Good Clean Reads

“Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.”  ~Henry James

I have been thinking a lot about kindness lately because I believe it defines our capacity to show up in our life. The Buddhists teach loving kindness as a fundamental doctrine for both inner and outer peace. In fact, religious philosophy of all denominations...

“The important thing is to enjoy the activity for its own sake, and to know that what matters is not the result, but the control one is acquiring over one’s attention.”
― Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

 

In a love business, the idea of pleasure is a primary theme and as a writer on the topic of enhancing pleasure, I have often freely exchanged the concepts of pleasure and enjoyment, as though they were...

“None of us knows what might happen even the next minute, yet still we go forward. Because we trust. Because we have Faith.”   -Paulo Coelho

 

It’s easy to trust when life is giving us what we want, when our relationships are stable and communication flows. Leaning toward trust when our health is broken, our relationship connections are tattered and we can’t find the words to express our own needs...

Letting go is a real life choice. Not only a path to authentically stay present to the groundless situations that happen in our relationships, it is also a remarkable courageous surrender to controlling the outcome. The trade off of certainty for a real experience of the present moment is more than worth it as we hear author Laura Munson describe her season of unlikely happiness in “This is Not...

“Patience serves as a protection against wrongs as clothes do against cold. For if you put on more clothes as the cold increases, it will have no power to hurt you. So in like manner you must grow in patience when you meet with great wrongs, and they will then be powerless to vex your mind.”  Leonardo DaVinci

I had never understood the virtue of patience as a curative for the things that make you...

Perhaps the single most devastating emotional pain we suffer is the fear of abandonment. Millions of children know this experience as their primary relationship to their parents, and the effects are wide-ranging and long-lasting. Abandonment is rarely about the person being left, it is most always a reflection of what is broken in the person doing the leaving. Yet the abandoned person rarely perceives this, instead the message of unworthiness and the belief of being fundamentally unlovable is planted deep inside of us. Almost like a dormant genetic trait in the human genome, most of us seem to carry the potential for this erroneous belief. Tragically, most of us also have plenty of opportunities that trigger it.

“As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.”  ~Henry David Thoreau, “Economy,” Walden, 1854

 

Our time is our life. How we spend the hours of our days is the truest measure of what we create, what we value and how we invest our life energy. This is why the recent statistics regarding the social takeover of Internet gaming and social media should give us pause for wonder and concern....

“There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, that it hardly becomes any of us to talk about the rest of us.” ~Edward Wallis Hoch

 

My teenage daughter has removed herself from Facebook. Her cold-turkey drop of a technology that had dominated many of her free hours caught my attention. “I noticed how anxious it makes me,” she replied simply when I asked why. “I just...

“The finest thing in the world is knowing how to belong to oneself.” -Michel de Montaigne

I am convinced that the most significant and meaningful change we can make within all of our relationships begins with our foundational ability to relate to our selves. This teaching is ancient and lies at the heart of every spiritual discipline. The Buddha summed it up saying: “You yourself, as much as...