Loving Kindness Based Mental Health

Reclaim Your Health and Happiness #2

What if…?

On your life path, have you discovered success, status and high earnings don’t result in happiness?...ruin your health?...and develop small and mean parts of you, leaving huge areas untouched and unexplored?  What if pressure, stress, and lack of sleep make you unhealthy mentally, physically, and spiritually?  What if your inner world is cramped, hot, bothered, and lacking fulfillment? What if all this is making you unhappy?

1.    That would make sense to me.

2.    It’s not your fault—but it is your responsibility—and this empowers you.

3.    You can learn to a) Slow down. b) Soften. c) Connect with awareness. d) Take life less personally.

4.    The results are less fear and more inner spaciousness, curiosity, compassion, courage, and kindness.

Inner Guide

What if the reason you are here, reading this text, comes from seeking--though you may not be sure what you are looking for?  What if you are following prompts of an inner life that is struggling to be whole, harmonious, and fulfilling?  That would make sense.

Readiness to Learn

The older we get, the more our lives are enriched by lessons we weren’t ready to learn when we were young.  When we’re young and wholly engaged with the external world, we may manage to feel “alive”, or “fine,” for a while without much of an inner life.  But as the defeats and diminishments pile up, we run the risk of feeling dejected, depressed, or dead before our time if we lack inner resources.

Wholeness ≠ Perfection

The demanding path of wholeness takes us in ever-widening orbits of being fully human. But wholeness isn’t perfection. Neither is being fully human.  Progress includes falling and getting up time and time again.

When we leave self-protective delusion behind and engage consciously with our inner life, we often experience the heartbreak we’ve been trying to avoid. 

Heart Break

Our darkness, our shadow behaviors, and our ongoing imperfection break our hearts.  The brittle heart shatters.  The supple heart breaks--open, stretching, and growing into greater capacity for the many forms of love.  And it’s not easy.

Strangely, perhaps, there’s nothing wrong here.  There is difficulty but nothing bad.  And you are not stupid or unevolved because you experience difficulty.  The path of being human includes difficulty.  It’s the suffering you learn to reduce.

Inner Resources

Inner resources become more and more important as we recognize how much we don’t control…how much we don’t understand…how much we don’t know. 

Inner resources put our lives in perspective, help us embrace our shadow and our light, and transcend the regrets and fears that often come with aging.  They help us reclaim our ground of being and root ourselves in something larger and truer than our own egos.  They show us, again and again, that beauty exists. Love exists.  Forgiveness exists.  And that a whole, healthy, happy life is possible. 

 My Offer

I can support your journey. I can help orient you to the sometimes frightening and sometimes beautiful inner landscape.  I can show you new ways to interact with the many parts of yourself as well as the external world.  I can offer practices and exercises to clarify your path, develop your inner resources such as patience, confidence, resolve, gratitude, curiosity and kindness.  I can tell you (the many) mistakes I’ve made and what I see from here and now. 

You feel more and more brave and able to walk your path and live your life. 

Sometimes I describe my work as holding a mirror to your Sun.

This writing is influenced by my teacher, Parker Palmer.