THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

You can be spiritual without ever leaving your home. It is not about where you go, but about how you live your life and your relationship with your source

HOW TO GET TO CARNEGIE HALL

Getting to Carnegie Hall

How do you get to Carnegie Hall?
Practice, practice, practice.
This is how we should approach
our spiritual practices.
Practice, practice, practice.

Like anything one must practice at
an instrument,
a craft, or
a spiritual practice
the way to master it is easy.
Practice, practice, practice.

PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT

Practice makes perfect,
I hear that all the time.
If you keep doing something,
you will eventually master it.

We all have habits we have mastered,
which are unhealthy,
dysfunctional,
and harmful.

What if we practiced habits,
which were spiritual
transformative,
uplifting,
and healing.

What if our spiritual habits
were not practiced
now and then,
but daily

What if we were as
devoted to practicing
our spiritual habits as
the negative ones

So today let’s begin
practicing those practices
which are spiritual,
transformative,
uplifting, and
healing.

Let’s practice them
until we have mastered them
and we feel the protection
which comes from within and
from above.

PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE

So I am sitting here thinking about the word practice. I have come to realize that I have this love hate relationship with the word. On the one hand I realize I cannot master anything if I do not practice. I cannot make something a habit unless I do it so often that it becomes part of my daily routine. There are things which I have practiced doing so often and for so long that I now just do them automatically.

My spiritual journey has been filled with opportunities to practice. It has not always been easy, but it has been important that I remain true to my practice. Several years ago I remember a friend of mine wrote about keeping a gratitude journal for November. It prompted me to keep one daily, not just in November. At first doing so daily was not easy. There were days I did not want to do it, but I pushed myself through and now it is just part of my practice and if I do not do it, I feel off. It is like something is incomplete and missing in my day.

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PRACTICING MEANING

So I have been thinking about practical ways to practice meaning in our everyday lives. One of my sources of inspiration this month came from one of the women who was at our anniversary celebration. She suggested we have a wall in our kitchen/gathering area where people could write inspirational words or phrases. This got me thinking what if we all did this. What if we create a wall or a mural of proverbs? They could come from one faith tradition, or in our space, a myriad of faith traditions. They could come from the Book of Proverbs in the Hebrew Bible or one of numerous other collections of proverbs. Here is a list of three of my favorite collections of proverbs:

• Like a Yeti Catching Marmots: A Little Treasury of Tibetan Proverbs·    
• Soul Would Have No Rainbow if the Eyes Had No Tears and Other Native American Proverbs·        
• African Proverbs, Parables and Wise Sayings

Do you have one you would like to share?

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THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

Are you living your life as a devotional practice?

COOKING IS LIKE MEDITATION

Over the last few months, I have had to make major changes in the way I eat and therefore the way I cook. Initially, I felt a little overwhelmed at the growing list of foods that I could no longer eat and for the first time in my life, cooking seemed stressful. It was then that I had to return to my basics and go back to some of the basic lessons that I had learned across my lifetime. One being that cooking is like meditation. When I stop, relax, and focus on being at one in the moment and with the ingredients, my creativity would kick in and the answers to what and how to prepare would flow like a river.

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