~ JOHN O'DONOHUE ~ Excerpt from the book, Eternal Echoes

 Each one of us is alone in the world. It takes great courage to meet the full force of your aloneness. Most of the activity in society is subconsciously designed to quell the voice crying in the wilderness within you. The mystic Thomas a Kempis said that when you go out into the world, you return having lost some of yourself. Until you learn to inhabit your aloneness, the lonely distraction and noise of society will seduce you into false belonging, with which you will only become empty and weary. When you face your aloneness, something begins to happen. Gradually, the sense of bleakness changes into a sense of true belonging. This is a slow and open-ended transition but it is utterly vital in order to come into rhythm with your own individuality. In a sense this is the endless task of finding your true home within your life. It is not narcissistic, for as soon as you rest in the house of your own heart, doors and windows begin to open outwards to the world. No longer on the run from your aloneness, your connections with others become real and creative. You no longer need to covertly scrape affirmation from others or from projects outside yourself. This is slow work; it takes years to bring your mind home.

THE GRIT OF AUTHENTICITY: INHABITING REVOLUTION

 When you live from your intuitive core, your belly, your heart, let your soul lead and spirit guide you, your words and actions will be naturally subversive. You will go to your edge. Question is, will you wholly inhabit your own revolution? In beauty? This inner revolution is a perpetual ceremony of the heart. It's what you are for.

When you are real, cooked down to essence, rather than half-baked to get approval, to look good, the projections from others may fly, seek you out and try to stick to you. Don't let them. Instead, let your authenticity support you in carrying on whole-hearted, vulnerable conversation to resolve whatever arises. It is hard work. Uncomfortable. Deeply human. Can be harrowing. And often downright delicious. Intimate. Naked. Courageous work marked by your solid presence. Here. Now.

I'd rather be whole than good, C. G. Jung said. And by whole, he meant real, messy, ensouled, deeply human, heart-broken open with compassion flowing first to ourselves, to resource and prepare to let it flow widely, to others.

Being too comfortable, amenable, pliable to the point of contorting yourself — is a ticket to selling your soul right up the river. Don't buy it. When you live from your own knowing-ness, from your gut and your wildly-rooted intelligence, you feel alive. Genuinely, madly, creatively alive.

Being real — true to your Self, your soul — is gritty. And grit causes friction, makes fire to clear the way for living a revolutionary act. This act is marked by action that the earth and the soul of the world are crying out for. And the cry is going to get louder, more pain-filled, and grievous before enough souls answer wholeheartedly.

When you get real, it is actually not about you. Your individual program is only the ground from which you step. From which you step and choose whether you will make this life of yours a walk of grit and beauty, or one of accommodation to the forces that insist you do it their way, be well-behaved, produce, consume, make nice, and as the poet, Mary Oliver says, "barely breathing and calling it a life."

Thing is we're not talking a self-improvement project; that's only the gateway. We are being used. By Spirit. One way or the other: we go consciously or we are abducted — individually and collectively, now. So it's a great time to dive in.

When we realize we have no choice but to offer ourselves up — like a sacrifice — to the mystery of Great Spirit's guidance, this guidance insists on shaping us as a soul-centered contributor. And we're in it! Soul's got us. And Spirit carries us along. We're goners to those egoic, mechanistic, competitive ways; the ways that have undone the earth and so many souls who walk the earth, swim her waters, send roots down into her and watch from the skies.

To inhabit your own core, your vital, knowing center and a soul-centered way of being, you need to do the inner excavation. What we call, in Jungian psychology-speak, Shadow work and in shamanic speak, Underworld soul work, including ego-dismemberment work to heal old wounds and retrieve parts of your soul you had otherwise disowned or split off. We need these pieces of our souls, as well as aspects of our bodies, and our connection with Spirit, and with the earth, along with the Other-than-human-ones and wild intelligent forms of life — to feel deliciously alive, ready to roll, to serve this crying earth and love 'em up.

This is real adult work, asking everything of you. And will alter your world completely, but before that happens you'll be met with severing old ways, dismemberment, metaphoric death, dreams, visions — both lovely and horrifically heart-pounding, yummy, gut-wrenching, Beauty, raging tears, sweet snot, broken open heart, blue-shimmering darkness, warm, comforting light. Rebirth. Love. Hope. A deep sense of connection with it all. And a palpable knowing of what you are for.

So it's a slow dive, a conscious descent into the depths of your soul, the dark ground of your being and your dreams: the Underworld of your psyche. This is vital work — no way around it — to discover what you've tucked away in the archetypal Shadow of your own psyche. If you're lucky you will unearth what you had otherwise disowned to adapt to the egoic, mechanistic, competitive, earth-ravaging ways of modern Western culture. And most often, these pieces of your otherwise whole psyche that you had disowned are what makes you utterly You. Beautifully. Creatively. Wildly alive. Authentically so. You. And you are needed here.

Your essential soul's powers — what you were born with before you lost track of them and they, you — are to be found there, in that excavation into your dark depths, awaiting you to carry them home, like mama leopard carries kitties. With a fierce tenderness, knowing that all life — yours, your beloveds, the earth, humans and other than humans — is at stake. The world needs you to be fully alive. Real. The world needs you to find, bring home and embody your soul's gifts and healing powers. It's messy work. It's what we are for.

When you are transparent, you will stand out as you are truly seen. When you are transparent, others can "see through" you into you as your heart and true essence shines. You are clear, direct and kind. You are not an enigma; you don't leave people scratching their heads wondering what you just said and did.

You do not hide. You are honest to the bone. You are courage enfleshed.

When you are congruent, you are wholistically aligned. What you think, say, feel in your heart, feel in your body and the actions you take line up to support and reflect each other. You know it in your body, often in your gut, when you put your attention there.

Congruent. Authenticity happens in the guts and bowels of your life. Being authentic is the grunt-work of the soul, of any deeply human, spiritual path. Being half here, half there, half-hearted, faking it to look good, strategizing to make things easier for your self -- that's the common way of the unconscious clotted middle, driven by our egoic, addicted culture. It's a way that lacks wholeheartedness. Lacks real courage to let the heart break. Shatter. Broken whole and holy open to finally know compassion for self, others, earth. To live and love — on-fire, fully alive, juiced and ready to serve.

Being authentic and soul-centered costs you your ticket to ride from the collective mainstream to the illusion of safe and secure. And opens the door to your bloody and glistening, broken whole heart -- reveals to you the honey of this wildly delicious, messy life. Leaves you and those you touch, feeling radically free. Without choice now. Solid and light. Authenticity strips away all that is NOT real. All that is not made from love, to love. All that is of enriched soul and in-spired Spirit remains. There is no living a soul-centered life without being authentic — without mustering the courage to do the excavating in the dark: the Shadow work.

Again, C. G. Jung: “People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.”

What will you do?

~  Melissa La Flamme

The moment you stop waiting for the journey to feel smooth is the moment you actually start making progress. Most people quit because they confuse discomfort with failure, not realizing it’s just part of the climb. Anything worth achieving is supposed to stretch you, challenge you, and expose the weak spots you need to strengthen. If you keep chasing ease, you’ll stay exactly where you are. But if you learn to work through the resistance, you’ll build the resilience that success requires. The growth you want lives on the other side of what feels uncomfortable today.

"If there is a fear of falling, the only safety consists in deliberately jumping." ~ Carl G Jung

You'll win if you're willing to be terrible at something for way longer than feels reasonable, fail in ways that make you cringe later, and keep showing up when every logical part of your brain is telling you to quit.

Arrogance over Empathy

 "The most dangerous people are often the ones who have never been dragged to the edges of themselves and forced to live there. They move through the world with clean hands and steady voices, believing that a life unshaken by deep pain is the natural standard, and anything else is a personal failure. They talk about healing as if it is a simple decision, like changing a shirt or taking a different street home. They stand on solid ground and look down at those clinging to the ledge, and instead of reaching out, they question why anyone is still hanging there. They mistake their comfort for wisdom, their luck for strength, and their lack of wounds for proof that others are weak.

These are the ones who say “just get over it” because they have never had to sit awake all night, arguing with their own thoughts just to stay alive until morning. They have never felt the way a memory can choke you harder than hands ever could. They have not known what it is to feel your heart race at the sound of footsteps, or a door closing, or a voice that sounds like someone who once hurt you. To them, the mind is a quiet room that always obeys. They cannot understand what it means to be trapped inside yourself, replaying scenes you never asked to watch, begging your body to calm down while it shakes without your permission. So they call it overreacting, they call it negativity, they call it drama, because they have never had to crawl out of an invisible prison one breath at a time.

They laugh at the word “triggered” as if it is a joke instead of a hidden wound being ripped open again and again by things no one else even notices. They roll their eyes at panic attacks because they have never felt their heart slam so hard they thought it might stop, or their chest tighten until the air turned to stone. They think trauma is a story with a clear beginning and a clear end, some terrible thing that happened a long time ago and is now neatly filed away. They cannot grasp that for some people, the “after” is just as brutal as the event itself. The body remembers what the mind tries to bury. The danger is not just their ignorance, but the confidence with which they offer advice about battles they have never had to fight.

These are the people who look at someone still struggling to stand and say, “But it’s been years,” as if time alone is medicine. They do not see how old wounds can bleed through the strongest smile. They do not know that a person can go to work, pay their bills, crack jokes, and still wake up every day feeling like a part of them never left the moment everything went wrong. They judge what they can see and dismiss what they cannot. When someone cries “too much,” they call it attention-seeking. When someone goes quiet, they call it cold. They do not understand that both can be desperate forms of survival. They see only the behavior and never the bruise beneath it.

They confuse survival with drama because they have never had to build a life on top of something that shattered them. They see a woman who double-checks every lock and think she is paranoid, not realizing she is trying to feel safe in a world that taught her she is not. They see someone who pulls away from touch and assume they are cold-hearted, not knowing that touch once meant danger. They see someone who struggles to trust and call them difficult, never understanding that trust, for some, has been used like a weapon. They do not know what it is like to be betrayed by someone who said “I love you,” to be hurt by someone who should have protected you, to be silenced when you finally found the courage to speak. And because they do not know, they decide it is easier to pretend the hurt is exaggerated than to admit the world is far crueler than they wanted to believe.

The terrifying part is not only that they misunderstand, but that they often do not want to understand. To truly listen would mean facing the fact that the world is not as safe as they feel. It would mean admitting that the comfort they live in is not guaranteed, that their peace is not proof of fairness, only of fortune. It would mean accepting that people they admire, systems they trust, and families they defend are capable of deep harm. It is easier to believe the survivor is too sensitive than to accept that cruelty sits closer than they think. It is easier to say “you’re overthinking” than to ask, “What happened to you?” and then hold the answer with care.

So they turn their faces away from the rawness in other people’s stories. They dismiss the shaking voice, the restless hands, the crowded silence between sentences. They offer shallow phrases: “Everything happens for a reason,” “Others have it worse,” “You just need to think positive.” These words sound kind on the surface, but underneath they carry something sharp: the message that if you cannot simply choose to feel better, you must be the problem. They turn suffering into a test you are failing. They turn trauma into a choice you are not strong enough to undo. And in doing so, they cut survivors twice—once with what was done to them, and again with the judgment that follows.

The truth is, no one needs you to have lived their exact nightmare to show them respect. You do not have to know the burn of every fire to understand that fire hurts. You do not have to have cried their exact tears to understand that grief is heavy. What breaks hearts is not the lack of shared experience; it is the lack of effort to care. The most dangerous people are not simply unscarred; they are unwilling to open their eyes. They protect their comfort by denying another’s reality. They protect their innocence by calling another’s story an exaggeration. They would rather guard their sense of safety than admit that someone in front of them is carrying more than they can see.

If you have survived what others do not understand, your existence is not an exaggeration and your pain is not an inconvenience. You are not weak for still feeling what happened to you. You are not “too much” for breaking down on a day that looks ordinary to everyone else. You have faced things that would have crushed the people who now call you dramatic. You have walked through nights that would have stolen their light completely. The strength it takes to keep breathing in a life that sometimes feels unlivable is a strength most people will never be forced to find. Your scars do not make you less; they are proof that you refused to disappear.

And if you are one of the few who has not been torn open by deep trauma, that is a gift, not a qualification to judge. Your peace is not a prize you earned by being better; it is a tenderness life has allowed you to keep. Honor it by refusing to use it as a weapon against those who were not as lucky. Instead of saying “just move on,” try saying “I may not understand, but I believe you.” Instead of doubting someone’s reaction, consider that you cannot see the weight they carry. Let your lack of scars make you softer, not sharper. Let it teach you to listen more than you speak, to ask instead of assume, to comfort instead of correct.

In the end, the world does not need more people who stand at a distance and demand that pain be tidy. The world needs people who are brave enough to sit with what they cannot fix, to hear stories that unsettle them, to hold shaking hands without pulling away. The most dangerous people are those untouched by trauma who choose arrogance over empathy. The most healing people are those who, whether broken or unbroken, choose to let another person’s truth matter more than their own comfort. May you always be the latter. May you never turn away from a wounded heart just because it scares you. And if you carry wounds yourself, may you know this: you are not a burden for feeling deeply, you are not wrong for still hurting, and you deserved gentleness in every moment someone told you to “just get over it” instead of asking how they could help you carry what was never yours to bear alone."

~ SDG

Leap

 Great things rarely happen in comfort.

If you wait until everything feels perfect, you will watch opportunity walk right past you.

Courage is doing it anyway while your hands shake and your mind doubts.

Success belongs to the ones who take action while everyone else overthinks.

Leaping into the unknown is where new doors open and new strengths appear.

You were built for more than playing it safe.

Move now, learn as you go, and let the results catch up to your effort. 

Dare

 In a society that values conformity and obedience, the individual who dares to think for themselves is often ostracized and ridiculed. These nonconformists, these outcasts, are the true pioneers of society, the ones who push us to question our assumptions and expand our horizons. They are the ones who are not afraid to be different, to be themselves.

If you find yourself feeling like an outsider, like you don't fit in with the crowd, that's a good thing. It means that you have the potential to make a real difference in the world. Don't be afraid to be yourself, to follow your own path. The world needs your unique perspective. 

When we are calm, unhurried, and free from stress and distractions the brain slips into a richer, more nuanced mode of thought. Some call this Slow Thinking, and the best minds have always understood its power.

You'll win if you're willing to be terrible at something for way longer than feels reasonable, fail in ways that make you cringe later, and keep showing up when every logical part of your brain is telling you to quit.

I wanted magic but settled for distraction. I wanted depth but swam in the shallow end, smiling for the camera, while drowning quietly, just out of frame.

The comfort of illusion

 

The real glow-up

 The real glow-up isn’t about looks, money, or attention. It’s the moment you realize your energy is valuable and you stop handing it out to people who only take and never pour back. It’s when you stop explaining yourself to those committed to misunderstanding you, stop showing up for people who never show up for you, and stop shrinking just to make others feel comfortable. It’s choosing peace over proving a point, choosing boundaries over burnout, choosing yourself without apology. It’s the kind of transformation no one can see at first, but everyone feels. Because the moment you treat your energy like it’s expensive, your entire life begins to rise to that standard.

A parable

  A farmer and his son had a beloved stallion who helped the family earn a living. One day, the horse ran away and their neighbors exclaimed, “Your horse ran away, what terrible luck!”. The farmer replied, ‘Maybe so, maybe not. We’ll see’.

A few days later, the horse returned home, leading a few wild mares back to the farm as well. The neighbors shouted out, “Your horse has returned, and brought several horses home with him. What great luck!” The farmer replied, “Maybe so, maybe not. We’ll see.”

Later that week, the farmer’s son was trying to break one of the mares and she threw him to the ground, breaking his leg. The villagers cried, “Your son broke his leg, what terrible luck!” The farmer replied, “Maybe so, maybe not. We’ll see.”

A few weeks later, soldiers from the national army marched through town, recruiting all the able-bodied boys for the army. They did not take the farmer’s son, still recovering from his injury. Friends shouted, “Your boy is spared, what tremendous luck!” To which the farmer replied, “Maybe so, maybe not. We’ll see.”

Maya

 “Without courage we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can’t be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.”

You’re not stuck for lack of options. You’re stuck because you cling to what’s outlived its purpose. Loyalty isn’t the same as carrying dead weight. Release what’s been pulling you beneath the surface.

You can’t outwork a bad strategy. All that hustle without a clear direction just leads to burnout. Stop for a moment. Look at what’s actually working. Make the adjustments you need. The solution isn’t to push harder—it’s to work smarter. Effort is powerful, but only when you aim it the right way.

Mandela

 "It always seems impossible until it's done."

Building from scratch

Building a business with no safety net requires a level of determination most people will never understand.

You carry all the pressure, all the risk, and all the responsibility while trying to look confident on the outside.

There are days when fear wants to take over and you still show up anyway.

That is what makes you different.

Entrepreneurs bet on themselves when no one else does.

You need a strong mindset, unshakeable belief, and a work ethic that refuses to break.

It is not easy, but the freedom makes every struggle worth it.

Entrepreneurship is a brutal teacher

 Entrepreneurship will humble you before it rewards you.

It will expose every weakness, test every belief you have about yourself, and force you to grow faster than you ever planned.

There are days when you question your sanity, your decisions, and even your abilities.

But if you stick through the failures, the setbacks, the sleepless nights, and the doubt, you become someone who cannot be broken by normal problems.

Business teaches you what books never will.

Survive the struggle, and you come out with knowledge, resilience, and freedom no job could ever give you.

- The Innocents Abroad - Mark Twain

"In America, we hurry ~ which is well; but when the day's work is done, we go on thinking of losses and gains, we plan for the morrow, we even carry our business cares to bed with us...we burn up our energies with these excitements, and either die early or drop into a lean and mean old age at a time of life which they call a man's prime in Europe...What a robust people, what a nation of thinkers we might be, if we would only lay ourselves on the shelf occasionally and renew our edges!"

The people most successful are brutally honest with themselves about their weaknesses. Not in a self-flagellating way. Just clear-eyed assessment. They see their flaws without drama or denial. Most people can't do this. They either deny weaknesses completely or dramatize them into identity. Neither is truth. Just clear observation. This is hard. This is who I am. Now what?

Authenticity

 

~ Derek Walcott from Sea Grapes

 “Love After Love”

"The time will come

when, with elation

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door, in your own mirror

and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.

Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life." 

Some people live like they’re trying not to break. I live to feel every crack.

 I came into the world with a voice that refused to hide. I want to give language to what so many of us couldn’t say out loud. I want it to be a home for anyone who had ever felt too tender, too queer, too alive for the world around them. I want to speak and write about love and loss and identity with such raw honesty that it could stop you in your tracks.  

I don’t want to get out without a broken heart. I don’t want to slip quietly through life. I want to be changed by it, marked by it, shattered and remade by love. I am full of gratitude, awe, and a steady reminder that beauty and sorrow often share the same breath.  

I want to learn and teach how to stay soft in a world that can be cruel. 

The goal isn’t to survive untouched. It’s to love so deeply that you can’t help but be changed. It’s to let the breaking be proof that you were here and that you lived all the way through.

Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy. ~Pema Chödrön

~ E.E Cummings

 A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feelings through words.

This may sound easy. It isn’t.

A lot of people think or believe or know they feel, but that’s thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling, not knowing or believing or thinking.

Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.

To be nobody-but-yourself, in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else, means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

There's no thinker ~ just thinking.

 The voice in your head isn't you. 

It’s a loop of conditioning pretending to be someone.

Mom

 May you know that absence is alive with hidden presence, that nothing is ever lost or forgotten.

May the absences in your life grow full of eternal echo.

May you sense around you the secret Elsewhere where the presences that have left you dwell...

~ JOHN O’DONOHUE

The noise

 Sometimes you have to stand in the emptiness of your own company to realize you were never really empty—just surrounded by people who never filled you. There’s a quiet kind of truth that surfaces when the noise fades and the room feels too still. You start to notice how much of yourself you gave away trying to be understood, accepted, or loved by people who only saw the surface of you. The silence can feel sharp at first, almost unbearable, but slowly it becomes a space where your heart starts to breathe again. In that stillness, you begin to see that being alone was never the problem—it was being unseen while you weren’t.

And when that realization sinks in, something changes. You stop craving company for the sake of not feeling lonely and start craving connection that feels like home. You begin to choose peace over presence, depth over distraction. The emptiness that once frightened you becomes a sacred place where your spirit rebuilds itself. You learn that solitude isn’t a void—it’s a vessel. And in filling it with your own laughter, your own thoughts, your own love, you finally understand: you were never lacking—you were just waiting to meet yourself without all the noise.

Great game

 

The Fourth Sign Of The Zodiac ~ Cancer

 I know, you never intended to be in this world.

But you’re in it all the same.

so why not get started immediately.

I mean, belonging to it.

There is so much to admire, to weep over.

And to write music or poems about.

Bless the feet that take you to and fro.

Bless the eyes and the listening ears.

Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste.

Bless touching.

You could live a hundred years, it’s happened.

Or not.

I am speaking from the fortunate platform

of many years,

none of which, I think, I ever wasted.

Do you need a prod?

Do you need a little darkness to get you going?

Let me be urgent as a knife, then,

and remind you of Keats,

so single of purpose and thinking, for a while,

he had a lifetime.

~ Mary Oliver