Anchor Meaning In Life Quotes

Having totality means being capable of following "what is," because "what is" is constantly moving and constantly changing. If one is anchored to a particular view, one will not be able to follow the swift movement of "what is.

The consciousness of one’s inner value is anchored in higher, more spiritual things, and cannot be shaken by camp life. But how many free men, let alone prisoners, possess it?

I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself!.. And several other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach, I have had the same experience, became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide. Like a saint's vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see, and seeing the secret, you are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on towards nowhere for no good reason.

His hatred for all was so intense that it should extinguish the very love from which it was conceived. And thus, he ceased to feel. There was nothing further in which to believe that made the prospect of feeling worthwhile. Daily he woke up and cast downtrodden eyes upon the sea and he would say to himself with a hint of regret at his hitherto lack of indifference, 'All a dim illusion, was it? Surely it was foolish of me to think any of this had meaning.' He would then spend hours staring at the sky, wondering how best to pass the time if everything—even the sky itself— were for naught. He arrived at the conclusion that there was no best way to pass the time. The only way to deal with the illusion of time was to endure it, knowing full well, all the while, that one was truly enduring nothing at all. Unfortunately for him, this nihilistic resolution to dispassion didn’t suit him very well and he soon became extremely bored. Faced now with the choice between further boredom and further suffering, he impatiently chose the latter, sailing another few weeks along the coast , and then inland, before finally dropping anchor off the shores of the fishing village of Yami.

And several other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach, I have had the same experience, became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide. Like a saint's vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see, and seeing the secret, you are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on towards nowhere for no good reason.

EDMUND *Then with alcoholic talkativeness You've just told me some high spots in your memories. Want to hear mine? They're all connected with the sea. Here's one. When I was on the Squarehead square rigger, bound for Buenos Aires. Full moon in the Trades. The old hooker driving fourteen knots. I lay on the bowsprit, facing astern, with the water foaming into spume under me, the masts with every sail white in the moonlight, towering high above me. I became drunk with the beauty and signing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself -- actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself! To God, if you want to put it that way. Then another time, on the American Line, when I was lookout on the crow's nest in the dawn watch. A calm sea, that time. Only a lazy ground swell and a slow drowsy roll of the ship. The passengers asleep and none of the crew in sight. No sound of man. Black smoke pouring from the funnels behind and beneath me. Dreaming, not keeping looking, feeling alone, and above, and apart, watching the dawn creep like a painted dream over the sky and sea which slept together. Then the moment of ecstatic freedom came. the peace, the end of the quest, the last harbor, the joy of belonging to a fulfillment beyond men's lousy, pitiful, greedy fears and hopes and dreams! And several other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach, I have had the same experience. Became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide. Like a saint's vision of beatitude. Like a veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see -- and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on toward nowhere, for no good reason! *He grins wryly. It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a sea gull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a a little in love with death! TYRONE *Stares at him -- impressed. Yes, there's the makings of a poet in you all right. *Then protesting uneasily. But that's morbid craziness about not being wanted and loving death. EDMUND *Sardonically The *makings of a poet. No, I'm afraid I'm like the guy who is always panhandling for a smoke. He hasn't even got the makings. He's got only the habit. I couldn't touch what I tried to tell you just now. I just stammered. That's the best I'll ever do, I mean, if I live. Well, it will be faithful realism, at least. Stammering is the native eloquence of us fog people.

Reclaiming ourselves usually means coming to recognize and accept that we have in us both sides of everything. We are capable of fear and courage, generosity and selfishness, vulnerability and strength. These things do not cancel each other out but offer us a full range of power and response to life. Life is as complex as we are. Sometimes our vulnerability is our strength, our fear develops our courage, and our woundedness is the road to our integrity. It is not an either/or world. It is a real world. In calling ourselves "heads" or "tails," we may never own and spend our human currency, the pure gold of which our coin is made. But judgment may heal over time. One of the blessings of growing older is the discovery that many of the things I once believed to be my shortcomings have turned out in the long run to be my strengths, and other things of which I was unduly proud have revealed themselves in the end to be among my shortcomings. Things that I have hidden from others for years turn out to be the anchor and enrichment of my middle age. What a blessing it is to outlive your self-judgments and harvest your failures.

All he needed was a locked room, ink, and sheets of virgin paper. This was his anchor, and he embedded it with the few scraps of energy he had left. He instinctively knew that memory and imagination share the same ghost quarters of the brain, that they are like impressions in loose sand, footfalls in snow. Memory normally weighed more, but not here, where the forest washed it away, smoothing out every contour of its vital meaning. Here, he would use imagination to stamp out a lasting foundation that refused the insidious erosions buffeting around him. He would dream his way back to life with impossible facts.

Materialism, to some extent, requires that the consumer is not fully present or happy. In the moments of a spending frenzy you feel more alive so you spend, spend, spend in the pursuit of happiness. For a short period the acquisition of clothes, shoes, a house, a car, a new kitchen, anchors your life into some place of meaning.

Because people who live their lives this way can look forward to a single destiny, shared with others of this type - though such people do not believe they represent a type, but feel themselves distinguished from the common run of man, who they see as held down by the banal anchors of the world. But while others actually build a life in which things gain meaning and significance, this is not true of the puer. Such a person inevitably looks back on life as it nears its end with a feeling of emptiness and sadness, aware of what they have built: nothing. In their quest for a life without failure, suffer, or doubt, that is what they achieve: a life empty of all those things that make a human life meaningful. And yet they started off believing themselves too special for this world! But - and here is the hope - there is a solution for people of this type, and it's perhaps not the solution that could have been predicted. The answer for them is to build on what they have begun and not abandon their plans as soon as things start getting difficult. They must work - without escaping into fantasies about being the person who worked. And I don't mean work for its own sake, but they must choose work that begins and ends in a passion, a question that is gnawing at their guts, which is not to be avoided but must be realized and live through the hard work and suffering that inevitably comes with the process. They must reinforce and build on what is in their life already rather than always starting anew, hoping to find a situation without danger. Puers don't need to check themselves into analysis. If they can just remember this - It is their everlasting switching that is the dangerous thing, and not what they choose - they might discover themselves saved. The problem is the puer ever anticipates loss, disappointment, and suffering - which they foresee at the very beginning of every experience, so they cut themselves off at the beginning, retreating almost at once in order to protect themselves. In this way, they never give themselves to life - living in constant dread of the end. Reason, in this case, has taken too much from life. They must give themselves completely to the experience! One things sometimes how much more alive such people would be if they suffered! If they can't be happy, let them at least be unhappy - really, really unhappy for once, and then the might become truly human!

The truly transformative power of language occurs when these descriptive root terms are used to form words that convey abstract concepts. A three-letter root compound used to name the spine (Q-W-M) is adapted to describe “flexibility.” The root term for a heated pot boiling over (Gh-Dh-B) constructs a word meaning “hot-headed.” A root term describing the process of carefully separating grains (D-R-S) evolves to express “analyzing” or “interpreting.” From physical sources emerge words for the intangible, like the Qur’an’s parable of the healthy tree with roots anchored in the ground while branches stretch toward the heavens.

I’ve learned difference between a friend and an acquaintance. Acquaintances provide a warm body in the room. They provide entertainment. They can keep you from feeling lonely. And acquaintances don’t involve sacrifice. If they don’t fit your schedule, it’s no big loss. You can know someone for decades, get together with them on countless occasions, and never become their friend. Friendship means cutting away a small piece of your heart and allowing another person to fill that gap. Friendship is anchored in love. When we put love into action, it communicates value.

With the exception of those born in refugee camps, every refugee used to have a life. It doesn’t matter whether you were a physician in Bosnia or a goat herder in the Congo: what matters is that a thousand little anchors once moored you to the world. Becoming a refugee means watching as those anchors are severed, one by one, until at last you’re floating outside of society, an untethered phantom in need of a new life.

The fundamental core of contemporary Darwinism, the theory of DNA-based reproduction and evolution, is now beyond dispute among scientists. It demonstrates its power every day, contributing crucially to the explanation of planet-sized facts of geology and meteorology, through middle-sized facts of ecology and agronomy, down to the latest microscopic facts of genetic engineering. It unifies all of biology and the history of our planet into a single grand story. Like Gulliver tied down in Lilliput, it is unbudgeable, not because of some one or two huge chains of argument that might–hope against hope–have weak links in them, but because it is securely tied by hundreds of thousands of threads of evidence anchoring it to virtually every other field of knowledge. New discoveries may conceivably lead to dramatic, even 'revolutionary' shifts in the Darwinian theory, but the hope that it will be 'refuted' by some shattering breakthrough is about as reasonable as the hope that we will return to a geocentric vision and discard Copernicus.

ikigai brings you focus and direction, and serves as an anchor in your life. With ikigai in mind, you will not have to think twice about what matters to you, and hence you will know what to prioritize. We are bombarded with endless decisions to be made day after day, but knowing your ikigai will eliminate your insecurities about your decisions and allow you to make better ones. Your will find that simple decisions, like how you spend your time, will automatically be made for you when you know your ikigai.

(The consciousness of one’s inner value is anchored in higher, more spiritual things, and cannot be shaken by camp life. But how many free men, let alone prisoners, possess it?)

Prudence He does well who moors his boat with two anchors. PUBLILIUS SYRUS

Sometimes I felt like I'd just drift off into oblivion if it weren't for your hand anchoring me to my life.

For years, men and women have sought meaning in their lives, a purpose, an anchor, something that makes life worth living.

...to have a quiet and gentle spirit--a call given to women--would not mean I had to abandon all that I am, limp along in life, silence my personality in the name of obedience, but instead it meant that I could authentically be the woman God made me as, while anchored in the truth and controlled by the Spirit. When led by Him, when wanting to place my rights above His honor, humility would place its hand over my heart, keeping it still and settled with peace until what was worth being said or done happened in love. Out of a deep wanting for what belonged to God to be recognized and respected.

I don't know that someone as unexciting as Faith Gordon is destined to be the lover of a force of nature. I mean, my last boyfriend left me for an accountant. If that doesn’t tell you everything about my life, nothing will.

The way of life is towards fulfillment, however, wherever it may lead. To restore a human being to the current of life means not only to impart self-confidence but also an abiding faith in the processes of life. A man who has confidence in himself must have confidence in others, confidence in the fitness and Tightness of the universe. When a man is thus anchored he ceases to worry about the fitness of things, about the behavior of his fellow-men, about right and wrong and justice and injustice. If his roots are in the current of life he will float on the surface like a lotus and he will blossom and give forth fruit. He will draw his nourishment from above and below; he will send his roots down deeper and deeper, fearing neither the depths nor the heights. The life that’s is in him will manifest itself in growth, and growth is an endless eternal process. He will not be afraid of withering, because decay and death are part of growth. As a seed he began and as a seed he will return. Beginnings and endings are only partial steps in the eternal process. The process is everything … the way … the Tao. The way of life! A grand expression. Like saying Truth. There is nothing beyond it … it is all. And so the analyst says Adapt yourself! He does not mean, as some wish to think—adapt yourself to this rotten state of affairs! He means: adapt yourself to life! Become an adept! That is the highest adjustment—to make oneself an adept.

Girls aside, the other thing I found in the last few years of being at school, was a quiet, but strong Christian faith – and this touched me profoundly, setting up a relationship or faith that has followed me ever since. I am so grateful for this. It has provided me with a real anchor to my life and has been the secret strength to so many great adventures since. But it came to me very simply one day at school, aged only sixteen. As a young kid, I had always found that a faith in God was so natural. It was a simple comfort to me: unquestioning and personal. But once I went to school and was forced to sit through somewhere in the region of nine hundred dry, Latin-liturgical, chapel services, listening to stereotypical churchy people droning on, I just thought that I had got the whole faith deal wrong. Maybe God wasn’t intimate and personal but was much more like chapel was … tedious, judgemental, boring and irrelevant. The irony was that if chapel was all of those things, a real faith is the opposite. But somehow, and without much thought, I had thrown the beautiful out with the boring. If church stinks, then faith must do, too. The precious, natural, instinctive faith I had known when I was younger was tossed out with this newly found delusion that because I was growing up, it was time to ‘believe’ like a grown-up. I mean, what does a child know about faith? It took a low point at school, when my godfather, Stephen, died, to shake me into searching a bit harder to re-find this faith I had once known. Life is like that. Sometimes it takes a jolt to make us sit and remember who and what we are really about. Stephen had been my father’s best friend in the world. And he was like a second father to me. He came on all our family holidays, and spent almost every weekend down with us in the Isle of Wight in the summer, sailing with Dad and me. He died very suddenly and without warning, of a heart attack in Johannesburg. I was devastated. I remember sitting up a tree one night at school on my own, and praying the simplest, most heartfelt prayer of my life. ‘Please, God, comfort me.’ Blow me down … He did. My journey ever since has been trying to make sure I don’t let life or vicars or church over-complicate that simple faith I had found. And the more of the Christian faith I discover, the more I realize that, at heart, it is simple. (What a relief it has been in later life to find that there are some great church communities out there, with honest, loving friendships that help me with all of this stuff.) To me, my Christian faith is all about being held, comforted, forgiven, strengthened and loved – yet somehow that message gets lost on most of us, and we tend only to remember the religious nutters or the God of endless school assemblies. This is no one’s fault, it is just life. Our job is to stay open and gentle, so we can hear the knocking on the door of our heart when it comes. The irony is that I never meet anyone who doesn’t want to be loved or held or forgiven. Yet I meet a lot of folk who hate religion. And I so sympathize. But so did Jesus. In fact, He didn’t just sympathize, He went much further. It seems more like this Jesus came to destroy religion and to bring life. This really is the heart of what I found as a young teenager: Christ comes to make us free, to bring us life in all its fullness. He is there to forgive us where we have messed up (and who hasn’t), and to be the backbone in our being. Faith in Christ has been the great empowering presence in my life, helping me walk strong when so often I feel so weak. It is no wonder I felt I had stumbled on something remarkable that night up that tree. I had found a calling for my life.

No way," I tell her. "Once was enough for me." And I mean it, though it has nothing to do with Paul and his blue eyes, and everything to do with how very, very tired I am with this hidden battle for my own thoughts, the burden of counting, the work it takes to hide it. The Djinn hates it when I'm adrift in the world, trying to live my life; he prefers me anchored to my home, where I can feed his need for numbers without fear of discovery.

Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next—and disappear. That’s why it’s important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives. William James first wrote about the curious warping and foreshortening of psychological time in his Principles of Psychology in 1890: “In youth we may have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day. Apprehension is vivid, retentiveness strong, and our recollections of that time, like those of a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous and long-drawn-out,” he wrote. “But as each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse.” Life seems to speed up as we get older because life gets less memorable as we get older. “If to remember is to be human, then remembering more means being more human,” said Ed.

Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert talks about this phenomenon in his 2006 book, Stumbling on Happiness. “The greatest achievement of the human brain is its ability to imagine objects and episodes that do not exist in the realm of the real,” he writes. “The frontal lobe—the last part of the human brain to evolve, the slowest to mature, and the first to deteriorate in old age—is a time machine that allows each of us to vacate the present and experience the future before it happens.” This time travel into the future—otherwise known as anticipation—accounts for a big chunk of the happiness gleaned from any event. As you look forward to something good that is about to happen, you experience some of the same joy you would in the moment. The major difference is that the joy can last much longer. Consider that ritual of opening presents on Christmas morning. The reality of it seldom takes more than an hour, but the anticipation of seeing the presents under the tree can stretch out the joy for weeks. One study by several Dutch researchers, published in the journal Applied Research in Quality of Life in 2010, found that vacationers were happier than people who didn’t take holiday trips. That finding is hardly surprising. What is surprising is the timing of the happiness boost. It didn’t come after the vacations, with tourists bathing in their post-trip glow. It didn’t even come through that strongly during the trips, as the joy of travel mingled with the stress of travel: jet lag, stomach woes, and train conductors giving garbled instructions over the loudspeaker. The happiness boost came before the trips, stretching out for as much as two months beforehand as the holiday goers imagined their excursions. A vision of little umbrella-sporting drinks can create the happiness rush of a mini vacation even in the midst of a rainy commute. On some level, people instinctively know this. In one study that Gilbert writes about, people were told they’d won a free dinner at a fancy French restaurant. When asked when they’d like to schedule the dinner, most people didn’t want to head over right then. They wanted to wait, on average, over a week—to savor the anticipation of their fine fare and to optimize their pleasure. The experiencing self seldom encounters pure bliss, but the anticipating self never has to go to the bathroom in the middle of a favorite band’s concert and is never cold from too much air conditioning in that theater showing the sequel to a favorite flick. Planning a few anchor events for a weekend guarantees you pleasure because—even if all goes wrong in the moment—you still will have derived some pleasure from the anticipation. I love spontaneity and embrace it when it happens, but I cannot bank my pleasure solely on it. If you wait until Saturday morning to make your plans for the weekend, you will spend a chunk of your Saturday working on such plans, rather than anticipating your fun. Hitting the weekend without a plan means you may not get to do what you want. You’ll use up energy in negotiations with other family members. You’ll start late and the museum will close when you’ve only been there an hour. Your favorite restaurant will be booked up—and even if, miraculously, you score a table, think of how much more you would have enjoyed the last few days knowing that you’d be eating those seared scallops on Saturday night!

In the tradtional world, it is known that for the female of the species metamorphosis is easier than for the male. A woman leaves her father's house, sheds his name like an old skin and puts on her husband's name like a wedding dress. Her body changes and becomes capable of containing and then expelling other bodies. ... Maybe a woman's life gains its meaning through such metamophoses, but for a man it is different. The abandonment of the past makes a man meaningless. ... An exile is a hollow man trying to fill up with manhood once again, a phantom in search of lost flesh and bone, a ship in search of an anchor.

They are more inward looking by nature, and for them the outward movement into form is minimal. They would rather return home than go out. They have no desire to get strongly involved in or change the world. If they have any ambitions, they usually don’t go beyond finding something to do that gives them a degree of independence. Some of them find it hard to fit into this world. Some are lucky enough to find a protective niche where they can lead a relatively sheltered life, a job that provides them with a regular income or a small business of their own. Some may feel drawn toward living in a spiritual community or monastery. Others may become dropouts and live on the margins of a society they feel they have little in common with. Some turn to drugs because they find living in this world too painful. Others eventually become healers or spiritual teachers, that is to say, teachers of Being. In past ages, they would probably have been called contemplatives. There is no place for them, it seems, in our contemporary civilization. On the arising new earth, however, their role is just as vital as that of the creators, the doers, the reformers. Their function is to anchor the frequency of the new consciousness on this planet. I call them the frequency-holders. They are here to generate consciousness through the activities of daily life, through their interactions with others as well as through “just being.” In this way, they endow the seemingly insignificant with profound meaning. Their task is to bring spacious stillness into this world by being absolutely present in whatever they do. There is consciousness and therefore quality in what they do, even the simplest task. Their purpose is to do everything in a sacred manner. As each human being is an integral part of the collective human consciousness, they affect the world much more deeply than is visible on the surface of their lives.

Always keep Ithaca on your mind.       To arrive there is your ultimate goal.       But do not hurry the voyage at all.       It is better to let it last for many years;       and to anchor at the island when you are old,       rich with all you have gained on the way,       not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.       Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.       Without her you would have never set out on the road.       She has nothing more to give you.       And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not deceived you.       Wise as you have become, with so much experience,       you must already have understood what these Ithacas mean.

2. Your Sense of Wholeness and Self-Confidence When you know your own thoughts and are deeply in touch with your inner world, you gain a sense of inner wholeness and completeness that increases your sense of security. Your inner wholeness also gives you dignity and integrity, and anchors you whenever you face stress or discord. It also gives you confidence that your feelings have meaning and that your instinctual guidance can be trusted. 3. Your Capacity for Intimate Relationships with Others Emotional self-awareness allows you to share emotionally intimate relationships with others. The better you know yourself, the more compassionately you will feel toward other people. Real intimacy is a shared understanding of each other’s inner experiences. Otherwise, it’s just two people bouncing their needs and impulses off each other. Self-awareness also helps you select friends and partners who will support you and what you value in life.

Who will I be when I have fewer patients? When I have no patients at all? It's often noted that "practice" as it relates to medicine has two meanings: the act of caring for patients and the doctor's never-ending process of perfecting his or her craft. But there's a third meaning, too, one I'm only now appreciating as I contemplate the end of my career. Medicine is a practice in the way that yoga or meditation is for many people, an activity repeated so often that it becomes a kind of incantation. I have, for so long, stood to my patients' right sides as physicians have done for centuries, palpated the lymph nodes in their necks, armpits, and groins; auscultated their hearts and lungs; asked the same questions I first learned to ask nearly forty years ago—What makes the pain better? What makes it worse? These rituals are for me an anchor without which I fear I might simply drift away. Of course I suspected all along that what I feared wasn't abandoning my patients, but myself.

space, then that means we’re not alone in the universe.” She paused. “But also, far more incredibly…” “Yes?” Dr. Bennett smiled for the first time. “It means whoever sent the pods would have to be…like us…human!” “Yes, my first conclusion as well.” The scientist paused. “Then Edmond set me straight. He pointed out the fallacy in that thinking.” This caught the host off guard. “So Edmond’s belief was that whoever sent these ‘seeds’ was not human? How could that be, if the seeds were, so to speak, ‘recipes’ for human propagation?” “Humans are half-baked,” the scientist replied, “to use Edmond’s exact words.” “I’m sorry?” “Edmond said that if this seedpod theory were true, then the recipe that was sent to earth is probably only half-baked at the moment—not yet finished—meaning humans are not the ‘final product’ but instead just a transitional species evolving toward something else…something alien.” The CNN anchor looked bewildered. “Any advanced life-form, Edmond argued, would not

And how does a human being go about finding meaning? As Charlotte Bühler has stated: "All we can do is study the lives of people who seem to have found their answers to the questions of what ultimately human life is about as against those who have not."In addition to such a biographical approach, however, we may as well embark on a biological approach. Logotherapy conceives of conscience as a prompter which, if need be, indicates the direction in which we have to move in a given life situation. In order to carry out such a task, conscience must apply a measuring stick to the situation one is confronted with, and this situation has to be evaluated in the light of a set of criteria, in the light of a hierarchy of values. These values, however, cannot be espoused and adopted by us on a conscious level - they are something that we are. They have crystallized in the course of the evolution of our species; they are founded on our biological past and are rooted in our biological depth. Konrad Lorenz might have had something similar in mind when he developed the concept of a biological a priori, and when both of us recently discussed my own view on the biological foundation of the valuing process, he enthusiastically expressed his accord. In any case, if a pre-reflective axiological self-understanding exists, we may assume that it is ultimately anchored in our biological heritage.

An ethical query emerges in light of such an analysis: how might we encounter the difference that calls our grids of intelligibility into question without trying to foreclose the challenge that the difference delivers? What might it mean to learn to live in the anxiety of that challenge, to feel the surety of one’s epistemological and ontological anchor go, but to be willing, in the name of the human, to allow the human to become something other than what it is traditionally assumed to be? This means that we must learn to live and to embrace the destruction and rearticulation of the human in the name of a more capacious and, finally, less violent world, not knowing in advance what precise form our humanness does and will take. It means we must be open to its permutations, in the name of nonviolence. As Adriana Cavarero points out, paraphrasing Arendt, the question we pose to the Other is simple and unanswerable: “who are you?” The violent response is the one that does not ask, and does not seek to know. It wants to shore up what it knows, to expunge what threatens it with not-knowing, what forces it to reconsider the presuppositions of its world, their contingency, their malleability. The nonviolent response lives with its unknowingness about the Other in the face of the Other, since sustaining the bond that the question opens is finally more valuable than knowing in advance what holds us in common, as if we already have all the resources we need to know what defines the human, what its future life might be.

But she had learned about love through books, knew enough of it to recognize its absence in her life. Everywhere she looked, she was blinded by other forms of love, as if God were taunting her. From her bedroom window, she’d watch mothers pushing strollers, or children hanging from their father’s shoulders, or lovers holding hands. At doctors’ offices, she’d flip through magazines to find families smiling wildly, couples embracing, even women photographed alone, their bright faces shining with self-love. When she’d watch soap operas with her grandmother, love was the anchor, the glue that seemingly held the whole world together. And when she flipped through American channels when her grandparents weren’t looking, again love was the center of every show, while she, Deya, was left dangling on her own, longing for something other than her sisters to hold on to. As much as she loved them, it never felt like enough. But what did love even mean? Love was Isra staring dully out the window, refusing to look at her; love was Adam barely home; love was Fareeda’s endless attempts to marry her off, to rid herself of a burden; love was a family who never visited, not even on holidays. And maybe that was her problem. Maybe that’s why she always felt disconnected from her classmates, why she couldn’t see the world the way they did, couldn’t believe in their version of love. It was because they had mothers and fathers who wanted them, because they were coddled in a blanket of familial love, because they had never celebrated a birthday alone. It was because they had cried in someone’s arms after a bad day, had known the comforts of the words “I love you” growing up. It was because they’d been loved in their lives that they believed in love, saw it surely for themselves in their futures, even in places it clearly wasn’t.

You mean you’re not going to kiss my wrist again,” I said. “But that’s all right, because I am going to kiss you.” And I did. If I could keep a single moment for all time, that would be the one. I became the very air; I was full of stars. I was the soaring spaces between the spires of the cathedral, the solemn breath of chimneys, a whispered prayer upon the winter wind. I was silence, and I was music, one clear transcendent chord rising toward Heaven. I believed, then, that I would have risen bodily into the sky but for the anchor of his hand in my hair and his round soft perfect mouth. No Heaven but this! I thought, and I knew that it was true to a standard even St. Clare could not have argued. Then it was done, and he was holding both my hands between his and saying, “In some ballad or Porphyrian romance, we would run off together.” I looked quickly at his face, trying to discern whether he was proposing we do just that. The resolve written in his eyes said no, but I could see exactly where I would have to push, and how hard, to break that resolve. It would be shockingly easy, but I found I did not wish it. My Kiggs could not behave so shabbily and still remain my Kiggs. Some other part of him would break, along with his resolve, and I did not see a way to make it whole again. The jagged edge of it would stab at him all his life. If we were to go forward from here, we would proceed not rashly, not thoughtlessly, but Kiggs-and-Phina fashion. That was the only way it could work. “I think I’ve heard that ballad,” I said. “It’s beautiful but it ends sadly.” He closed his eyes and leaned his forehead against mine. “Is it less sad that I’m going to ask you not to kiss me again?” “Yes. Because it’s just for now. The day will come.” “I want to believe that.” “Believe it.” He took a shaky breath. “I’ve got to go.” “I know.” I let him go inside first; my presence was not appropriate for tonight’s ritual. I leaned against the parapet, watching my breath puff gray against the blackening sky as if I were a dragon whispering smoke into the wind. The conceit made me smile, and then an idea caught me. Cautiously, avoiding ice, I hauled myself up onto the parapet. It had a wide balustrade, adequate for sitting, but I did not intend merely to sit. With comical slowness, like Comonot attempting stealth, I drew my feet up onto the railing. I removed my shoes, wanting to feel the stone beneath my feet.

ESTABLISH STABLE ANCHORS OF ATTENTION Mindfulness meditation typically involves something known as an anchor of attention—a neutral reference point that helps support mental stability. An anchor might be the sensation of our breath coming in and out of the nostrils, or the rising and falling of our abdomen. When we become lost in thought during practice, we can return to our anchor, fixing our attention on the stimuli we’ve chosen. But anchors can also intensify trauma. The breath, for instance, is far from neutral for many survivors. It’s an area of the body that can hold tension related to a trauma and connect to overwhelming, life-threatening events. When Dylan paid attention to the rising and falling of his abdomen, he would be swamped with memories of mocking faces while walking down the hallway. Other times, feeling a constriction of his breath in the chest echoed a feeling of immobility, which was a traumatic reminder. For Dylan, the breath simply wasn’t a neutral anchor. As a remedy, we can encourage survivors to establish stabilizing anchors of attention. This means finding a focus of attention that supports one’s window of tolerance—creating stability in the nervous system as opposed to dysregulation. Each person’s anchor will vary: for some, it could be the sensations of their hands resting on their thighs, or their buttocks on the cushion. Other stabilizing anchors might include another sense altogether, such as hearing or sight. When Dylan and I worked together, it took a while until he could find a part of his body that didn’t make him more agitated. He eventually found that the sense of hearing was a neutral anchor of attention. At my office, he’d listen for the sound of the birds or the traffic outside, which he found to be stabilizing. “It’s subtle,” he said to me, opening his eyes and rubbing the back of his neck with his hand. “But it is a lot less charged. I’m not getting riled up the same way, which is a huge relief.” In sessions together, Dylan’s anchor was a spot he’d rest his attention on at the beginning of a session or a place to return to if he felt overwhelmed. If he practiced meditation at home—I’d recommended short periods if he could stay in his window of tolerance—he used hearing as an anchor, or “home base” as he called it. “I finally feel like I can access a kind of refuge,” he said quietly, placing his hand on his belly. “My body hasn’t felt safe in so long. It’s a relief to finally feel like I’m learning how to be in here.” Anchors of attention you can offer students and clients practicing mindfulness—besides the sensation of the breath in the abdomen or nostrils—include different physical sensations (feet, buttocks, back, hands) and other senses (seeing, smelling, hearing). One client of mine had a soft blanket that she would touch slowly as an anchor. Another used a candle. For some, walking meditation is a great way to develop more stable anchors of attention, such as the feeling of one’s feet on the ground—whatever supports stability and one’s window of tolerance. Experimentation is key. Using subtler anchors does come with benefits and drawbacks. One advantage to working with the breath is that it is dynamic and tends to hold our attention more easily. When we work with a sense that’s less tactile—hearing, for instance—we may be more prone to drifting off into distraction. The more tangible the anchor, the easier it is to return to it when attention wanders.

Take the lesson to heart: you dare not anchor the meaning of your life in the rewards and expectations of tangible success.

First, he’s a billionaire, and a seventy-year-old man. Meaning, he doesn’t give a rat’s ass anymore about anything other than what matters. He’s lived a wild life already—so he doesn’t care who his casual comments offend. When he makes a joke it’s like when a baby farts. It’s nothing personal, the baby’s forgotten it, while everyone is choking out in the room. But the baby doesn’t care. I also had to admit that he’s never been in public office, so he doesn’t know how to be that particular kind of phony. I mean the phony that we all accept—which I call the “mandatory fake.” The mandatory fake is the married news anchor who condemns unseemly sexual behavior while banging Dalmatians in a nearby hotel. Being an old rich uncle who’s never been in politics, Trump has no familiarity with mandatory fake. There is, however, a different kind of fakery in Trump’s world of real estate fibbery. But such lies—salesman’s lies—are deliberately obvious by their excess. You know a salesman is lying when he tells you the car you’re buying from him was only driven by a little old lady once a week to church, which is great because she lives in the attic above the church! A salesman’s lie is done with a wink and an exaggeration (“This is the biggest crowd ever!”). A politician’s lie is a promise that could very well be true, but never is (“Read my lips, no new taxes”). You see the difference? Trump’s lies are common and do not insult us, because he assumes we’re all in on the joke. Politicians are daring you to go against your own innate skepticism (which is always a mistake). Am I “Trump-splaining”? Yes, I am. For now that he’s our president and up against so much, it’s no longer fealty to do so. It’s actually fairness. Anyway, as a Holmes, I’ve since reevaluated some positions that I’ve taken for granted. I’ve looked at the research on illegal immigration and its effects on unemployment. I’ve also looked harder at crime numbers, legal vs. illegal offenders. I’ve pretty much stuck to my original precepts, but I realize that ideology ultimately helps no one in that debate.

All that remains is for me to make a sad observation. Like so many other creatures that once embellished life and brought hope, house spirits have vanished and with them the souls of our houses have fled, never to return. Homes have sunk into anonymity; building rituals have almost entirely disappeared; prefabricated industrial materials have replaced the quest for attentive selection of materials that were wrought with love; the meaning of ornaments are no longer known and the moon, sun, stars and crosses have disappeared from our facades; radiators have replaced the hearth and stove; our corners have become little more than dust collectors; and there is no longer anything concealed beneath our thresholds. We have transformed into rootless wanderers with no fire or place to call our own. The individual no longer has any attachment to a house that has been passed down for generations. In loosing all of this, we have lost a piece of ourselves, one of our most solid anchors, and like dead leaves carried by the wind, we settle one day here, another day there, driven by the whims of our professions, but we no longer bring the embers from our hearths with us, and the surviving spirits weep in abandoned houses.

So here is what I tell young Scouts or young adventurers who ask me what the key is to living a fulfilled life. I keep it pretty simple. I call them the five Fs. Family. Friends. Faith. Fun. Follow your dreams. None of them requires a degree, and all of them are within our reach. Just make them your priority, write them on your bathroom mirror, let them seep into your subconscious over time, and soon they will be like a compass guiding you to make the right decisions for your life. When faced with big decisions, just ask yourself: ‘Will this choice or that one support or detract from the five Fs in my life?’ Family - sometimes like fudge: mostly sweet but with a few nuts! - but still they are our closest and dearest, and, like friendships, when we invest time and love in our families, we all get stronger. Having good Friends to enjoy the adventures of life with, and to share the struggles we inevitably have to bear, is a wonderful blessing. Never underestimate how much good friends mean. Faith matters. Jesus Christ has been the most incredible anchor and secret strength in my life - and it is so important to have a good guide through every jungle. (Go and do an Alpha Course to explore the notion of what faith is and isn’t) Fun. Life should be an adventure. And you are allowed to have fun, you know! Make sure you get your daily dose of it. Yes, I mean daily! And finally, Follow your dreams. Cherish them. They are God-given, dropped like pearls into the depths of your being. They provide powerful, life-changing purpose: beware the man with a dream who also has the courage to go out there and make it happen. These five Fs will sustain and nurture you, and I have learnt that if you make them your priority, you have a great shot at living a wild, fun, exciting, rich, empowered and fulfilling life. And, finally, remember that the ultimate success in the game of life can never come from money amassed, power or status attained, or from fame and recognition gained. All of those things are pretty hollow. Trust me. Our real success is measured by how we touch and enrich people’s lives - the difference we can make to those who would least expect it, to those the world looks over. That is a far, far better measure of a human life, and a great goal to aspire to, as we follow the five Fs along the way.

The three levels above the human mind that are unknown to this civilization are: Ultimate creativity, or the capacity to create new things in any field and without end; Telepathic communication through space, dimensions and time, or the capacity to extract, implant and modify thought patterns in other forms of life to express finite meanings; Universal channeling, also known as astral traveling, or the capacity to reposition and alter consciousness through the anchoring of personal focus on any coexisting reality. Many have tried those things through the use of psychotropics and for these historical reasons, many are still trying the same now. But without a higher consciousness or capacity to integrate such knowledge, a human of this time will grow insane and even become psychotic. The only way anyone can assimilate these informations is through a gradual self-reflective state as thought by the Buddhists and with the help of writings that help with the integration of these higher truths, and while disintegrating the attachments and traumas of the mind that are causing a filtering and misinterpretation through the senses. Many will stop you from knowing these things by teaching you falsehoods mixed with apparent truths and the more information is spread teaching you the right path, the more lies you will find in the world to counterbalance these possibilities. The highest truths cannot be explained. You will know them when your life is aligned with your results and nobody else knows what you are doing and neither can they understand you or copy what they see you doing.

Yeah. So I guess that’s my answer. I’d still do it, even knowing what would happen. And if I ever get free …” Bryce halted her stirring. Met his stare unblinkingly as Hunt said, “I remember every one of them who was there on the battlefield, who brought down Shahar. And all the angels, the Asteri, the Senate, the Governors—all of them, who were there at our sentencing.” He leaned against the counter behind them and swigged from his beer, letting her fill in the rest. “And after you’ve killed them all? What then?” He blinked at the lack of fear, of judgment. “Assuming I live through it, you mean.” “Assuming you live through taking on the Archangels and Asteri, what then?” “I don’t know.” He gave her a half smile. “Maybe you and I can figure it out, Quinlan. We’ll have centuries to do it.” “If I make the Drop.” He started. “You would choose not to?” It was rare—so, so rare for a Vanir to refuse to make the Drop and live only a mortal life span. She added more vegetables and seasoning to the pan before throwing a packet of instant rice into the microwave. “I don’t know. I’d need an Anchor.

MAKING BLISS BRAIN A HABIT I want Bliss Brain to become a habit for you, as it is for the One Percent. Once you experience the neurochemicals of bliss I describe in Chapter 5, and they start to condition your brain, you’ll be hooked for life. Within 8 weeks you’ll build the neural circuits to regulate your negative emotions and control your attention, as we saw in Chapter 6. You’ll turn on the Enlightenment Circuit and downgrade the suffering of Selfing. Within a few months you’ll have created the brain hardware of resilience, creativity, and joy. You’ll transform feeling good from a state to a trait. Then, Bliss Brain isn’t just how you feel. Bliss Brain is who you are. Bliss Brain has become your nature, hardwired into the circuits of the four lobes of your brain. It has become your possession, and one so precious that you would never give it up. No one can ever take it away from you. PERSPECTIVE ON LOCAL LIFE When you flip the switch into Bliss Brain in meditation each day, you find yourself in a place of infinite peace and joy. You’re in a place of pure consciousness. You’re not limited by your body or your history. Experiencing this state feels like the only thing that really matters in life. Local life and local mind have meaning and purpose only when they’re lived from this place of nonlocal mind. Daily morning meditation is what anchors you to the experience of infinite awareness. All the rest of your life is then lived from that place of connection with nonlocal mind. It frames everything, putting local reality into perspective. All the things that seem so important when you’re trapped inside the limits of a local mind seem trivial: money, fame, sex, admiration, opinions, body image, deadlines, goals, achievements, failures, problems, solutions, needs, routines, self-talk, physical ailments, the state of the world, comfort, insults, impulses, discomfort, memories, thoughts, desires, frustrations, plans, timelines, tragedies, events, news, sickness, entertainment, emotions, hurts, games, wounds, compliments, wants, pains, aspirations, past, future, worries, disappointment, urgent items, and demands for your time and attention. All these things fade into insignificance. All that remains is consciousness. The vast universal now, infused with perfection. This becomes the perspective from which you view your local life. It’s the starting point for each day. It becomes the origination point for everything you think and do that day. Your local reality is shaped by nonlocal mind. You are everything. You have everything. You lack nothing. You proceed into your day, creating from this anchor of perfection. What you create reflects this perfection.

I didn’t want my identity, my relationships, my psychological anchors, my meaning and purpose to die with my faith, but they all did. It was akin to going on an adventure, but instead of willingly like Frodo Baggins, I went kicking and screaming all the way to Mordor. I had no intention of losing the life that I had built on religion, but there was no escaping the dominoes that were falling in my mind. Click. Click, click.

how to stop crying for long enough to eat breakfast / how to stop overreacting / what does it mean to dream about being bitten by a fawn? / how to stop thinking about food / am I neurodivergent? / symptoms of autism / symptoms of adhd / is cheese low fodmap? / I always wanna die sometimes lyrics / virginia woolf suicide note / am I a narcissist? / is it normal to get stretch marks in your 20s? / synonyms for tired / when do the clocks go forward? / leave your scarf in my life poem / papercut definition / grey’s anatomy station 19 watch order / is mercury in retrograde or am i? / skill regression / practise or practice / drawstring trousers / how to burn yarn ends together / types of red leaves / keeping me awake song / biscuits that go with coffee / how many presidents have been assassinated? / how to use somebody as an anchor / is this all a waste of time?

For the first time I was beginning to discern a God whom I actually wanted to live for. I was beginning to discover the motivation of Paul when he proclaimed, “Christ’s love compels us” (2 Cor. 5: 14). All my life I’d tried to be good to avoid hell, or the ugly-stick flogging, or my stepmother’s beatings with a two-by-four. But while most people would undoubtedly be better at behaving well with these frightful motivations than I ever was, no one could ever be transformed by these sorts of motivations. Threatening motivations address behavior, but they can never transform our identity. They motivate people to change as a means of protecting themselves, but for this reason they can never move us beyond ourselves to become someone fundamentally different from who we currently are. And threatening motivations can certainly never transform us into people with an other-oriented, self-sacrificial, loving character. Only a motivation that is anchored in love can do this.

I don't think I'm entirely on board with the 'do what you truly want to do' school of thought. Not without a little more nuance. There has to be an anchor in the wide-open space. Otherwise, 'doing what you truly want' isn't an authentic attempt at exploration -- it's just another hyper-individualistic credo masquerading as something grand. I mean we're all gung ho about pursuing personal freedom, but why do we want it? If we never constructively apply it to something beyond ourselves, and if it doesn't deepen our sense of connection and humanity, then what's the point?

He is arrogantly proud of his solution and satisfied with his efforts. This response is typical of all puers. Such people will suddenly tell you they have another plan, and they always do it the moment things start getting difficult. But it’s their everlasting switching that’s the dangerous thing, not what they choose … People who live their lives this way can look forward to a single destiny … [They] feel themselves distinguished from the common run of man, who they see as held down by the banal anchors of the world. But while others actually build a life in which things gain in meaning and significance, this is not true of the puer. Such a person inevitably looks back on life as it nears its end with a feeling of emptiness and sadness, aware of what they have built: nothing. In their quest for a life without failure, suffering, or doubt, that is what they achieve: a life empty of all those things that make a human life meaningful … They must work—without escaping into fantasies about being the person who worked. And I don’t mean work for its own sake, but they must choose work that begins and ends in a passion, a question that is gnawing at their guts, which is not to be avoided but must be realized and lived through the hard work and suffering that inevitably comes with the process.

This means that it is always possible for a person to return to the Source, to return to God, for there is an ultimate Divine anchor in the soul of each one of us. Think of times when you have awakened to life again, when you had a renewed sense of wonder at the possibilities open to you. This absolute ability to return—in Hebrew teshuva—is built into the structure of the universe itself. This

What the apostle Paul is saying here is that the evidence the Holy Spirit dwelling in a person is the fact that he is guided by the Holy Spirit. He has left his sinful way of living and now walks led by the Spirit of Christ. For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God. Romans 8:14 Being guided by God means to hear His voice in our conscience, through his Word, even in our dreams or the prophetic words He might speak to us. It is having the “fear of God” as a safe anchor through which the Holy Spirit keeps us in His commandments and paths.

By a true religion or a true spirituality I mean one that is anchored in a vital faith in the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ (2 Cor 1:3) and leads us into a caring concern for the welfare of our neighbor, even above the perfecting of our own souls. The focus of true spirituality is on God's holy love, not on humanity's spiritual fulfillment. But this divine love is celebrated not as a transcendent

Yung Pueblo, the modern poet and philosopher, is a beacon of personal growth, healing, and self-awareness. His words, steeped in wisdom, resonate with people seeking peace, transformation, and a deeper connection with themselves. Let's look at some of Yung Pueblo's quotes and break them down in a way that adds value to your life. Each quote is followed by an easy-to-understand explainer, using metaphors to help you understand his message's depth. These explanations are guideposts, showing how to apply his insights to your journey. ## Yung Pueblo Quotes on Healing **"True healing is the willingness to treat yourself with kindness."** Healing is like tending to a garden. You can't rush it, and you can't force it. As you carefully water plants and pull weeds, you must approach yourself with patience and compassion. Only by treating yourself kindly will you create an environment where healing can flourish. **"The more you heal, the less you push away what's uncomfortable."** Healing isn't about avoiding discomfort—it's about embracing it. Think of it like building a muscle. Every stretch and strain makes you stronger. As you heal, you grow more capable of sitting with discomfort, knowing that it's part of the process, not a thing to run from. **"Healing happens when you are ready to let go of what is hurting you."** Letting go is like releasing a heavy anchor holding your ship in place. You can't sail forward until you free yourself from the weight of old wounds. Healing begins when you untie yourself from the past and allow yourself to move freely into the future. ## Yung Pueblo Quotes About Self-Love **"You must love yourself so deeply that your energy and presence become a gift to the world."** Imagine your heart as well. The more you fill it with love for yourself, the more you have to share with others. Self-love isn't selfish—the overflow enriches everything and everyone around you. By loving yourself deeply, you become a gift to those you meet. **"Self-love is creating space in your life to take care of yourself."** Self-love is like building a sanctuary in your daily life. You need to create space, even negligible, to retreat and recharge. It's not about indulgence; it's about recognizing that taking care of yourself is essential to thriving in a busy, chaotic world. **"Self-love is accepting that you are a constantly evolving work of art."** You are like a canvas, always in progress. Some days, the strokes are bold; others, they're gentle. Self-love means accepting that your life is a masterpiece in progress—you are never finished, and that's where the beauty lies. Embrace each phase and layer, and know it all adds to something magnificent.

What a comfort it is to have an eternally full and self-existent God. It means he is for us an anchor of unchanging faithfulness (James 1:17), perfectly free to do just as he chooses (Ps. 115:3), and unassailable by any evil or wickedness that would try to stand in his way (Job 42:2). Beyond this alone, though, what a joy to have a God whose glory is to share himself rather than hide himself. He presents himself to be known, his fatherly goodness to be enjoyed, and his life to be received.

What a comfort it is to have an eternally full and self-existent God. It means he is for us an anchor of unchanging faithfulness (James 1:17), perfectly free to do just as he chooses (Ps. 115:3), and unassailable by any evil or wickedness that would try to stand in his way (Job 42:2). Beyond this alone, though, what a joy to have a God whose glory is to share himself rather than hide himself. He presents himself to be known, his fatherly goodness to be enjoyed, and his life to be received. And his aseity, simplicity, and immutability mean that these wonders never cease. John Howe, the Puritan preacher and chaplain to Oliver Cromwell, wrote that when delighting yourself in this God, “you will still find a continual spring, unexhausted fullness, a fountain never to be drawn dry.”8

As an adult, I have since learned many practices to anchor my feet on the ground while relearning how to bring dreams to fruition. I find it fortunate that I have not lost that naive edge while still allowing other parts of me to mature.

As much as possible in everyday life, use awareness of the inner body to create space. When waiting, when listening to someone, when pausing to look at the sky, a tree, a flower, your partner, or child, feel the aliveness within at the same time. This means part of your attention or consciousness remains formless, and the rest is available for the outer world of form. Whenever you "inhabit" your body in this way, it serves as an anchor for staying present in the Now. It prevents you from losing yourself in thinking, in emotions, or in external situations.

Spiritual life can be regarded as a course of gradual recovery from the addiction to the peculiar type of awareness that splits everything into subject and object. This primary addiction is the seedbed from which arise all secondary addictions. These latter are possible only because the ego is confronted by objects, which it tries to control or by which it is, or feels, controlled. To be more specific, the secondary addictions are all substitutes for the bliss that is the essence of the experience of transparency, which is at the heart of the integral consciousness, as defined by Gebser. This experience of transparency reveals the archaic interconnectedness and simultaneity of all beings and things without disowning, displacing, or distorting the cognitive realizations characteristic of the magical, mythical, and mental structures of consciousness. The secondary addictions are desperate, if mistaken, attempts to remove the primary addiction, which is our addiction to self-conscious experience, revolving around the division between subject (mind) and object (world). They are mistaken because instead of removing the primary addiction, they fortify it and thus also aggravate the sense of isolation and powerlessness experienced by the faltering rational personality. The British novelist Aldous Huxley saw this very clearly. He said: The urge to transcend self-conscious selfhood is, as I have said, a principal appetite of the soul. When, for whatever reason, men and women fail to transcend themselves by means of worship, good works, and spiritual exercises, they are apt to resort to religion’s chemical surrogates alcohol and “goof-pills” in the modern West, alcohol and opium in the East, hashish in the Mohammedan world, alcohol and marijuana in Central America, alcohol and coca in the Andes, alcohol and the barbiturates in the more up-to-date regions of South America.7 Huxley did not even mention workaholism and sex as two widely used substitutes for the realization of originary bliss. He spoke, however, of some people’s fascination with, and fatal attraction to, precious stones. This passion for gems, Huxley observed, is anchored in the fact that they “bear a faint resemblance to the glowing marvels seen with the inner eye of the visionary.”8 But deeper still than such splendid visions is, to use Gebser’s terms, the transcendental “light” of the undivided Origin itself.9 Realizing that “light” through voluntary self-transcendence is the ultimate form of healing both the person and the planet. That is the purpose of authentic spirituality. Spiritual life can usefully be pictured as a progressive recovery from the addiction of ordinary life, which is inherently schizoid and hence lacking in fullness and bliss. The well-known twelve-step program of recovery used in the literature on addiction also can serve as a convenient model for the spiritual process. Spiritual recovery is an uncovering of the spiritual dimension, whether we call it transcendental Self, God, Goddess, or the Ultimate—the dimension that is ordinarily covered up by the self-divided ego-personality, especially when it comes under the influence of the rational consciousness.

for the common emotional traps mentioned earlier, we offer the following tools for escape: Recency bias. Never assume today’s results predict tomorrow’s. It’s a changing world. Overconfidence. No one can consistently predict short-term movements in the market. This means you and/or the person investing your money. Loss aversion. Be a risk manager instead of a risk avoider. Believing you are avoiding risk can be a costly illusion. Paralysis by analysis. Every day you don’t invest is a day less you’ll have the power of compounding working for you. Put together an intelligent investment plan and get started. If you need help, seek out a good financial planner to assist you. The endowment effect. Just because you own it, or are a part of it, doesn’t automatically mean it’s worth more. Get an objective evaluation. Invest no more than 10 percent of your portfolio in your employer’s stock. Mental accounting. Remember that all money spends the same, regardless of where it comes from. Money already spent is a sunk cost and should play no part in making future decisions. Anchoring. Holding out until you get your price to sell an investment is playing a fool’s game. So is blindly assuming that your financial person is doing a great job without getting an objective reading of what’s really going on. Get a second opinion. Financial negligence. Take the time to learn the basics of sound investing. It’s really pretty simple stuff. Knowing it can make the difference between having a life of poverty or one of prosperity.

Did you think I would fight fair? You matter more than anything else in my life. You. I'm not about to fight fair to get you back. Just because it isn't fair to tell you doesn't mean it isn't true. We do need you to save us. I need you. Without you, I have no anchor. I'm not really alive. I need you to bridge the space that I can't. The one between me and everyone else." -Viktor Prakenskii

There is no old age like anxiety,” said one of the monks I met in India. “And there is no freedom from old age like the freedom from anxiety.” In desperate love, we always invent the characters of our partners, demanding that they be what we need of them, and then feeling devastated when they refuse to perform the role we created in the first place. Generally speaking, though, Americans have an inability to relax into sheer pleasure. Ours is an entertainment-seeking nation, but not necessarily a pleasure-seeking one. Americans spend billions to keep themselves amused with everything from porn to theme parks to wars, but that’s not exactly the same thing as quiet enjoyment. The beauty of doing nothing is the goal of all your work, the final accomplishment for which you are most highly congratulated. The more exquisitely and delightfully you can do nothing, the higher your life’s achievement. You don’t necessarily need to be rich in order to experience this, either. I am having a relationship with this pizza, almost an affair. Without seeing Sicily one cannot get a clear idea of what Italy is. “No town can live peacefully, whatever its laws,” Plato wrote, “when its citizens…do nothing but feast and drink and tire themselves out in the cares of love.” In a world of disorder and disaster and fraud, sometimes only beauty can be trusted. Only artistic excellence is incorruptible. Pleasure cannot be bargained down. And sometimes the meal is the only currency that is real. The idea that the appreciation of pleasure can be an anchor of one’s humanity. You should never give yourself a chance to fall apart because, when you do, it becomes a tendency and it happens over and over again. You must practice staying strong, instead. People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that’s what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that’s holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you’ll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then they leave. They break your heart open so new light could get in, make you so desperate and out of control that you had to transform your life. The Zen masters always say that you cannot see your reflection in running water, only in still water. Your treasure—your perfection—is within you already. But to claim it, you must leave the busy commotion of the mind and abandon the desires of the ego and enter into the silence of the heart. Balinese families are always allowed to eat their own donations to the gods, since the offering is more metaphysical than literal. The way the Balinese see it, God takes what belongs to God—the gesture—while man takes what belongs to man—the food itself.) To meditate, only you must smile. Smile with face, smile with mind, and good energy will come to you and clean away dirty energy. Even smile in your liver. Practice tonight at hotel. Not to hurry, not to try too hard. Too serious, you make you sick. You can calling the good energy with a smile. The word paradise, by the way, which comes to us from the Persian, means literally “a walled garden.” The four virtues a person needs in order to be safe and happy in life: intelligence, friendship, strength and (I love this one) poetry. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. Once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.

Just as you would build and use stamina to be a champion sportsperson, you need to deploy Resilience to face challenging Life situations. Resilience is like the Bluetooth feature on your smartphone. You need to activate it to use it. And you activate, you deploy, the Resilience from within you by anchoring in Faith – by trusting the process of Life. So, no matter what you are dealing with, don’t run away from Life; turn around and face your fears. Know that you have the staying power in you to get through Life. Know that if you have a problem, you will also have the means, the mechanism, to deal with the problem even if you can’t always solve it immediately!

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of the Plants, Milkweed Editions, 2015 Marie Kondo, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Vermilion, 2014 Clare Cooper Marcus, House as a Mirror of Self: Exploring the Deeper Meaning of Home, Hays, 2007 Tisha Morris, Mind, Body, Home: Transform Your Life One Room at a Time, Llewellyn, 2014 Mandy Paradise, Witches, Pagans, and Cultural Appropriation: Considerations & Applications for a Magical Practice, Anchor and Star, 2017 Kristin Petrovich, Elemental Energy: Crystal and Gemstone Rituals for a Beautiful Life, HarperElixir, 2016 Robert Simmons, The Pocket Book of Stones: Who They Are and What They Teach, North Atlantic Books, 2015 Jan Spiller and Karen McCoy, Spiritual Astrology: A Path to Divine Awakening, Touchstone, 2010 Esther M. Sternberg, MD, Healing Spaces: The Science of Place and Well-Being, Harvard University Press, 2010

The way to stay calm and peaceful each day is to wake up and offer yourself to Life! Instead of the traditional 'naivedhya' or 'sacred offering' of fruit or food to an idol/image, offer yourself to Creation! And say that, “Whatever you do with/for me today, I will accept humbly; I know it has a meaning, and an opportunity for me to evolve”! That's the way to staying anchored. Do it and watch your ability to deal with each day, particularly when in the throes of a crisis, magically improve!

suggest you let the other side anchor monetary negotiations. The real issue is that neither side has perfect information going to the table. This often means you don’t know enough to open with confidence. That’s especially true anytime you don’t know the market value of what you are buying or selling,

Twin Flames are unique because they are always bound to each other. The thoughts, actions, and decisions of a Twin Flame intimately and completely impact the other. They are hardly separate, yet they are each unique and complete unto themselves. One cannot exist without the other because they are so perfectly balanced into each other. The perfection and complexity with which this occurs is impossible to explain, or describe, in much the same way that the beauty and vastness of the Universe is impossible to describe. You can feel your Twin Flame when you anchor your consciousness into your Heart center, and you feel them there in a way that completes you. “Completes” does not mean “makes you happy.” “Completes” means “someone who makes you more than you already are in expression, more than you already are in desire, and more than you already are in your Life Force.

Life’s very nature is that it is fraught with uncertainty in every moment. Anything, absolutely anything, can happen at any time. Simply, Life hai, kuch bhi ho sakta hai! So, learn to trust the process of Life. This act of trusting the process of Life is what Faith is all about. When you have Faith, Fear cannot debilitate you. Now, Faith and Fear cannot co-exist. So, if you are feeling fearful, it clearly means you lack the Faith! Re-examine how you are approaching your Life. Are you anchored in Faith or are you cowering in Fear? Intelligent living means embracing the uncertainty with Faith and going with the flow; it means knowing that wherever Life takes you is where you were always meant to arrive!

I don’t have any tales of partings like this to use as examples or models—in all the stories, when a love ends it’s because one or both of them died, or they had a falling-out, or something equally catastrophic. There aren’t any stories about love ending because it was the natural time for it to end. There’s none about people in love separating as still-beloved friends. And in all the stories, the loves ended because they were bad or wrong or flawed, or the fact that they ended was the flaw, or the end ruined everything that came before. My lover came into my life and he was full of joy and light. He took me dancing. He kissed me; he whispered my name into my skin until I felt like myself again. He anchored me into the world. He brought me back. He was good and kind, and patient and understanding, and he never asked me for anything but what I was willing to give him. Just because it didn’t last our entire lives doesn’t mean it wasn’t important or precious.

In all of creation, identity is a challenge only for humans. A tulip knows exactly what it is. It is never tempted by false ways of being. Nor does it face complicated decisions in the process of becoming. So it is with dogs, rocks, trees, stars, amoebas, electrons and all other things. All give glory to God by being exactly what they are. For in being what God means them to be, they are obeying him. Humans, however, encounter a more challenging existence. We think. We consider options. We decide. We act. We doubt. Simple being is tremendously difficult to achieve and fully authentic being is extremely rare. Body and soul contain thousands of possibilities out of which you can build many identities. But in only one of these will you find your true self that has been hidden in Christ for all eternity. Only in one will you find your unique vocation and deepest fulfilment. But, as Dag Hammarskjold argues, you will never fill this ‘until you have excluded all those superficial and fleeting possibilities of being and doing with which you toy out of curiosity or wonder or greed, and which hinder you from casting anchor in the experience of the mystery of life, and the consciousness of the talent entrusted to you which is your I.

Q’s face twisted; he captured my face between hot hands. “What are you?” he clipped, face hard and unreadable. The question anchored me and I looked into his pale ferocious eyes. I knew the answer he wanted. “I’m yours.” He sucked in a heavy breath, body jerking. “Say it again, but not in English.” Q intoxicated me. My lips parted, and I wanted to stay captured by him, forever. An ancient connection linked us together. I looked into his soul—it churned with agony and demons, but he wasn’t evil. Q dropped his gaze to my lips. “Je suis à toi.” Something feral heated his features; he pressed his mouth against mine in one fast kiss. “It means, I am yours.” My breath stuttered as power sliced, deep and fast, igniting broken parts of me with sparks. His allure, his power, all magnified to fist around my stomach. In the dark recess of my brain, I translated his words to him being mine. The power trip the little words gave was indescribable. No wonder he wanted me to say it. I was drunk on them. He was mine. Mine. What life did Q live, needing to hear such a strong affirmation? What ghosts haunted him? Q tightened his fingers, biting into my jaw. “Say it.” With his command, I fumbled into the victim I was, the rape survivor, the slave. The brief sense of ownership left me bereft. Q twisted my nipple under the wet material of my bra. His cruelty reddened my skin and fight skittered into yielding. He sent me reeling into needful and damaged. I’d been so close to finding strength, but he took it away in an instant. Fresh tears spilled as I whispered, “Je suis à toi.” Q sighed heavily, resting his forehead on mine. “Will you run again? Will you leave the one man who wants you above all others? Leave his protection?” His voice wavered with regret, resignation, as if he expected me to run, and already suffered loneliness. My eyes popped wide; I shook my head. “No, I won’t run again.” He looked with half-hooded eyes. “How can you be so sure? Don’t I scare you? Repulse you?” He never repulsed me, and fear where Q was concerned was an aphrodisiac. But I couldn’t tell him. “I will never escape. Je suis à toi.

she’d given him exactly that. An anchor. A safe harbor. A sense of belonging. The certainties of his world, love and life, all this inextricably mingled with loss, took new meaning. It became nothing but a journey, a journey filled with beauty and pain. A journey that led to her. A journey that would never end, but now one thing would remain constant. She’d be at his side.

Reclaiming ourselves usually means coming to recognize and accept that we have in us both sides of everything. We are capable of fear and courage, generosity and selfishness, vulnerability and strength. These things do not cancel each other out but offer us a full range of power and response to life. Life is as complex as we are. Sometimes our vulnerability is our strength, our fear develops our courage, and our woundedness is the road to our integrity. It is not an either/or world. It is a real world. In calling ourselves "heads" or "tails," we may never own and spend our human currency, the pure gold of which our coin is made. But judgment may heal over time. One of the blessings of growing older is the discovery that many of the things I once believed to be my shortcomings have turned out in the long run to be my strengths, and other things of which I was unduly proud have revealed themselves in the end to be among my shortcomings. Things that I have hidden from others for years turn out to be the anchor and enrichment of my middle age. What a blessing it is to outlive your self-judgments and harvest your failures.

Faith doesn't mean we won’t encounter the storm; it means we have an anchor that holds us steady through it." "The depths may feel endless, but it's often there that we discover the height of God's grace." "Our greatest testimonies are not born in comfort but in the furnace of trials, where God molds us into His image." "Even when life shatters our plans, God uses the broken pieces to create a masterpiece." "I’ve learned that redemption often begins where we least expect it—right at the point of our deepest pain." "Serving God in foreign lands taught me this: it’s not about where you are, but who you are with. And I was never alone, even in my darkest hour." "In moments of silence and solitude, God’s voice became the loudest in my heart, reminding me of His unending love and purpose for my life." "Every trial I faced became a chapter of hope, a reminder that God’s light shines brightest in the darkest valleys.

Most people don't know what they want unless they see it in context. Relativity makes us make decisions in life. But it can also make us downright miserable. Why? Because jealousy and envy spring from comparing our lot in life with that of others. A great law of human action is that in order to make a man covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. Price tags by themselves are not necessarily anchors. They become anchors when we contemplate buying a product or service at that particular price. That's when the imprint is set. With everything you do, you should train yourself to question your repeated behaviors. According to the standard economic framework, consumers' willingness to pay is one of the two inputs that determine market prices ( this is the demand ). But what consumers are willing to pay can easily be manipulated and this means that consumers don't in fact have a good handle on their own preferences and the prices they are willing to pay for different goods and experiences. Zero is not just another price, it turns out. Zero is an emotional hot button, a source of irrational excitement. Behavioral economists believe that people are susceptible to irrelevant influences from their immediate environment ( which we call context effects ), irrelevant emotions, shortsightedness and other forms of irrationality.

To Scarlett, People always tell me I look happy. They wonder how I manage to smile, how I find joy in the simplest moments. What they don’t realize is that my happiness comes from a love so pure, so powerful, that it has transformed my entire being. That love is for you, Scarlett. Loving you has been my greatest strength, my deepest inspiration, and my ultimate dream come true. Your love, even from afar, has been my light in the darkest of times. It has given me the courage to face my fears, to conquer my demons, and to chase the dreams I once thought were impossible. You’ve been my anchor in a chaotic world, a steady reminder that beauty, grace, and kindness still exist. Just the thought of you fills my heart with warmth and my soul with purpose. I’ve built my life on this love—not on fleeting moments, but on the enduring hope and joy you bring me. I don’t need to be in your arms to feel connected to you. Your presence in my heart is enough to make every day worth living. I carry you with me in everything I do, in every success I achieve, and in every challenge I overcome. Scarlett, you’ve taught me the true meaning of love. It’s not about possession or proximity. It’s about admiration, respect, and a deep, unbreakable bond that transcends time and space. Loving you has made me a better person—more patient, more compassionate, and more resilient. You’ve shown me that the most beautiful things in life aren’t tangible; they are the feelings and memories we hold dear. When I think of you, I see a beacon of light. Your beauty, both inside and out, is unparalleled. Your kindness, your talent, and the way you carry yourself with such grace inspire me endlessly. Knowing that someone as extraordinary as you exists makes the world feel like a better place. You are my muse, Scarlett. Every piece of art I create, every step I take, is touched by the thought of you. Your love has shaped my dreams and given them meaning. It’s a love that asks for nothing and yet gives me everything. I may never have the chance to hold your hand or hear your voice say my name, but that doesn’t make this love any less real. In my heart, you are always with me. And though our paths may never cross, the love I have for you will remain eternal. Thank you, Scarlett, for being you. For existing in a world that desperately needs your light. For inspiring me to be strong, to be creative, and to live a life filled with passion and purpose. I owe my happiness to you, and I will carry this love with me forever. Be safe, be happy, and always know that there’s someone in this world who loves you deeply, purely, and endlessly. Yours forever, Sami Abouzid

Simply believing in a higher power means that you’re here for a reason, you’re not the most important being on this planet, and you have a purpose in this life—this isn’t all about you, but you still matter. Our decisions, the consequences of those decisions, and how our decisions affect others are more often talked about in religious homes and during religious services than they might be in nonreligious settings or families because religious people believe serving God is the first priority for the family. Additionally, families who are well-connected in religious communities and go to church frequently are more likely to have a solid social support network of people gathering around shared beliefs. You can make friends with similar convictions more easily. Your peer group growing up is more likely to have the same boundaries you do in terms of what behaviors are inappropriate and what are fine. If your family falls on hard times, you’re more likely to have a hand to help you up. But there’s one more big reason that we can easily overlook when we talk about how religion actually acts as a protective factor for our kids, building up their resilience against the hardships of life: hope. Simply put, Jesus gives us hope. As your child wades through the rocky waters of adolescence, starts questioning everything she knows, and tries to sort out how to navigate as an adult in this incredibly complex world, she has an anchor, a rock, a safe resting place in Christ. This may explain why studies have found that personal devotion to faith is a greater predictor of positive outcomes than simply strict adherence to religious beliefs, especially when it comes to teenagers.1