Life’s Ground Rules

Paradoxes

1. You most engage what you run away from; running away is a very specific, focused, motivated action.
2. Acceptance is not acquiescence.
3. Passivity is a very determined activity. Forgetting is as active a process as remembering. Doing nothing is a specific decision, process and work product.
4. It is rare to see fully all that there is, yet nothing else.
5. To require that others respond to you as exactly you want means you give them control over you.
6. If you influence others to respond in the specific way that you want, and they do, you have rendered them inauthentic in your mind.
7. Activity is not necessarily the same as productivity; doing does not equate with being.
8. Assumptions and beliefs, like traumas, are ways of stopping time.
9. ‘More’ is not a goal, but because it is elusive, it has appeal as a container of hope and happiness.
10. Suffering and desire are the two secrets we cannot keep.
11. See it big. Keep it simple.
12. Be aware of definitive statements that foreclose exploration. A statement by one man was sufficient to explain all the unexplainable to him: “All women are females.”
13. You can be strong if you allow yourself to be weak.
14. The only thing constant is change. Often the hardest work is accepting the changes.
15. The loss of the illusion is more difficult than the loss of the real thing.
16. The more you run away from something, the more apparent it becomes.
17. We criticize, perhaps to prove that we do not posses the fault.
18. Both opposition and conformity occupy the same prison.
19. Only when you feel fully secure can you be aware of how afraid you were before.
20. Fighting something engages it; accepting it lets it go.
21. Only the impossible is addictive a fantasy that has been lost but given temporary hope by proxy.
22. The answer always gives birth to and shapes the question. Only by listening to the answers can you finally give voice to the question.
23. Adolescents can teach us the depth of superficial things.
24. If you don’t change your direction, you are likely to end up where you are headed (ancient Chinese proverb).
25. Action is not the same as emotion. Judgment resides in the potential space between the two.
26. It is a moment of liberation to know that no one is binding you.
27. The most common thing that gets in the way of seeing something as it truly is, is our preconception of it. The most common thing that gets in the way of listening and understanding something, is trying to fix it.
28. Fear, change and adventure are synonyms.
29. Mistakes and successes are teachers.
30. The past is a lesson. To let go of it and learn from it is a process.
31. “Finding” yourself is creating yourself.
32. All you have to do is the next right thing. Sometimes it isn’t clear what the next right thing is, but you can almost always be clear as to what it isn’t.

Antipodes

• The opposite of perfect is real.
• The opposite of fear is freedom.
• The opposite of control is mastery.
• The opposite of doing is being.
• The opposite of repetition is creativity.
• The opposite of working harder is working smarter.