Category Archives: Jessica Patterson

Something Good

2 Replies

miniaturepeonies1. Wisdom from Brave Girls Club, “Let yourself be a perfectly imperfect human being. Let yourself feel what you need to feel and process your life the way you need to process it. Let yourself BE in all your beautifully imperfect human-ness. And give everyone else the same grace.”

2. Don’t be original; be obvious.

3. 33 thoughts on reading (A manifesto of sorts) from Austin Kleon.

4. Dear Homeless Guy: I Don’t Care If You Buy Crack With The Dollar I Gave You on Medium. The last line of this really has me thinking.

5. Write from a full cup from Alexandra Franzen.

6. Truthbomb #648 from Danielle LaPorte, “I don’t want to change the world. I want to love it.”

7. Permission from Glenda Burgess, (thanks for sharing, Lindsey).

8. reasons for my leaving from lists and letters.

9. Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more from Claws Carefully Sheathed.

10. Wisdom from Rachael Maddox, “Maybe the magic that was missing all along was the will to be all the way true to the call of your brilliant heart.”

11. Learning to Measure Time in Love and Loss on The New York Times, Modern Love.

12. Wisdom from Pema Chödrön

Instead of asking ourselves, “How can I find security and happiness?” we could ask ourselves, “Can I touch the center of my pain? Can I sit with suffering, both yours and mine, without trying to make it go away? Can I stay present to the ache of loss or disgrace — disappointment in all its many forms — and let it open me?” This is the trick.

13. 33 Mantras to Quickly Calm Your Stress Response: Because you deserve to live with ease. Sandra Pawula on Medium.

14. Wisdom from Elizabeth Gilbert on Facebook: Ultimate Forgiveness and Preach.

15. Wisdom from Phillip Moffitt,

The truth is that you will never be absolutely safe. All things change constantly, even what is most precious. You know that you and those you love will die, but not when or how. This is the angst of life, the price of being a conscious human being. It is not a flaw, although many people cannot let loose of seeing it in such a manner. It is just the way life is constructed. When your awareness of this vulnerability is triggered, you can be swept into panic, collapse into depression, or desperately try to distract yourself. One of the values of spiritual practice is that you are able to come to terms with this anxiety in a conscious manner. Your life becomes more integrated because you are no longer trying to deny or avoid what is true.

16. It Happened to Me: I Taught Fitness and Failed a Fat Test from Sadie Chanlett-Avery.

17. Wisdom from Rebecca Lindenberg, “I think there is a general misconception that you write poems because you ‘have something to say.’ I think, actually, that you write poems because you have something echoing around in the bone-dome of your skull that you cannot say.”

18. If People Were Honest About Women’s Bodies from BuzzFeed Video.

19. What Happens When Cross-Species Best Friends Reunite After Five Years? Hint: someone makes a video, I watch it and sob.

20. Wisdom from Adrienne Rich, “All new learning looks at first like chaos.”

21. Wisdom from Geneen Roth, “When you stop shaming and blaming and feeding the desire to be someone else with a different life, the war with food ends as well.”

22. a ghost’s schedule from Marc Johns. I love this so much.

23. Dear Body: I’m sorry for mistreating you on Hello Giggles.

24. 28 Teeny Tiny Wild Mice on Bored Panda.

25. Wisdom from Brave Girls Club, “Is it time to simplify? Instead of being spread in a too-thin layer all over the place, maybe it’s time to pare your life down to the handful of things that mean the most to you. Then let the rest go so that you can give the very best of yourself to the very best things.”

26. An Itty Bitty White Lie from Rachel Cole. Reason #238 why I love her.

27. Awake in the World: Waking Up Without Words — Ikebana by Alexandra Shenpen.

27. Wisdom from Hafiz,

I should not make any promises right now,
But I know if you
Pray
Somewhere in this world –
Something good will happen.

Satya Robyn shared this on Facebook today, and followed it with some wisdom of her own, “Pray, give thanks, ask for help, admit something to yourself or another human being, listen carefully, be kind, eat chocolate, stop blaming, love everything. It all works.”

28. To Hear the Falling World by Jane Hirshfield. (Thanks for sharing, Jessica).

Only if I move my arm a certain way,
it comes back.
Or the way the light bends in the trees
this time of year,
so a scrap of sorrow, like a bird, lights on the heart.
I carry this in my body, seed
in an unswept corner, husk-encowled and seeming safe.
But they guard me, these small pains,
from growing sure
of myself and perhaps forgetting.

29. There’s A New “Marcel The Shell” Video And It’s Freaking Adorable.

30. Wisdom from Sogyal Rinpoche, “Although we have been made to believe that if we let go we will end up with nothing, life reveals just the opposite: that letting go is the path to freedom.”

31. you are your own damn permission slip from Justine Musk. Word.

Something Good

2 Replies

1. My Sisters, The Sugar Junkies on Guinevere Gets Sober.

2. The Recovering Body: Physical and Spiritual Fitness for Living Clean and Sober, Jennifer Matesa’s latest book which releases in a few days. I was lucky enough to get an early copy, and it’s so so so good. It gives you the research, the facts, and examples of the stories of various specific people, as well as Jennifer’s own story of addiction and recovery. As with her other writing, this book is brutal in its truth, but elegantly written, compassionate, and so helpful.

3. I am so in love with the new banner on Rowdy Kittens. Tammy shared a link to the site of the artist who created it, and the first post on her blog is all about an offer she’s making to illustrate blog headers. I have been thinking about the site I’m building for the work I’ll be doing teaching and writing, and I am so excited about the opportunity to commission Philippa. Her work is exactly what I was picturing in my head. Thanks, Tammy!

4. 27 Stressful Things You Tolerate Too Often from Marc and Angel Hack Life.

5. Roasted brussel sprouts with bacon and apples recipe from Back to Her Roots. Roasted brussel sprouts are one of my favorite things.

6. Who is in charge of you? Wisdom from Elizabeth Gilbert on Facebook. My favorite line is this: “ultimately, other people can only help me; they cannot save me.” Also from Elizabeth on Facebook, Every Journey is a Spiritual Journey and The Most Strangely Reassuring Advice I Ever Received.

7. 5 Signs You Are Coming Alive on Rebelle Society.

8. Wisdom from Socrates: “The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.”

9. Wisdom from Dilgo Khyenste Rinpoche, “Try to see all your joys and sorrows as if you were watching a movie, letting go of of the idea that you have to strive hard to avoid what is unpleasant. This will make your happiness indestructible.” (Thanks for sharing, Sandra).

10. ST. VINCENT – Official Trailer (2014) [HD]. This movie has some of my favorite actors. Anyone seen it yet?

11. The Dark Knight of the Soul on The Atlantic, which discusses the potential dark side of meditation.

12. Wisdom from Walt Whitman, “I am larger, better than I thought, I did not know I held so much goodness.”

13. Deep Thoughts From a Late Bloomer on Flingo.

14. A Loving Pledge to Smarten the Fuck Up on Rebelle Society.

15. At The Age Of 29, Brittany Is Ending Her Life In A Courageous Way.

16. Talking to a Dead Man: Conversation with a Gang Member in Detroit on Medium. The man in question says at one point, “More kids mean more poverty, more crime when they join the gangs, more trouble for everyone. It should just all end with us dying.” I sure hope there’s another way…

17. Video: Here’s Life Inside A Bed-Stuy Squat. So incredibly sad.

18. Mary Lambert talks her new album, new girlfriend and new attitude with the New York Post.

19. Wisdom from Tara Brach, “Mindfulness is a pause — the space between stimulus and response: that’s where choice lies.”

20. Wisdom from Chögyam Trungpa,

It is said in the texts that those who have attained the highest level of enlightenment suffer more than ordinary people. Their suffering is like the difference between having a hair in your eye as opposed to feeling a hair touching your palm. You feel much more. In other words, they are more in tune with how other people feel. That kind of discomfort is necessary in order to work for others. Positively speaking, it’s like the ache a mother or father would feel if their child cries. But there is another form of discomfort that arises from losing your grip on how to maintain your ego, which is not necessary. That kind of discomfort is an extra burden. So suffering could be very helpful or it could be somewhat of a nuisance.

21. 8 Compelling Reasons to Live with Less from Be More With Less.

22. Why You Should Start Blogging (Even If You’re Not a Writer) on Medium.

23. Unbearable Compassion from Ram Dass, in which he says, “if you armor your heart you starve to death” and,

Here’s where the faith comes and the faith is deepened through your own practices, through your own direct experiences. It’s not belief that someone hands you. It is faith that comes from your own direct experiences. So you learn to keep your heart open in hell. Finally.

24. Which reminded me of this, Louis C.K. Hates Cell Phones, and what he had to say about “the forever empty.”

25. Marriage by Jeff Oaks.

26. Wisdom from Jessica Patterson,

To do this work, you have to know center. You have to know it well enough to let circumference shift without collapsing the shape of you. You have to know center well enough that you can hold space for those you love when they lose their step, when they lose center, when they falter. To do this work, you have to be willing to hold center like a focal point so those who crash on your shores can do so without fear that you will make it about you. Even when it affects you to your core. Even when it hurts you to see them hurting or struggling or making dumb decisions or acting base or mean. Because to do this work, you have to be spacious enough to actually hold space for others. To do this work, you have to be committed to being a light in the darkness, an anchor in the many baffling storms we endure. If you drown every time someone you love is drowning, this is not the work for you. If you lose your center so easily when someone you love is lost, this is not the work for you. If your reaction to hard times or discomfort is judgment and aversion, this is not the work for you. If someone else’s trauma inevitably becomes your own, then this is not the work for you.

27. Big challenges and small wins from This (Sorta) Old Life. Because, this:

In the midst of a big hard time, it’s good to have some small wins. It’s good to be reminded that little fixes can make a big difference in how we feel. It’s good to feel competent. It’s good to remember that no time is all good or all bad, and that the important thing is to keep moving forward, doing what we can. Sometimes that’s the only way we can do home, and life.