Worry is a waste of time.

It changes nothing.

Most of the things you are worrying about now, you won’t remember in a few years.

Stop focusing on the small stuff that you won’t even remember a week from now, and certainly not on your death bed.

Life gives you no refunds for the time you spent worrying.

What you focus on expands, so focus on what is truly important and meaningful to you. Decide to constantly feed what is beautiful about yourself and your life rather than what isn’t.

The quality of your life will be determined by the quality of your attention. And this is your choice.

By trying to furiously control life, you often end up controlled by it.

Shiva is the power of destruction, dissolution, or transformation in our lives. Nothing entirely new and innovative can be created without this strong, and often unsettling, force that turns the tables on the status quo, normality, and habituation. Without Shiva, our lives would be dull and uneventful—one long Groundhog Day, playing the same scene over and over again. Yet the word destruction strikes fear in our hearts; we freeze at the very thought of losing what is dear to us. Of losing everything.

Hurricanes like Irma, Maria, and Harvey embody this extreme aspect of Shiva. Monumental raging winds and rising water completely obliterate the old, often leaving thousands homeless and grieving the deaths of friends and family. In the aftermath, something new is eventually created, but loss of home and loss of life are not easily assimilated or accepted. Those affected may experience emotional trauma as well as financial burdens. These human crises break our hearts. How do we face life at times like these?

At this moment, you and I are living in an information age. We are living through shifts in the meta-structures of the game that are very profound. We haven’t even begun to grow into it.

Our mythology is so based on our previous ages and consciousness, that we haven’t even understood it yet. I mean, we’re just beginning the dance of understanding what it means when we have a collective unconsciousness, when we have information moving at the rate it is. We’re still getting overloaded trying to collect it. But it’s obvious – you can’t collect it.

Many have memories of fun-filled afternoons, family vacations, weekends loaded with laughter and wise knowledge being passed from an idealized parent.

 

What about the others?

 

The children who shy away from light because they are strangely comforted by the darkness.

 

How about all of the once innocent children, now struggling adults, who hide inside the shadows that dance along with their lives.

 

Not every childhood memory is warmly filled. Many are chilled with ice as sharp as knives. Pain that swallows them alive.

 

What about them?

 

Those that get denied and pushed aside. The ones that we choose not to see because it makes us uncomfortable or forces us to face our own darkness.

Globally we are at this moment of diagnosis on the planet. We are standing in front of the doctor and they are telling us we are entering the sixth mass extinction. The shock of this has the potential to have humanity dig deeper than imagined and write a completely new program, unleashing a rapid healing response across the globe.

For some years in California, a young man came to my lectures in a bed, brought in a bed. He was a quadriplegic. He could not speak. He was about twenty-eight years old. He was like this (laying back on a slant). His attendant could hold his hand over an alphabet board and there was just enough capacity to point at letters. That was the way he spoke. Each time he came, I went over to him and hugged him, and then I would wait while he spelled out some words. I felt in myself how reactive I was to the immensity of his deprivation state.

When you look back at your own life, you see that with the suffering you went through, you would have avoided it each time if you possibly could, yet when you look at the depths of your character now, and the fact that you’re sitting here doing this work, you see it’s all a product of those experiences.

I remember when I was on a book tour for Radical Acceptance, one of the places I stopped was the Buddhist university, Naropa, and they had a big poster with a big picture of me and, underneath the photo, the caption was: Something is wrong with me.

You are a sovereign being. You are the only governing authority when it comes to your life. The moment you choose to let go of blaming others is the moment you take possession of the key to your own shackles.

I often quote the psychologist Carl Rogers, who said, “It wasn’t until I accepted myself, just as I was, that I was free to change.” In other words, this acceptance — this recognizing what’s going on inside us and this deep unconditional tenderness — is the prerequisite to change.

I recently heard about a man who attempted to sneak his pet turtle onto a flight by placing it between two buns and wrapping it in a KFC wrapper. When he was discovered, he told the officials that he just couldn’t leave his beloved pet at home.

As a psychologist and a psychotherapist, I could see that each of us would get our minds into a certain place, our thought processing into a certain place where we would tend to see life, day by day, in a very repetitive fashion, and with a set of habits and thought that we were incapable of breaking through.

There comes a time in our lives where we make a decision. Sometimes it’s a conscious choice and sometimes it stems from an experience that we can no longer deny. Either way, we arrive at a point in our lives where we know or feel that it is time to move forward.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the inevitable “aging and decaying process.”

I witness my own body and mind as I struggle with various aches, pains and wrinkles, as well as that of my friends and family.