Passion or Lust???

I recently came across an interesting concept in the book, The Passion Test by Janet Bray Attwood and Chris Attwood. The authors were discussing the difference between lust and passion.

Lust stems from a lack in one's life . . . either one is attempting to fill something that is missing or cover up a dull a pain that is too great for him/her to handle. Lust is basically a means to fill a void. Lust may involve money, intimacy, food, or materialistic possessions.

Passion, on the other hand, is what one loves in life. It connects one with their innermost self. When in alignment with your passion . . . life is filled with joy and fulfillment.

Take a step back from life and ask yourself whether your actions stem from an attempt to fill a void or from something that is your heart's true desire.

All life is a boomerang.

We receive what we give.

What does it mean to Surrender?

When we surrender to God, we surrender to something bigger than ourselves - to a universe that knows what it's doing. When we stop trying to control events, they fall into a natural order, an order that works.

Surrender means, by definition, giving up attachment to results. When we surrender to God, we let go of our attachment to how things happen on the outside and we become more concerned with what happens on the inside.

In Zen Buddhism, there's a concept called "zen's mind" or beginner's mind." They say that the mind should be like an empty rice bowl. If it's already full, then the universe can not fill it. If it's empty, it has room to receive. This means that when we think we have things already figured out, we are not teachable. Genuine insight can not dawn on a mind's that is not open to receive it. Surrender is a process of emptying the mind.

Excerpt from Return to Love, by Marianne Williamson

Emotional Cleansing . .

If you are emotionally blocked and you cannot, or you do not, know what you feel, or if you have blocked what you feel so effectively that you become emotionless, you become a negative person, and you also create a physically diseased body. By keeping your emotions clear, emotional negativity does not reside in you, and you become lighter and lighter.
This requires that you clear yourself each day of your emotional impacts. Just as you dispose of your physical body wastes and toxins, so too, dispose of your emotional wastes and toxins by finishing emotionally finished business, by not going to bed in anger, by seeing that you do not feel contaminated emotionally, and by learning to work with and to honor your emotional currents of energy.

Excerpt from The Seat of the Soul by Gary Zukav

Happiness in Life does not come from Getting, it comes from Being.

Don't aim at success -- the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run -- in the long-run, I say! -- success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it."
~ Viktor Frankl Quotes from Man's Search for Meaning

When we are no longer able to change a situation - we are challenged to change ourselves.

Viktor E. Frankl