Be Gentle With Yourself Today
“You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.” — Buddha
Hello there, friend. Welcome. Hope there is stillness with you today, and quietness, and that spark of possibility that so often lives just beneath the noise of daily life. Take a breath. Relax your whole body. Straighten your spine. And just observe the mind for a moment without getting too tangled up in it.
They arise, they drift, and when you meet them with an expanded awareness, with compassion and understanding, they dissolve on their own. You are so much larger than anything your mind produces in a given moment.
Thoughts Are Smoke, You Are the Sky
“You are the sky. Everything else is just the weather.” — Pema Chödrön
The Buddha spoke of four heavenly abodes: loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. Equal minded in all affairs of life.
That last one is a quiet superpower. To know that everything simply is, and to meet it with the naturalness of a sunrise. To tune into the wisdom of the ancients, the wisdom of the trees, the ones that stand through every storm, rooted and unshaken.
We hide inside our boxes when it rains. But what is out there and what is in here is one and the same. As within, so without. As above, so below. What you think, you are. What you believe, you become.
You Are the Writer of Your Own Motion Picture
“The greatest act of courage is to be and to own all of who you are, without apology, without excuses, without masks.” — Debbie Ford
You are the director and writer of your own story. And it happens per second, in each and every moment. You create your world now, and then the next, and the next, and it keeps going. When the current story feels ready for a change, you can try on a new one.
New glasses. New perceptions. New possibilities.
Get curious. Assume that the opposite of what you believe so easily is also true. And watch yourself, steady and calm, in the presence of two opposing ideas. That kind of inner spaciousness is freedom.
Love the Unlovable Parts
“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” — Carl Jung
The things that bother you in others are the shadows inside yourself asking for your attention. That is the work. To take what appears ugly on the outside and find the beauty waiting inside it. To see pain as a gift that arrived in disguise.
There is gold in the difficulty. It is the muck where the lotus blossoms. It is the golden Buddha hidden in mud. It is the brass that, when struck, turns to gold.
We are here to polish our love. To become more light. Books carry wisdom for this. Teachers carry it. And each of us carries it within us already, waiting to be remembered.
Stack Your Value, Free the World
“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
So gather up your skills. Become sophisticated in your craft. Stack up on values, on wisdom, on strength. Position yourself so that your presence is genuinely helpful to the world around you.
Make yourself rich, spiritually, mentally, physically. Because a full person lifts others. You wake people up simply by being yourself, through your creations, through your gifts.
It is a circuitry of energy. Your vibrational resonance reaches further than you know.
Liberation Begins With One Thought at a Time
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.” — Viktor Frankl
Your greatest mission here on Earth is liberation. Freedom from the programs, the inherited limitations, the chains you arrived with. You jumped into this life with excitement to figure that out, in your own unique way.
So what does complete liberation look like for you? Start there, in your mind’s eye. Draw it up. Then begin with the smallest available step: free yourself from one limiting thought today.
Because limiting thoughts are the only real barriers between where you are and what you are truly capable of becoming.
That becoming is already underway. Keep going, friend.
This is Paolo of Start Early Today. Find more at startearlytoday.com and makepurethyheart.com.
Namaste.
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