We really don't need to give ourselves headaches or ulcers waiting for the world to respond to us as it should. John Lennon was right: life's what happens while we're making other plans. If we let ourselves be still, the faith and the love and the hope can come to life in the waiting.

Your experience may be that the world gives you unpleasant symptoms. It scares you, it frustrates you, it gives you a pain in the neck, it gives you a pain in the belly, it doesn't love you enough, it keeps you awake. We all feel some of that, some of the time. Sometimes we feel too much of that to remember how to wake up. Practicing mindfulness meditation will enrich your life. And, as Leonard Cohen writes and sings, we don't have to be perfect.

Ring the bells that still can ring, forget your perfect offering.

There is a crack, a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in.

~Leonard Cohen, "Anthem"

Work with you begins with mindfulness, though we may never actually speak of mindfulness. Does it help you add a column of figures if you keep reminding yourself that you're doing addition? We don't usually need to focus on the name of a thing we're doing while we're doing it.

Mindful meditation is the paying of non-judgmental attention to moment-to-moment experience. It began with Buddhism, indeed a few of my teachers were Buddhists, but we don't have to be Buddhists to be mindful, indeed we don't need to speak of Buddhism in order to learn how to do it.

Our work begins with mindfulness, and grows to include what you might need to think about accepting. Or what needs more thought, or less thought. Or what needs more feeling, or less feeling. Or needs new actions, or an end to old actions. Or what simply needs patience, or perhaps a new, constructive impatience.

Change can be terrible. A loved one dies. A home is lost. A lover leaves. A severe illness visits suffering on you and yours. There's no use pretending such changes are beautiful. Yet surviving calamities means more than still breathing and eating. It means finding or creating what makes life after calamity beautiful enough to want to keep on keeping on.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.

Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.

We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous,
talented, and fabulous?

Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God.

Your playing small doesn't serve the world.

There is nothing enlightened about Shrinking so that
other people won't feel insecure around you.

We were born to make manifest the Glory of God that is within us.

It's not just in some of us.

It's in everyone and as we let our light shine we unconsciously give
other people permission to do the same.

As we are liberated from fear our presence
automatically liberates others.

~ Marianne Williamson, from "Return to Love"