darrell-calkins

Recovery through sleep isn__ going to happen if the majority of the components of your being aren__ getting enough stimulation or resistance to work against. Your brain may be tired after work, but if your body and emotions haven__ been challenged through the day, they__e going to keep irritating you even if you__e asleep. They don__ need rest; they need work for real recovery to take place.

The temptations and reactions that can cause non-creativity, imbalance and distraction are many. Let__ start with the prejudice everyone has against imposed challenges. It__ a concept that people associate with an accusation, a kind of guilty until proven innocent. Or, you__e not good enough until you prove it, with the implication behind this that you will probably fail or are unworthy. If you settle for this association at the expense of perceiving the actuality and necessity of challenge, or Creative Resistance, in hundreds or thousands of situations in every day of your life, and in anything worthy of your attention, you bought into the illusion sold basically to keep you small, in control, like those and safe for those who sell it.

Laughter has got to be the single healthiest activity one can perform. Just think how healthy you would be if you could sincerely laugh at that which now oppresses you.

The human body, like the human mind, is best at versatility and adaptability. This is our greatest skill and our greatest chance to unlock natural potential. What that means in terms of physical movement is that a fairly equal amount of time and effort should be allocated to the widest possible range of activity. That includes strength, flexibility, precision and endurance, but it certainly doesn__ stop there.

Transformation, on the other hand, is creating beauty from horror or destruction (or, for beginners, an actually pleasant evening with the usual family problems).

Physical well-being necessitates listening to what you already know, and then taking it seriously enough to act accordingly. When you wake up and feel the impulse to arch your back, stretch and exhale with a loud sigh, for God__ sake, do it.

On the high-end spectrum of emotions, which are innately connected to intuition and direct comprehension as well as imagination and creativity, meaning true empathy and knowledge, appreciative realization, transformation and invention, one finds a richer and more voluptuous combination of experience. Unfortunately, to __et there,_ one has to be willing to sacrifice what is known for what is not.

The composite of what you know to do__hat which compels you, that which you are naturally already drawn to, that which exploits the unique potentials inside you, that which you know you are capable of doing, that which will build a bridge between imagination and reality__auses a relationship that obliges sacrifice.

People generally believe that stress is responsible for depletion, but apathy and uninspired systematic repetition are equally responsible. Or rather, systematic repetition produces as much or more stress and anxiety as anything else.

Yearning often does not provide a sense of attainment or __eace,_ as it is fuel for one__ personal purpose, to in some specific way give or create; to do that is not necessarily easy or peaceful.

The nature of yearning is urgent so as to guarantee evolution, change.

If your curiosity reaches a breaking point (compelled actually means that you only have the remaining choice to act on it, having tried all the other options before), and becomes fascination with mystery or truth, you find what you need. Maybe it__ a person, maybe it__ a tragedy, maybe it__ an explosive recognition that, __y God, I__ still alive.

Now, if you open the treasure chest of desire, what do you find there? What do all the desires have in common? You. Go ahead and stop here and test it for a few days if you are really serious about the question. After you get past the first thousand, you begin to enter into a subtle territory, known as the border between desire and yearning. Or, if you want, between answers and questions. The defining quality, or essence, of desire is that it is engaged as if it were an answer.

Of course, the self-righteous demand and expectation for love, and exactly how it should be expressed, is not the most streamlined method for producing it in another for you. That is, it does not compel or create the love itself. You__e neither loving nor producing that which would compel the love toward you. You__e compressed between them both and incapable of accepting either. And rightly so. Which then accelerates the accumulating suffering.

The experience of frustration comes from the separation we impose between our yearning and our fear. Generally, we yearn for that which we fear, or at least fear the unknown (mystery, and therefore and paradoxically, truth) that will be caused through the pursuit of yearning. The more the separation between these two, yearning and fear, the more frustration if you are conscious, or the more neurosis if you are not (literally, __ can__ stand the frustration, I__ going crazy_).

The typical image of a depressed, lazy and tired person is someone hunched over and inert. Often, the assumption is that if one had more enthusiasm and inspiration, he would then stand up straight and move. In many cases, this equation is backward. But, as with everything related to one__ physicality, balance is the key. An overly erect and rigid posture may convey confidence and power to some, but it also causes a subtle accumulation of tension and rigidity on various levels, including psychological and emotional.

The essential war within, and the cause of suffering, begins with the presumption that yearning, impulse and curiosity, desire and question, exist so as to end them. To attain, to acquire, to answer.

Once you get off the bandwagon of believing that truth is your enemy and is bad news with all kinds of associated unhappy obligations, you can then afford to take it on with some enthusiasm and start to have some fun with it. You can begin to trust yourself and play with mystery and big questions without the need for a crutch of an answer to lean on and sell to others (__ere you go, this crutch worked for me._). And you then begin to see these big words, like imagination, fearlessness and truth as signposts to more fun, instead of the reverse as you do now. To start the engine, just follow what you yearn for, make a contract with that which compels you, and fulfill the trust of that contract through choice and action.