by Pausha Foley on January 24, 2012
Step #1 Don’t tell me what you are not – tell me what you are. Don’t tell me what you let go of – tell me what you embrace. Don’t tell me what you need to get over – tell me what you are expressing. Don’t tell me what you need to fix or change – tell me what you are creating. Don’t focus on what you are not – focus on what you are.
Step #2 Choose. Do not wait for God, universe, spirit, purpose, destiny, authorities or society to do it for you.
Step #3 Be present to what you are creating, right now. Before you learn how to create what you want, realize how you created what you have.
Step #4 Find out who you are. You are your body, you are your soul, you are your life. Include everything, and everything becomes an expression of you. Exclude it – and it becomes an expression of your trauma.
Step #5 Include death into your life. Death is wonderful, it is a graduation, a transition, as much as birth. What’s there to be sad about? What’s there to grieve about?
Step #6 Travel far. When your background changes you see what is only you, in sharp relief.
Step #7 Believe what you say you believe.
Step #8 Don’t lie. Not to yourself, not to others. Never.
Step #9 Go find out what you want, don’t wait until it finds you.
Step #10 Consider the possibility of your future being entirely different than your past. [click to continue…]
by Pausha Foley on January 18, 2012
I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to consider, don’t want to think of mentors in my life. There is a wall of resistance, a feisty child stomping her foot in protest – you will not tell me what to do!
You will not tell me what to do. No teacher ever had. There weren’t all that many of them, maybe that’s why, maybe I never wanted any.
My first Zen teacher – I stayed with her only because she opened the door wide and said: stay or leave, it’s all the same to me. I stayed. [click to continue…]
by Pausha Foley on December 28, 2011
My first life began when I was born. A little being that jumped out of my mother’s womb into a cold, dark night. Winters come early to Poland, the evenings of October are long and gloomy, wet with freezing rains, slippery with sleet that will soon turn into snow. The white snow will cover dusty streets and sooty, dirty buildings, smoothing the edges, sparkling brilliantly in the lamplight. For a few days, for a few weeks, the city will turn into fairyland. But it was not a fairy land that I saw when I first opened my eyes. The world was cold and dark, and I was scared.
My second life began when I sat on a train. It was a summer evening, golden and brilliant, heavy with the scents of flowers and weeds and sharp smell of hot iron train trucks and railroad ties covered with soft tar. As the train made it’s stately progress through the countryside I read my way through a book. It was a book about soothsayers, about the world of those who can see beyond time, beyond space, about the world where the truth is known. The book said: “all is one”, and my head snapped up, like that of a dog on a scent.
“I knew that!” I realized, “I always knew that! I must have forgotten!”
On that day I remembered that there is more in the world than my life, than my college friends, my boyfriend, my clothes and my troubles. On that day I have decided to look. [click to continue…]
