[Side note: I'm officially launching my freelance web coding service in June. This might be handy for you if you're a web designer and you could use a hand with the more technical stuff. If so, you might like to read this. Okay, where were we?]

Safety.

This is the part where I ramble for a while. Although somewhat unplanned and unstructured, I’m pretty sure we’ll cover some interesting ground. Okay! Let’s get started…

Returning to safety.

Always returning to safety, even though it’s hard to remember. Your beliefs about reality have to support it. If you believe you’re unsafe, fear is the result. It (fear) is actually the best way to relate to the world in that situation. So the root of the problem, of turning from fear to love, is in feeling safe or unsafe.

“Not minding what happens”

A quote I remember from a Buddhist monk. But that can be so, so hard. It’s attachment, to want one set of circumstances and not want another, but I dislike the word because it doesn’t offer a solution, it just stares back and says, “The way you’re thinking now, that’s making you unhappy.” Something like that. Not helpful.

So back to feeling safe, because that’s our hope. If we can view things as safe, then it’s all good. Love results instead of fear. When you feel safe there’s no need to worry about yourself. You naturally, without force, feel inclined to care for others. You’re fine, you’re okay, but they could use a hand. You care, so you do.

I guess, really, feeling safe or unsafe is a creative belief.

Imagine if you lived with the “feeling safe” mindset for a few months. All these people would love and support you back because you loved and supported them first. You really would be safe. And likewise, if you feel unsafe, your fears become real. You take them seriously and make sure they don’t hurt you. Your every action is driven by the fear, to conquer that which makes you vulnerable. Even as you grow more powerful, you still see unsafety everywhere.

All of this leads to…

How do we go about tipping the balance, feeling safe where we are now, in our present circumstances? I think this is one of those big, massive lifelong projects, something you can work on forever. But there also has to be something we can do something about today. Otherwise, how could we ever begin?

It’s got to come back to how we view reality. What do we think it’s all about? What’s the game we’re playing, and what are the rules?

The default answer is “I am a physical person with a physical body, in this world. There might be some creator who is bigger than me, or there might not be. I am mortal and I am going to die. I have maybe 60 years left, but death could really come at any instant, and then I cease to exist.”

If you really believe this, it’s completely logical to feel fear. It doesn’t make sense to not be afraid. This is a scary reality to live in!

So we have to create for ourselves a non-scary reality.

It can’t be too concerned with the physical stuff. That’s impermanent and out of our control to some degree. Happiness does not lie there. Do we agree on that? I think we do. Certainly there’s satisfaction in creating stuff, in expressing ourselves, but that can’t be dependent on physical outcomes or we get frustrated when it doesn’t work out how we want it to.

I think perspective is really important.

Place this visit to earth in the context of an immortal spirit / consciousness, temporarily experiencing this reality. It’s all going to pass and nothing important will be lost when it does. That way the little stuff doesn’t matter so much. That also means that we can tell what the important stuff is, because it doesn’t pass, it’s not tied to this physical world.

Even though the physical stuff is going to pass, it’s still here, now. So let’s call it a playground. We can do some pretty cool stuff here. Meet people, make cool stuff happen, practice and become good at things, maybe even masterful. Hey, it’ll pass, but doing it is fun, and we might as well have fun while we’re here. If we’re safe, we can pretty much do whatever we want and it’ll be okay. So we might as well do what’s fun.

So what’s the point of playing here? What would we look back on with gladness after our time here? What could we do that would be meaningful after we’ve left? Connect with people. Do awesome things together and share the experience. Care for them and help them enjoy their time here, too. Become stronger and more capable, so little things don’t knock you over and so you are capable of manifesting the wonderful things you imagine. Have fun even as you are learning and making a mess of things. You’ll get better with practice. Learn. Come away understanding yourself, other people and the world a little better. Indulge your curiosity and learn everything there is to know about the things that interest you.¹

In this world, you can still die.

But your consciousness remains unharmed, and you get to keep your growth – your wisdom, your strength and your lovingness, even if you are separated physically from those you love. This is like when you say “So and so is a very loving person.” The people they love are not so important as their general, unconditional attitude of love for whoever they encounter.

I can feel the objections, the resistance to this world view rising in me already, and I know I have more ground to cover, more corners of my mind to unearth. But this post is growing long, and I think this is enough to chew on for one day.

See you next time to explore further how we can feel safe in this world.

1. If you’re observant you might have noticed Steve Pavlina’s principles of truth, love and power there. Interesting. [↩]

Hello!

I’m officially launching a web coding service in June (you can check out the details over here). The service itself is good, but it’s very general, and after Naomi’s post today I thought it’d be much better to offer a very specific service.

So my question to you is: What one, specific thing would you like done for your website? This should be:

• Something new to add
• Something to change
• Something to fix

I’m offering coding but not graphic design, so “design me a new logo” is out, but “get me a forum” is in.

First 10 answers get it done for $39, as long as I can do it in 3 hours. Yes, this is crazy cheap. I’m looking for feedback, not trying to get rich.

If it would take longer than 3 hours, we’ll talk about finding a smaller-scale task to get you started in the right direction.

Looking forward to hearing your ideas! You can leave a comment or contact me directly if you prefer.

Anything is one of a million paths. Therefore you must always keep in mind that a path is only a path; if you feel you should not follow it, you must not stay with it under any conditions. To have such clarity you must lead a disciplined life. Only then will you know that any path is only a path, and there is not affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you to do. But your decision to keep on the path or to leave it must be free of fear or ambition.

I warn you. Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself, and yourself alone, one question. This question is one that only a very old person asks. My benefactor told me about it once when I was young, and my blood was too vigorous for me to understand it. Now I do understand it.

I will tell you what it is: Does this path have a heart?

All paths are the same, they lead nowhere. They are paths going through the bush, or into the bush. In my own life I could say I have traversed long, long paths, but I am not anywhere. My benefactor’s question has meaning now. “Does this path have a heart?” One makes you strong; the other weakens you.

The trouble is nobody asks the question: and when a person finally realizes that they have taken a path without heart, the path is ready to kill them. At that point very few people stop to deliberate and leave the path.

A path without a heart is never enjoyable. You have to work hard even to take it. On the other hand, a path with heart is easy; it does not make you work at liking it.

For my part there is only the traveling on paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart. There I travel, and the only worthwhile challenge is to traverse its full length.

And there I travel looking, looking, breathlessly.

- Don Juan
Apprentice to a Yaqui Sorcerer
Sourced from http://www.whale.to/a/path_with_a_heart.html

Yesterday I imagined having an enormous whiteboard in my room. I could write up clouds of notes for different blog post ideas, leave the ideas up there for a few days and jot down more thoughts as I came up with them. I’d have space to have a few ideas going at once because the whiteboard would be huge. So I wrote on Twitter:

Dear universe: I would like an entire wall of my room to be a whiteboard. Thank-you!

Within a few minutes, the universe (twitterverse?) answered. First @maadonna suggested whiteboard paint, and also a great place to buy huge whiteboards. Then @brendam told me of a scheme to create huge whiteboards with cheap shower wall panels from Bunnings. At first I was sceptical of actually fitting a whiteboard in my room (it’s tiny) and finding a way to mount it on my wall (I’m renting), but the idea of blutacking a lightweight piece of plastic to my wall sounds like it just might work.

I’m amazed at how quickly a solution came. When I wrote the original tweet, I was only half serious, and I didn’t think I could really do it. Once the suggestions came, I soon has a feasible way to make it happen. Without even trying!

I do believe a trip to Bunnings is in order.

The following is an adaptation of the recipe for Sue’s Super Soup found in Karen Knowler’s 50 Quick, Easy, Healthy & Delicious Raw Food Recipes ebook.

Ingredients:

• One avocado
• Two tomatoes
• Juice of one orange
• Two tablespoons flaxseed oil (or olive oil. Flaxseed oil contains omega 3 for those of us who don’t eat fish.)
• Four tablespoons sultanas (try more or less if it’s too sweet or not sweet enough)
• A dash of tamari OR soy sauce OR a pinch of salt (just a little bit!)
• Some red or green capsicum, finely sliced

Directions:

1. Place everything except the capsicum in a blender.
2. Blend to a smooth consistency.
3. Pour into a soup bowl, garnish with capsicum. This adds a bit of texture to the soup.
4. Serve with crunchy toast for dipping, or flax crackers if you’d like to keep the meal entirely raw.

Serves one. Enjoy!

Just a short check-in this week. It’s even a short intro. Let’s get to it!

The hard stuff

Random stress

Couldn’t I just accept that things are not too bad right now and enjoy the stuff that’s working out well? Seems not, at least not all the time. Note to self: Life Is Pretty Okay. Don’t stress!

The good stuff

Development!

Last week, I wrote about setting goals centered around character development instead of around producing an external result. I picked out persistence as the attribute I wanted to develop, so I decided to spend an hour per day for a week working on a project. The project I picked was to develop a little web app to help me review my new followers on Twitter.

I finished the week successfully (yay!) and the application’s taking shape. The whole thing’s been quite fun, and the hardest part has been coming up with a name for it. My eternal gratitude to anyone who has a suggestion!

As I get further into it, I see that I could take the idea further than I originally anticipated, and I’m coming up with lots of ways to make the project more interesting and to make some money on the side as I go. I have to credit my initial intention for this. My definition of success on this project is to persist – to keep putting in the time even when obstacles come up. If I were purely aiming to make money, I would have been put off as soon as I realised I had competitors.

And all this aside, dev work is fun. I like coding, figuring out how to do new and interesting things. So horray for interesting projects!

That’s it!

Catch you next week! And feel free to join me in the comments. What was the hard and the good in your week?