Tag: rules

  • The Ten Rules For Being Human.

    You Will Receive A Body
    You may love it or hate it, but it will be yours for the duration of your life on Earth.

    You Will Be Presented With Lessons
    You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called “life.” Each day in this school you will have the opportunity to learn lessons. You may like the lessons or hate them, but you have designed them as part of your curriculum.

    There Are No Mistakes; Only Lessons
    Growth is a process of experimentation, a series of trials, errors, and occasional victories. The failed experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiments that work.

    Lessons Are Repeated Until Learned
    Lessons will repeated to you in various forms until you have learned them. When you have learned them, you can then go on to the next lesson.

    Learning Does Not End.
    There is no part of life that does not contain lessons. If you are alive, there are lessons to be learned.

    “There” Is Not Better Than “Here.”
    When your “there” has become a “here”, you will simply obtain another “there” that will look better to you than your present “here.”

    Others Are Only Mirrors Of You.
    You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects something you love or hate about yourself.

    What You Make Of Your Life Is Up To You.
    You have all the tools and resources you need. What you do with them is up to you.

    All The Answers Lie Inside Of You.
    All you need to do is look, listen, and trust.

    You Will Forget All Of This At Birth
    You can remember it if you want by unraveling the double helix of inner knowing.

    Summary

    Your time here on Earth is brief. Time passes and things change. You have options and choices in which to make your wishes, dreams, and goals become reality.

    When you ask yourself, ‘Why am I here?’ or ‘Why is this happening to me?’ or ‘What’s it all about?’ turn to your spiritual primer. Ask yourself, ‘What is the lesson?’ If you hear a defensive reaction using the words ‘never’ or ‘always’ in your response, you haven’t yet learned the lesson. Next, go a little deeper and ask, ‘What is there for me to learn from this experience?’

    Each time you view your circumstances as possessing value, regardless of the apparent confusion or hardship, you grow. Your personal evolution will depend on how readily you embrace your lessons and integrate them into your
    life. Remember, the only consequence for resisting lessons, is that they will
    keep repeating themselves until you learn them. When you have learned a lesson, you will always be tested. When the lesson is learned, the test will be easily passed, and you then move on to more complex and challenging ones.

    You can look back on the incidents in your past and see clearly the lessons you have learned, resisted, and are still repeating. ‘Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, and today is a gift, that is why we call it the present.’

    It is more challenging to look at your present situation and see exactly what your lessons are. Looking into the future is the most difficult. Wishing that you had already graduated from the school of life does not accelerate your progress or make the lessons any easier. Examining the situation for the real lesson is the scavenger hunt.

    Remind yourself that you are here to learn lessons. Be present with your process. Pay attention to what you are experiencing. Be diligent with actions which enable you to ‘get’ the lessons presented to you. Ask for answers and
    you shall receive them. Listen with an open heart. Explore all options. See your judgment as a mirror. View each crisis as an opportunity. Trust yourself.

    Believe in yourself. Look within yourself, to your higher self, for guidance on all your choices. Extend compassion to yourself. Remember, there are no mistakes, only lessons (Rule Three). Love yourself, trust your choices, and everything is possible!

    From If Life is a Game, These are the Rules, © 1998 by Cherie Carter-Scott,
    published in the UK in 1999 by Hodder & Stoughton

    Seen this on Facebook today….and love it.

  • A field with no rules.

    Rewrite, Rewrite, Rewrite were the last words spoken in our final writing class for the year, they echoed and bounced around in my head, unsure if this was encouragement or a reprimand.

    We had just sat though an hour and a half of listening to the words the students had written. Words of emotion, of defeat, of growing up, of unique perspectives, of finding their way, and to me there was no need to rewrite a thing.

    They had given me pieces of their lives told with feelings and said out loud in fear or with great bravado, with pride and with youthful expression, to me it seemed they were perfectly perfect fitting into their life experience.

    Where they were in life fit perfectly in how they wrote. I am not sure rewriting is the answer, it seems that if you say, rewrite you are rejecting what they wrote.

    Rewrite, redo, and reword it…

    The juxtaposition between the enthusiastic teacher, her encouraging voice, and her caring eyes, and the words, Rewrite struck me with contradiction…like a smile with a slap.

    I then wondered how often I had done this, ‘rejecting the project’ while trying to teach technique.

    I began an Art Quilt group, and my intentions were to be with ladies who enjoy creating quilts without patterns, to let go of the ‘rules’ of quilting and just play with the fabrics and even mix metaphors and jumble up what those who came before us defined as perfect quilting.

    Rebels, daring to not follow the well-trodden path.

    When I began quilting, my Aunt told me that I could do anything I wanted, that I didn’t have to follow or adhere to any quilt rule or pattern, that quilting was making a sandwich, putting fabric batting fabric, and I was the creator.

    She taught me without teaching me rules.

    I wonder if you can do the same with writing, if you could just use the same writing instruments; words, paper, pencil and then allow writing to come what may.

    Let the writer go free, allow the writer to follow what feels right for him, to not make him bend and twist into a forgone conclusion of what writing needs to be.

    Whether it be writing, quilting or living life, we seem to neglect the person for the skill, toss out the personality, the Spirit, the essence in trying so hard to get to perfect.

    Maybe it isn’t the writing or the quilt or life but it’s getting to Perfect.

    Is there a way to teach without spoiling it with perfect?

    I guess what we all fear in life is not being able to measure up to perfect.

    I say, once again, kill perfect, declare it a swear word…

    Imperfect has to replace it; it will free so many from the fear of failing. Whether you are writing or creating art, if you let go of perfect you will set free in wide-open fields with unlimited possibilities.

    Lets all play in the field of pure potential as the wise masters say…a field with no rules.

  • We Play!

    “When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college – that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared at me, incredulous, and said, “You mean they forget?” ~Howard Ikemoto

    Imagine a world where we didn’t forget to be a child, to have the childlike wonder of the world, a sense of knowing we know how to do anything without fear and lack of self-confidence?

    Where we didn’t have to take classes to learn how ‘draw correctly’ or write perfectly, but instead do what feels right for you.

    It seems at times we are taught so much, we are taught how not to be ourselves.

    We learn until we lose our way back to our self.

    Perhaps the class we need the most is an open class without rules or expectations, a class where we go to unlearn all the fears and lacks that have been preached to us, a safe zone where we shed the years and layers of all the things that are not us.

    A shedding room, a fleecing space where we can get back to the childlike place, where we are the center of the Universe, where we can do anything and we admire ourselves and all that we accomplish, where we affix stars to all that we do each day, where there is an unlimited amount of energy and things we want to see and do, where the world is wide open and we are free.

    How do we take off the heavy cloaks of doubt, fear, and lack that we drag around each day? How do we quiet the voices that have trained us to be motionless in fear?

    We wiggle free by doing things no adult in their ‘right’ mind would do… we play!

  • Morale within a Cult.

    What I am finding so intriguing or mind bending as I contemplate Evil, is that Evil is literally defined in the eye of the beholder, there seems to be a personal preference accommodation, not an official Evil standard we all go by.

    I was going to say that we all believe killing is wrong, but in war we say it is okay. Well, okay for us to kill, but not be killed. We swing and spin in our definitions…

    Evil seems hard to pin down so that all looking at it will agree, there seems to be a viewpoint that changes evil into good and good into evil.

    This has to be what divides us that we can’t even agree on what defines evil in humanity.

    What also makes it hard is that you can be raised in evil and not know it, and be told anything outside of your home and church is wrong, and you believe it. Fearing what you don’t know.

    You believe it until you don’t believe it and then you find it hard that you ever could have believed what you believed.

    Life after cult is an incredible ride, it has such fluid openness and freedom, a sense of being an individual unattached and unfettered, a free spirit.

    Free spirits are bad for morale within a cult.

  • Mask of High Morals.

    When I looked up the meaning of Evil it said “profoundly immoral or wrong.” And when I looked up the word Immoral it said ”contrary to accepted moral principles.”

    And, Moral is defined as “relating to issues of right and wrong” or “derived from personal conscience: based on what somebody’s conscience suggests is right or wrong, rather than on what rules or the law says should be done.”

    So evil is breaking the moral code.

    What happens in a family where the moral code is twisted, if right is wrong and wrong is right?

    When a child breaks that code, instead of being right, the family actually sees them as evil, for they broke the family’s moral code.

    I am surprised that evil is actually defined more by morals or immoral behavior than actual rules and laws.

    Discerning evil is harder when what you call normal is evil and good is a foreign concept.

    Evil is actually only a personal affront to your own morals. And the morals are personal to you.

    Morals, “according to common standard of justice: regarded in terms of what is known to be right or just, as opposed to what is officially or outwardly declared to be right or just.”

    What is known to be right or just, not what is an official right or wrong.

    My teachings of evil or my awareness of morals were defined by my parents and my mother’s religion, the churches conscience was my mothers.

    Evil is going against the morals…and if the morals themselves are evil, then what?

    Raised in a vaccum of evil morals all good becomes evil.

    Imagine living up to evil morals…where the gold standard is far beneath its value, where bad is seen as good and good bad.

    It seem perposterous, incredibly insane, to not recognize evil, the evil of the norm. But when your evil was defined by a limited cult of religious fanatics, you are then raised to see anything outside the walls of the churches morals to be wrong.

    The church wore a mask of high morals.