I used to think I knew how some caterpillars become butterflies. I assumed they weave cocoons, then sit inside growing six long legs, four wings, and so on. I figured if I were to cut open a cocoon, I’d find a butterfly-ish caterpillar, or a caterpillar-ish butterfly, depending on how far things had progressed. I was wrong. In fact, the first thing caterpillars do in their cocoons is shed their skin, leaving a soft, rubbery chrysalis. If you were to look inside the cocoon early on, you’d find nothing but a puddle of glop. But in that glop are [...]
Life and Living
In my “Zero Attachment, Zero Anxiety” post, I commented on a contradiction between some of my earlier writing and what I have come to see as a constructive approach to creating your best life. The contradiction was about the concept of yearning. In the book The Joy Diet, I wrote that yearning is the internal map of the course your life was meant to follow. I believe I wrote something like, “Your destiny pulls you through life by the heart.” Last month I wrote that intense yearning is a form of attachment that can actually stop the thing you desire [...]
This week I sliced my thumb nearly to the bone, smashed my knee so hard my head exploded, bought $400 worth of software it turned out I did not need, and spent one long day griping at everyone I saw. This, gentle reader, does not fulfill my self-help motto “live it to give it.”
At the end of that awful day, bruised and bleeding from both my thumb and my bank account, I realized I had lost the life rhythm of my essential self. I was working flat out and accomplishing very little.
This is not a first for me.
Past experience [...]
For the past two weeks or so, every traffic light I drive through turn yellow while I’m in the intersection. Those lights are yellow for much less total time than they are either red or green, but I’ve become a yellow-light magnet. What’s more, as I drive under the lights, it almost feels as though my attention is being called: “Psst! Look! Another yellow!”
I have taken this as a hint to slow down. This is something I’ve been told approximately 3,968,452 times. Last month.
Seriously, I’ve been justly accused of overworking pretty much everything: my drawing, my writing, my body. [...]
by Pamela Slim
If you have been around the field of personal development in the past 20 years, you have surely heard of vision boards as a great way to graphically illustrate your hopes and dreams, as well as increase the likelihood that you will get what you wish for.
Martha was recently on Oprah talking with Louise Hay and Cheryl Richardson about the Law of Attraction. Helping to demystify “the secret behind The Secret,” they discussed practical ways to attract more of what you want in your life and less of what you don’t.
Martha and Cheryl brought their own vision [...]
