“The challenges faced in daily life, business, career or creative pursuits are a vital part of your accomplishments. If managed with compassion and insight, these challenges will inform your process and ensure your success.”    -Tdukes

Opening the mind and the heart will change your attitude, thinking, and behavior. Invariably, with change comes resistance. While you need to move through this resistance to achieve sustainable change, it is important to recognize that resistance accounts for personal and organizational stability. Change requires that we hold resistance in our awareness and feel its persuasive power while persevering with an open mind and heart.                 -Tdukes

Today is a good day to practice mindfulness. So many fears and doubts are arising, on our collective horizon, that it may be difficult to establish those feelings of hope and possibility that often carry us through difficult times. The practice of mindfulness is the basis for managing unwanted and non-productive thoughts, feelings and beliefs. Goldstein reminds us: “Mindfulness is a quality of noticing, of being aware of what’s happening in the moment, not allowing the mind to be forgetful. . . [there is no]. . . other factor which [is] as powerful as mindfulness for the cultivation of wholesome states of mind and the diminishing of unwholesome ones.  There is nothing special we have to do to eliminate unskillful states or make skillful ones happen, except to be aware of the moment.  Awareness itself is the purifying force.” (Goldstein, 1976, p. 141)

Today is a good day to pay attention to what is working in your life. Marvel at the successes you have achieved. Sort through the challenges and find your accomplishments. Look to your relationships, your friends and family, expand you view over your lifetime and allow the feeling of your successes to emerge into consciousness, right now.

Goldstein, Joseph. (1976).  The experience of insight:

A simple and direct guide to Buddhist meditation. Boulder, CO:  Shambhala.

That which you are going to become is always present.

As you sit quietly. . . and rest into this moment. . . gain a sense of who you are. Who is sitting here? Note the feeling of the body. . . note the tensions. . . the breath. . . and relax.

Now gain a felt sense of who this is. . . sitting here. Release any mental concepts or images and allow a feeling/seeing sense of who this is. Allow a cloud made up of millions of pixels; pinpoints of emotion, image, sensation and feeling.

And ask, “Who is this that I am going to become?” Allow your self to emerge.

Spend time with this being. Become better acquainted now.

“It is good to listen. If you listen carefully, without always passing judgment, you will enter into the very heart of the creature to whom you pay attention. You will begin to grow the flowers of your soul. Then all of nature will whisper to you her secrets.” (p. 161)

Michael, E.J. (1995).  Queen of the sun:  A modern revelation.  San Francisco:  Harper Collins.

All of us function within our perceived limitations, unconsciously sorting what we think we can do and all that we assume we can not. These mental constructs directly influence our success, and not always for the better. This is particularly true in our relationships. If we can create more space around the way we think of ourselves and how we perceive others, we open the mind to seeing more clearly what is really possible. Open minds – open possibility in our relationships – and naturally invite new choice.

“If I have a chance at the time of my death to take an accounting of what I’ve done, I won’t be asking how enlightened I’ve become, I’ll be asking how much kindness I’ve shown to others.” – Lin Jeson

As conscious beings, we can develop an understanding of how to proceed with our daily responsibilities by receiving guidance from the teachings of others. Lin Jeson reminds us of the importance of kindness as exemplified by the Buddha; he ”set out walking the earth not in quest of enlightenment but in search of a means to end the suffering he saw all about him. If I ever hope to realize a generous, loving, merciful, nonviolent human society, I too must carry on the daily practice of generosity, love, mercy and nonviolence that the Buddha set in motion. This is the practical and ordinary work of the bodhisattva.” (more) Perhaps, our enlightenment comes in a brief flash of kindness where we reveal and are revealed by, that which informs our oneness.