As we expand, we melt. Our hearts open. Our thinking changes. Our obsessions subside, our addictions quietly pass away. This is the slow, elegant, loving process through which, little by little, we let go of the old and welcome the new. We open our hearts and allow in a few more people, just a few more relationship experiences, just a few more kinds of relationships. We learn there are no mistakes, and our hearts become a circle so large that there are no more boundaries, no differences, no judgments. We know the graciousness of that great undivided familiarity, in which there are no more strangers, only friends.

We stretch, and to our amazement we don't break. Instead, we grow. Suddenly, everything becomes easier, and our hearts, which once we believed could love only one person, or were battered so badly we thought they could never love again, expand so fully that the whole world is welcome. In such a state of openness, we see that we've only forgotten how to be together, we faintly and beautifully remember that once we were all together. We remember the way we were in a universe of incredible softness where there were no edges, no walls, no mind games, no rules. In that incredible world, we were happy. We loved one another. It wasn't a feeling. It was a state of being called joy.

The future of love is this all-encompassing embrace. For when we have expanded so much, we will finally arrive at a place where the heart can open its doors to everything and everyone. Our souls have been taking us on this journey and Love is the magnificent destination to which they have been leading us. Now we can feel joy. Now, at last, we can be satisfied. Now, finally, we are home.

Life is not a problem. It is a miracle, a gift, a teaching, a celebration. Thanksgiving acknowledges the miracle of life - every gift - and saying "you're welcome" is a kind of thanksgiving in itself. It acknowledges the gift of thanks. It says that we live in a world of beautifully interacting thankfulness. It affirms that we live in a world awash with treasures, with miracles and blessings, that we are blessed with an endless array of people, moments, experiences, surprises, magic, curiosities, and beautiful coincidences to which our only delighted, ecstatic, and unchanging response should be thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving is the soul's acknowledgment that all is well, that life is a grand and beautiful gift, that all we have to do is carry ourselves to the altar of life with a shouted breath of thanksgiving. Give thanks

Empathy

Suddenly, we are willing to see and to serve. .....we know the grace of being able to look at another's suffering and say, "I see your hurt. I see the tragic battering of your spirit. I understand your need and I'm here to feel it with you, to show you that you are no longer alone."

This is the bath of empathic compassion that arises from the level of our own soul and washes over the ailing personality, wiping its tears, washing its feet, cleansing its wounds. With such an elegant embracing of another, we can truly feel with them.

We do this on the spiritual level. In a moment of grace, we open the frame of the context and start asking the larger questions: How can I love in this situation? What must I understand about this other person in order to gather him into a healing embrace of emotion? How can I quietly, gracefully join with him in his suffering?

Since we remember that we are really all part of one great soul, we can see our beloved as ourselves, and know that we can give without end, without harm. And we know we can give everything. We can give not only our material possessions but our words, our bodies, our insights, our time, our money, our empathy, our listening, and our compassion.

My own parents, married forty-seven years, always called one another "Dearie".  
"Dearie," one of them would call out. "What is it, Dearie?" the other would always respond, as if to say, Whatever you need, I will give it to you, whatever you ask, I will do it gladly. The antiphony of their "Dearies" was a sweet music that punctuated my young life. To me it meant that they saw one another as equal in spirit, and that in that great love they were always willing to serve one another. They called each other "Dearie" to their dying day.

Generosity is circle that returns unto itself. The more we give, the more we have. And in that state of generosity, willing spiritual sharing, we ourselves are healed.  For when are generous, we can see the vast abundance that is also there for us. This is true generosity because no one is excluded. We are drawn together, united by it. Through it we have a taste of union. It grants us ease and gives us the grace of knowing that life is more than an endless struggle. Indeed it is gracious, generous, and kind.

Aliveness
Aliveness is energy. It's the juice,the vitality, and the passion that wakes up our cells every morning. It's what makes us want to dance. It's the energy that moves a relationship from the status quo to something grander and much more expansive, something that makes our hearts beat faster, our minds, and our eyes open wider than ever before. Everything is of interest to a person who is truly alive, whether it's a challenge, a loving moment, a bucket of grief, or a glimpse of beauty.

What are you being? What are you choosing to be? Is it loving? Is it caring? Healing?You can be more of that no matter what you are doing. Yet, the magic of it is, the more of that your are BEING, the more what you are DOING will fall perfectly into place to allow you to "be" even more of that!Trust this process. It works.You will discover that forms - physical ways to "be" a thing - will suddenly start to just "show up".Beingness becomes form.

Life is pointless...and that is God's greatest gift.

The only way to find out what you know is to call upon yourself to know it.

A slut shares her sexuality the way a philanthropist shares his money — because they have a lot to share, because it makes them happy to share it, because sharing makes the world a better place.

“Easy”: Is there, we wonder, some value in being difficult?

To believe that God doesn't like sex is like believing that God doesn't like you: we all wind up carrying a secret shame for our own perfectly natural sexual desires and fulfillments. We prefer the beliefs of a woman we met who is a devoted churchgoer. She told us that when she was about five years old, she discovered the joys of masturbation in the back seat of the family car, tucked under a warm blanket on a long trip. It felt so wonderful that she concluded that the existence of her clitoris was proof positive that God loved her.

We have been taught by our culture that when our partner has sex with another, we have lost something. Not to sound dumb, but we are confused. What have we lost?

We measure the ethics of a good slut not by the number of his partners, but by the respect and care with which he treats them.

It is amazing to us to think … that most people in our culture have never had a chance to watch another person enjoy sex. No wonder we worry so much about our appearance.

Joe was very possessive. I was perfectly faithful. He would beat me, screaming imprecations, 'You slut!' when another man looked at me. After I left, I decided he was right — I am a slut, I want to be a slut, I will never promise monogamy again. After all, why would any care who I fucked? I will never be a piece of property again, no matter how valuable that property is considered. Joe made a feminist of me. A feminist slut.

 Myth #3: Loving someone makes it OK to control his behavior.

Sex is for pleasure, a complete and worthwhile goal in and of itself. People have sex because it feels very good, and then they feel good about themselves. So we are proud to reclaim the word “slut” as a term of approval, even endearment. To us, a slut is a person of any gender who has the courage to lead life according to the radical proposition that sex is nice and pleasure is good for you.

Some people consider any form of sex education to be child abuse, and many do not feel that children should have any information at all about adult sexual activities. …How are we to teach our children to say 'no' to an abusive adult if we are not frank about what it is that they should say no to?

We see ourselves surrounded by the 'walking wounded' — by people who have been deeply, if not irrevocably, injured by fear, shame, and hatred of their own sexual selves. We believe that happy connected sex is the cure for these wounds, that it is important, possibly even essential, to most people's sense of self-worth, to their belief that life is good. We have never met anyone who had low self-esteem at the moment of orgasm.

We've … been called “indiscriminate” in our sexuality, which we resent: we can always tell our lovers apart.

 When both genders feel free to answer 'yes' or 'no' with no concern for anything but their own desires, a truer understanding, and a more positive sexuality, can be achieved.

Dossie tells the story of a woman friend of hers back in the '70s who, as an experiment, sat patiently in a singles' bar one night, being approached by many men, until finally one to whom she felt attracted came along and began to flirt. She asked him nicely if he would like to come back to her place and fuck. He swallowed his ice. It took the poor fellow a couple of minutes before he could talk coherently again, and when they actually got to her place he found himself impotent. That's how deeply ingrained some of these cultural stereotypes can be.

[Wilhelm] Reich theorized that without the suppression of sexuality and the imposition of anti-sexual morality, you could not have an authoritarian government, because people would be free from shame, and would trust their own sense of right and wrong. Such people are unlikely to march to war against their wishes, and we would like to think they would be unlikely to agree to operate the death camps too.

If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose--because it contains all the others--the fact that they were the people who created the phrase 'to make money.' No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity--to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words 'to make money' hold the essence of human morality.

"Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns--or dollars. Take your choice--there is no other--and your time is running out."

The above is an excerpt from Atlas Shrugged, © Copyright, 1957, by Ayn Rand

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