For New Year’s Eve 2011, Jeremy and I sat down and made our goals for the year. We made sure the goals were measurable, challenging, and lead us in the direction we wanted to go. After all, the experts say to set SMART goals. As diligent students, we complied.
Well, I accidentally opened up this document last week, for the first time since we created it (more than a year ago). I had completely forgotten about it. Reading through every line of the document, I felt a surge of guilt and disappointment.
You know that feeling in your stomach, almost ashamed that nothing on the list—of supposedly important items—were achieved. I didn’t end the year with 30K facebook fans, I didn’t do yoga everyday (In fact, not even once for the whole year), I didn’t become an early riser, and my living & working space is still messy.
Even though this story contains life lessons from a broken heart (a painful break up), its lessons are applicable to many other life situations. I highly recommend reading this, even if you are not going through a broken heart.
We are all faced with a series of great opportunities
brilliantly disguised as impossible situations.~Charles R. Swindoll
Nine months ago, as I carted my meager belongings into my parents house–a move that was supposed to be temporary–my world came crashing down. It was an apocalypse I was anything but prepared for.
After envisioning a walk down the aisle, my relationship of six years came to a screeching, and quite unexpected, halt. My heart was broken. I lost several freelance jobs I had come to count on, and my already shaky income became non-existent. Worst of all, I endured a blow to my self esteem that left me curled up on the couch unable to do anything more than sleep and sob.
Photo by
Valerio BoncompagniThe more I broaden my interpretation of what can be called a ritual, the more I find them, and find myself creating them in my life.~Lisa Weiner
I was sitting with my therapist in the midst of college finals. It was one of our last sessions together before I would return home for the long summer vacation. It stunned me that my sophomore year at college was coming to an end. Where had the time gone?
“I feel like it’s too soon,” I told her, “Like I’ve worked through all these changes, and now it has to come to an end. It’s strange, but I almost don’t want to leave anymore.”
She looked me in the eye. We both knew I had gone through a hard semester, both academically and socially. That year, I met my biological parents for the first time, reconnected with family in a country 14 hours away, and lost myself in working too much and sleeping too little. I had contemplated not returning to school or taking off time the next year. It was surprising to both of us that I might actually be enjoying my time there—right when it was about to end.
This is the season for resolutions. I reckon you have considered one or two yourself.
Unfortunately, as the year progresses, most New Years resolution tend to fall by the wayside and end up as mere intents.
Here’s an insightful approach towards creating a life that’s not only happier and more fulfilling, but one that also automatically responds to your most meaningful resolutions.
Photo by
Vanessa PaxtonEvery artist dips his brush in his own soul and
paints his own nature into his pictures.~Henry Ward Beecher
“Okay, let’s say life is a blank canvas. Anything you want. What would you paint, babe?” I asked my husband.
There was a brief pause. He grabbed a few Almond Rocas off the kitchen counter, made his way to the couch, and then sat there … like a happy, modern Buddha.
He responded, “I don’t think about what to paint, I think about how to paint.”
Irritation quickly spread throughout my entire body. Regardless of the Zen reading and Vipassana training I had been doing, that was not the response I’d anticipated.
Photo by
Jon JacobsenTo forgive is to set a prisoner free
and discover that the prisoner was you.~Lewis B. Smedes
I sat in the middle of the large wood-cabin conference hall and scuffed the pine floor with my hiking shoe. The flames in the huge rock fireplace danced as I gazed at them, lost in thought.
I hadn’t wanted to come to this retreat.
“What’s it like?” I asked my friend, Bruce, one of the organizers of the retreat. “There’s no dancing around the fire in loincloths with mud on our faces, is there?”
I work as an engineer, and I recently returned to the office after a one-week break.
I checked my e-mail inbox: 100 unread e-mails. A sense of dread washed over me. “There goes the next four hours of my life responding to e-mails,” I thought.
Reading those 100 e-mails made me sad. Not one of them was written with the intention of expressing gratitude or encouragement! All of them were focused on customer complaints that needed to be addressed and problems that needed to be fixed.
The last few months have been a difficult time for my family – during which, we lost a close family member who I loved deeply.
The shocking news from her sudden diagnosis of a lethal cancer and subsequently losing her within weeks of diagnosis have left us distraught. Yet, this whole experience has been a humbling source to reflect upon some of life’s important lessons.
As we reconcile to this irreparable loss, we have been reflecting on the entire crisis and searching for the lessons it offered us. While there are many lessons to be learnt, I would like to share what I felt to be the most important one: the power of love.
A few years ago, when I first started this site, I used to do posts on gift ideas around Christmas time (like this one and this one). I haven’t done another post like that, mainly because the gifts I like to give are quite boring (to the outside) and are usually non-fiction, inspirational type books.
Maybe it’s a personal preference, but I feel that “things” don’t last, but books do. A good book will move us, it will motivate us to take different action, and it will inspire us to see the world differently. In essence, a good book will change us.
If you’re been reading this Blog for awhile, you’ve probably already head of me recommending “The Power of Now“, which I believe it’s a must read for everyone (the audio book doesn’t count). That book changed my life and was the basis upon which this site got started, but that was over four years ago.
Since then, there are other books I’ve fallen in love with and do highly recommend. I thought to share some of them with you, just in case you were curious and/or was looking for gift ideas.
It is us, and that large and complex brain of ours that seem to seek out drama, repeat negative self-talk, create false illusions of fear, and generally makes our life difficult in almost all situations. Seriously.
Every single struggle we experience on a daily basis; every complaint, every dissatisfaction, every problem can be drilled down into a single source of root cause: our brain and the stories it tell us.
Because our brain’s job is to keep us safe, it is constantly acting from a place of fear. Its job is to ensure our survival. As such, its job is not to ensure that we have a blissful experience while we are alive.
Photo by
Kevin Russ
Photo by
Photo by
Photo by
Photo by
Photo by
Photo by
Photo by