Growing up in my household, periodically I would, like many teenagers, “forget” to do my chores. My parents would always put me in my place by saying something like, “But you remembered to call your friends, didn’t you? You seem to remember what is important to you!” They were right and it is a lesson I carry with me even today.
As a teenager, doing chores was not important. They were always going to be there and unless I really needed my allowance, which was important, spending time doing chores was not near as important to me as being with my friends. At the time, the choice was simple, time with friends or time without them doing chores. The problem was when my chore was to do laundry and my favorite outfits were not available; then doing laundry was more important than time with friends.
Read moreIf V is for Victim, then W is for Warrior and warriors are
not victims. When I first heard the word warrior I had this image of somebody
doing battle, at war against an enemy and it was not an image I wanted to
embrace. Warrior, as defined by Toltec Wisdom, is a Toltec who is “fighting for
freedom from her own domestication and social conditioning. She is free from
needing to link her self-worth to the beliefs, thoughts, and wishes of her
fellow human, free to be happy no matter what happens in life.”
Being a warrior, from this perspective is about embodying the five agreements,
detaching from those things, ideas, beliefs, and people who constrain our
happiness, obscure our clarity, and live as parasites in our mind, body, and
soul.
Read moreMost of us when we hear the word, stalking think of someone who is constantly watching us, following or harassing us, making
us feel afraid or unsafe. Those of you who know me well enough, know this is
not the type of thing I generally blog about and you would be right. You also
probably know that I tend to take words that have “negative” connotations to
them and looking at them from a completely different perspective. So today, I want
to talk about stalking as a healthy and transformative thing we can do for and
to ourselves and not others.
Read moreIt is not as if I have not written about compassion before. I have done so a couple of times in Compassion and Courage’s Friend: Compassion. However, I felt inspired to reflect on this spiritual value again for two reasons: the holiday season and the recent tragedies globally involving the deaths of children and adults. The recent tragedies at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut and at the Chenpeng Village Primary School in the Henan province of China[1] have begun conversations about weapon control and addressing mental health issues domestically and globally. These are the topics most frequently addressed by the media and on social media outlets, such as Facebook and Twitter, surrounding these and similar tragic events in our world.
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