Sacred Life Sunday: Space

As the weather starts to make itself bearable and the sun casts its golden last rays of light earlier and earlier each day, I find myself wanting to carve out a space for myself. Pretty quickly that turns my mind to the (peach) guest bedroom, which I feel I've been letting go to waste. Now, don't get me wrong. I love to have guests. But honestly, we don't get all that many who stay at the house. Really only a couple of times a year. So to me it felt like that room was dwarfed by a double bed and because of that I haven't been using the peach room at all.

Before my mom visited in June, JP put our old desk in the room for her to use. We were going to get rid of it months ago when we got the new desk, but it didn't feel right. I'm really glad we didn't because it's gotten a great second purpose. I'm turning it into my creative space on which I'm not afraid to get messy and paint right over again and again.

Pushing the guest bed into the corner was easy and will be easy to readjust when guests do actually come to town. In the meantime, it has cleared up a good amount of floor space for me to do yoga or meditate whenever I please, which I plan to do at least a few times per week.

It's so nice to be in the process of tidying up this area of the house. Right now I consider it a meaningful work in progress. Having a dedicated space to go to will help me get back in touch with the part inside that I tend to neglect too often.

Read more...

The Beckoning of Lovely

Have you checked out the enormity of YouTube lately? It is unbelievable how much it has grown in the past few years. There is a whole lot of silly and bizarre, but there is also a decent amount of interesting and inspiring, too. 

I might have been the last one to see it, but I came across this video a couple of weeks ago called 17 Things I Made ...

and I was so touched to see that it turned into this ... 

The coolest thing is that The Beckoning of Lovely is going to be a movie (submission details toward the bottom) with all sorts of creative things submitted by people like you and me! I think it's a pretty awesome idea. It makes me happy to see that people from all walks of life can come together and give a piece of themselves to make something beautiful. I can't wait to see the end product. 

What lovely things are you thankful for this week?

Read more...

Decluttering

Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. ~Eckhart Tolle

I'm ready to clear away the clutter in my life, both the physical clutter and mental clutter. My desk has been piled with books and useless papers for too long, and I am finally going to go through it all. Today. The desk is just one of the surfaces in the house where it is so easy to let things accumulate. I can be a tidy person when I actually keep up with it, but once I start to let it go, it just goes.

This is the physical manifestation of how I felt during school this summer. I had to keep up the appearance of having my stuff together despite the fact that things were out of control. This summer was pretty trying with having to go home to Maryland and help my mom deal with things in the face of my father's abandonment. Things were out of control, but I still managed to keep it together enough to get A's in my classes.

I've felt pretty cluttered emotionally, too. The situation with my father has been a grieving process that I am sure will continue to surface at times. I have had a few dreams lately that I've woken up from in tears. This is normal, I know, and I have tried to embrace what I am feeling at the time. Bringing my attention to the emotions that surface actually causes them to subside. This makes me less emotional in the long run. Fighting the emotions only makes me feel worse.

I am really trying to make an effort to be present, which is difficult at times. But I know that when I manage it, I feel whole and complete. Eckhart Tolle says that "life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness." It is not beneficial for me to look at myself as a victim. There is a reason that this has happened and it is for the betterment of my own evolution and what I bring into the world. Sometimes it seems so much easier to wake up and be angry, hurt, and frustrated. But those are the days when I feel at my worst, when my ego is constantly in my head, having imaginary conversations that don't get me anywhere.

Tolle also says, "If the shutters are closed, the sunlight cannot come in." On the days where I allow myself to become victim, I completely close the shutters, and I am alone in a dark room. I think we all can relate to those days where we've wallowed in our own darkness, sometimes just for the useless sake of wallowing.

My surfaces inside and outside need some serious purging and arranging. I've used the clutter in my outside world to put off dealing with the internal clutter for too long, and that's about to change. I am going to start on the outside, where it's easiest. Then I am going to go deep and get through the emotional gunk so that my inside is clean and shiny and where I need it to be.

Read more...

Breathe

"Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash." (Matthew 7: 24-29)

Having made a strong connection in recent months with Eckhart Tolle's writings, this particular passage resonates with me deeply. With school coming to a close soon, I feel like I am in a constant future-thinking state. I have the biggest project I've ever had to do awaiting me, and I'm having a difficult time not thinking beyond it. I am trying to remember to breathe. In reality, there is nothing I can change about the present and everything is right in my world at this moment. Always.

Academia is a very future-driven creation. In a way it has become my spiritual reminder to live for the present. I feel so much better when I can quiet my mind and just be. The present is the building block for the future, and if I don't nurture it and show reverence, my future will have a crumbling foundation.

Read more...