Inspired Living

“There must be more to life than having everything”

(Maurice Sendak)

Sendak said it all, didn’t he? Most of us have been raised to believe that the measure of a successful life has to be in the tangibles – things like cars, houses, careers, travel and family. Oh yes, and those calculated relationships! Taken together, these are the aspirations that generations before us thought and taught must be the keys to “the good life.” And indeed, they do bring a kind of satisfaction that passes for happiness. The key word here is “passes” and of course, the fact that everything passes is not going to keep us happy for long.

So what doesn’t pass? Can we ever be happy? These are the big questions which some of us may face after a life filled with acquired dissatisfaction, with fleeting pleasures and endured pains. Is there a way to live not so much in traditional aspiration as in inspiration?

QUIET DESPERATION

We spend most of our lives avoiding the fundamentals of natural well-being, and the resulting disconnects are the cause of disease and disaster. For instance, it’s not that in our hearts and even  in our heads, we don’t want reality, it’s just that we want that reality to be what we think it should be. We want life to fit a personal wish list that keeps getting longer and a personal timetable that keeps getting shorter.  We spend our days in hot pursuit of what we want and our nights tossing and turning over what we don’t want. In our aspiration lies our desperation.

John Kabat-Zinn sums up our predicament like this: “The world itself is weeping and begs for us to bring an entirely different level of attention and resolve to its suffering based on our inherent beauty, goodness and creative imagination.”

“Can we create by sourcing the actual as the foundation, change as the template and what is next as the unlimited field of possibility?” says Steven Harrison. Indeed we can, and in fact, we must, begin to courageously engage in life fully and fundamentally rather than partly and preferentially.

INSPIRED LIVING

The foundation for inspired living is not an idea or an ideal; it is solidly based on what we may call “Fidelity to Reality” or the direct recognition of, and co-operation with, what is. It involves us deeply and completely in living fully. Inspired living calls us to question our traditional guides, to withdraw our investment in bankrupt beliefs. To finally move away from limitation and fragmentation toward a more fully cooperative and therefore sustainable way of real relationship to each other and mother earth.

Inspired living invites us to be fully alive, to watch more alertly and to follow the flow of life with less resistance. To stop stubbing our toes on hard facts that have always been trying to tell us something very important: to the degree that we resist what life actually demands, to that degree we will suffer.

We’re called upon to stop living in an imaginary projection of our  virtual world, and to  embrace not only our full humanity but also our full divinity. That is our Natural Well-Being, and its cornerstones are what has never gone away and does not come and go: Reality, Truth, Love and Peace.

At BE WELL! we’re engaged in broadening and deepening our understanding of, and relationship to, the  body, mind and spirit. It’s our intent to nourish the whole of our being. In other words, as someone once said at tea one day:  “Be Well! is about living fully without the fight, right?”

If you have a comment or a question, please contact us.

Thank you, and be well!

Happiness is joy in simple things.
Happiness is joy in simple things.