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crumbs of inspiration

About me: West Texas raised. All I ask is for good art, good music and good football. Arriva el Cruz Azul!
In times of difficulty, meaning strengthens us not by changing our lives, but by transforming our experience of our lives.

The Italian psychiatrist Roberto Assagioli tells a parable about 3 stone cutters building a cathedral in the Middle Ages. You approach the first man and ask him what he’s doing. Angrily he turns to you and says, “Idiot! Use your eyes! They bring me a rock, I cut it into a block, they take it away, and they bring me another rock. I’ve been doing this since I was old enough to work, and I’m going to be doing it until the day that I die.” Quickly you withdraw, go the next man, and ask him the same question. He smiles at you warmly and tells you, “I’m earning a living for my beloved family. With my wages I have built a home, there is food on our table, the children are growing strong.” Moving on, you approach the third man with this same question. Pausing, he gives you a look of deep fulfillment and tells you, “I am building a great cathedral, a holy lighthouse where people lost in the dark can find their strength and remember their way. And it will stand for a thousand years!” Each of these men is doing the identical task. Finding a personal meaning in your work opens even the most routine of tasks to the dimension of satisfaction and even joy. We may need to recognize meaning for the resource it is and find ways to pursue it and preserve it.

-Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D.

I’ve had some of these books for a while, I need to hurry up and finish them cause it’s the only thing keeping me from buying new ones. From top to bottom The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain Halo Evolutions The Seven Military Classics of Ancient China Einstein The Wu-Tan Manual Speeches that changed the world WWII, the people story
3 more chapters and I’ll be done with Kitchen Table Wisdom

This book has been a real treat, especially since it was one of those “Hey this might be interesting and it’s on sale” book purchases at Bookman’s. If you are interested in reading some of what I have shared so far you can check out the tag.

mv12.tumblr.com/tagged/kitchen_table_wisdom

There is still plenty of it to share. Can’t wait to hand this book over to my little cousin, promised her I would let her read it once I was done.

“There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness.”

-The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexande Dumas

Attachment closes down options, commitment opens them.

Ain’t that the fucken truth

Often, times of crisis are times of discovery, periods when we cannot maintain our old way of doing things and enter into a steep learning curve. Sometimes it takes crisis to initiate growth.

-Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D.

-Kitchen Table Wisdom

In the leadership conferences I participate in, I always try and pass on to the students the importance of always being willing to take on a challenge. When presented with a high level challenge, most people fear that they are not ready or have not been properly prepared to do the task at hand. But the only way to know if you are truly prepared to take on a challenge is by doing it. In life though, we don’t really have a choice, these challenges come and go every so often, some more challenging than others. The attitude that people choose to adapt to take on these challenges are what separate the proactive from the reactive. While the reactive person would find excuses and begin to point fingers trying to blame other things on the difficulty of life, proactive people look at these challenges as an opportunity to learn and grow. Reactive people see these challenges as proof of the sporadic and unpredictable nature of life, making them focus on the moment instead of the possible outcomes. Proactive people appear to live a more “easy” life, because their attitude conditions them to embrace life’s hardships as learning experiences, not as obstacles.

I had thought joy to be rather synonymous with happiness, but it seems now to be far less vulnerable than happiness. Joy seems to be a part of an unconditional wish to live, not holding back because life may not meet our preferences and expectations. Joy seems to be a function of the willingness to accept the whole, and to show up to meet with whatever is there. It has a kind of invincibility, that attachment to any particular outcome would deny us. Rather than the warrior who fights toward a specific outcome and therefore is haunted by the specter of failure and disappointment, it is the lover drunk with the opportunity to love despite the possibility of loss, the player for whom playing has become more important than winning or losing.

-Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D.

-Kitchen Table Wisdom, Embracing Life

Without judgement, many things can be made holy

-Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D.

-Kitchen Table Wisdom

discus?

Perfectionism is the belief that life is broken

A perfectionist sees life as if it were one of those little pictures that used to appear in the newspapers over the caption “What’s wrong with this picture?” If you looked at the picture carefully you would see that the table only had three legs or the house had no door. I remember the “Aha!” that these pictures evoked in me as a child. I wonder now why anyone would want to take such satisfaction in seeing what is missing, what is wrong, what is “broken.”

The pursuit of perfection has become a major addiction in our time. Fortunately, perfectionism is learned. No one is born a perfectionist, which is why it is possible to recover. I am a recovering perfectionist. Before I began recovering, i experienced that I and everyone else was always falling short, that who we were and what we did was never quite good enough. I sat in judgement on life itself. Perfectionism is the belief that life is broken.

… Few perfectionists can tell the difference between love and approval. Perfectionism is so widespread in this culture that we actually have had to invent another word for love. “Unconditional love,” we say. Yet, all love is unconditional. Anything else is just approval.

-Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D.

-Kitchen Table Wisdom, Beyond perfection

discuss?

Reclaiming ourselves usually means coming to recognize and accept that we have in us both sides of everything. We are capable of fear and courage, generosity and selfishness, vulnerability and strength. These things do not cancel each other out but offer us a full range of power and response to life. Life is as complex as we are. Sometimes our vulnerability is our strength, our fear develops our courage, and our woundedness is the road to our integrity. It is not an either/or world. It is a real world. In calling ourselves “heads” or “tails,” we may never own and spend our human currency, the pure gold of which our coin is made.

-Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D.

-Kitchen Table Wisdom, Judgement

Don’t forget, the coin is made of gold

Judgement does not only take the form of criticism. Approval is also a form of judgement. When we approve of people, we sit in judgement of them as surely as when we criticize them. Positive judgement hurts less acutely than criticism, but it is judgement all the same and we are harmed by it in far more subtle ways. To seek approval is to have no resting place, no sanctuary. Like all judgement, approval encourages a constant striving. It makes us uncertain of who we are and of our true value. This is as true of the approval we give ourselves as it is of the approval we offer others. Approval can’t be trusted. It can be withdrawn at any time no matter what our track record has been. It is as nourishing of real growth as cotton candy. Yet many of us spend our lives perusing it.

-Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D.

-Kitchen Table Wisdom

“The life in us, is diminished by judgement far more frequently than by disease”

I am convinced I will be able to rule the world once I am done reading this. About a third of the book is translation notes. READ IT!
There is a tenacity towards life which is present at the intracellular level without which even the most sophisticated of medical interventions would not succeed.

-Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D.

-Kitchen Table Wisdom, Life Force

Another little excerp from the book I’m reading :) It really is amazing when you think about it. Life Force. The strenght and power that is hard wired into our very genes, which fights for us day after day, every second of every minute of every hour. Always vigilant, to ensure our bodies can function to their best. It reminds me of a story my mom told me, about her pregnancy with me. Of all the complications she had at the first tri-mester, and how the Doctors where not really sure how it was that I survived. Doctor said “Su bebe esta afferado a su vida”, Your baby is clinging to his life. Of course I clinging, as long as my body still had the will to fight, life was mine.