogyal as translator. When the distraught woman told the teacher that she was dying and it was translated to him, he burst into uncontrollable laughter. You can imagine how the woman must have felt. When finally the teacher composed himself sufficiently to explain the cause of his amusement, he said, via Sogyal:

From the moment we are born, we start dying.

We are all dying, at least our physical bodies are.  From conception, our rate of growth exceeds our rate of decay/degeneration until we reach a peak when the ratio begins to reverse.  If we are careful, we will be able to retard the rate of decay/degeneration or reduce the ratio so that we can live longer.  The question for me today is:  How are we living?

Are we living the life we want?  Or are we living the life we don’t want?   Are we, in fact,  contributing to our ‘dying’?  And slowly, since we now know how to prolong the life of the physical body?

It seems to me that every time we deny ourselves our true and deepest desires, our most intimate longings, our natural passions, we deny ourselves life.  We die.  That said, I realize that there is a great deal of confusion surrounding our notions of ‘desire’, ‘longing’ and ‘passion’.  These are not unambiguous concepts and they are often controversial.

Go through a book of quotations and you will find statements both exalting and condemning them and from people whom many of us would regard as wise, inspiring and knowledgeable.  Likewise in religious/spiritual teachings.  And add to that the most recent, ‘New Age’ take on it ala The Law of Attraction and you can understand why so many people feel conflicted.

I have written previously about passion and desire so I won’t repeat it.  My focus here is on how we might be dying a slow death by denying ourselves, and not just in large, obvious ways but is small, moment-to-moment ways, what we deeply and truly desire.

I believe we all want to be happy but it seems to me that many of us expect happiness to arrive in some special packaging in a dramatic and obvious fashion, rather like the overture in an opera – that relationship, that income, that lifestyle… But in fact, that state of consciousness called happiness, is lying in wait for us in every moment.  It is there regardless of what we happen to be doing.  Yet, how often we miss it because we are too busy directing our attention to the things that we believe don’t make us happy – a particular person, incident, word, situation etc.

In these ’small’, yet critical moments that we fill our lives with, we deny ourselves the life we want by focusing on the life we don’t want.  In short, we allow ourselves to die a slow death!

What do you think?  Do you find you are waiting for a grand entrance of Happiness in your life?  Do you think you might be dying a slow death by denying yourself your deepest desires, longings and passion?  If so, what might be stopping you?

Lucy Lopez – Hire Me!

Finding happiness  moment to moment!

a

One of the things that I am passionate about is living with passion!

Passion can mean different things to people but one thing that most people understand about passion is that it has a strong energy or force about it.  When that energy is channeled in loving ways, it can result in spectacular feats and achievements.  When it is channeled in fear-driven ways, it can be disastrous, hence the expression ‘crimes of passion‘, for instance.

Our most lofty dreams and ideals are the mental representations of the energy of passion that we are each so abundantly blessed with.  When we give up on our dreams, we stem the natural flow of this wondrous energy.

So many of us have given up on our dreams and ideals relegating them to the dungeons of ‘impossible‘ or ‘impractical’.  Yet, how we admire and look longingly on those who have been faithful to their dreams and ideals.  How we secretly wish we could be like them.

But,  just as we leave a theater, having succumbed to the story on the screen, having lived for an hour or so, the life of the protagonist or ‘hero’, having endured with them their crashes and rejoiced over their triumphs, we slink away from the dazzling glow of our off-screen dreamers and achievers telling ourselves ‘That could never be me’.

Like it or not, passion is your life blood.  Like it or not, dreaming is your nature.  Like it or not, you can.  Question is, do you want to?

Men are admitted into Heaven not because they have curbed and governed their passions or have no passions but because they have cultivated their understandings.  The treasures of Heaven are not negations of passion but realities of intellect from which all the passions emanate uncurbed in their eternal glory.

William Blake

Lucy Lopez – Hire Me!

Awakening to our Greatness!

a

Image at Company of Truth

“She lived her life with passion, using every waking moment to experience joy and peace and oneness with all of life. That she did her best is indisputable. Everyone does their best even if judged otherwise whether by themselves or others. But she, she poured passion into her life, she allowed it to flow freely and fully for she knew without a trace of doubt that that was what enabled her to reach beyond the security of her habits, outside the confines of her beliefs and across the enchanting landscape of her imagination. Yes, she lived a life she was happy to die for!”

Can you hear that being said when they celebrate your passing? Would you like it to?

“Take your passion and make it happen”

Flashdance

Life, as we know it, has patterns, patterns that appear in every facet of life so that if you change the pattern in one area of your life, it is likely to emerge in other areas of your life. It’s a bit like the ‘ripple effect‘ except that its effects are most noticeable, initially at least, within your life only.

So, for instance, if you found something, anything, that you felt really passionate about or could get passionate about and fed it uncompromisingly with that energy of passion, not only would that part of your life experience wonderful changes, you’ll experience changes in other areas of your life.

Why? Because the energy of passion brings out the best in you. It draws on your natural goodness, greatness, magnificence, beauty, wholeness and creativity.

And what is passion? It is the natural, spontaneous response to truth which itself is the vessel of all that is good and great!  Passion. therefore,  is not an addiction nor an enslavement.

It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under any other circumstances.

The like force has the passion over all his nature. It expands the sentiment; it makes the clown gentle, and gives the coward heart. Into the most pitiful and abject it will infuse a heart and courage to defy the world, so only it have the countenance of the beloved object. In giving him to another, it still more gives him to himself. He is a new man, with new perceptions, new and keener purposes, and a religious solemnity of character and aims. He does not longer appertain to his family and society; he is somewhat; he is a person; he is a soul.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Lucy Lopez – Hire Me!

Awakening to our Greatness!

a