Suffering

Happy Monday, Folks! Hope you had a great weekend.

Another week begins and already I’m tired. Unfortunately, my weekend failed in the resting department because of work. I hope to get a passing mark a la restoration tonight as I turn in early.

Where's the human version of this basket?

The last time I managed to squeeze in a post, I started the story of my trip to an island in Korea. My parting words for that last post were: expect the unexpected, which has now become my motto because you can plan, schedule, create lists here and there until kingdom come but life has its special way of moving the universe around to make things either more difficult or more pleasant—whichever it pleases. Lately, I’ve been on the more difficult end, but I’m pressing through. I basically tell God I don’t want to suffer. And who am I to be pretentious or bold enough to demand such a thing? We all suffer along a particular scale; it’s part of the human experience.

However, I want to capture each moment that induces suffering and nullify it completely. Do I have the strength? I do if I unleash my spirit. The body and mind suffer, but can the spirit suffer? The spirit is separate from body and mind; it cannot suffer. Therefore, I want to be more in rhythm with my spirit because the body's cravings for physical desires make it weak and the mind experiences constant anguish as it conjures negative illusions of past, present, and future and the material desires of this world. The spirit moves past the suffering, transcends time, and rests in total peace and security from all negative forces.

Although my body succumbs to physical fatigue and my mind carries so much weight of an unpredictable, hazy future, my spirit unfurls its wings and glides above in faith under God’s perfect protection. That’s why I take good care of my spirit because I can either nurture its already great power or put it under harm's way by burying it beneath the weaknesses and instabilities of my body and mind. I want my spirit to shine more and more each day until it outshines my body and mind because they are the source of my suffering.

Captured while on a train ride from a ski resort in Korea

So, I feel better already. I’m afraid the conclusion of my Nami trip will have to come for the next post. I did not expect to write about suffering, but here's to that one mark of life, the unexpected.

What are some ways that you eliminate suffering? Do you believe it can be eliminated in this world of ours? I’d love to hear your responses. Until next time, be at peace.

Thanks for reading,

Sammy  :)

"Future" Problems

Happy Monday, folks! Okay, I know Mondays don’t rank high in everyone’s favorite day, but any marker that signals the start of something is all right in my book. Maybe it’s my obsession with beginnings and endings. Anyway, I hope you had a great weekend. I saw Invisible Man yesterday night at the Huntington Theatre with my friends and it was more spectacular than I expected. Be careful out there with the flu outbreak if you live in the U.S. Virtual hugs if you are sick! :)

Couldn't resist. I want a Kitty now!

SO, in the midst of my personal devotion today, I took some time apart for meditation. I focused on breathing and the three principles of love, kindness, and compassion. My meditation has no complex formula. It just is. My thoughts meandered about while I tried to refocus them back on the circular path of breathing and the three chosen principles. I filled my lungs to full capacity, deflated them of all air, and filled them again, deflated and back again. In the next second, I reached farther into myself because anxiety had been an issue lately and I wanted to address it before the day ended. What happened next surprised me.

A flurry of thoughts burst through one after the other like an onslaught of black arrows that rained from an unseen enemy: “I want to be successful now. I want to help my family financially now. I want to be financially independent now. I want my own place now. I want a cool apartment now. I want to be published now. I want to hold my book in my hands now. I want to enjoy time with my friends in New York now. I want to be in Japan now. I want an acceptance letter to a school in California now. I want all these things now. Now. Now. Now! I want them now!”

Help.

My eyes opened and I exhaled. Okaaaaay. Apparently I wasn’t aware of the two-year-old living deep inside the recesses of my mind. And what an annoying two-year-old she is. With a rise of embarrassment, I pinpointed the source of my anxiety. You know how people tell you to forget your past or how not to let your past control your present and determine your future? Well, my problem was that I let the future intrude on the peace and sanity of my present. I wanted the future I desired now and my refusal of the present brought irritability and pain. I fell back to an old habit of ascribing value to my life through a negative mind frame: my life is valuable if I have these future things now. False.

When I resumed meditation, I told myself that this present moment mattered the most and I already had everything I needed right now: the breath that gave me life, my mind, food for my physical body, shelter, good friends here in Boston, my family’s health, a teaching gig ready to start in a few weeks, memories of an unforgettable experience in Korea, and so on and so on.

When the future happens and I have those things I wanted today, I will say same thing: I already have everything I need right now.  

How about you? Ever have “future” problems? How did you deal with it? Would love to hear your responses!

Thanks for reading,

CSS :)

Channeling Inner Desires to Motivate: ESPER, an Introduction

Hi There!

Are we stuffed with turkey? Or in my case, salmon? :-D I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving day and weekend. If your Thanksgiving was awful, I'm sorry about that. Just remember you can always make better days ahead. You can start with now! :-) 

Happy Happy Joy Joy! Wait, Wrong Cartoon.

Today, I want to talk a little about channeling inner desires to motivate. I mentioned several posts earlier about how I’d learn to overcome the serious writer’s block crippling my writing. I can’t believe that it was only a month ago that deep discouragement over my lackluster progress overwhelmed me. I didn’t think I’d ever produce something that would be published. 

Just replace "Bloggers" with "Writers". My parents reaction to my writing!

 At first, I thought the culprits behind my procrastination were laziness, lack of discipline, and boredom, but the truth had been fear of rejection and lack of faith in my writing abilities. Understanding these deeper meanings helped me progress to the next phase of achieving my goals and ultimately, my dreams: channeling my inner desires to motivate me to write productively on a daily basis. We all have our unique motivations for writing, and I’ve tapped into mine. It’s been driving me to action like I’ve never experience before in my life. I realized that my inspiration comes from within not from the outside, and I had to clearly identify my purpose.  I credit the website Personal Excellence by Celestine Chua for helping me unravel all these issues. If you struggle with procrastination, self-doubt, or goal setting, I highly recommend it.  Reading Celestine’s writing transformed my focus on life and my writing.

For the next several days, I’m going to share my experiences using the goal-setting/achieving model ESPER that Celestine explains on her website. ESPER stands for Establish, Strategy, Planning, Execution, and Review. I’ve decided to use ESPER to finish editing COT. As I’ve told you before, I made some big changes to COT (changing one of the female MCs to a male) so it’ll involve some rewriting and reworking. I’m very excited about the edits and rewrites I’ve made so far. My novel is bursting with vitality and new energy because I’m finally writing the book I want to read! Not the book that I think others would want. That’s just stifling. Letting go of all my inhibitions and loving the world I’m creating infuses COT with a freshness I didn’t think it could ever possess.

Attitude is key in all of this. Your writing reflects your attitude. If you’re unhappy, fearful or dissatisfied with yourself, then the prose won’t represent your highest potential as a writer. I’m not saying you have to be super high on life to write a great novel because history shows us a ton of amazing writers who suffered from difficult emotional issues. If you don’t believe in yourself and the words you’re putting down, then you won’t convince your readers that your writing matters. And that’s what I desire. For someone to read my book and think: it matters that I’m reading this or I’m not wasting my time reading this book.

I do the same thing.

If you checked out the link on ESPER, I’d love to hear what you think about it.

Thanks for reading,

CSS