You Don't Have to Be Anything You Don't Want to Be

You don’t have to be anything you don’t want to be.

You don’t have to live up to anyone’s expectations.

There’s no need to strive for a kind of perfection that’s not very interesting to you.

You don’t have to believe in ideas that make you sad or tormented.

You don’t have to feel emotions that others try to manipulate you into feeling.

You are free to be who you want to be.





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TRUE LIFE

"True life is lived when tiny changes occur," said Leo Tolstoy.

I agree. It's rare for us to undergo rapid, dramatic transformations in short periods of time.

That's why it's delusional to be forever pining for some big magic intervention that will fix everything.

The best way to alter our course is slowly and gradually, by conscientiously revamping our responses to the small daily details.





CHAMPIONING THE DIVINE FEMININE

Here are practical ways I carry on the work of championing and embodying the Divine Feminine:

I regard relationship as a crucible for spiritual work.

I think of the practical expression of kindness and compassion and ethical behavior as an essential spiritual practice.

I assume that a crucial element of spiritual practice is the consciousness and compassion we bring to the sometimes chaotic and messy details of being human beings.

I proceed as if loving and caring for animals and plants and the Earth is the test of our spiritual intentions.

I regard play and fun and humor as not diversions from "serious" spiritual work, but rather being at the center of it.

There are more, but I'll stop for now. What about you? What are the practical ways you carry on the work of loving Goddess?





WHAT NOURISHES YOU EMOTIONALLY AND SPIRITUALLY?

I'm not talking about what entertains you or flatters you or takes your mind off your problems.

I'm referring to the influences that make you stronger and the people who see you for who you really are and the situations that teach you life-long lessons.

I mean the beauty that replenishes your psyche and the symbols that consistently restore your balance and the memories that keep feeding your ability to rise to each new challenge.

I invite you to take inventory of these precious assets. And then make a special point of nurturing them back.





MY DAILY HOROSCOPES

Some people don't know that I write daily horoscopes, available as text messages sent to your cell or smart phone.

They're shorter than the weekly 'scopes, but on the other hand they're more frequent -- every day of the week.

My weekly horoscopes are free, but the dailies cost about 67 cents a day if you sign up for a subscription.

If you think you might enjoy getting regular bursts of inspiration from me to illuminate your adventures, check them out.

Go to RealAstrology.com. Register or log in. On the new page, click on "Subscribe / Renew" under "Daily Text Message Horoscopes" in the right-hand column.





HOORAY FOR OUR STORIES

"Having 'a sense of self' means possessing a set of stories about who we are," according to William Kittredge in his book The Nature of Generosity.

He says there are two basic types of stories: The first is "cautionary tales, which warn us" and therefore protect us. The second consists of "celebratory" tales, which we use to heal and calm ourselves.





HOW TO INTERPRET OMENS

All omens should be interpreted favorably—as revelations about how to solve our riddles, perpetrate liberation, avoid trouble, ease suffering, find redemption, and perform tricky maneuvers that enable us to slip free of our mind-forged manacles and guess the deeper meanings behind our experiences.





PHENOMENA THAT INSPIRE WONDER

What are mirabilia? They're phenomena that inspire wonder, winsome curiosities, small marvels, eccentric enchantments. Here are a few:

* The National Center for Atmospheric Research reports that the average cloud is the same weight as 100 elephants.

* The average river requires a million years to move a grain of sand 100 miles.

* With every dawn, when first light penetrates the sea, many seahorse colonies perform a dance to the sun.

* A seven-year-old Minnesota boy received patent number 6,368,227 for a new method of swinging on a swing.

* Clown fish can alter their gender as their social status rises.

* In the Hindu epic the Mahabharata, the hero and heroine fall in love without ever gazing upon each other, simply by hearing tales about each other's good deeds.

* Twelve percent of the population believes that Joan of Arc was Noah's wife.

* The closest modern relative of the Tyrannosaurus rex may be the chicken.

* Kind people are more likely than mean people to yawn when someone near them does.

* Singing Gregorian chants can cure dyslexia.

* All the gold ever mined could be molded into a 60-foot bust of your mom.

* The moon smells like exploded firecrackers.

* The most frequently shoplifted book in America is the Bible.

* Black sheep have a better sense of smell than white sheep.

* There are about 60,000 miles of blood vessels in your body. Every square inch of your body has an average of 32 million bacteria on it.

* French author and statesman André Malraux observed that Jesus Christ was the only anarchist who ever really succeeded.

* In his book The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead, physicist Frank J. Tipler offers what he says is scientific proof that every human being who has ever lived will be resurrected from the dead at the end of time.





TAKING A BREAK FROM THE COLLECTIVE'S MONKEY MIND

One goal of meditation is to empty the mind of its obsessively generated thoughts, habitual rationalizations, and addictive images.

Alas, much of the media functions as a reverse meditation machine. Not only does it stir up your own mental clatter, it also floods you with the seething surge of other people's private pandemoniums.

Furthermore, it delivers this rattling racket with entertaining words and brilliant color and crystalline sound, driving it as deeply into your psyche as your own flotsam.

What might heal the effects of the media's reverse meditations? How about a day-long fast from all media once a month -- not just from Facebook and Instagram and Twitter, but the thousands of other sources that channel the collective's monkey mind?





“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.”

—Dan Millman.

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."

—Buckminster Fuller





IMAGINE THE WORLD BELONGS TO YOU

Imagine that the whole world belongs to you. The birch trees in New Hampshire's White Mountains are yours, and so are the cirrus clouds in the western sky at dusk and the black sand on the beaches of Hawaii's Big Island.

You own everything, my dear sovereign -- the paintings in all the museums of the world, as well as the Internet and the wild horses and the eight-lane highways.

Please take good care of it all, OK? Be an enlightened monarch who treats your domain with reverent responsibility.

And make sure you also enjoy the full measure of fun that comes with such mastery. Glide through life as if all of creation is yearning to honor and entertain you.





DEAR GORGEOUS GENIUS

Dear Gorgeous Genius: You possess exceptional capacities that are absolutely unique. You're a masterpiece unlike any other that has ever lived in the history of the world.

Furthermore, the precise instructions you need to ripen into your genius have always been with you, even from the time before you were born. In the words of psychologist James Hillman, you have a soul's code.

You might also call it the special mission you came to Earth to carry out; the divine blueprint that contains the open secret of how to be perfectly, unpredictably yourself; the master plan that is your heart's deepest desire.

Would you like help in deciphering it? The Divine Intelligence Formerly Known as God is always on call, ready to help. It's your birthright to ask Her a specific question every day about what you need to do next to express your soul's code; it's also your birthright to receive a response.

The divine revelation may not be as unambiguous as a little voice in your head. It might appear in the form of a TV commercial, an odd dream, or an encounter with a stranger. It could be demanding and difficult, delivering information you'd rather not have to deal with. Or it might show up as a clear and simple feeling of knowing exactly what to do, and it could be easy and fun.

What question will you ask the Divine Wow today?





YOUR VITALITY

"There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. If you block it, it will never exist through any other medium. It will be lost. The world will not have it.

"It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable it is, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open."

—Martha Graham





WHAT IF YOUR DESIRES ARE HOLY?

Some spiritual traditions teach the doctrine, "Kill off your longings." In their view, attachment to desire is at the root of human suffering.

But the religion of materialism takes the opposite tack, asserting that the meaning of life is to be found in indulging desires. Its creed is, "Feed your cravings like a French foie gras farmer cramming eight pounds of maize down a goose's gullet every day."

At the Beauty and Truth Lab, we walk a middle path. We believe there are both degrading desires that enslave you and sacred desires that liberate you.

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Psychologist Carl Jung believed that all desires have a sacred origin, no matter how odd they may seem.

Frustration and ignorance may contort them into distorted caricatures, but it is always possible to locate the divine source from which they arose.

In describing one of his addictive patients, Jung said: "His craving for alcohol was the equivalent on a low level of the spiritual thirst for wholeness, or as expressed in medieval language: the union with God."

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"The primordial fire that sparked millions of galaxies is the same fire that sparks the human creative impulse."

—Cindy Spring

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"The human reproductive drive is a watered-down version of the godsex that spawned our solar system."

—"Lieutenant" Anfortas, the homeless guy in the Safeway parking lot

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"Feelings that originate in the human genitalia are among the most powerful forces on earth. They have a complex relationship with the feelings that stem from the human heart: at various times in competition or in harmony.

Together these primal energies have forged and toppled empires; unleashed terrible and wonderful ideas; and generated the greatest stories ever told. Our goal is to harness our sexual urges in service to the heart's wisdom."

—Sheila Samizdat

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"Mad! One must become mad with love in order to realize God. When a person attains ecstatic love of God, all the pores of the skin, even the roots of the hair, become like so many sex organs, and in every pore the aspirant enjoys the happiness of communion with the Supreme Universal Self."

—Ramakrishna

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Like all of us, you have desires for things that you don't really need and aren't good for you. But you shouldn't disparage yourself for having them, nor should you conclude that every desire is tainted.

Rather, think of your misguided longings as the bumbling, amateur expressions of a faculty that will one day be far more expert. They're how you practice as you work toward the goal of becoming a master of desire. It may take a while, but eventually you will get the hang of wanting things that are really good for you, and good for everyone else, too.

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"The only way anyone is ever cured of desiring nonsensical things is by getting the nonsensical things and then experiencing the unpleasant but educational consequences."

—Ann Davies

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"To become a master of desire, keep talking yourself out of being attached to trivial goals and keep talking yourself into being thrilled about the precious few goals that are really important. Here's another way to say it: Wean yourself from ego-driven desires and pour your libido into a longing for beauty, truth, goodness, justice, integrity, creativity, love, and an intimate relationship with the Wild Divine."

—Raye Sangfreud

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"God has desires. Since I want to be close to God and to model myself after God, I therefore don't aspire to extinguish my desires, but rather to make my desires more God-like: i.e., imbued with an inexorable ambition to create the greatest and most interesting blessings for everyone and everything."

—Collin Klamper

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As much as I love men and women, they can't satisfy the full extent of my yearning. I need intimate relations with clouds and eagles and sea anemones and mountains and spirits of the dead and kitchen appliances and the creatures in my dreams.

To be continued. To be enhanced and amplified and enlarged upon, world without end, amen. One day I really do hope to be a wise enough lover to be an ocean-fucker and sky-sucker and earth-boinker.

—Jumbler Javalina

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"When I hold you, I hold everything: crones praying in the foamy sand at low tide, a shocked waterfall gracing a new housing development, the foxglove by the fence sipping the fragrance of distant blue straggler stars, my dream of the white crow dreaming of me. In your eyes I see everything that lives."

—mash-up of Pablo Neruda and Rob Brezsny

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Imagine it's 30 years from now. You're looking back at the history of your relationship with desire. There was a certain watershed moment when you clearly saw that some of your desires were mediocre, inferior, and wasteful, while others were pure, righteous, and invigorating.

Beginning then, you made it a life goal to purge the former and cultivate the latter. Thereafter, you occasionally wandered down dead ends trying to gratify yearnings that weren't worthy of you, but usually you wielded your passions with discrimination, dedicating them to serve the highest and most interesting good.





DESIRE IS THE PATH TO LIBERATION

Brian Bruya wrote the following words: "Is desire the noxious weed that keeps us lurching from one unsatisfactory pleasure to the next? Is it true that uprooting desire is the only way to liberation?

"Daniel Odier, a scholar and teacher of tantra, turns this wisdom on its head in his book *Desire: The Tantric Path to Awakening*. He says that desire is the only true path to liberation.

"Odier objects to any belief system that pretends to offer liberation in any form other than simple, personal experience. Odier's tantrism focuses on 'micropractices,' conscious withdrawal from habitual activities for just a few seconds several times a day. The crux is to attain consciousness, presence—and beyond this, there is no goal.

"For when there is eventually presence in every activity, the luminosity of existence pervades everything. At this point, the smallest things give pleasure. Gross desires fall away, to be replaced by spontaneous desires arising in a life of grace and joy."

More.