You may have noticed a lack of blog posts here lately, but there is a good reason for this. As I have recently started a new blog called The Happy Monk - a little guidance on the path to liberation
However I may occasionally/rarely blog here but most of my time, effort and energy will be spent on maintaining and creating new content for my blog.
So, would you please be kind enough to change your bookmarks to the new website address: http://www.thehappymonk.net
Thank you!
“All intimate relationships—close friendships and good marriages—are based on continued and mutual forgiveness. You will always trespass upon your friend's sensibilities at one time or another, or your spouse's. The only question is, Will you forgive the other person? And more importantly, Will you forgive yourself? We have to deepen our understanding, make ourselves more equal to circumstances, more easy with what we have been given or not given. We must drink from the deep well of things as they are.”
David Whyte, “CROSSING THE UNKNOWN SEA – WORK AS A PILGRAMMAGE OF IDENTITY”
If life is a journey where are we headed? And if we can answer that, how de we get there? What path should I take?
When your standing on the crossroads of life you don’t know which way is necessarily the best for you. One road may mean happiness, another adventure, and yet another means safety and security. It takes heart to be alive in the world.
In his book, Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity, David Whyte recounts a life-changing event at work. In a moment of exasperation he stuck his head into a meeting at work asking if anyone else had seen David. A stunned silence followed by laughter answered him. In that moment he knew he had been lost and the ensuing year was about reclaiming who he was and becoming a full-time poet. In a conversation that evening a friend said to him, “You must do something heartfelt, and you must do it soon.” It was a challenge to him to move out of his comfort zone and to do something with real meaning.
I have finally come to accept I don’t what to do. I am trying to let go and relax back into who I really am – this wise emptiness, this mysterious yet audible silence. I now realized that it is up to my deepest self, this fertile blankness, to create something – and hopefully something soon.
This is now in it’s hands and until that moment I had been resisting trying to let go, trying to figure out things for myself and it is clear that I can’t manage on my own. There is no alternative but to surrender to the One within me. This, after all, is what seeing is all about – awakening to one’s deepest being and surrendering to its guidance.
Are you trying to make sense out of life’s transitions? I'm currently in the middle of a transition and yet the destination is still unknown. Like myself, you’re probably been at the in-between stage more than a few times in your life – but you’re not seeing any results.
You keep asking yourself, “What should I do and how did I end up here?” Maybe your waiting for the next step in your life to appear and you’re feeling frustrated and stuck, like you're not making any progress fast enough.
What else can you do apart from a.) worrying b.) going over things in your head over and over, and c.) feeling like a hamster on a wheel?
It’s no surprise that my copy of Transitions by William Bridges is well thumbed and richly annotated for my own use.
Being in-between marriages or careers can take on a particularly painful and confusing when things are changing so profoundly. It as if we launched from a riverside dock to cross a landing on the opposite side – only to discover midstream that the landing was no longer there. (And then we looked back to the other shore, we saw that the dock we had left from had broken loose and was heading downstream.)
Life is a series of transitions whether it is personal, a job, marriage, dreams or physical challenges. It is a set of steps that take us from an ending, through a neutral period, then a new beginning.
One day everything seems to be coming apart; the next day, life goes on as usual, and we wonder whether we have been imagining it all.
Previously, I worked in customer services for a large telecommunications company. I thought my job was safe, secure and permanent. But, before I knew it the company announced a large round of redundancies.
Initially, I felt optimistic and hopeful about my future. As I had just started a new job, was only there for a few months and before I know it, I’m out of a job. But the job search has not been easy as I though it would be.
But recently, I felt as though I was just spinning my wheels. I thought I was doing all I could do, but nothing seemed to be working out, and that was frustrating. Now I was ready, I wanted something to happen immediately as I had took the time and put in effort! Something should have happened by now.
Not knowing what the future holds can make you feel like a hamster on a wheel. You find yourself constantly asking, What do I do now?"
Even though I’m unemployed, I’m trying to enjoy it – the uncertainty of it all. In one word, it’s about acceptance. Surrendering to the uncertainty – you’ve done your best and hopefully things will come together somehow.
The beauty of the book is that it is not just a manual on ‘how to cope’, but gets us to see that the process on disorganization, death and renewal is a fundamental nature and theme of mythology. The cycle is natural and admitting it makes it much easier to deal with it. Whenever a significant change hits me, I always turn to this book.
I highly recommend this book to anyone who is in the midst of a transition.
I really like this video as Steve Jobs talks about passion and truly love what you're doing. As I’ve always struggled with work and career issues – they seem to be the largest unresolved issues in my life right now.
“Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect then looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever – because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well worn path, and that will make all the difference “