again and again

This never gets old. At least not for me.

bill of rights

you have the right to ask for what you want.
you have the right to say ‘no’ to requests or demands you cannot meet.
you have the right to express your feelings, positive or negative.
you have the right to change your mind.
you have the right to make mistakes and not be perfect.
you have the right to determine your own priorities.
you have the right not to be reponsible for others’ behavior, actions, feelings or problems.
you have the right to expect honesty from others.
you have the right to be angry with someone you love.
you have the right to feel scared and say ‘i’m afraid.’
you have the right not to give reasons for your behavior.
you have the right to make decisions based on your feelings.
you have the right to your own needs for personal time.
you have the right to be playful and frivilous.
you have the right to be healthier than those around you.
you have the right to be in a non-abusive environment.
you have the right to make friends and be comfortable around people.

yoga goes green…

This made me giggle.

your kind nature….

God, I love this woman and this video cracks me up. Welcome to The Work.

Come out of denial

things haven’t been the same since you came into my life

The Secret is out! Finally!

out of the woods and into the light

“We practice the Art of Allowing. Which means reaching for the thought that feels best, not the thought that is the real thought, not the thought that is telling it like it is. Telling it like it is only holds you where it is: ‘Damn it, I’m going to tell it like it is. I’m going to tell it like it is, because everybody wants me to tell it like it is.’ Tell it like it is if you like it like it is. But if you don’t like it like it is, then don’t tell it like it is–tell it like you want it to be. If you tell it like you want it to be, long enough, you will begin to feel it like you want it to be, and when you feel it like you want it to be, it be’s like you want it to be.” — Abraham

OPRAH is talking about The Secret today. I wonder if Abraham will be on it, since Esther is featured in The Secret. If you guys don’t know what The Secret is, watch OPRAH today and enjoy!

on peak hill…

“Don’t try to recreate peak experiences. Instead, just accept them as the gift that they are, and don’t beat up on yourself for not being able to stay there. Because if you stayed there, they wouldn’t be peak experiences. They would be normal, every day in time hum drum boring, experiences. So, savor the peak experiences and compliment yourself upon your achieving of them, and expect more of them, and leave everything else out of the equation.” — Abraham

my love, my love, don’t you know? i am out on a limb for you

I once had a co-worker that I despised for no good reason. I just didn’t like him. I was reading A Course in Miracles back then (does anyone read that book anymore?), and became inspired to try to rid myself of the hatred I felt toward this person for rubbing me the wrong way.

So, as the book recommended, and even though I am not really a Christian, everytime I saw him in the hall or he passed my office or when I would hear his name, I said in my inside voice: "The Christ in me says hello to the Christ in you."

Around the same time (early 1990s) my first love dumped this guy he was dating to go out with me. The dumped guy would give me crazy mean looks when I ran into him, even though I’d never spoken a word to him before. We were both at an Everything But The Girl concert at Tipitina’s in New Orleans when I started saying "The Christ in me says hello to the Christ in you" to him mentally every time I saw him.

Earlier this year, I started tuning into The View. Now Elisabeth Hasselbeck is clearly TV’s most annoying, frustrating, aggravating personality. I would feel so angry when she would speak, and she would drive me nuts.

"The Christ in me says hello to the Christ in you."

One day, I ran into the guy at work and we actually had a good conversation in which he told me he had been struggling with cancer. His wife stopped by the next week and was just lovely and they invited me to dinner. I don’t know if it was my relentless application of "The Christ in me says hello to the Christ in you," but something changed. I was compassionate towards him, and by the time he died, I was really, really attached to him. He was a bright spot in my day.

When my mother passed away 11 years ago, the guy from the Everything But The Girl concert sent me the sweetest condolence card I’d ever received and we became best friends.

Fast forward to the new Rosie-fied version of The View and I have to say my heart melts everytime I see and hear Elisabeth Hasselbeck. I no doubt think she is still a Rebublican with firm beliefs far from my own, but now, perhaps after spending time with Rosie and her clan, she is so much less polarizing. She still has her opinions, but now she seems so much softer. It’s like her humanity has awoken and her heart has opened. Or maybe it was mine that opened.

I don’t know if she changed, or if I changed by repeating "The Christ in me says hello to the Christ in you" everytime she came on screen, but I think this is the best example of a Christmas story. A Course in Miracles, which I don’t really read anymore but from which I could still probably recite portions from memory, says "The holiest spot on Earth is where an old hatred become a present love."

I couldn’t agree more.

This Christmas, and everyday, "The Christ in me says a big fat honking wonderful hello to the Christ in you."

if this is sweet sweet truth, then i want to know

“There’s an expression in the physical environment that you use to entertain each other that says, “I worry that I’ll go down to the dock, and that my ship will have already come and gone. I’ll miss my boat.” And we say, another boat, another boat, another boat. You have no idea how many boats are coming to your dock. It’s a steady steam, and it doesn’t matter how many of them you’ve missed. The only thing that matters is what are you doing right now in your vibration? And you can tell what you’re doing right now in your vibration by the way you feel.” — Abraham

If that quote made you feel all juicy inside, go watch this movie.

a thousand names for joy

"If you stay in the center
and embrace death with your whole heart,
you will endure forever."
Tao Te Ching [Stephen's version]

A doctor once took a sample of my blood and came back to me with a long face. He said he was bringing bad news; he was very sorry, but I had cancer. Bad news? I couldn’t help laughing. When I looked at him, I saw that he was quite taken aback. Not everyone understands this kind of laughter. Later, it turned out that I didn’t have cancer, and that was good news too.

The truth is that until we love cancer, we can’t love God. It doesn’t matter what symbols we use – poverty, loneliness, loss – it’s the concepts of good and bad that we attach to them that make us suffer. I was sitting once with a friend who had a huge tumor, and the doctors had given her just a few weeks to live. As I was leaving her bedside, she said, "I love you," and I said, "No, you don’t. You can’t love me until you love your tumor. Every concept that you put onto that tumor you’ll eventually put onto me. The first time I don’t give you what you want or threaten what you believe, you’ll put that concept onto me." This might sound harsh, but my friend had asked me to always tell her the truth. The tears in her eyes were tears of gratitude, she said.

No one knows what’s good and what’s bad. No one knows what death is. Maybe it’s not a something; maybe it’s not even a nothing. It’s the pure unknown, and I love that. We imagine that death is a state of being or a state of nothingness, and we frighten ourselves with our own concepts. I’m a lover of what is: I love sickness and health, coming and going, life and death. I see life and death as equal. Reality is good; so death must be good, whatever it is, if it’s anything at all.

– Byron Katie

Pre-order Katie’s new book, A Thousand Names For Joy, and check out her blog.

a certain devil may care, but i don’t, i’m loving this

You don’t need to punish yourself for love. Or sex. Or money. Or your past. Or anything.

     –  Alan Cohen

i’m just gonna take the money i make, and i’m gonna go away

Have you ever had the experience of reading or hearing something at just the right time — so much so that it feels like the universe is giving you a message? I love that and it happened 5 minutes ago, thanks to the quotes delivered to my e-mail from Alan Cohen’s web site:

“Don’t make your ability to love yourself conditional on someone else’s ability to love you.”

– Paul Ferrini

you love me and that’s all that i can think of right now

This article on appreciation really makes sense to me. Marianne Williamson has a great lecture on this subject and I think it’s worth thinking about and acting on. See how much you can "baby" someone in your life this week, especially strangers. They’ll love it, and I bet you will, too.

Speaking of babies………. it’s mighty hard to believe, but mine is turns 1 this week!!

More on that later!

we’ve all got our wars to fight, but i won’t fight with you

I’m always shocked when someone says they don’t check their e-mail that often.

Perhaps it’s the luxury of working in a corporate environment where I have access throughout the day, but often e-’s are my preferred method of communication. There’s something about the written word, the act of hammering out sentences on a keyboard and being able to construct everything — or not construct everything — per your liking.

In conversations, things can pop out that don’t sound quite right or your thoughts can just pile up and never get thoughtfully organized. Then there’s the matter of the other person in a conversation that you have to interact with, changing what you might want or need to say.

In an e-mail, you can take your time and say exactly what you want to say, how you want to say it — you basically have a captive audience. Plenty of people say things in emails can be misconstrued, that you should never have a “serious” conversation over email. I beg to differ with those people. I sometimes find that with an appropriate amount of judgment, some things come off better over e-mail.

In fact, e-mails in the early stages of dating can be crucial if spelling, grammar, punctuation and subject/verb agreement matter at all when it comes to choosing a mate. Speaking for myself, I always want to make sure a person can put together sentences in a smart and thoughtful way before they try to put together a relationship; you want to make sure they are trying to get into your soul, not your ‘sole.’ (Ugh, unfortunately that is a real life example.) A well-written and cute email can go a long way to warming my heart.

But, if you’ve been following my life through this blog, you know that these last 6-to-8 months have been about sloughing off all the things that are no longer absolutely required. So, I’m trying to break my addiction to useless email. For the last two weeks, I’ve been canceling nearly every e-mail subscription that I have. All my favorite bands, gone. All my favorite stores, gone. All my favorite quotes, gone. All of it, gone. I’ve killed at least 18 subscriptions in the last week alone. I figure if I really want to know something, I’ll find it out eventually, right?

I’ve been feeling lighter, and that makes me want to need less and less. I want to slow down my life and have less information and things to remember.

I want to have time to read a book, and maybe if I’m not reading these emails, I might have time to do so.

I want to remember what it was I loved about being alive, and maybe if I’m not reading and deleting these emails, my memory will be jogged.

I want to watch my netflix selections for a change, and maybe if I’m not reading and dealing with these useless emails, I’ll be able to enjoy those dvds.

I want the clarity that is coming in to continue to flow unfettered, so I’m canceling these subscriptions. So when I get in email that I do REALLY want, from actual real people like YOU reading this, I’ll be more present and ableminded to enjoy it and respond. Maybe it will feel like a real life again and I’ll thaw out.

It’s about showing up, and after a few years off, I’m ready to get unburied and be. here. now. again.

sarah, you live and you learn you’re invisible

My monthly horoscope from planetwaves is freaking me out. Usually, his forecasts are wrong wrong wrong for me, but this one couldn’t be more accurate. Also check out your monthly ‘scope at my favorite, astrology zone.

Taurus (April 19-May 20)

It would not be fair to say you didn’t know what you wanted before now, but I think it’s very fair to say that you’re making significant discoveries, particularly what you truly need from love. The astrology for the foreseeable future has you skating on a razorblade between emotions associated with fear and desire. The fear may be enormous, the desire, incredibly specific.

There’s a relationship, which is the extent to which you are, one by one, willing to bring all your feelings to the surface. Most people hide their fears from themselves; you cannot do that any more. It may seem that as you go ever closer to the core of your being, at some point there will be no turning back. But I assure you that you’ll reach a natural limit; this comes with a revelation, decision or acknowledgement whereby you find the new sense of outer direction that quite literally changes everything.

i got your number on my wall, one day soon i’m gonna call

Today’s Abraham quote is so darn juicy, so the CORE of what Abraham is all about, I had to post it. Enjoy!

We practice the Art of Allowing. Which means reaching for the thought that feels best, not the thought that is the real thought, not the thought that is telling it like it is.

Telling it like it is only holds you where it is: ‘Damn it, I’m going to tell it like it is. I’m going to tell it like it is, because everybody wants me to tell it like it is.’

Tell it like it is if you like it like it is. But if you don’t like it like it is, then don’t tell it like it is—tell it like you want it to be. If you tell it like you want it to be, long enough, you will begin to feel it like you want it to be, and when you feel it like you want it to be, it be’s like you want it to be.

what does my body have to do with my gratitude?

Abraham says that if you are in the mode of appreciating, you can’t be miserable. So, in the effort to focus on what I appreciate today about my life, I thought I’d share my list:

Good health
Fantastic friends
Lovely condo
Beautiful view each morning
Breakfast with BL the last two days
A good job
Creative instincts
Comp Time
The Ice Spot Amy gave me
TiVo
Free magazines
Kindness of strangers in the elevator
Free food all weekend
Free Coca Cola Zero to try
Air conditioning
Andrew visiting from SF
Six Feet Under moving to Sunday
Two new mp3 demos from Mimi
Fun co-workers
Trip to Cape Cod and Boston looming
No longer afraid of flying
Eyes getting proper oxygenation
Clean living space to return to
Figure-flattering items from Club Monoco
Recent phone chat with MM
Day off on Friday so I won’t be stressed before my show at Eddie’s
Seeing Shannon on Fri
Surprising cash reserves after paying bills
Seeing JC in the lobby
Casual work environment
Comfortable bed
lots of new music
Continued sales of CD
Strong appreciation of my body this week
A feeling of change in the air
The field of all possibilities
New guitar strap that I love
Upcoming mention in OUT magazine
and the list goes on…