‘I have a dream that my four little children will one day live where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.’ MLK
.. Growing up as a mixed race person, those early years of my life were marked with my own personal civil rights movement, in which all the races divided inside me, wanted to be unified and at peace, after all I am Japanese and American, and born out of my parents crossing a racial line that was taboo at that time!
.. I spent an afternoon at the racetrack with a friend. We each bet on all six races. Each time she bet she picked the winner. Then she put her winnings on the next race. She told me that the same thing happened every time she came to the track. She couldn’t bet without winning. So she seldom did. It scared her too much. She was afraid something terrible would happen. She was afraid of what it might mean.
Perhaps it’s a similar fear that prevents us from acknowledging our dreams. I’m using the word dream with a different meaning now; but it’s a meaning familiar to us all. It points to the world where our desires are fulfilled, and our hopes are made real. Perhaps we are afraid we will be disappointed. Or perhaps we are afraid that we won’t, that our dreams will come true, and that all rules we thought we knew about our life would change forever, and we won’t even recognize ourselves anymore. Read More
Dreams show the inner truth and reality as it really is: not as I conjecture it to be, and not as my client would like it to be, but as it is. – Carl Jung
Every day we challenge the rational mind with our dreams. Every night we turn reason, time, and conventional meaning upside down. But dreams are more than the places we visit when we are asleep. When we speak of our dreams we speak of something more than the unconscious images and impulses that surface when we are sleeping; we also affirm the vast spaces of our hopes and aspirations.
When we hear Dr. Martin Luther King say, “I have a dream,” we respond to his words because we recognize that his inner world, and the outer world of his experience, are in complete agreement. He trusted his dream, and he made it real!
So the question arises, how can we learn when to trust our dreams? How do we know when to make them come alive, and what we should do to make them real? [Read More]
Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world. — Harriet Tubman!
The great thing about negative self-talk is that when you really pay attention it can teach you a lot about yourself. Unfortunately, if you’re swamped by negative emotions or if you’re feeling overwhelmed, you may
not have the perspective necessary to learn everything you might. But if you can get some distance, your inner dialog can be a gold-mine of information. After all, your self-talk is not really ‘you’, it’s like a radio station you happen to be tuned into. The secret is to find a better station to listen to. Before you change stations however, listen well. Somet
imes it may be like listening to a one-sided news broadcast. Even though you know it’s propaganda, you can still hear a lot between the lines. It’s the same with your own negative self-talk. You can find out a lot about yourself behind the drone of self-doubt, or the propagandistic stories you’ve been telling yourself. You’ll always find alternative messages when you listen well. Read More
Communication is more than just words. It is how we walk in the world, what we do, and how we do it. It’s our body-language, our posture, the different ways we move, how we stand – metaphorically and literally. Even our smallest actions will determine the effect we have on others. We communicate what we imagine our lives to be, and our beliefs about who we are. We communicate the entire sum of our whole life. At any given time we embody everything that is true for us, our values and beliefs, as they are in that moment.
Many of us have been trained, not into silencing the voices inside our heads, but into becoming so used to the negative background buzz that we no longer consciously hear it. It’s part of the dynamic; not questioning, not challenging, deaf obedience. Not listening to the voice sublimates it into a continual negative feeling. You end up get used to feeling bad about yourself most of the time.
Here’s one way to deal with this negative inner terrorist.
About a hundred and fifty years ago the naturalist Alfred Wallace lay in a hammock on a small island in a remote part of what is now Indonesia. In the delirium of a tropical fever a vision came to him which was a forerunner of ideas that were barely acknowledge until over a century later….
There are two kinds of freedom; freedom ‘from’ and freedom ‘to’; one to extricate yourself from externally imposed limitations, the other to move you forward towards new horizons – the Declaration of Independence or the Bill of Rights. ..
Am I utilizing all the elements that seem to be opposing me to my own best advantage? or am I getting frustrated, discouraged, defeated?
Am I trusting that I have the innate ability to make the best decisions, and if not to automatically adjust and course-correct when I make a mistake, without discouragement or self-judgment? or do I tend to give up after hitting one or two obstacles?
Am I celebrating and learning from the flow of life, energy, and the challenges that surround me? Do I see life as complimentary? or do I see it as oppositional? am I resentful of competition, mistrustful, afraid?
Ask yourself what happens in your work, your relationships, in your life in general, when things are going well, and when they’re not?
If you believe that people with certain political or religious leanings are better than other people who do not share those leanings – that’s a belief. You may value being with those people. But if you confuse that value with the idea that those people are somehow better, then you are limiting your options, limiting what you might learn, limiting how you might change. You are confusing your values with your beliefs. To read moreClick Here
For a long time I was navigating between two opposing world views. So I spent a significant part of it just drifting. The imperative was to set course for an altogether new world, a world that had nothing to do with a compromise between those other two.
Many people simplify the complications of their life by blame, denial, resignation, anxiety, and greed; or conversely through the opposite of those things. But it may be very much same in the end, one way or the other. They live in the safe harbor of digital simplicity — ‘yes’ or ‘no’, ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ . Read more
You may have heard about the internment of American citizens of Japanese origin during the Second World War. Most of them practiced a form of Buddhism known as Jodo Shin. I once heard my friend Rev. Ryo Imamura give a talk about his Jodo Shin Practice. His family, like many others in the camps, had been in the U.S. for several generations. He spoke about how Jodo Shin practice, even in the internment camps, was centered on gratitude. Imagine, your own government puts you in an internment camp, confiscates your property, and you spend years there practicing gratitude every day!!
As I listened to him I thought, “Wow! Impressive!” And I was proud too because I feel deeply connected to these Japanese-Americans through my own Japanese heritage. Read More
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