Alexandra Franzen | Open Space Practice, (AKA: A Thousand Shades of Gray)

1. 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.

1. Playing the Odds from Rachel Cole. If this seems confusing when you first read it, I beg you to keep reading it, over and over, until it starts to make sense. It’s such an important shift, revolutionary.

2. Square One from Susan Piver, her message for the Open Heart Project in which she talks about basic goodness, saying it is, “Something real, something gentle, something fierce.”

3. Wisdom from Alexandra Franzen, from her most recent newsletter, “If you can help even just one human being to feel stronger, braver, safer, more connected, more hopeful, more informed, more inspired, or more loved through your words… you have done a great service.”

4. Fuji in a Trash Bag: A non-hiker’s guide on how not to climb a mountain on Medium.

5. Technology hasn’t Changed Us. Things haven’t changed as much as you might think. on Medium.

6. So much wisdom from Pema Chödrön, a list of links to various articles she’s written.

7. These Ladies Stood In Front Of An Interactive Mirror Without Knowing What To Expect. So sweet.

8. Wisdom from Isabel Foxen Duke, “Why would you choose the perception of reality that makes you feel bad, when you could just as easily choose what makes you feel good?”

9. How to Get Unstuck, wisdom from Andrea Scher.

10. What Keeps Me Awake at Night, a list from Laurie Wagner.

11. Wisdom from Don Miguel Ruiz, “Death is not the biggest fear we have. Our biggest fear is taking the risk to be alive—the risk to be alive and express what we really are.” (Thanks to Sandra for sharing).

12. Truthbomb #630 from Danielle LaPorte, “Stillness requires courage.” And, Truthbomb #631, “Have a conversation with the aching.”

13. The Path of Pausing, more wisdom from Pema Chödrön,

The primary focus of this path of choosing wisely, of this training to de-escalate aggression, is learning to stay present. Pausing very briefly, frequently throughout the day, is an almost effortless way to do this. For just a few seconds we can be right here. Meditation is another way to train in learning to stay, or, as one student put it more accurately, learning to come back, to return to being present over and over again. The truth is, anyone who’s ever tried meditation learns really quickly that we are almost never fully present. I remember when I was first given meditation instruction. It sounds so simple: Just sit down, get comfortable, and bring light awareness to your breath. When your mind wanders, gently come back and stay present with your breath. I thought, “This will be easy.” Then someone hit a gong to begin and I tried it. What I found was that I wasn’t present with a single breath until they hit the gong again to end the session. I had spent the whole time lost in thought.

Back then I believed this was because of some failing of mine, and that if I stuck with meditation, soon I’d be perfect at it, attending to each and every breath. Maybe occasionally I’d be distracted by something, but mostly I would just stay present. Now it’s about thirty years later. Sometimes my mind is busy. Sometimes it’s still. Sometimes the energy is agitated. Sometimes calm. All kinds of things happen when we meditate—everything from thoughts to shortness of breath to visual images, from physical discomfort to mental distress to peak experiences. All of that happens, and the basic attitude is, “No big deal.” The key point is that, through it all, we train in being open and receptive to whatever arises.

14. You are Imperfect and Needy. I Love That About You. wisdom from Mara Glatzel.

15. Holy wow, this Note from the Universe, “Jill, do you know what’s a 1,000,000 times better than getting to the top the mountain? Getting there, after having been lost.”

16. The Koshas: 5 Layers of Being from Yoga International.

17. Wisdom from Gloria Steinem, “In depression you care about nothing. In sadness you care about everything.” (Thanks for sharing, Susan).

18. Mary Lambert “Secrets” (Stank Remix) // Hits 1 // SiriusXM. “Seriously, guys. I told you I don’t hold anything back.”

19. Street Art Spotter: Dallas Clayton Spreads Good Vibrations Across L.A.

20. The World’s Simplest Learn to Run Program.

21. Wisdom from Rumi, “Oh my friend, all that you see of me is just a shell, and the rest belongs to love.”

22. Wisdom from Lodro Rinzler, “In the Buddhist context, giving up means that you are surrendering everything that is holding you back from experiencing reality in a direct and pure manner.”

23. Shared on Chookoloonks’ This Was a Good Week: Slow & Steady, and My Jam.

24. Sam Pepper Exposed. This makes me so angry, but I’m so happy people like her are making videos like this.

25. Breaking the Pattern of Feeling Unworthy and KEY to Self-Esteem from Kute Blackson.

26. Wisdom from Galway Kinnell, (shared before, but so worth doing so again),

We’re all seeking that special person who is right for us. But if you’ve been through enough relationships, you begin to suspect there’s no right person, just different flavors of wrong. Why is this? Because you yourself are wrong in some way, and you seek out partners who are wrong in some complementary way. But it takes a lot of living to grow fully into your own wrongness. And it isn’t until you finally run up against your deepest demons, your unsolvable problems–the ones that make you truly who you are–that we’re ready to find a lifelong mate. Only then do you finally know what you’re looking for. You’re looking for the wrong person. But not just any wrong person: the right wrong person–someone you lovingly gaze upon and think, “This is the problem I want to have.”

27. This Converted Cave in France Cost $1.35. I want to go to there.

28. Wisdom from Buddha, “Three things cannot be hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.” (Thanks to Positively Present for sharing).

29. Shared on Susannah’s Something for the Weekend list: Mary Oliver on the Magic of Punctuation and a Reading of Her Soul-Stretching Poem “Seven White Butterflies” and Lena Dunham gives great advice.

30. Shared on Susannah’s Something for the Weekend list last week: 10 of the best first date questions…possibly ever (Alexandra Franzen is the queen of prompts), and Lisa Congdon on Creative Evolution (Episode 3 of Tiffany Han’s new podcast, “Raise Your Hand. Say Yes.”), and Thai Chicken Chopped Kale Salad recipe.

31. Wisdom from Nayyirah Waheed,

the becoming | wing
be easy.
take your time.
you are coming
home
to yourself.

32. Wisdom from Clementine Paddleford, “Never grow a wishbone, daughter, where your backbone ought to be.” (Thanks to Amanda for sharing).

33. A Sweet List of Things to Remember on Rebelle Society.

34. How Neil Gaiman Stays Creative In An Age Of Constant Distraction.

35. “You Don’t Get What You Wish For; You Get What You Believe,” wisdom from Elizabeth Gilbert on Facebook.

36. Freedom in 704 Square Feet. *swoon*

37. Mod Kitchen Furniture DIY from This (sorta) Old Life. I love this kitchen, the space and the light.