Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

Wild Geese 

You do not have to be good. 
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

The Dreaded God Complex

     So, then I asked myself, well, what is stopping you today from settling down with one person? While I'm SURE that there are more reasons, I came up with one answer. Well, because you are special, and you need to DO special things with your life. What's most important is that you live your life in an extraordinary way, you must write that book, change the world for the better, and in a big way. You need to get to the end of your life and be able to point to the work you've done. You need to be GREAT.
    When I heard myself say this in my head, I asked myself this question, WHO SAYS I DO?
Do I want to be great or do I want to be happy? Well, I want to be happy of course!!! So, can I let all that garbage go about who/what I want to be and just enjoy who I am?!!!
 Wow, I can be so unaware, this is huge!

I found this helpful link. It's about the God Complex. I think it's all about needing to feel like we matter, that we're special, that there's something immortal about us. Which of course there is already. In all of us.
Thanks for reading.

http://lifedev.net/2008/07/god-complex/

The If Only's and my God Complex!

         Since one of my very oldest friends is getting married and I'm headed to the shower, I've been suffering from a case of the 'if only's today. Why am I not still with this one, or that one? Why didn't I stay to make it work? Could it have worked? Then I started making the calculations, well, if I had stayed or if it had worked out, then x wouldn't have happened, leading to y, to z, today's situation.
          Reminded me of this great American Indian story I know. Here goes: Two older women run into each other one day. They knew each other as girls and are eager to hear how the other's life has turned out. As they learn about the way the other woman's life unfolded, they begin to look at their own life and wonder, If only I had done this, I would have the wonderful happiness that the other one has... They are so sad thinking about this great loss that they decide to go to a shaman for advice. The shaman listens to their concerns and sends them both home with a task: weave a tapestry about each of your lives and come back in a month. The women do and when they return, they both are bearing a tapestry that reflects the important parts of their lives. For one, who had travelled the world learning about art and culture, her tapestry showed the important monuments she'd seen and the friends she'd made in the different cultures she'd visited. For the other woman, who had raised a fine family but never left her village, the tapestry showed her wedding and her children's first steps, birthdays and holidays and so on. Taking both of these tapestries in her hands, she said to the women. How your life could have been different if you had only made different choices? That is like pulling just one string out of your tapestry and by so doing, you've undone the whole thing.
         I can't pull the threads out either, I placed them their with my own hands, imperfect as they might have been, it is all my handiwork.
               

Astrology

Wow, even my disbelieving aunt found her description of her 2010 TOTALLY correct. These guys are really good, no kidding.

http://www.cafeastrology.com/

Ever since high school when my friend Anna introduced me to Linda Goodman's sun signs I've found that the character descriptions based on horoscopes are pretty true. But I never believed in those daily predictions in the newspaper. BUT, I found their horoscopes and forecasts on here  to be eerily true for me. Also their love sign compatibility ratings. I also looked up some of my friend's horoscopes and they were right on the money. Wow, I guess we are influenced by the moon and stars, huh?

Focusing Technique

This is by far my favorite mind body technique. Spending 5, 10, 20 minutes 'focusing' is a gift to yourself.

From the website:
"The Focusing process is based on research ...done by Eugene Gendlin and his colleagues. They compared successful therapy clients with unsuccessful ones, discovering that success in therapy could be predicted from client behavior in the first few sessions. If at some point in the session the client had an unclear bodily awareness, and slowed down his or her talking in order to refer to this and try to symbolize it, then the psychotherapy would ultimately be successful.
Gendlin named this unclear bodily awareness the "felt sense," and the process of attending to the felt sense, in such a way that meaning emerges, he called Focusing."

And that link:

http://www.focusing.org/fot/cornell_focusing_technique.html