Daily Inspirations and Smiles

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Daily Inspirations and Friends

Others can be daily inspirations for us -- maybe it starts by being daily inspirations for them.

Daily Inspirations-- One Day at a Time

How Do Daily Inspirations Reprogram Our Hearts?

Daily Inspirations:

Love is what we were born with. Fear is what we have learned here. The spiritual journey is the unlearning of fear and the acceptance of love back into our hearts.
Marianne Williamson

Except ye become as a little child, ye shall not enter the kingdom of heaven…The kingdom of heaven is within you.

Jesus

The material world operates based on outcomes. Every interaction with a person, object, or circumstance is ultimately judged as being either good or bad – based on outcomes. And in this system, every moment of human existence within the brain neural network is assigned these same judgments of “good” or “bad”. With every “good”, there is a sense of connection and Presence. With every “bad”, there is an experience of separation and abandonment.

As we grow older, we collect more and more of these separation experiences – bad’s without corresponding good’s -- and therefore, abandonment and shame dominates our brain’s programming.

Whenever we perceive that we have done something “bad”, we instinctively separate from ourselves, our higher Presence, and others. And in that separation, there emerges a growing and free floating fear of impending doom – impending and ultimate separation. The more separation we experience, and the more fear dominates our perceptions of and reactions to life.

We have been programmed by alternating closeness and separation to believe that we can control our relationships with others – we are responsible for their outcomes. And when relationships fail, it is perceived as being our “fault”, and that we are “bad” – deserving to be separated, alone, and abandoned.

Then as other life events happen, they trigger the unresolved programming of our past, and we experience even more separation, even when separation is not what is actually occurring. We are now programmed to expect separation, abandonment, punishment, and abuse – because the programming says that is what we deserve. Daily inspirations become daily desperations – trying to avoid the seemingly inevitable.

Finding daily inspirations is a way of beginning to have our hearts reprogrammed – to begin to experience what is true --from an unconditionally loving and accepting and adoring higher Presence. This inspirational Presence – through the daily inspirations in readings, quotes, and others’ voices – begins to improve relationships with ourselves and others, allowing closeness, and supportive sharing to emerge -- bringing spiritual awakenings and insights – allowing us to transcend material life – allowing us to be reprogrammed by our daily inspirations.

We begin to return to the simplicity and serenity of healthy children – loved, secure, and nurtured in the experience of permanent and inspired intimacy --where no one is ever “bad” -- and no one is ever abandoned and alone.

With the support and sustenance of our daily inspirations, our heart once again becomes our home.

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Stopping the Pain -- With Daily Inspirations

I have found the paradox,
that if you love until it hurts,
there can be no more hurt,
only more love.
Mother Teresa

Mother Teresa devoted her life to the dying and abandoned of Calcutta, India. What she sacrificed to be who she was had to have hurt tremendously on a human level. Yet what her words describe as her experience, strength, and hope, is that there is an overriding payoff for caring about others. I hear in her voice the impression that what active love and caring offers cannot be found any other way.

We can’t all love in such dramatic ways as she did, but we can love with similar intensities.

A spiritual person was asked by a lame beggar for money outside a temple. The spiritual person replied, “Silver and gold have I none, but such as I have, give I thee…” And as he lifted the man up, the lame man walked.

Love and caring is about what do I have, and what do others need. I have offered people that I cared about what I had and they have at times refused my gifts. To receive others love actually requires sometimes something more than need. The benefit of helping the poor and dying is that typically they are more willing to accept whatever is offered.

Ultimately the truest gifts of love are not material or financial. They are affirming and consistent presence – smiles, listening, attention, unconditional acceptance and admiration – the same gifts that my higher Presence gives me every day.

Life is so full of distractions that I can become lost in the details. And love involves exiting the details of life and becoming focused on others – for my own spiritual strength. They possess the hidden secrets to life, and as I have loved them, I have found my truest and best selves -- and joys that my human brain could not understand orcomprehend. My brain could only observe in puzzled awe.

Finding daily inspirations involves maintaining a clearness of focus that comes from consistent inspirational listening -- to inspirational words, readings, quotes, and to other people’s voices -- reminding us of the timeless Unseen Presence, who can only be experienced in intimate closeness – which begins in being present for others.

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Life Can Be MORE -- through Daily Inspirations

Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden

when the flowers are dead. The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and richness to life that nothing else can bring.
Oscar Wilde


The need and desire for closeness drives us to fight for affection and run from intimacy. Being human goes far beyond the chemicals of the body, and the neural energies of the brain. We are spiritual beings living in physical bodies, limited physically by the speed and capacity of the processor and hard drives in our brains.

But not really.

We are greater – MORE -- than the sum of our parts.

As vague and as confusing as the word “love” can be, it somehow reflects an experience of something from beyond the neural sparks inside our brains. An awareness fades in and out that somewhere in the swirl of conscious and unconscious thought – there is -- MORE.

And where this is most vivid is where we unexpectedly find ourselves present in a closeness with another person that has little to no expectations, and no romantic agendas. Presence – a personal and unconditional and uncontrollable energy that fills our insides with the quiet serenity of being nestled softly in a loving and present parent’s arms – gently rocked and held close and cuddled – Presence.

“Daily inspirations” are not just about time and days. It reminds us to remember – to remember to live inside of our experiences – by realizing we are More – and that More is available -- when we experience consciously our normal state of loneliness, and find the inspirational readings, the inspirational resources, and the inspirational relationships we need to live intimately closer to others, to ourselves, and to our higher Presence.

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How Does Love and Faith Relate to Finding Daily Inspiration? (Part Four)

The human heart feels things the eyes cannot see,
and knows what the mind cannot understand.
Robert Vallett

Finding daily inspirations is about learning to live primarily in the experiences of the human heart not the mind or brain.

The brain is merely a laptop of the soul. But our species and culture have made it the ultimate destination of existence. It is believed that if we know the facts, and understand the dynamics of life, we can control our ultimate outcomes.

The real quality of living is not in the outcomes – that is a human myth. Ultimately inspiration helps us see that quality living exists in the perceptions and reactions of a heart that’s intimately connected to a higher Presence.

Inspirational quotes and readings contain messages that only the heart can read. And when it does, we can feel our brains and bodies relax deeply into the warm loving Arms of “they” who are Present. Daily inspiration involves learning to live within those warm loving Arms. We don’t want to be “just visiting”.

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How Does Love and Faith Relate to Finding Daily Inspiration? (Part Three)

To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary.
To one without faith, no explanation is possible.
St Thomas Aquinas

The brain tries to understand so it can control. It is naturally and genetically programmed to operate this way. The heart – the spiritual side of ourselves – does not operate in thought and understanding. It hears no words or explanations. It only experiences the Presence or absence of Presence within each interaction and relationship.

Daily inspirations are about transcending thought, and experiencing consciously a dimension that can only be realized within an intimate connection of hearts.

Inspirational messages, quotes, and readings can cross a barrier between what is perceived by the brain, and what is really real. I find that as I experience my humanness, and listen to inspirational words and meanings, my heart is led by an inspiring Presence to a spiritual bridge that carries me to better places.




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How Does Love and Faith Relate to Finding Daily Inspiration? (Part Two)

Faith is an oasis in the heart
which will never be reached by the caravan of thinking.
Kahlil Gibran

In the absence of inspirational spiritual experiences, we pursue an “oasis” of flowing spiritual energies with our brains, and not our hearts. We are left with the dry lifeless sands of endless searchings.

Thought is what my brain does. And it is very capable of being “schizophrenic”. In the absence of true inspirational resources, my brain will create mirages out of thought -- neural energy. And I will live in those hallucinations for long periods of time, rarely if ever wondering if it is really real. Some people live their whole lives in this imaginary world, and never know it is only a mirage.

Many people collect into groups of travelers and follow the same mirages. It is so much easier than struggling to be ourselves – to follow the path of least resistance. And if many others are following the same trail, it must be right. It is like a sign at a crossroads that says “God” and points in one direction, and “Thoughts about God” that points in the opposite direction. It is far easier to “think” God, than to live intimately with higher Presence.

In my experience, where truth and my brain meet is at the point of the conscious human experience of pain. The absence of any experience of conscious pain can only be caused by human mental and spiritual disease – the destruction of sensation within my inner self.

My heart is my deeper self who can hear and experience the inspired “supernatural”. In that cool and shaded place, where there is rest and hope – and inspiring directions to better and better inspirational places of the heart

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How Important Is It?: My Inspirational Human Experience (Part One)

Normally when I lead an inspirational recovery support meeting, I have detailed elaborate notes that summarize a week plus of daily inspirations -- inspirational readings, journaling, meditation, and inspiring experiences. This time I had no notes – I could not pull together all of the inspirational experiences and readings that had come together for this topic.

My collection of experiences and inspirational insights consciously began last Sunday, with an inspirational life training group that I lead using Twelve Step spiritual principles. We were finishing Step 8 and discussing Step 9: these two principles deal with identifying how we believe that we have harmed others, preparing to make amends when we really have harmed someone, and actually making the direct amends to others.

I was saying how each person will do this inventorying and making of these amends based on their level of emotional necessity. Someone in the group described this thought profoundly for me as, “how important is it?” This question has vibrated all week in my inspirational listening and journalling .

The other piece of this topic is “experience”, from the inspirational concept of “we share our experience, strength and hope”. The level of importance of anything or anyone in my life is the level of my conscious human experience of that person, thing, or situation. The way that I first became aware of my problems and illness was when my human experience became startlingly conscious – feelings started coming back into parts of me that been cut off and numb.

Before I began my spiritual recovery over twenty-two years ago, I was an “intellectual.” Being an intellectual does not mean one is intelligent—it just means that one thinks a lot. And because we think a lot, we seem to know things that others don’t know – which again makes us seem intelligent. And because we are under the influence of thought, as one would be a drug, we seem more calm and strangely in control of ourselves. This too is only a perception and not a reality.

Like an alcoholic, my tolerance of thinking was so great, that I could think people “under the table”. Again, this was not because of my intelligence, but because of my ability to ingest huge amounts of thought.

Shortly before beginning my spiritual recovery, my second wife left the scene. I believed that everything was now fixed – she was, of course, my problem. But without her to think obsessively over, I became majorly distressed – I began to detox from the huge obsessions I had be using. Thinking was no longer working for me, and I was in serious trouble.

(to be continued)


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Levels of Necessity for Daily Inspirations

Being human is having a disease of separation from others, from ourselves, and from our higher Presence. Humanity suffers - often unconsciously -- sometimes consciously - always with some level of pain, fear and loneliness lurking just beneath the surface.

Each of us has our own personal experience of what this means. Somewhat like yard sales: one person's junk is another person's treasure. Each of us have unique mental perceptual filters - some genetic, and many created by past life events and circumstances that were never resolved. So we each experience life at different levels of consciousness, with different expressions of mental filtering, and with different levels of conscious pain and separation.

Finding daily inspirations, for me, is finding those inspirational life quotes, experiences, actions, and relationships that match my moment to moment levels of pain and loneliness, bringing me back to and increasingly maintaining a level of serenity, joy, and presence. Because my conscious levels of pain has been rather extensive, beginning at age two, it has been necessary to pursue more daily inspirations experiences than has seemingly been necessary for many others. My level of necessity for finding daily inspirations has driven me to find and practice a different inspirational lifestyle.

Finding daily inspirations has involved developing inspirational resources that I practice daily, in all of the affairs of my life. And then there were times of heightened consciousness when I needed "booster shots" of additional daily inspirations resources - in order to return to a level of comfort and serenity. The key here is to develop and store - in my spiritual and emotional banks -- the needed daily inspirations so they are available daily, and so that more inspirational resources are available when there is an increased need.

There are three major areas of finding daily inspirations that I have found helpful:

Daily Inspirations through Inspirational Readings
I have about eight daily readers that I have read almost daily for close to twenty years. These daily inspirations typically include inspirational life quotes and some form of inspirational sharing about the thought in the quote.

Also, I have other books from which I find daily inspirations, which I frequently read from a few paragraphs up to a page each day. These are books that feel personal rather than professional -- experiential rather than intellectual -- similar to my own life experiences rather than "preachy" and detached.

I listen to readings to hear the voice of a higher Presence, giving support, direction, and closeness, and I hear their voices in these daily inspirations.

Daily Inspirations through Inspirational Music and Meditations
I have found that certain types, styles, and forms of music and nature sounds settle my brain, and allow me to listen more attentively to Presence in others, in readings, and in life events. Soft music and nature sounds seem to encourage my mind to rest and to hear clearly.
On different days, the specific music and sounds that help me find my daily inspirations varies. There is music that I used when I first began daily inspirations that I find distracting or disabling of my inspiration now. And there are new music, sounds, and verbal meditations that I continue to add.

Meditation tapes have also been helpful to me for over 20 years as aids to daily inspirations. These tapes give verbal directions for receiving daily inspirations through mental and physical relaxation and focusing. Again, different levels of necessity or pain seem to respond better to different recordings.

Daily Inspirations through Inspirational Relationships
In my experience, human beings possess the highest levels of spiritual energy and Presence for daily inspirations. I have had a spiritual guide for over twenty years, and I have been and am a guide for others. When I struggle with my illness of being human, I go to other humans who know they have the same disease, and who have been practicing daily inspirations living as the treatment for their symptoms.

I have also found that when I cannot reach my spiritual guides, my higher Presence comes to me in the form of the people who simply appear and respond in my life for those immediate needs. They may not understand, but they are always the messengers of the exact daily inspirations needed...

My life has no accidents or coincidences. All events and people are placed in my life exactly as I need them and ultimately as I would want them if I had my higher Presence’s level of information. And I am the same for others. The difference each time is the level of my ability to hear, which depends on my level of access to conscious pain.

Frequently my spiritual guide will be someone for whom I am officially their spiritual guide. The key seems to be my level of acceptance of the fact that, by myself, I am powerless over what I perceive and how I react. An inspirational window or door opens inside and I am able to leave my humanness and enter a better place.

My level of necessity for daily inspirations is directly proportional to the level of my conscious discomfort with my humanness. The level at which I need to find daily inspirations is determined by my level of spiritual and emotional necessity. The task and gift of my life is to find levels of daily inspirations that match my levels of daily necessity. And I believe we can all share these same challenges and these same opportunities together. The daily inspirations we need are always available.




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A Request from Finding Daily Inspirations

For many years, I have led inspirational groups and life-training sessions, given inspirational talks, worked individually with people seeking a Better Life, both professionally and personally. In all of these instances, I have been able to see my “audience” – their faces, their reactions, hear their questions and comments. And I have adjusted everything I have done to match the specifics of the persons involved, using the visual and auditory feedback from others as a GPS device to guide me in helping others find understanding and daily inspirational living.

Now for the first time, I am writing and communicating out into the vast expanse of the internet -- where there are no faces, and no voices – no feedback or cues to tell me what is being received or confused – to tell me what specific needs or interests people have – or really whether or not anyone is even there at all.

For this reason, I am requesting something from you, whomever you may be who is reading this. I believe that you will receive in return the personal benefits of my many years of being therapist and a spiritual and human guide. My responses are personal – my own experience, strength and hope – and deepened by my professional clinical experiences.

Inspirational living, for me, involves finding and experiencing a loving, caring, unconditional Presence that passes human understanding and comprehension. This Presence is not the “God” of traditional organized religion, but does not conflict with Christian spirituality.

This Presence somehow takes us above the purely human frailties and isolation of normal life, to a place of peace, joy, and companionship that no longer requires the obsessive outcomes and illusions of the past. And this Presence exists most powerfully in the connection of two or more of us together – for in this union of souls, God becomes flesh and dwells among and with us.

Here are my requests:
1. When my writing creates a question, please send your question to me so I can respond. If your question is one several people are asking I may post an article on my site addressing the question in more detail. But I will address your question, as I understand it.
2. When my writing seems related to something that you are experiencing or struggling with presently, please feel free to ask for my suggestions, comments, and support.
3. If you have a life experience that seems to relate to or contradict what you hear me saying, please share it with me
4. If you have a friend or acquaintance who is struggling to find daily inspiration – hope – in a current life situation, ask them to read some of my writings, and/or to send me their questions and struggles so I can support and maybe even help them find some inspired solutions.
5. And if anything else comes to mind that you would like to simply express or ask, please do so. Whatever you write, feel, or think is perfect – unconditionally. Having the freedom to be and experience freely who we are can be one of the most liberating and inspiring gifts we can receive.

Let’s find daily living inspiration – together.

I am listening.

Will
BetterPlaceByD@aol.com or comment section below.

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How Do We Take Care of Ourselves? -- an Introduction to the Question

One indicator of emotional, mental, and spiritual health is the willingness and ability to “take care of ourselves”. The words sound simple. JUST love and affirm yourself, have relationships with people who do the same, and be attentive and responsive to your needs and wants – and you will be happy.
“Once upon a time….. Happily ever after.”

If it is so simple why do so few people actually accomplish it? And why do the majority of people experience a nagging shadow of a feeling-thought in the back of their minds that something is missing? What if this is as good as it gets?!

The truth that I have experienced in my life is that self-care is not hard – it is totally impossible. Rather radical for someone advocating hope, and daily inspiration, and a better life. And this radical awareness is a crucial beginning to taking care of ourselves through finding daily inspirations, journalling, developing a daily intimacy with a higher Presence, ourselves and other human beings.

Perhaps a starting point would be to realize and accept that we do not know what we want and need. In an inspirational talk that I have given, I give a situational question: Image that you have been given $500 million dollars, with one stipulation. A sensor will be placed on your wrist that monitors your happiness or unhappiness. And it will beep if you are unhappy. If it beeps, telling us you are unhappy, we will take away everything you have. HOW LONG COULD YOU KEEP THE $500 MILLION?

This question could be repeated with health, relationships, success, and fame – virtually anything that humans value and desire. The reality is that having the whole of the material world as we would want it could not keep us from “losing our own souls” – our soul being our sense of being unconditionally loved by, and connected to the presence of others, and unconditionally caring and loving of ourselves.

At first glance, it looks like we are “screwed” – hopelessly and helplessly condemned to fluctuating levels of pain, fear, loneliness, sadness, rage -- misery.

The most commonplace way that mankind has dealt with this reality is “denial” – "don’t even know I am lying”. In unconsciousness, the brain creates, to survive, an alternate universe of facts, thoughts, perceptions, and reactions. It is experienced as acceptable because it virtually eliminates the experience of pain and fear, except in exceptional moments and events.

Happiness in this universe is experienced as relief from flashes of pain, and as emotional numbness. I can remember thinking that I had a good day if I had experienced little or no conscious emotional energy.

So taking care of ourselves, in human terms, means becoming distracted by external circumstances and events, with a corresponding loss of self-awareness, and experiencing this blindness as hope and happiness.

For many in our time, this unconscious state is deteriorating. The truth is beginning to invade our alternative universes. And the initial gifts of conscious pain and discomfort are beginning to open wonderful fountains of living presence and change which can wash away the darknesses of the past and bring us into the Light of inspired living.

We will be continuing to find daily inspirations that can give us new light –Life.

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What is the difference between inspiration and motivation?

Earlier in my life, I was very dissatisfied with living - severely depressed and anxious nearly all the time. I believed that if the circumstances and details of my life changed, I would feel different - maybe happy. And consequently I was very motivated to find motivational direction that would lead to change.

I read the pop motivational literature. Because I was a therapist, I had access to professional versions of motivational practice - like cognitive therapy, and psycholinguistics. And I went to workshops and seminars, listened to tapes, and watched videos.

Overall much of motivational programming was insightful and interesting. The problem for me was and is that motivational programs assumed certain beliefs that did not work for me.

For example, motivational programming is focused on obtaining specific outcomes as a means of reaching happiness through "success". This did not work for me. Every successful outcome had a trap door that took me straight back to where I started - struggling to reach the carrot of another outcome that was somehow going to make me happy - this time. It was much like an animal in a cage going round and round in an endless wheel of motivated outcomes - going ultimately nowhere.

For me, daily inspirations indirectly takes me to different outcomes. But by changing my perceptual filters and emotional reactions, daily inspirations allows me to begin to actually thrive in the process of living as it is, and not in the illusions and distractions of possible and pursued outcomes -- successes.

The second problem I ultimately had with motivational programs is that they seemed to market the delusion that I can be taught how to control my life --relationships, successes, business, outcomes, etc... It was my belief that if I understood "it", and acted on this understanding, I could control "it" - and my life would be as I believed I wanted it to be. I heard them say over and over again that they were going to teach me to control my life.

In my experience, finding daily inspiration involves developing an inspired relationship beyond myself, that changes the diseased programming of my human brain-damaged perceptual filters -- and allows me to experience a level of serenity and Presence, irregardless of the specific outcomes. Outcomes are actually the scapegoats my brain blames for neural distress. Daily inspirations is about taking responsibility for accessing the spiritual resources necessary to perceive and respond differently.

A third problem was that motivational programs typically assume that thought is the root of all that humanly is -- the basis of getting control of one's life. We supposedly are what we think, and if we change our thoughts we will change our lives.
For me, I have come to see most thought as a drug of distraction that can give periods of relief, but not conscious levels of serenity and Presence.
Thought, I believe is encapsulated suppressed neural energy within my brain. My brain has transformed pain and fear energies in rigid and frozen blocks of energy called thoughts. Then my brain sells these thoughts as being the truth. It is like convincing someone that a picture of someone is actually that person. And for years, I accepted the insanity of such perceptions and conclusions.

Thought neutralized painful neural energies, like crack and alcohol would. And it plunged me deeper and deeper into chronic unconsciousness.

Thought was the psychosis my wounded lost selves used to avoid the pain of my unresolved past - an imaginary place where I could go to stop experiencing life - where I became a mental object in a personal universe. That is until thought could no longer manage the pain that continued to leak out of the cracks in my unconsciousness

Where thought is complete and solid, experience is dynamic and flowing. Where thought operates in an empty vacuum, alone and isolated, experience requires relationships, interaction and sharing, connection - intimacy with self, others, and a higher Presence.

Finding daily inspirations is about learning to experience more and more, and think less and less. Finding daily inspirations is about learning to have fuller and deeper living experiences.

Motivational programs have much to teach and provide in the pursuit of more life. And in my experience, it frequently lacks the fluidity to make life flow and become whole within the process operating instead within the illusion of outcomes.





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