Your Outer World is a Reflection of Your Inner State

Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in a marital relationship. It's one thing to believe that the person sitting across from you at the dinner table is mean, a jerk, exhibits all sorts of negative unconscious behavior. That very well may be true, and you can work very hard to try to "fix" that person. That effort is unlikely to succeed, but you can try.

 The more important question is why? Not, "Why is this person like this?" Most people in bad relationships spend the bulk of their time pondering this question, both in their heads and out loud. It's a futile inquiry. The better "why" questions is, "Why is this person part of my world?" For the answer to this one you have to look inside yourself. That's where the title to this post comes in.

An Actual Judge's Order in a Divorce

Some judges' orders say more than others, and this one says it all.

When Fathers Die -Tiger and Earl Woods

Sometimes men go a little crazy when their fathers pass away. They lose their rudder and scud across life's ocean for a while.

When my grandfather died, my father lost his way in similar fashion. It didn't help matters that he died in 1969, the advent of the sexual revolution.

Black Marriage Day A Celebration of Suffering

This article was originally published by Technorati on 26 March 2010. To see all my Technorati articles, click Lifestyle in the Contents listing on the sidebar.

Black Marriage Day is the 28th of March. What to wear? What to wear? Though I'm neither black nor married (with no prospects even), I'm pretty excited about it.

Some 300 communities across the country will celebrate the joys of marriage with various events, such as vow renewal ceremonies, marriage workshops, black tie galas and the premier of two marriage-related movies, You Saved Me and Why Did I Get Married Too?.

See the trailers . . .

Another Swing at Inner Peace

I have said that inner peace is a physical phenomenon. Start with the physical sensations inside your body and hold your focus there because that's literally what inner peace is (see The Pain-Body label for more articles). And that's good advice.

But we can also look at it another way. As our good friend Eckhart Tolle puts it in A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose (Oprah's Book Club, Selection 61),"Being at peace and being who you are, that is, being yourself, are one." (p. 114-115)

What we are trying to get to is feeling like ourselves again, uncluttered by ego and pain-body and any kind of background unhappiness that is common to most of us."

A recent experience brought this home to me in a personal way. I received word that an old girlfriend of mine got married, and when I found out about it I could sense that it had ignited my pain-body.