Kurt Swensen - Portland, Oregon Alcohol and Drug Addiction Counseling Treatment - Drug Addiction, Alcohol Addiction, Sex Addiction, Food, Nicotine, Shopping, Gambling

This quote is by a woman named Jaki Hull. I have not previously heard of Jaki but her work comes highly recommended. I did a Google search when I got home and was unsuccessful in finding Jaki on the Internet. Perhaps the spelling is wrong, but the message to me was clear and potent.
My sense was she was referring to one of the fundamental issues that can traumatize us as very young beings (perhaps as young as 1 or 2) and plague us for the rest of our lives.
Looking at how we mange disappointment and our use of different tools including the Twelve Steps is important, if not critical to successful recovery as we have all had many disappointments in our lives.
The pain seeks relief and our addictions sometimes provides the respite. Negotiating disappointment may bring the answer.

Tonight we are expecting snow in Portland and it reminds me of nights (as a small person) when I used to hope that it snowed so I wouldn’t have to go to school. As an adult it reminds me of Peace, quiet, and those times when I can/could sleep in with a loved one and enjoy NOT going to work. Isabelle and I look forward to white in the morning……..

Love to all, Kurt

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/health/dealing-with-dementia-among-aging-criminals.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1&hp

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness
comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house

empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be
clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame,
the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Rumi

The Essential Rumi, versions by Coleman Barks

The Little Ways That Encourage Good Fortune

Wisdom is having things right in your life
and knowing why.
If you do not have things right in your life

you will be overwhelmed:
you may be heroic, but you will not be wise.
If you have things right in your life
but do not know why,
you are just lucky, and you will not move
in the little ways that encourage good fortune.

The saddest are those not right in their lives
who are acting to make things right for others:
they act only from the self–
and that self will never be right:
no luck, no help, no wisdom.

William Stafford

Stories That Could Be True (1977)

Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Derek Walcott
“Love after Love” from COLLECTED POEMS 1948-1984 by Derek Walcott. Copyright © 1986 by Derek Walcott. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

4. Thoughts precede emotions, an infinitesimal lapse that isn’t recognized because the thought about a situation and the reaction to it seem to be simultaneous. When you perceive a situation as fearful, instantly that thought provokes the natural reaction—fearful feelings. As the thought veers into preoccupation with the situation’s possibledevelopments, the fear feelings that follow gather force. 

5. The universal law of attraction, which cannot differentiate what you want—something of positive nature—from what you don’t want—a negative something—is in perpetual operation to provide whatever you focus your energy on. When that focus is on the fearful aspect of a situation—say lack of money, which is the focus of many—the universe can only provide situations to continue that lack because it has no reasoning ability to understand that what you want is enough money, not lack of it. You have the power to change your thoughts! Thinking I have money for everything I need and feeling grateful will start the universal flow that will provide it.

The Poker Game

Questioner: Can you expand on the concept which is that it is necessary for an entity, during incarnation in the physical as we know it, to become polarized or interact properly with other entities and why this isn’t possible in between incarnations when the entity is aware of what he wants to do. Why must he come into an incarnation and lose conscious memory of what he wants to do and then act in a way in which he hopes to act?

Ra: I am Ra. Let us give the example of the man who sees all the poker hands. He then knows the game. It is but child’s play to gamble, for it is no risk. The other hands are known. The possibilities are known and the hand will be played correctly but with no interest.

In time/space and in the true color green density, the hands of all are open to the eye. The thoughts, the feelings, the troubles, all these may be seen. There is no deception and no desire for deception. Thus much may be accomplished in harmony but the mind/body/spirit gains little polarity from this interaction.

Let us re-examine this metaphor and multiply it into the longest poker game you can imagine, a lifetime. The cards are love, dislike, limitation, unhappiness, pleasure, etc. They are dealt and re-dealt and re-dealt continuously. You may, during this incarnation begin—and we stress begin—to know your own cards. You may begin to find the love within you. You may begin to balance your pleasure, your limitations, etc. However, your only indication of other-selves’ cards is to look into the eyes.

You cannot remember your hand, their hands, perhaps even the rules of this game. This game can only be won by those who lose their cards in the melting influence of love, can only be won by those who lay their pleasures, their limitations, their all upon the table face up and say inwardly: “All, all of you players, each other-self, whatever your hand, I love you.” This is the game: to know, to accept, to forgive, to balance, and to open the self in love. This cannot be done without the forgetting, for it would carry no weight in the life of the mind/body/spirit being-ness totality.