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The quieter you become, the more you can hear.

-Ram Dass

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Clarity of Motivation and Intent

Do you feel as though your efforts are not bearing enough to fruition? Do you seek happiness in many ways and yet still find an element of unsatisfactoriness? Do you try to alter certain patterns in your life but come up short without enough energy?

You deserve peace, freedom, and happiness. Those are the goals of a good life. And there is a way to actualize them. 

Motivation

Examining your motivation is an essential mechanism behind practicing peace, freedom, and happiness. 

Recognize your suffering.

Suffering is a spectrum. It can range from full-blown torture to an ever-present background sense of uneasiness.

How is it you suffer?

Always apply this question directly to this moment. Don’t examine your life’s story. Examine the sensations that comprise this moment. 

In what ways are you not happy, not at ease, not feeling whole?

Check in throughout the day, the week, the month. Discover in each moment how your suffering shows itself. And in so doing you will discover the patterns of suffering that play throughout your moments. 

Recognize your methods to relieve suffering.

Everyone wants and seeks happiness. Where we differ is in the methods we believe will grant us happiness. 

What are your methods?

What do you do to make yourself happy? Does it last?

What do you look forward to every day?

The majority of our methods for happiness are more often than not methods to experience pleasure. Pleasure is pleasing but it is not lasting. And pleasure’s cessation is its own kind of suffering. 

If you examine this stuff thoroughly, you will notice that all of your methods for relieving suffering and experiencing happiness are never lasting. You always must seek these things again and again. 

Combine these into a motivation to seek full, complete, and lasting liberation from suffering and imbuement of peace, freedom, and happiness. 

Recognize that you always have an element of suffering in your experience. 

Recognize that your methods for freeing yourself from this suffering and experiencing happiness are limited and ineffectual. 

Develop this recognition into the motivation to practice an intentional path to be victorious over these limits. 

Intent

The next thing to examine is your use of intent. Even with the right motivation, how we intend to use it can be the limiting factor between success and stagnation. 

The only goals you are working toward are the ones you are working on now. 

Setting goals for the future, such as becoming enlightened, is important. However, working toward a future goal is delusional. 

What matters are the actions and activities you take now with the intent of making that future goal into the present. 

Therefore do not develop a habit of waiting for your intent to manifest.

Your practice is itself the manifestation of the intent. Again, motivation comes into play here. 

If you are drowning underwater, the intent to reach the surface and breathe is not something you work toward. It is a full-bodied clawing toward making that reality now. 

Hold no divisions and conflicting reservations. 

Intent works when it is whole and total. Like that drowning person, the intent to reach the surface and breathe fresh air is wholly undivided. The drowning person is not also tempted by watching TV, chasing after fish, or whatever. 

Thus motivation is what solidifies intent. The more you recognize your suffering and the possibility of being free from it, the more you will strive towards actualizing that now instead of satisfying yourself with distractions and lesser pleasures while waiting for a liberated future that will never transpire. 

With Motivation and Intent examined, aligned, and balanced, you will find the necessary energy to practice your path and the necessary clarity to practice it effectively, leading to the experience of a tangible result. These will lend great effort and focus to your meditation practice and spiritual path. 

Get it. 

Namaste!

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“You: Love wrapped in Earth.

Energy dancing in human skin.

Just here.

Just alive.

Simple changeless awareness.”

From my book: Pain, Life, Love

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Forensicsandflowers

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Witchtober day 01: cozy witch

My ko fi

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“The mind can go in a thousand directions, but on this beautiful path, I walk in peace. With each step, the wind blows. With each step, a flower blooms.”

Thich Nhat Hanh

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“People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar.”

Thich Nhat Hanh

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Happiness does not come from consumption of things.

Thich Nhat Hanh (via lazyyogi)

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THIS ISN’T REAL

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me holding a gun to a mushroom: tell me the name of god you fungal piece of shit

mushroom: can you feel your heart burning? can you feel the struggle within? the fear within me is beyond anything your soul can make. you cannot kill me in a way that matters

me cocking the gun, tears streaming down my face: I’M NOT FUCKING SCARED OF YOU

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I personally wanna see less 'you are not a burden/it's not work to love you' and more 'you are worth the work it takes to love you.' I KNOW I'm a burden sometimes. that isn't such a terrible thing! humans are strong. we can carry burdens. and it is work for me to be there for my friends, but it's work I'm willing to do.

we need to acknowledge this because pretending love isn't work will never make people like me feel less guilty for accepting love. we need to talk about it so people don't feel bad for having boundaries and not always being up to do the work. we need to accept it so we can properly appreciate what others do for us and what we're doing for them.

yes it does take work to love you. but guess what? you still deserve love, and you deserve people who are willing to do the work to love you. it doesn't make you bad. all love take work. and everyone is worth it.

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“It ends or it doesn’t. That’s what you say. That’s how you get through it. The tunnel, the night, the pain, the love. It ends or it doesn’t. If the sun never comes up, you find a way to live without it. If they don’t come back, you sleep in the middle of the bed, learn how to make enough coffee for yourself alone. Adapt. Adjust. It ends or it doesn’t. It ends or it doesn’t. We do not perish.”

— Caitlyn Siehl 

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My friend sent this to her Professor today