The Connection Between Love & Forgiveness

A life without forgiveness is a life half-lived. There’s not one person on this planet that doesn’t have something or someone they need to forgive. When we hold these things inside ourselves, our life doesn’t flow. But, here’s the trick: we think because we hold a grudge in one area (like a business deal gone bad) we think it doesn’t affect our love life. Once you are wounded in any area of life (business, childhood, relationships, etc) it creates a block in our energy and our ability to attract to us the things we want. It also affects our ability to fully experience joy and abundance in our lives. When you look to see where you haven’t forgiven, go beyond your relationships, go to every area of your life.

So, then HOW do we forgive?

“The first step is to hold the intention to have the courage to look at these things. Because often when we look at these things it brings up a lot of self-judgment. It requires that we look through kind and healing eyes. Once you see an area where, perhaps you had responsibility, treat yourself with the same degree of love and compassion that you would give a friend. If you feel stuck, just start by free form writing the answer to this question ‘what do I need to forgive?’

Often we don’t want to look at these things because it brings up a memory of lost possibilities. Things we believe would have happened, could have happened or should have happened, had not this injustice been done to us.

Even more important than forgiving another, it’s urgent to forgive ourselves. Somehow we believe that we need to confront another individual to gain the relief we are looking for from these judgments. Your capacity to experience joy and success is in direct correlation with your ability to forgive yourself and others.


Who or what will you forgive today?




http://thedailylove.com/

Avalokiteshvara- Buddha of Compassion

Mantra of Avalokiteshvara


Namo Ratna Trayaya, Namo Arya Jnana Sagara, Vairochana, Byuhara Jara Tathagataya, Arahate, Samyaksam Buddhaya, Namo Sarwa Tathagate Bhyay, Arhata Bhyah, Samyaksam Buddhe Bhyah, Namo Arya Avalokite shoraya Bodhisattvaya, Maha Sattvaya, Maha Karunikaya, Tadyata, Om Dara Dara, Diri Diri, Duru Duru Itte We, Itte Chale Chale, Purachale Purachale, Kusume Kusuma Wa Re, Ili Milli, Chiti Jvalam, Apanaye Shoha

Interpreted as Homage to the jewels of spiritual refuge, to the ocean of perfect wisdom, all-illuminating one, gone beyond, foe destroyer, completely perfected Buddha, Homage to all those gone beyond, foe-destroyers and perfect Buddhas, Homage to Avalokitesvara, Bodhisattva, Mahasattva, lord of great compassion........



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOFRlvrRb_o

The Call

I have heard it all my life,
A voice calling a name I recognized as my own.
Sometimes it comes as a soft-bellied whisper.
Sometimes it holds an edge of urgency.
But always it says: Wake up my love. You are walking asleep.
There's no safety in that!
Remember what you are and let this knowing
take you home to the Beloved with every breath.
Hold tenderly who you are and let a deeper knowing
colour the shape of your humanness.
There is no where to go. What you are looking for is right here.
Open the fist clenched in wanting and see what you already hold in your hand.
There is no waiting for something to happen,
no point in the future to get to.
All you have ever longed for is here in this moment, right now.
You are wearing yourself out with all this searching.
Come home and rest.
How much longer can you live like this?
Your hungry spirit is gaunt, your heart stumbles. All this trying.
Give it up!
Let yourself be one of the God-mad,
faithful only to the Beauty you are.
Let the Lover pull you to your feet and hold you close,
dancing even when fear urges you to sit this one out.
Remember- there is one word you are here to say with your whole being.
When it finds you, give your life to it. Don't be tight-lipped and stingy.
Spend yourself completely on the saying.
Be one word in this great love poem we are writing together.

www.oriahmountaindreamer.com

Nature..and grace.

The nuns taught us there were two ways through life - the way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you'll follow.

Nature only wants to please itself. Get others to please it too. Likes to lord it over them. To have its own way. It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it. And love is smiling through all things.

Grace doesn't try to please itself. Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries. The nuns taught us that no one who loves the way of grace ever comes to a bad end. I will be true to you. Whatever comes..

The only way to be happy is to love. Unless you love, your life will flash by.

-The Tree of Life

Love Redeems

I believe that the world was created and approved by love that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love.” -Wendell Berry

Love saves us. Although this line of thinking is usually reserved for religious parables, the truth of life bears out that love is the singular source that enlightens, inspires and guides us to the very best of our selves. Ask anyone who has had a brush with death what their final moments were filled with, and it becomes clear that life’s most meaningful reckoning happens in our capacity to give and receive love.

Most of us don’t see the love that is coming towards us in the same way that we often don’t recognize the transformative power of our own loving touch. Getting out of our head and learning to listen through our heart is the well-trodden path of those fortunate in love. As I see it, following the path of relaxing, releasing and reconciling will bring you to a new way of seeing your relationships, feeling the love that is around you and making daily choices to grow the heart of your life. Enhancing your capacity to love is how you will measure your success in life.

Relax

The biggest life-changing relaxation method you can cultivate in your loving relationships is developing the capacity to let things be as they are. This starts within us: When we embrace ourselves with all of our imperfections, we have an internal barometer and capacity to offer this grace to the people we love. Probably the single most destructive force in relationships is the tension that builds when you demand your relationship to be what you think it should be, rather than learning to love what it is. There are millions of ways that this non-acceptance plays itself out in every relationship. It always begins within us.

Release

There might not be another word in the English language that evokes as much opening, tenderness and possibility as release. On an emotional level, the ability to let go is the essence from which real intimacy is made. Our human longing to hold onto those we love must mature if it is to survive into emotional release. The experience of release is found in all of the tiny, daily acts of forgiveness that being in a loving relationship demands. It grows in the trust that offers both partners the encouragement and freedom to follow one’s own heart without the fear of abandoning someone else or being abandoned. Developing the courage to let go and release is the way to peace in our selves and in our relationships.

Reconcile

It begins with our selves, this capacity for reconciliation. It is impossible to forgive other people’s trespasses against us when we hold ourselves hostage to our own past mistakes. In fact this endless source of self-recrimination is the fuel for our need to be right and vindicated in relationships. We demand that the world demonstrate a respect for us that we often don’t hold for ourselves and one that usually cannot even be fulfilled. Coming to terms with ourselves: our beauty, our confusion, our missteps and our best intentions is the ground of our thoughts. The degree to which we live in harmony with our own weaknesses and mistakes exists in direct proportion to our capacity to live with those of others.

Love does not fail us; we fail to see our own loveliness and the love coming towards us over and over again. Study the way of loving and commit yourself to relaxing, releasing and reconciling as the way of redemption. It is the only Promised Land waiting for us all.

Take Heart

No heaven can come to us unless
our hearts find rest in it today.
Take Heaven.

No peace lies in the future which
is not hidden in this present instant.
Take Peace.

The gloom of the world is but a shadow;
behind it, yet, within our reach, is joy.
Take Joy.

And so, I greet you, with the prayer
that for you, now and forever,
the day breaks and the shadows flee away.

—Fra Giovanni

The Road Not Taken

A few 'experiences' on a relatively, balanced out Monday, trigger me to pause a moment and reflect. My eidetic memory of circumstances, choices, decisions, a confetti of emotions, manage to catch me at the least unexpected of times. It has always been, well, amusing, undescribable, gut-wrenching, complex. I do not know whether I shall ever manage to tell it as it is.. tell it the way it is, for me..

Here's a poem that resonates..

And somewhere, just as it is, in the last stanza.. I would hope to find solace in the fact that it shall be told, heard and understood.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference

-Robert Frost

If, for once

If, for once.
You would admonish your own pain,
You’d put it aside, to see how it is an attempt in vain
To take notice of the small precious moments it refrains
The anguish it caused and causes all – in disdain

If, for once,
You would recognize that your child has been harmed
Would have come to you when confused and unarmed
Who’d have looked up to you for guidance & care
Nurturance, support and comfort to be there

If, for once,
This could happen, then we might understand
That what we seek is a protective loving hand
That all suffering has a reason
And sometimes a season

If, for once,
You might see how we all are affected
How life paths are all interconnected
And to ensure that karmic energy is absolved
Not carried forward, empathetically resolved

If, for once,
To reflect how conflict takes from life,
Our natural life force that is all encompassing
To operate from our inherent goodness
To forgive and redeem ourselves

Maybe, then
Relief in the aftermath of severe tribulation
A moment of connection, a sign of compassion,
From the natural joys and highs that flow
Like a babbling brook or an afterglow

Maybe, then
This beautiful life would seem light
Our hopes and aspiration might seem right
Our dreams would be ones to look forward to
To know that this life journey was worth it all the while


Everyone mistakes the limits of their vision for the limits of the world.

Oriah Mountain Dreamer~* - The Invitation

It doesn't interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart's longing.

It doesn't interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn't interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life's betrayals or have become shrivelled and closed from fear of further pain.

I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it, or fade it, or fix it.

I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own; if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, be realistic, remember the limitations of being human.

It doesn't interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself. If you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul. If you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see Beauty even when it is not pretty every day. And if you can source your own life from its presence.

I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand at the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, 'Yes.'

It doesn't interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone and do what needs to be done to feed the children.

It doesn't interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the centre of the fire with me and not shrink back.

It doesn't interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away.

I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.


http://www.oriahmountaindreamer.com

Oriah Mountain Dreamer~* - The Dance

I have sent you my invitation,
the note inscribed on the palm of my hand by the fire of living.
Don't jump up and shout, "Yes, this is what I want! Let's do it!"
Just stand up quietly and dance with me.

Show me how you follow your deepest desires,
spiralling down into the ache within the ache.
And I will show you how I reach inward and open outward
to feel the kiss of the Mystery, sweet lips on my own, everyday.

Don't tell me you want to hold the whole world in your heart.
Show me how you turn away from making another wrong without abandoning yourself when you are hurt and afraid of being unloved.

Tell me a story of who you are,
And see who I am in the stories I am living.
And together we will remember that each of us always has a choice.

Don't tell me how wonderful things will be . . . some day.
Show me you can risk being completely at peace,
truly OK with the way things are right now in this moment,
and again in the next and the next and the next. . .

I have heard enough warrior stories of heroic daring.
Tell me how you crumble when you hit the wall,
the place you cannot go beyond by the strength of your own will.
What carries you to the other side of that wall,
to the fragile beauty of your own humanness?

And after we have shown each other how we have set and kept the clear, healthy boundaries that help us live side by side with each other, let us risk remembering that we never stop silently loving those we once loved out loud.

Take me to the places on the earth that teach you how to dance, the places where you can risk letting the world break your heart.
And I will take you to the places where the earth beneath my feet and the stars overhead make my heart whole again and again.

Show me how you take care of business
without letting business determine who you are.
When the children are fed but still the voices within and around us shout that soul's desires have too high a price,
let us remind each other that it is never about the money.

Show me how you offer to your people and the world
the stories and the songs you want our children's children to remember, and I will show you how I struggle
not to change the world, but to love it.

Sit beside me in long moments of shared solitude,
knowing both our absolute aloneness and our undeniable belonging. Dance with me in the silence and in the sound of small daily words, holding neither against me at the end of the day.

And when the sound of all the declarations of our sincerest
intentions has died away on the wind, dance with me in the infinite pause before the next great inhale of the breath that is breathing us all into being, not filling the emptiness from the outside or from within.

Don't say, "Yes!"
Just take my hand and dance with me.

http://www.oriahmountaindreamer.com

I Like For You To Be Still by Pablo Neruda

I like for you to be still
It is as though you are absent
And you hear me from far away
And my voice does not touch you
It seems as though your eyes had flown away
And it seems that a kiss had sealed your mouth
As all things are filled with my soul
You emerge from the things
Filled with my soul
You are like my soul
A butterfly of dream
And you are like the word: Melancholy

I like for you to be still
And you seem far away
It sounds as though you are lamenting
A butterfly cooing like a dove
And you hear me from far away
And my voice does not reach you
Let me come to be still in your silence
And let me talk to you with your silence
That is bright as a lamp
Simple, as a ring
You are like the night
With its stillness and constellations
Your silence is that of a star
As remote and candid

I like for you to be still
It is as though you are absent
Distant and full of sorrow
So you would've died
One word then, One smile is enough
And I'm happy;
Happy that it's not true

Mirrors

mirrors that serve us
mirrors that deserve us,
mirrors that conserve us
and unnerve us

mirrors that break
mirrors that remake
mirrors that partake,
sometimes opaque

in our sorrow and delight
witness every plight
that render insight
at blue hours of twilight

mirrors in vain
mirrors in pain
mirrors that notice
our loss and our gain

mirrors when we wondered
mirrors we loathed
mirrors we pondered
when we clothed and unclothed

mirrors on the inside
mirrors between
some on the outside
some seen and unseen

mirrors within mirrors
a mirror, you are too
some for exploration
and some, an inner view..

Again

Of night and day
And night again

Of love
Inspite of love again

It flows in my veins
As respite again

Of night and day
And night again

tira mi su..

http://tiramisu.co.in/

Gratitude

Turning 33 and grateful for all the precious gifts & countless blessings that have come my way..

For the numerous lessons learnt, re-learnt and learning
For the awareness that life is a learning curve, ever evolving
For the ability to appreciate the minutiae of each day
For spiritual guides and divine intervention
For compassion, love and kindness that encompasses all

For the strength to pick up the pieces, cradle, nurture and carry on
For speedy recovery and miraculous healing
For forgiveness and the ability to trust
For silver linings and eternal optimism
For connections and chance meetings

For eyes of wonder and curiosity of a child
For inner wisdom when all seems to fail
For the ability to seek, reflect and introspect
For suffering, for it has brought about integrity, courage and conviction
For each sensory organ that makes me feel 'alive'

Thank you. Universe.

When The Trees Sing

When the trees sing,
It doesn't really matter
If you know the song,
Or if you know the words,
Or even if you know the tune.
What really matters is knowing
That the trees are singing at all.

The Summer Day by Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?


(Sent to me by my wonderful friend- Kaizad Cassad)

Exploring Our Womanhood Through Love

In Marc Gafni's book, Soul Prints, he talks about each of us having an individual spiritual signature or "soul print." Our soul print is as unique to each of us in the realm of the spirit as our finger print is in the physical world. If we can discover our soul print, Gafni says, we are better able to experience profound connections to ourselves, to others and to God. Marc Gafni's words speak to me. I believe that, embedded in each of us is the summons, the yearning to be our truest, richest self, to explore our womanhood as deeply and as passionately as we possibly can, to. We hear a lot these days about writing our own scripts and being heroines of our own stories. And yet for most of us, at this moment in our lives, the process of discovering our soul prints (or stories), of learning to listen to our soul's voice instead of our personality or ego is an entirely new way of mapping the exploration of our womanhood. I believe it's a map worth following no matter how arduous, surprising, overwhelming, mysterious, glorious, tragic, whimsical and often laughable our exploration turns out to be.

I wish this exploration process wasn't so new. I wish it was an old familiar process like baking my grandmother's recipe for sugar cookies or nursing a baby or knowing when to reach out and embrace a loved one so that it would be (I'll admit it) easy -- something I could schedule into my day like jogging or a yoga class. I wish I could say that twenty, even ten years ago I became aware of my soul print, discovered my story and immediately began to live it, enabling me to write this from a wise and fully actualized perspective. Please! No way. Like most of us, I've just begun to work through the personal baggage and the patterns of behavior keeping me from soul discovery. My use of the word "work" is a good indicator of how I can quickly become clueless about how to find my way back to my soul print, the map to my own story. I still get caught in that familiar trap of thinking I can take control and improve my own life not to mention the lives of those I care about like my children. I forget that, as independent manifestations of God's love, children are to be protected and nourished, physically, mentally and spiritually, but never commanded.

I still set ridiculous deadlines for myself requiring that I operate off of an adrenaline high (usually accompanied by not a little anxiety) so I can show the world what? That I can do it all? That I can have it all? That if I can't have it all, I can have enough? I forget that I have within me an inner place of calm and wholeness from which to create that which has infinite value; that which is timeless; that which expresses my soul's voice, the only truth I have to offer. I still become depressed about wrinkles, bags under my eyes, cellulite, chronic illness, occasional aches and pains, memory loss, menopause, empty nest syndrome (although it's four years away) and my insatiable craving for Milky Ways. I forget that, at any time, in any place I have the freedom and the power to be "in the moment," breathe deeply and freely, filling myself with light and laughter. I still act from fear, forgetting that by experiencing the resonance of my inner knowing, learning to discern and trust my inner voice, I can act from love.

For love is the one sure way I know back to my soul print, as Gafni calls it, and the exploration of my own womanhood. For me it's not through genealogy, organized religion, therapy, revisited childhood experiences or amassed adult accomplishments that I am able to explore who I am with courage and compassion. It's through love. I'll give you an example. It was through love for my daughters that I began to write prayers for them in 1995 when they were 12 and 8. As I drew upon that love day after day, feeling and resonating with its warmth and light and expressing that resonance through words, I began to feel, for the first time, love for myself as the adolescent I was, and as the adult I am. Since then, through the website, books, workshops, school activities and continuous writing of prayers, I have learned that the better I can give and receive love, the better I am able to receive the souls and the stories of other women and girls. And it is during those times of connection that I discern for a moment, however ephemeral, the joy of knowing the presence of God within. I don't need to tell you that these moments have been the high points in my exploration. I have come to believe that the only times we know the depth of happiness we all long for, is not when we pursue happiness as a goal in itself, but when we experience it as a byproduct of the love we feel.

In another wonderful book, The Feminine Face of God, the Unfolding of the Sacred in Women, by Sherry Ruth Anderson and Patricia Hopkins, it says that a critical part of a woman's exploration into her self and spiritual development is a willingness not to know where she is going. The miracle that, step by step, comes out of that trust is a sense of wholeness experienced through love. If we are truly going to explore our womanhood, we must begin to trust the unknown, the reality of the moment, the exploration process. The miracle that comes with our trust is we are led to the essence of who we are. We discover our soul print. We live our stories.

In my second book of poems, More Prayers On My Pillow, there is a chapter entitled " I Am Love - I Am Me." Here is an example:

May I awake
With heartfelt joy
Greeting the day
With a song of my Soul
Filled with confidence
That I can be
One with my world
My body and mind are
Connected to Spirit.
My senses awake
To nature's beauty
My world will be
God's garden
Wherever I go
Whomever I meet
Whatever I do
If I live this day with love.

Copyright 2001, Celia Straus

My Meanderings Into The Unknown And Back Into the Known-1

The Raid-de- Himalaya is a rally that is an annual affair. It is one the world's highest and toughest motoring rallies that covers an altitude of 18,000 ft above sea level.
I participated as an official in 2006 and on the way, was fortunate to click a few pictures. This one was my first trip (I plan to make this a regular annual trip) to the Himalayas and apart from tough terrains, cold temperature, high altitudes, crazy anecdotes, I experienced something that I'd never before. Breaking mindsets, broadening my horizons, losing my fears, challenging myself, reinforcing my beliefs, learning the basics once again. I was in God's own land. The magnitude, the beauty, the spirituality of the place, overwhelms you; it intimidates you, teaches you to be humble, to be simple, to have faith in nature and in creation.
Here are some of the pictures, mainly smiling faces, some in the face of war, conflict, insecure futures.. whereas some, ignorant of it all; leading a blissful life, void of wants, ambition and selfishness.

This is also where I realised the joy and interest of taking pictures for the first time. So its close to my heart, thank you Ladakh, thank you nature, thank you destiny.

Martini Mixed Musings..

Juxtaposed.. I pose .. in my repose.. and I impose.. feeling exposed.. I pose.. again.. more eloquently posing.. the juxtapositon of my disposition.
Is there anything sweeter than this? The mere abandonement of being exposed.. all to my disposal.

Utter rubbish.
(I know :) But, its true to me, you see)

Oblong..exterior..rectangular, multidimensional.
Multi-faceted.. I hear, I hear you, so what?

I'm in my zone.
What's that, you ask?
Haa.. Hahahah.. Haa!

Alcohol? It's an easy escape.

Beyond that.. I know.
But do I want you to know me, hear me?

I ask..
I ask again.. and ha-ha, once again.
Well ask-it may add meaning..to your existence.. (and maybe mine) *revised

Does it add to mine? *previous
Umm..I'm beyond that, maybe not.. yet, I indulge, exuberate in my mere existence, of this moment. In my mirth, in my jest, in my 'knowingness', in my 'no-thingness'. In the obsolete, in the obscure, in the knowledge, the zest.. that I have, that I endure, that I accept.. I surrender to it.
(more crushed ice required in that martini, I think.)

One more cigarette smoked into oblivion..into yet another eternal moment.

Sip, sip, I say- hue of magenta illuminated woodwork, I see. I see..hues of purple, blue, true :)
Nurse, cajole and caress that last one. You know you can make it up that hill.. again. :)