Remembering Grace

First say to yourself what you would be: then do what you have to do. ~Epictetus

The truth is everything is here and now. The challenge is remembering how to overcome my fears and access grace or divine love in this moment. It comes down to self discipline to exercise a transformation heart/mind choice. This profound spiritual act comes down to applying not hiding from my greater self. So much of my life has been distracted by doubt, depression, despair and other self destructive mindsets. Much of my shadow side I can overcome by challenging me to cultivate an attitude based on exposing what is true. Either I can opt for more heavenly opportunities or reside in the hell of doing the same thing expecting different results. Being a creature of many unwholesome habits it is easy for me to become lost in the current societal drama. Getting out of my head and focusing on my heart/spirit connection is my salvation or what I call grace.

All my conscious life I have struggled to find my way in this world. Lost or asleep to life to being fully in contact with the pulsation of daily life; it’s very trials and tribulations I flee from. I believe I am not alone. Western civilization is at a crossroads where today’s outer conflicts can be traced to inner demons.

One of most amazing insights is how can I love all of life so intensely while not fully embracing parts of my own self? Cultivating self love that is reverent for the interconnection of all things is a life-long challenge. Paying attention to a deeper spirit requires tenderly listening to my own heart beat. Nature constantly reminds me to find grace. It show itself when I care for all things in this world. The delicate balance for me is how and what I identify myself with. My greatest challenge has to see how I can expand my love and forgive myself at times when I fall short. When I observe how I love all creation then I realize I just another drop in this pool of universal compassion.

My suffering is lessened when I realize that the “I” is rather a “we.” In these difficult times I believe all of us wish to find harmony amidst the turmoil. Inside each of us we have the gift of unearthing greater awareness liberating our collective unconsciousness from our deluded wants and providing light of our sacred needs. There is not greater treasure we can provide in our life time then for us to reduce our anxious wealth to relaxing with the cultivation of well being.

Is not life’s quest for each person on this planet to find peace within themselves thus leading the way? If we wish to lessen terror, improve our environment and help others ultimately we must whatever plagues our human condition we must go within. Real change can only happen when each of us change ourselves. Leading by example is the tenor of the times.

A rich life comes down to skillful interpersonal skills. How we treat all things, most importantly our very self is an extended act of divine love. The more evolved and successful one becomes is based on how we interface with people, things and places. Since these are extensions of our large self or the world when we show respect and sensitivity for them we ultimately show self love since truly it is all interconnected. The challenge is develop a positive feedback loop to celebrate our passion to be kind, gentle and sensitive. Greater awareness that all things are not separate I become gentler with myself. In this mysterious path of gracefully going forth the key is to remember not to fear or forget what matters most.

A Loving Guest House

Rumi once wrote “there are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.” Now I wish to celebrate all the ways to show my compassion. This for me is a natural remedy for my “dis-being-at-ease” or mental disease. When I visualize a vibrant white light this helps me embody the practice or “being at ease.”

I believe we are at a fantastic time where a spirit of magic is knocking at our individual and collective doors. Can we allow it in?

This spirit is wonderfully described in Rumi’s poem “Guest House.”

This being human is a guest house.
Every day a new arrival.

A joy, 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 whatever comes.
Because each has been sent
As a guide from beyond.

Have you ever sensed that you have guide from beyond helping you? Not as a form of mental torture yet a door to freedom. The hardest thing in my life is to face my darkest shadow. So I welcome my guide. The question is can I quiet my mind and listen to my heart for this too is my guide. For me my torture can only be calmed by allowing spirit to come in and touch my soul. This spirit comes from the mystery; the wind or just simple beautiful bird at your window. Can we be awake and listen to its silence to let it in?

How can I serve what is true and deep to honor my soul? Only if I am gentle with myself and not so self absorbed can this miracle occur. I guess a revolution of kindness is at our door step waiting to enter if we can just trust our guides. Yes, people are generous in crisis, such as hurricanes, death and many other forms of natural and human forms of disasters.

The earth today is filled with increased stress and constant pressure. Helping to promote mindfulness is an antidote. Quieting my mind and listening to my heart is how I have been transforming my anxiety into enthusiasm. If I can show up with the good and bad while treating them as equals. Showing up allows me to transform my stress and worry. I believe the all wise and enlightened being have found peace this way. If I can step into the consciousness of the heart the more time I can to run the deep with inner peace. Wise teachers from the beginning of time I learned about the power of this emotional regulation or mending our broken hearts. Just focusing on positive feelings such as appreciation, care, or compassion, I can create dramatic changes in my heart rhythms. This lessens my stress and anger and leads to my greater well-being. There is a chain of biological changes including lessening blood pressure and stress hormone levels. I can stimulate greater chi, by simply focusing on my heart energy.

When I engage in my heart more I come into balance. Quieting my mind and listening to my heart brings focused clarity, optimal health, and high performance. Also allowing me to accept my shadows provides me with the courage to be present to even the greatest things that haunt me. Whether things are a blessing or a curse, I challenge what Rumi suggests,

Be grateful for whatever comes.
Because each has been sent
As a guide from beyond.

Cultivating a Grateful Heart

When I focus on opening my grateful heart I awaken to tremendous new possibilities. Love and appreciation are two attitudes transforming my world. Focusing my mind with a greater heart connection happens when I count my blessings regarding the wonderful of it all.

There is no greater gift then being grateful and compassionate since this the ultimate act of celebrating life. When I exercise my “loving appreciation” this provides me with a gift that keeps on giving.

Today there are many unconscious self destructive acts both coming from individual and collective sources. Grateful love is evident by kind, aware and wise intentions. Simply reflecting about all the things that I am compassionate about I change my mind-set. Love, does not separate, it connects. In love is how I can lessen my suffering or disconnection and increase my well being.

Gratitude allows me to overcome so many fear-based emotions. I challenge you to reflect on your own appreciation? What about the many wonders and gifts you have experienced? By constantly remembering and cultivating a grateful spirit I foster an intention of the sacred and such attention to this illuminates my world even more. This is the door of light I welcome you to open!

Like many, I search for greater meaning. All I have to do is deeply listen to my own grateful heart. My gratitude is so interconnected to how I care for all things in this world. When I celebrate my appreciation and love for all creation then I allow myself to swim in the collective pool of universal compassion.

More conscious ways can lessen my suffering and provide me with greater happiness. When I cultivate a grateful heart I transmute my anxiety into vibrant new enthusiasm to greet and meet live with appreciation and compassion.

Living Love Poem

May I live my life with the intention of being a living love poem

Allow me greater light, love, and laughter and lessen my darkness, despair, and sorrow

Remind me to pause, relax and deeply listen to the heartbeat of the earth

Please Grandfather of the East empty my mind and blow new air of possibility



May my body fire become peaceful and centered so to coolly discover universal compassion

Allow me to experience life’s sorrow and then purify me to find its joy

Remember that I celebrate my gifts so I can exercise boundless affection to all

Please Southern Spirits energize me and share all that I have been blessed with


May I awaken to see that life’s water balances the negative with the positive

Allow me clarity so to observe not judge my emotions and find truth now

Remind me to break many old habits and bring forth new ways and insights

Please wise Grandmother of the West allow me to accept and discover new freedom



May I transform my dreams into action that embodies a grateful and clear message

Allow me to unwind stress and tension into creative forms of play and art

Remember to not be frightened or lonely since there are many beings assisting me

Please Northern Spirits purify and change my being so I can follow my soul


May all beings above support me and provide me with courage when I doubt

Allow the heavens above to help cool me when I feel hellish fires underneath

Remind me to cultivate sacred vision when I trust to explore what mystery emerges

Please if I feel separate return me back into the harmony interconnecting all things


May my sacred heart and earth celebrate that they are one and the same

Allow me refuge by connecting with the ground when my head insanely spins out

Remember to see how everything is related together into one shared universal spider web

Please give me courage to overcome my fear and be a living love poem!

Paying Attention to My Heart’s Intention

I transform when I set an intention to pay attention expanding my heart’s capacity. Exercising greater compassion is a present I give myself when I remember to pay attention. By quieting my mind and allowing my heart to open I then celebrate the greater mystery with wonder. Otherwise anxiety and despair may arise in my critical and cynical mind. The mental and material can rob us of the spiritual unless we cultivate the intention of listening to our heart. Today’s pressured filled life can quickly divert me from my natural world where my mind spins off ignoring my greater body. Only when I return back in my body sensations I may arrive, here in this very moment.

Allowing my heart to explore the space between nothing and everything I find an ocean deep of compassion. This space of emptiness can allow us to accept life and death as all things arise and fall. Such a perspective brings me to trust my and our deepest nature. Simply nothing is separated and everything is interconnected.

The practice of stillness, listening and just being opens the door to arrive in the mystery of now instead of moving from the past straight into the future. All things or the source is both shapeless and silent. Chang Tzu described as, “It is not a thing itself.”

This transformation transcends me to a higher self. Lao Tzu described this, “To embrace all is to be selfless.” So when I remember my being and shift out of becoming I see that the universe act in endless circles defining time and space by this circular motion where there is no beginning or end. Serenity comes from observing this harmonic process when we surrender into such simplicity. Everything falls into place in the present. The future and the past are just clouds in the mind. Flowing with this attention of what is happening in this moment a doorway of freedom is opened from the magic of acceptance.

May we I find greater insight to creatively find how to quiet myself. Also how can I inspire the emergence of heaven and earth by forming a natural trust that all things align. If we can relax now then we may invite new possibilities and perspectives to transform or experience in this very moment.

From some sacred native indigenous teachings I pray to the seven directions to behold me with

1. Self love
2. spiritual protection
3. gratitude
4. divine guidance

May I celebrate that I;

- Listen deeper
- Forgive more
- Find what is true
- Embrace my shadow
- Exercise my greater self
- Venture being vulnerable
- Risk heartbreak
- Profoundly care
- Freely experience experience

Deal with a Full Deck

Every April Fools Day I love to celebrate folly. 24 years ago, on April Fool’s Day, I visited my Congresswoman, Connie Morella, dressed up in a court jester costume. As Ray Cycle, a recycling action here I created, I stood on the Capitol steps at high noon and proclaimed, "You’re not dealing with a full deck when you throw out the joker out! Recycle Our Nation’s Capital."

I see the difference between a comedy and a tragedy as subtle, but significant-- we can learn from comedy rather than perpetuating a tragic fate. This is why I take refuge in our wasteful ways.


A sense of humor is essential. A process of purification is needed from our depressed, angry, anxious state of existence allowing laughter to clean. Also humor is about that nothing is what it appears. What is funny is that we are caught by our own projections, misinterpretations and desires. Such illusion, delusions and other tricks can either awaken or deceive us. When we see that we live in a house of mirrors and that both laughing and crying are the same release then we can laugh with joy in what is revealed.


Yes we are foolish beings. By appreciation this trickery then we begin to truly see. Oh the divine is so tough to find since laughter truly is primordial secret source of truth. In searching for some sense out of nonsense there is possibility to change our character is the fool!

The wild card is the highest card in the deck and is thrown out many times in the game. However, this discard is priceless, since laughter, love and merriment is it’s symbol is wildly free of the deck’s hierarchy. The fool is a shamanic force representing the non ordinary or the world of the psyche. Wisely mad this jester walks on the razor edge between sublime and the ridiculous. Fumbling on the high wire of reality and fantasy, The changer, the trickster, the transformer, this motley being is both sad, merry and may quite mad playing out a ludic role. Yes this ludicrous individual sheds light on both on bondage and our path to freedom.

From folly a kind of wisdom can be born from the fool and his/hers mischief. Out of our trials and tribulations some cleverness can arise from the perverse form of a clown. From laughter insight comes from this spontaneity with some form of sublime message. Shakespeare said that jesters do often prove prophets. He also said, “I had rather a fool make me merry than experience to make me sad.”

Observing a clown you are exposed to a full weather system of emotions. Much comes from simple human events without a sense of rawness embarrassing, tragic or uneasy moments. Even out of sorrow humor acts to balance grief.


You see, Ray Cycle's message is being "insightful and mindful". Today we can celebrate the fact that more people recycle then vote. However, we still need to manage the billions of tons of valuable resources that we waste every year. We deserve to conserve. Let’s have fun but not become foolish. To disregard and discard is folly. Demonstrating reverence for our land results in many happy returns. Let’s honor the process and not bury our problems. In recovery there is discovery—by giving back you feel more connected. I use poor humor to awaken such as "toot your frugal bugle with the gift of thrift, Recycle Our Nations’ Capital."

Recognizing that in face of laughing and crying are the same release. We can become free from the tragic only when we awake from the comic. It’s time we learn and laugh from a comedy, not a tragedy, of our errors. Just like Earth Day, everyday is April Fools Day if we can awaken to our human nature.

In Love

I put it to you that we are at an interesting crossroads in our history. Human conflict was first more with battling nature, and then we began to tame the elements and started fighting with each other. Today we face a global form of self destruction so evident by current events. Our individual self is interconnected and interdependent on our larger ecological self--the planet Earth. If we take care of the smaller self, we also must preserve the larger self.

However, this is just my experience; so I ask you to reflect if this is true for you as well. What have you seen in your own lifetime as to how humans relate to themselves, others and the earth? While individually we are kind, aware and wise, there appears to be a form of collective dysfunction when it comes to foreseeing and forestalling future man-made disasters that have their origins in an evidently ego-centered outlook.

When reflecting about all the things that I love, how can I divorce myself from feeling the same love for myself? The simple four letter word “love“does not separate, it connects. In love suffering and anomie is lessened, and well-being is enhanced. It transforms insight into idea into action in the grace of deep compassion.

My first insight when I was four was that I was so lucky to have food while other children were starving and dying. So quite early both gratitude and guilt became emotions I had to encompass at the same time, this “buzzing”—which we all experience—is our life force and is both nervously destructive and curiously creative.

I write out of my appreciation for the many wonders and gifts I have experienced. By constantly remembering and cultivating a grateful spirit, I foster an intention of the sacred and attention to this illuminates my world even more. This is the door of light I welcome you to open!

Like many, I have struggled to find meaning in a civilization that is so focused at times on the material. It appears at times that we are a culture denying a deeper spirit. All I have to do is deeply listen to my own heart beat. This great mystery we live is so interconnected, if only we dare to explore how we all care for all things in this world. Life’s greatest challenge is to see how I can expand this love that is myself to all things. When I am aware of how I love all creation, then I add just another drop in the pool of universal compassion.

I believe we all are trying to find the eye of this hurricane we call life—that still place in the midst of a storm. To find harmony requires inquiry into what is grace. Grace is a radical gift: by realizing greater awareness of my own concerns, I can liberate a collective unconsciousness and bring greater happiness to others. My suffering is lessened when I realize this is “our” suffering—the world beating with one heart. We can provide no greater gift in our own lifetime than contributing to reduction of anxiety, whether on an individual basis or a global basis.
Our greatest challenge today is for each person on this planet to find peace within themselves. If we wish to lessen terror, improve our environment, help others, resolve whatever plagues our human condition, we must go within and examine what is true.

What we do for future generations is a treasure we pass on to them and also give to our own soul. The challenge is to develop a positive feedback loop to celebrate our natural passion to be kind, gentle and sensitive. We will not evolve our spirit if we do not venture forth and risk vulnerability.

The simple act of lessening my own anxiety influences and creates momentum to calm others. When I pay attention to my love, I find the energy to cultivate wise action. As I become gentler with myself, I add to making this a more beloved place. In love changes our world when we free ourselves to explore the compassionate space of our higher self.