8.25.25
Meditation Mondays
Thought
Much of what remains undeveloped in us, psychologically speaking, is excluded because it is too good to bear. This may seem silly, but if you look honestly at your life, you will find it to be true.
We often refuse to accept our most noble traits and instead find a shadow substitute for them. For example, instead of living with spirit, we settle for spirit in a bottle. In place of our god-given right to the ecstatic, we settle for temporary highs from consuming something or possessing someone. At first it is puzzling why we would look for our potentially best qualities in something or someone else. From the point of view of the ego, the appearance of a sublime trait or quality might upset our whole personality structure.
In going down into the underworld a person of integrity can draw the skeletons out of the closet fairly easily, but he will likely fight to the end of his neurotic strength to hide the divinity of his own being.
- Robert Johnson and Jerry Ruhl, Living Your Unlived Life
Quote
Tara Brach on flow:
“When you stop resisting what is, you free yourself to be fully alive.”
Intention of the Day
My intention is to give myself the same compassion I offer to others.
What’s your intention today?
Happy Monday,
Val
8.18.25
Meditation Mondays
Thought
We are always living in expectation of better things, while at the same time we often repent and long to have the past back again. We look upon the present as something to be put up with while it lasts, and serving only as the way towards our goal. Hence most people, if they glance back when they come to the end of life, will find that all along they have been living ad interim: they will be surprised to find that the very thing they disregarded and let slip by unenjoyed was just their life-that is to say, it was the very thing in the expectation of which they lived Of how many a man may it not be said that hope made a fool of him until he danced into the arms of death!
– Schopenhauer, Essays of Schopenhauer
Quote
Rumi on acceptance:
“Life is a balance of holding on and letting go.”
Intention of the Day
My intention is to speak with kindness and act with love in all situations.
What’s your intention today?
Happy Monday,
Val
8.11.25
Meditation Mondays
Thought
The arts allow us to contemplate our experiences and therefore invite soul into the picture. They sustain the emotions the soul feeds on and retain the complexity of meaning that is proper to its realm. The mind appreciates the reduction of meaning to logic and classification, but the soul finds more to chew on in diversity, density, and subtlety. ... If we see ourselves as a puzzle to be solved, then we will be satisfied with rational explanations, but if we see ourselves as made up of unfathomable mysteries, then we will need images that are not excessively reductive. A good artistic presentation may well lead us deeper into confusion and help us feel the chaos of life more vividly than ever. The truth in art is diffuse and largely ineffable, but at the same time it offers a degree of honesty and certainty not found elsewhere.
- Thomas Moore, The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life
Quote
Seneca on interconnectedness:
“We are waves of the same sea, leaves of the same tree, flowers of the same garden.”
Intention of the Day
My intention is to celebrate the little victories and simple pleasures.
What’s your intention today?
Happy Monday,
Val
8.4.25
Meditation Mondays
Thought
Joseph Campbell's classic, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, documents the ubiquity of what he considered the mono-myth of the hero. This central myth seems to have three stages: departure, initiation and return. The departure stage arises when the person is expelled from the community or has outgrown the old dispensation. Then he or she is obliged to wander in strange lands. Descents, ascents and wounding initiate the neophyte into the mysteries of nature and of relationship. The return is seldom back to the old land and never back to the old psychology. Such a return would obviate the journey and annihilate consciousness. Rather the return involves circling back at a higher level. Thus the in-forming image of the quest motif is not a linear movement once and for all time, but rather an evolutionary movement akin to a spiral.
– James Hollis, Tracking the Gods: The Place of Myth in Modern Life
Quote
Thich Nhat Hanh on presence:
“This moment is not just a part of your life—it is your life.”
Intention of the Day
My intention is to see today as a gift, no matter what it brings..
What’s your intention today?
Happy Monday,
Val
7.28.25
Meditation Mondays
Thought
Wholeness of the personality is achieved when the main pairs of opposites are relatively differentiated, that is, when both parts of the total psyche, consciousness and the unconscious, are linked together in a living relation. But the dynamic gradient, the flow of psychic life, is not endangered, for the unconscious can never be made wholly conscious and always has the greater store of energy. The wholeness is always relative and gives us something to work on as long as we live.
'Personality, as the complete realisation of our whole being, is an unattainable ideal. But unattainability is no argument against the ideal, for ideals are only signposts, never the goal'.
– Jolande Jacobi, The Psychology of C. G. Jung
Quote
Malcolm-Jamal Warner on gratitude:
“If you just take a minute to stop, I guarantee you can find at least one reason to smile. If for some reason you can’t find a reason to smile, then that’s probably the best time to be the reason for somebody else’s smile.”
Intention of the Day
My intention today is to find joy in the ordinary and gratitude in the unexpected.
What’s your intention today?
Happy Monday,
Val
7.21.25
Meditation Mondays
Thought
The awareness that the universe is dynamic gives to the individual the quiet assurance that wherever he may be located he is in immediate candidacy for the strength that comes from a boundless vitality. This fact makes for a universal kinship among all living things. The blessing of self-consciousness makes possible a deliberate relatedness out of which arise all of the joyous overtones of human relations. To understand another human being even dimly is to bring to a point of focus an Infinite Resource.
– Howard Thurman, Meditations of the Heart
Quote
Lao Tzu on being:
“When you realize that nothing is lacking, the whole world belongs to you.”
Intention of the Day
My intention is to bring my full attention to every task and interaction today..
What’s your intention today?
Happy Monday,
Val
7.14.25
Meditation Mondays
Thought
If you try to view yourself through the lenses that others offer you, all you will see are distortions; your own light and beauty will become blurred, awkward, and ugly. Your sense of inner beauty has to remain a very private thing. The secret and the sacred are sisters. Our times suffer from such a loss of the sacred because our respect for the secret has completely vanished. Our modern technology of information is one of the great destroyers of privacy. We need to shelter that which is deep and reserved within us. This is why there is such hunger in modern life for the language of the soul. The soul is a shy presence.
The hunger for the language of the soul shows that the soul has been forced to recede to private areas; only there can it mind its own texture and rhythm. The modern world, by trumpeting the doctrine of self-sufficiency, has denied the soul and forced it to eke out its existence on the margins.
– John O'Donohue, Anam Cara: Spiritual Wisdom from the Celtic World
Quote
Eckhart Tolle on presence::
“Realize deeply that the present moment is all you have. Make the Now the primary focus of your life.”
Intention of the Day
My intention is to look for the good in people and situations today.
What’s your intention today?
Happy Monday,
Val
7.7.25
Meditation Mondays
Thought
To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development.
When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
– C.S. Lewis, On Three Ways of Writing for Children
Quote
Lao Tzu on unity:
“When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.”
Intention of the Day
My intention is to infuse love into everything I do today.
What’s your intention today?
Happy Monday,
Val