Challenges

The places where you have your biggest challenges are the places you have the most to give.

Queendom

We all have our own thing, and that's the magic.
And everybody comes with their own sense of strength,
and their own queendom.
Mine can never compare to hers
And her could never compare to mine.

Lady Jill Scott

Interiority: when you go to that space, you can't compare yourself to yourself, nor feel superior or inferior to anyone.

Magical creatures?

There are people in your life who inspire art. You blow them up into this mythical characters and you give them all those magical qualities or maybe they're just stepping stones for something bigger and better.

From Californication

Intimacy

The Key to a Healthy Intimate Relationship~

I'm often asked: what is the best way I can prepare for a healthy, deeply satisfying intimate relationship? How can I attract the right partner for me - a person who I can travel with on the journey of the heart, and is truly interested in exploring relationship as a crucible of healing and awakening?

There are many responses to these sorts of questions - workshops to attend, lists of 10 'secrets' to attract your perfect soul mate, 12 steps to manifesting your twin flame, and so forth. It can be important to experiment, with openness and curiosity, any approach that you feel drawn to.

The suggestion I usually make, though, is not nearly as sexy or compelling, or all that fun or flashy: learn how to take care of yourself. Learn how to practice radical self-care, self-kindness, and self-compassion. For to the degree that you are able to take responsibility for your own vulnerabilities and core emotional wounding, it is to this degree that you will release your partner from this burden, which is not his or hers to carry.

So what does it mean to 'take care of yourself' in this context?

By 'taking care' of yourself, I mean becoming very curious about your emotional triggers, about the feelings you do not want to feel - about your addictions, habitual behaviors, and how much you complain about and blame others and the world for your existential flatness, dissatisfaction, rage, and profound feelings of disconnection. Be willing at times to travel underneath the narrative, the very compelling story of 'me,' and make experiential contact with those emotions and sensations that you have abandoned - and at times are seeking in your partner. Make a commitment to stop complaining about your life and instead provide a sanctuary within you for your feelings, emotions, hopes, dreams, fears, and fantasies to unfold and illuminate.

Practice being kind to your feelings and emotions and you will naturally be kind to those intimate partners that are sure to trigger them in you. As long as we are looking to our partners to fulfill those functions that were not offered to us as young children, it will be difficult to come into a fulfilling, loving relationship that is not riddled by the pain of projection. Your partner is there to help you, to support you, but not to take care of or parent you. They were not put on this planet to do your work for you, but to skillfully support you as you turn toward, meet, and metabolize what has been knocking at the door of your heart for so long.

Perhaps there is no 'secret' to co-creating a fulfilling, supportive, mutually beneficial intimate relationship, as it is always in the end, a movement of the unknown. Intimacy is not something we can come to, figure out, or 'solve' by means of conceptual and egoic process, and may never, ever be resolved into a magical formula. But by learning to take care of yourself, you are creating a foundation upon which the mystery of intimacy can unfold, dance, and come alive within you.~

~Matt Licata

The Good People

I see the people that do the real work, and what's really sad is that the people that are the most giving, hardworking and capable of making this world better usually don't have the ego and ambition to be a leader.
They don't see any interest in superficial rewards.
They don't care if their name ever appear in the press.
They actually enjoy the process of helping others.
They're in the moment.
...It's not about the goal but the process.

From the movie Before Sunset

Reality is Reality

All our lives we're told, You can do anything you set your mind to! But you can't. If that were true, we'd all be movie stars, pro athletes, and presidents. Personally, I'd be this year's Super Bowl MVP.
This form of self-delusion was launched as a major crusade in psychology in 1950s, with the advent of the power-of-positive-thinking movement. It was a good idea, but some people now take positive thinking all the way to la-la land. They say things like, "You create your own reality." Sorry. Not on this planet. You create your own perception and your own meaning, but reality is reality.

From the book What Happy People Know, by Dan Baker

From Mr. Robot

Is any of it real?
A world built on fantasy!
Synthetic emotions in the form of pills,
psychological warfare in the form of advertising,
mind altering chemicals in the form of food,
brainwashing seminars in the form of media,
controlled isolated bubbles in the form of social networks.
You want to talk about reality?
We haven't lived in anything remotely close to it since the turn of the century.
We turned it off, took out the batteries,
snacked on a bag of GMOs
while we tossed the remnants in the ever-expanding dumpster of the human condition.
We live in branded houses trademarked by corporations built on bipolar numbers
jumping up and down on digital displays,
hypnotizing us into the biggest slumber mankind has ever seen.
You need to dig pretty deep before you can find anything real.