IMAGINING FULFILMENT AND HEALING

Refreshing our lives at all reachable levels

I have been inspired by a friend whose own courage, optimism and enthusiasm for life, led her to invite one hundred friends to celebrate with her on the occasion of her 60th birthday.

She invited people to bring some words of advice as follows.

"Imagine you are at the end of your life, reflecting on gladness and regrets. A young person comes by and asks for your advice about living a satisfying life. What core wisdom would you offer?"

Ideas seemed to tumble forth faster than I could write them.

Here are some of them. You are a child of the world and a wondrous being. Be fascinated by your awareness and curiosity. Pause from time to time to reflect on whatever puzzles you. Consider how crucial are words and the ways we put them together. Much of the wisdom of the last 3500 years survives in the writings of the world.

 

How can you benefit by this?

Mix your reading with conversations with people who share curiosity and intrigue about this wisdom.

Play with words so that you may have fun and new ideas as you play.

In terms of whatever went wrong, or seemed to go wrong, you do not need to despair.

Instead consider what can be found in it as your learning.

Ask yourself after difficulties,"what do I know now that I did not know before?"

You are entitled to seek anything you missed out on, and to know more about it than you than you knew before.

Know that each person is special.

Since we are biological beings, it makes sense to learn much about our biology.

Eat for pleasure in knowledge of which foods and drink promote your health and wellbeing.

Whatever is in a person is somehow conserved in their memory, ways of feeling, thinking, talking, explaining and living.

Ask your self "what would need to be true to result in what you are seeing, hearing or experiencing.

Respond to difference with curiosity rather than judgement, or hostility.

No wind favours a ship without a rudder.

To your own self be true or you cannot be true to anyone.

Then consider how you can help others with their truths.

You are entitled in your humanness, to open your mind to the two kinds of truth.

The truth of science is the reliability of that which stands up to test after test. This is the correspondence between explanation and measurement.

We call this "objective", in that its validity is used to make it possible for your house appliances, motor vehicles or computer to work time after time.

The second truth is to do with an integrity which does not hide behind dogma, but with courage faces the field of the intersubjective domain with compassion and recognition.

Awaken to the possibility that you can invent (create) your most important realities, and come to know the contexts in which your realities arise.

Discover as many jokes as you can and tell them whenever it may bring lightness and laughter to thosearound you.

Teach choice and never attempt to take choice away.

Whatever the place and whoever the people who were there in your vicinity when you arrived on earth, consider that your gift is to find who you are and to value the special gifts that you will bring to the earth and it's people.

If you are aware of their problems, look closely at your self to see if those problems are important to you.

Stay with new or unexpected ideas and ways of thinking long enough to give yourself a chance to integrate them.

Beware of certainty or dogma, lest you become imprisoned by those beliefs and risk tyrannizing others.

We may fall into being guardians of our own ways of thinking.

Consider the words of Oliver Cromwell (whether you have heard of, like or dislike his practices) when he wrote to the Church of Scotland,"Consider ye brethren, in the bowels of Christ, to consider that you may be mistaken"

Problems are our invitations to find our resources.

People have the resources, and our conversations are bridges to awakening us to more possibilities.

Music is a harmony for your mind and soul. Be ready to listen often enough to let it touch your being.

Consider all of your senses so that you may get in touch with your full capacity to see, hear, feel, smell and taste all that may awaken in your senses.

As you come to know your special qualities, be willing to fit them to your own fulfilment and the creation of a better world.

Never doubt that as each of us contributes with this belief, that we can bring into being people-helping and world saving happenings.

"Carpe Diem" Seize the day.

Wherever possible live in the present moment.