Miracle Workers

You have unlimited potential to create miracles in your life.

 (Louise Hay).

Our biggest opportunities arise from the realization that we are responsible for whatever we are experiencing right now and from the decision to take the appropriate actions. Our biggest mistakes happen when we keep looking for the answers in the external world and forget all the wisdom, power, knowledge, love, and strength we already have. We keep looking for our answers outside of us and somehow always feel unfulfilled, until at some point, we finally see the truth and know we are unlimited in our own ability to create good in our life.

We are deluded to look for love, happiness, joy, abundance, healing, wisdom, power, and strength in the external world.  Again and again we experience disappointment until we realize we have it all. The answers are already inside of us, and have been always there. No wonder that we failed before; we had been looking for them in the wrong place.

The miracle is subtle. Somehow it is an insight that the power is part of us, yet we also understand that it is truly beyond us and comes in the holy interactions with others. The miracle follows us around so to speak. The moment we understand that we are miracle workers, all the necessary strength and energy will be with us, just as we attract the people and situation to make it work. Like Moses, we take the hand of our sister and jump right into the sea. Behold, the waters part yet again.

Be ready to experience how powerful, joyful, peaceful, loving, wise, and abundant your life can be. Heaven and all the solutions to your problem are not somewhere else; they are at your disposal here and now! Stand ready to receive all the wonderful things that life has to offer. You are blessed and always have been.

By Christian and Su Zhen

Atonement

The other day I wanted to introduce Yom Kippur to our boys so I invited them into our Pooja Room and explained the Jewish tradition of starting the new year by recalling some of the mistakes of the old one with the promise to not repeat them in the future. Our younger boy said with an apologetic tone that he would treat his brother better next year. Our older boy said with a defiant voice that some of his worst mistakes on the baseball field will not happen again in the upcoming season.

So what exactly is Atonement about? I tend to know it when I choose against love. It doesn't happen often, but sometimes when I am cranky or when I have low energy, I know that it happens and my conscience tells me that this lack of love is likely to come back to haunt me one day in some way. But then, there is also the subconscious ballast that we have to throw overboard. Stuff that we do and trust that it is ok with our liberal spiritual mindset; yet, our subconscious system thinks differently. If we listen to our body carefully, we will find this ballast. The psychologists tell us that our body expresses our psychological burden and I believe they are right. One obvious example is a person who is hunched over. The weight of the world is symbolically on his shoulders. Diseases are another example. Louise Hay in 'You can Heal Your Life' has an entire appendix that assigns each disease with its psychological meaning.

If that all sounds complicated to you, let me tell you that it does to me as well. Perhaps it is my Protestant upbringing, but I tend to struggle with the concept of Atonement. I said to the boys on Yom Kippur that they should focus on the good intentions for the upcoming year and that is my approach as well. Whatever the mistake might have been in the past, it will probably come back to you with the reminder to do it better next time around. Focus on that positive fact and don't mind that life will probably shake you up a little to help you to let go of your baggage. Viewed from that perspective, Yom Kippur is every day, an invite to put your best foot forward at this holy moment.

The Tao at Work

The other day I asked a colleague how it can be that one of our star investors again rightly predicted the demise of a controversial company even though that particular sector wasn't even part of his coverage. She thought about it and then responded, "Well, I guess if you don't have an ax to grind you just have a sounder perspective." When she said that I immediately understood that she was describing a Tao traveler. That is what we do, we are completely impartial to whatever it is that comes our way. The Tao just is. This may sound like a cliche to you, but the longer you travel along your spiritual path, the more you intuitively feel that this is correct.

I work as an investment strategist and talk a lot to people with different views, conjectures and strategies. Everyone of them is good. The one thing I have learned in my business, you want to listen carefully to everyone, no matter whether they might have been right or wrong in the past and whatever they may have little or lots of investment experience. Believe it or not, I even listen carefully to myself. As E.M.Forster once said, "How can I tell what I think 'till I see what I say?" When you carefully listen to what you say, how you say it, and how your environment reacts to it, you can learn so much about what you really believe. Just to give you an example, sometimes I feel a little tingle in my knee after I have said something. Immediately a voice pops up in my head, "Aha, you are being inflexible again." I learned that insight from Louise Hay who claims that bad knees are a symbol of inflexibility.

I see the Tao daily at work. Lao-Tzu discovered this Force first in China but you can discover it everywhere. No matter what your professional background might be and no matter what position, you will always find the Tao at work.

J. Krishnamurti on Addiction

The highest form of human intelligence is to observe yourself without judgement.
J. Krishnamurti

How do you battle an addiction? I have been interested in this subject for a while just because I myself have a few habits that I would love to get rid off. Reading J. Krishnamurti the other day, an insight suddenly struck me: if you have a habit you cannot shake off, perhaps it's because your mind goes asleep when you do it.

Compulsive behaviour or an addiction has a clear message for you. You have trapped yourself into an activity that you think aids you psychologically (or you just think it's fun), when it is pretty clear to everybody else that it pulls you down. When you have accepted for yourself that you want to overcome the habit, you spend your time fighting it mentally, but whatever plan you come up with, by the time the desire arises, your mind and your actions are on auto-pilot. Here is J. Krishnamurti's simple advice: wake from your trance by observing your compulsive behavior in action (he gives the smoking example, but you can substitute any compulsive behaviour instead):

"Habit is a dead thing, it is an action which has become automatic, and the more one fights it the more strength one gives to it. But if the person who smokes becomes conscious of his habit, if he becomes aware of putting his hand into his pocket, bringing out the cigarette, tapping it, putting it in his mouth, lighting it and taking the first puff - if each time he goes through this routine he simply watches it without condemnation, without saying how terrible it is to smoke, then he is not giving new vitality to that particular habit. But really to drop something which has become a habit, you have to investigate it much more, which means going into the whole problem of why the mind cultivates the habit - that is, why the mind is inattentive."

Louise Hay in "You Can Heal Yourself" had another interesting insight. She claims that once you are in the process of tackling your addiction, you should watch what other side effects this change brings with it. Her argument is that the compulsive habit might be compensating an issue that you are not aware of, but once other side effects show up, you are given new clues what the underlying issue really is.

So I guess the bottom-line is just observe yourself with an ever increasing focus and you will figure things out sooner rather than later. Just try it!