My New Plan for Happiness

Step One:

Deprive yourself of a necessity such as shelter, food, water, air, or sleep for about 6 months. I personally recommend depriving oneself of sleep as it gives the mind less perspective, allowing you to feel the shift towards insanity.

Step Two:

After about six months introduce one of these back into your day. Voila! Instant happiness!!! You won’t care about the things you used to...you will just be glad to be alive!!

Yes, you guessed it…I had a great night last night…two sessions of 4 hours from my dear bambino after a couple of horrific nights.

I feel like hugging trees, bugs, strangers, & rocks. It’s great to be alive today! Thank-you Jesus!

Sesame Street - "A Cookie is a Sometime Food"

My brother did one of his health practicums at an elementary school and showed this video to the kids. I had to share this little diddy because whenever my mom brings over Dono's favourite monster cookies, I eat the majority of them before he gets to them! Terrible, I know.

This is also dedicated to Christal - she also has issues with eating too many cookies. Christal - cookies are a sometime food ok?!

Swinging at Great Grandma's

Self-Understanding: De Mello Writes...

Does the rose have a gift you lack?

It is content to be itself. It has not been programmed since birth to be dissatisfied with itself, so it does not want to be anything other than itself. De Mello states that this dissatisfaction with oneself is a form of violence towards the self.

…You want to become more knowledgeable, more popular, more successful, more loving, more meditative, to find God, to be your ideal self…

Think of the sad history of your efforts at self-improvement. Change is not brought about by your cunning, restless ego that is forever competing, comparing, coercing, sermonizing, & manipulating—an exhausting, self-defeating process like driving with your brakes on.

There is another way besides laborious self-pushing; it is called the way of self-understanding. Compare the attitude of a scientist who studies the habits of ants without a desire to change them. Rather than trying to change yourself, try observing yourself like a scientist would the ants. Study your reactions to people and things without judgment & condemnation. Then, a marvelous thing may happen: You may be flooded with the light of awareness, you may become transparent and transformed, and thus, change will occur.

This transforming light of awareness brushes aside your scheming, self-seeking ego to give Nature full rein to bring about the kind of change that she produces in the rose: artless, graceful, unself-conscious, wholesome, untainted by inner conflict.

Paraphrased from Anthony De Mello’s ‘Men of Violence’