Taking responsibility and giving up control are the two sides of the healing coin. Healing is at once a process of protection and openness, of boundaries and free-flowing energy, of mastery and surrender. Taking responsibility for the health and healing of one’s own body is different from being in control of it. Taking full responsibility is different from feeling guilty about the past, or rigid about how to proceed. To take thoughtful care of your body is to hone the self-healing abilities you already have. Taking responsibility for our health is not as easy as taking a pill and seeing results in a few hours. It requires education, discipline, research, trial and error and commitment. But no matter how much we learn about the body from science and medicine, and no matter how well we care for ourselves, the body’s ways are still often a mystery- complex, fragile, and uncertain. At some point in the healing process we must give up our compulsion to control the uncontrollable parts of our lives. We even must accept that we don’t always know what is ultimately best for our spiritual growth and our daily lives. We must believe in the presence and power of something wiser and vaster than our own grasping sense of self……Elizabeth Lesser

as we move toward a new year, we are called to evaluate, judge, regret and make new promises….maybe we can inquire, listen, honor and find gentle self-compassion instead…this beautiful life offers its gifts in the nuances of our heart beating with each breath and the gifts we tend to with each other…..in good times and in suffering…

Why should we see our life as broken at all? The very notion of ‘fixing’ may itself be the problem. At the root of every discouragement is a comparison: things should be different, things could be different, and because they are not, I am disappointed, I am discouraged. Shunryu Suzuki writes about problems that can’t be fixed, about suffering that we can’t escape. ‘The awareness that you are right here, right now, is the ultimate fact.’ Long ago when I sat thinking about my cancer, saying to myself, ‘I hate this, I hate this!’ And when the voice from beyond myself responded by saying, ‘I love you,’ I was experiencing Suzuki’s ‘ultimate fact.’ Even if you are to die from this hateful cancer, the voice said, ‘I love you.’ Even if you never see another morning, the voice said, I love you. Love doesn’t care about circumstance. Love cares only that you are here, right now……Lewis Richmond

love cares about us, complete with every flaw……

Although we tend to think of turmoil as an aberration and a sickness, every life is composed of an emotional and physical ebb and flow. Things go right, things go wrong. A therapist soon discovers that the painful situations people get into cause them to reflect. People are often moved to consider their lives seriously in the midst of confusion, and this enforced reflection may be the beginning of spiritual insight……Thomas Moore