We often present the idea of relationships in terms of two halves coming together to make a whole. But I think a much more apt description would be a Venn diagram: two complete circles overlapping and making something even more impressive in the middle. They still retain their individual wholeness, but they share things that neither would be capable of creating on their own.
You cannot come to someone else as a puzzle with a few crucial pieces missing and expect that they will fill it over with whatever spares they happen to have around. Because we are not mechanics. We are not here to fix someone’s own view of themselves, and convince them that what we see is what is real. Self-love is a complex journey requiring of just as much time and effort and attention as the love we give to someone else, and it isn’t something that we will magically find when someone just good-looking enough tells us that we should feel it.
— Gladiator
We now know that whatever you vibrate, you create and attract to yourself. So, you work on healing yourself in order to create peace around you. You become peace.
If there’s conflict living within you, you cannot live in a world of peace. The world mirrors back to you perfectly the condition of your love and of your intent. And if the world you’re living in is not a world that is at peace and at joy and at grace, then you have to find peace, joy, and grace within you.
The shaman no longer looks for meaning in life, but brings meaning to every situation. The shaman stops looking for truth and instead brings truth to every encounter.
You don’t look for the right partner, you become the right partner. And then the right partner finds you. It’s a very active practice focused on healing.
"— Alberto Villoldo
(Source: sun-hawk, via eloquence)
— Leo Buscaglia
(Source: sweetnlolita, via the-messenger-of)
— Unknown
(Source: copulati0n, via the-messenger-of)
— Ann Landers (via onlinecounsellingcollege)
After the inevitable “How many hours a day do you practice?” and “Show me your hands”, the most common thing people say to me when they hear I’m a pianist is “I used to play the piano as a kid. I really regret giving it up”. I imagine authors have lost count of the number of people who have told them they “always had a book inside them”. We seem to have evolved into a society of mourned and misplaced creativity. A world where people have simply surrendered to (or been beaten into submission by) the sleepwalk of work, domesticity, mortgage repayments, junk food, junk TV, junk everything, angry ex-wives, ADHD kids and the lure of eating chicken from a bucket while emailing clients at 8pm on a weekend.
Do the maths. We can function - sometimes quite brilliantly - on six hours’ sleep a night. Eight hours of work was more than good enough for centuries (oh the desperate irony that we actually work longer hours since the invention of the internet and smartphones). Four hours will amply cover picking the kids up, cleaning the flat, eating, washing and the various etceteras. We are left with six hours. 360 minutes to do whatever we want. Is what we want simply to numb out and give Simon Cowell even more money? To scroll through Twitter and Facebook looking for romance, bromance, cats, weather reports, obituaries and gossip? To get nostalgically, painfully drunk in a pub where you can’t even smoke?
What if you could know everything there is to know about playing the piano in under an hour (something the late, great Glenn Gould claimed, correctly I believe, was true)? The basics of how to practise and how to read music, the physical mechanics of finger movement and posture, all the tools necessary to actually play a piece - these can be written down and imparted like a flat-pack furniture how-to-build-it manual; it then is down to you to scream and howl and hammer nails through fingers in the hope of deciphering something unutterably alien until, if you’re very lucky, you end up with something halfway resembling the end product.
What if for a couple of hundred quid you could get an old upright on eBay delivered? And then you were told that with the right teacher and 40 minutes proper practice a day you could learn a piece you’ve always wanted to play within a few short weeks. Is that not worth exploring?
What if rather than a book club you joined a writer’s club? Where every week you had to (really had to) bring three pages of your novel, novella, screenplay and read them aloud?
What if, rather than paying £70 a month for a gym membership that delights in making you feel fat, guilty and a world away from the man your wife married you bought a few blank canvases and some paints and spent time each day painting your version of “I love you” until you realised that any woman worth keeping would jump you then and there just for that, despite your lack of a six-pack?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2013/apr/26/james-rhodes-blog-find-what-you-love
the underlying denominator between all of us is that we are so severely, so completely, beautifully and unfairly human.
there is a lot that i will never understand about other people, just as there is even more that i will never understand about myself. we ask each other questions. we ask for facts. for step-by-step instructions. for manuals on how to be ourselves. we ask so much when the only person who can truly and completely understand the bumbling mess and hodgepodge of being that you are is yourself. we stumble through our days, bumping into strangers and bumping into walls and thinking that all of the answers are in each other, in our environments — but the only place where we can look for utter solace is in ourselves.
in the past couple of years i’ve become increasingly content with myself and with life as a whole because i realized that in the end, the only one who has the power to save me is myself.
people are beautiful. strangers, even more so. the ones you love are mirrors where your hurts and your memories are pinned. but trying to explain the largeness of the things that keep you up at night, is the same as trying to explain how much the dream you had the night before means to you. we can only ‘get on each other’s level’ in a shallow sense of the phrase.
we yearn so fervently to submerge ourselves into another person’s skin. we’ve all written poems about it, have all tried osmosis through each other’s flesh. but when it comes down to it — this life is your own. you have all of the power to make it what you want to make it. you have all the power to neglect the blue skies. you have all the power to find the strength within yourself to make the changes that you know will only make you stronger.
we’ve all been emotionally hurt. we all have daddy issues and mommy issues and abandonment issues and not enough tissues — and that is what we have in common. we’ve all been sad. we all, to a certain degree, have known depression and degression. what i’m trying to say is that you are human and you are so unique but so is everyone else. let the world grow at their own pace.
what does it matter if you consider yourself more ‘mature’ than another human being your age. what does it matter? everyone learns the hard way, and that way may not be your way but that doesn’t mean that it’s less difficult or easier. it’s all subjective, my friend. all of our human lives, all of our individual fleshy selves — it’s wholly our own. there’s no use in comparing yourself to someone else. there’s no use in any of that. you will never know another human being and chances are, you’ll barely know yourself.
but that’s the beauty of all of this. we just don’t know. and we’ll never really know. and instead of fighting that, we should just let it be. yearn to find connections between humans. play cat’s cradle with commonalities. but don’t think your story more interesting. don’t think your tale something more worthy of telling than another’s. adios.
(Source: commovente)
— Houlahan
(Source: thingsthatsing, via fanfacefiction)
— Neale Donald Walsch (via onlinecounsellingcollege)