Getting Current with Your Inner Values

"Do your outer choices reflect your inner values?"

This quarter we are exploring inner or personal values.
Inner values are important beliefs or ideals that we are taught as children, and then draw from other fellow beings and belief systems.
They exert great influence on our behavior and serve as inner guides in all situations.

To begin our exploration of living with "right intention", it helps to make a list of what you consider your inner values. Spend time this week thinking about qualities that you value. You can start with moral precepts. Then explore what you value, respect and admire in some of the significant people in your life. These people can include those you may not know personally but have influenced your thinking in some way.
Keep adding to your list throughout the week. You may be surprised and enlightened by what you come up with.

Bring you list to class.

Living with integrity...

" Goals help you make your place in the world and be an effective person. But being grounded in intention is what provides integrity and unity in our life." -P. Moffit

I have always had goals in my life. I have achieved many of them. It is very satisfying to set a goal and to see it come to fruition. However I have found it more essential to keep my eye on what is truly important and what I most deeply value. When I do that I find my goals are more fluid and can shift when they need to. Goals are always changing. Inner values and what has heart and meaning is a constant.

"Only by remembering your intentions can you reconnect with yourself during those emotional storms that cause you to lose touch with yourself." -P. Moffitt

The Heart's Intention

So good to be back in class again...
This quarter our theme is "Intention". That is the "heart's intention" or right intention as the Buddha teaches. Intentions are not the same as goals. Goals have to do with something in the future and outcome. Intention is about present moment and connecting to what we most deeply value. We cannot control outcome, but we can set intention from what has meaning and significance for us. That doesn't mean goals are not important. But intention can help us to reach and clarify and change our goals when necessary.
Each day we can set intention. We might do that by phrasing it as a question. "Can I be kinder and gentler with myself today?" If I value non- harm, kindness and compassion, can I live that now, in each moment, today. If I am kinder to myself, that kindness will flow out into the world. If we phrase our intention as a question, it will feel more like an invitation and less like an admonishment.
What intention can you invite into your day, in this moment?
What intention can you live, that becomes, more and more, part of who you are?

September Reflections

It is still summer, and yet it is feeling like fall more and more. I am still picking dahlias from the garden and feeling the warm sun as I walk the trails, yet I find myself noticing the early signs of fall. Noticing is part of mindfulness. Noticing is simple really. It is not coming to conclusions or telling ourselves a story about a memory, it is just observing. Being an artist requires a great deal of "noticing" and not getting caught in personal perceptions. It sounds easy yet it is not. It takes alertness and discipline to just notice, to just see, to just feel. Nature teaches us volumes about that kind of simplicity because it is not self-conscious. It is "unutterably" itself, as David Whyte says in his poem "Everything is Waiting For You".
The next time you go for a walk practice just noticing. Then the next time you have a shower do the same... feel, hear, smell, taste.... be in that moment and then notice how easily your thoughts fly off to solve some problem or go over some conversation.
"Living well is not about being calm, it is about being present". -Judith Lasater