We can act from distress or we can act from peace. Someone once said that we are either goal-achieving or crisis-producing. In one way or another, we are always creating. When we are centered in peace, trusting the Good of this life, we find a depth of energy and clarity to our movements and our actions. We come to feel inwardly sustained and nurtured, and this gives us the capacity to manifest powerful and lasting results in our world. There is nothing flimsy or trivial about real peace. Peace burns in our hearts like a fiery flame, achieving great results. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, was once asked the key to his success as a minister. He said, "It's simple. I set myself on fire, and people come to watch me burn." When our life seems too tepid, too lukewarm, when we are in a holding pattern, a mental gridlock, perhaps we too need to catch on fire inwardly, to become aglow with the flame of peace. 

Hope is a decision. Hope is a choice we can make in the face of uncertainty, doubt or fear. Hope is an action we can take which releases us from feeling stuck, worried or unclear about how to proceed. Hope shines a light in our hearts that allows us to feel lifted, strengthened and encouraged to go forward in our life on this earth. We choose to feel hope in our hearts that life is good, that we are OK, that peace and freedom are at hand for ourselves and for all. We decide to feel hope now and let our spirits be lifted. 

What does freedom mean to us right now? I have a friend who freezes his mashed potatoes into ice cube trays. Then when he feels like having mashed potatoes, he decides how many cubes he wants, say two or three, and he pops them into the microwave, and the precise portion is instantly available. Sometimes we see our lives in terms of tidy categories, which we measure and dole out to ourselves. We use, what Alan Watts called, the Euclidean mind to measure: for or against, pleasure or pain, success or failure, and we find ourselves boxed into a very narrow way of seeing the Good of this life. Freedom comes to us when we release the need to pin everything down into fixed categories, when we let go of our need to measure our experience based on how we think it 'ought' to be, when we open our minds and open our hearts to a larger way of seeing and being in this life. 

Driving to and from work each day, we see sudden eruptions of beauty on each street. A block that last week was gray, barren and lifeless, today is filled with green lawns, delicate blossoms of crimsons, yellows, whites and pinks. Natural beauty nurtures our sensitivity; spring touches our hearts with the joy of sparkling new life. Each day, as we drive along our accustomed way, we see what was tired and old bursting with fresh green living vitality. We can meditate deeply on the radiance we see all around us. Yet this dazzling display of outer spring fireworks also has an inner subjective quality. Deep within our hearts there is a yearning to release the gray winter doldrums and feel fresh, young, innocent and newly alive. It's time. Let spring shine forth from our hearts now. 

As a lady was leaving a party, she said to her hostess, "Those brownies were so delicious that I ate four." The hostess replied, "You really ate seven, but who's counting?" Sometimes we find ourselves very busy counting and calculating. T.S. Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock said, "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons." Sometimes we are counting instead of living our life. We count— how much longer 'til I get off work; how much longer 'til I get finished shopping; how much longer 'til I get home; how many more dishes 'til I am through washing dishes. Yet we really only wash one dish — the one that is right in front of us. That's the only dish that we will ever wash. Animals realize this better than we do. They never become bored with repetition because they never count how many have happened or how many are left to go. We can release the need to count things, to keep score, and so fully enjoy this moment and whatever it brings as a great gift of life. When we count out our dance steps: one, two, one, two, we forget that life is a dance. 

John Cage, the composer, once said, "I'm trying to become unfamiliar with what I do." Giacometti, the artist, said that each new painting he did was as if he were painting for the first time. When we become too routine and habitual in what we do each day, we lose the sense of joy, energy and enthusiasm for our life. We can release our routines and feel an immediate surge of openness to new possibilities. Why continue trivial habits and outworn customs that no longer give meaning or joy to our lives? Let's embark on uncharted and unfamiliar paths so that we experience the excitement of new adventure in our lives. 

The Chinese symbol for crisis is also the symbol for opportunity. Many times in life, we experience situations that confront us with an apparent crisis; yet a crisis is also a call to action— it is an opportunity to have a breakthrough, a healing or new realization. A problem calls us to find a solution. Some years ago, the old Coronado Hotel in San Diego was in the process of being renovated. The plans called for the installation of new elevators. The hotel janitor complained to the architects, "If you put those new elevators inside the lobby, the lobby will be in shambles for months." "How would you do it?" one architect asked sarcastically. "I would put the elevators on the outside of the building," replied the janitor. And that's what they did. When faced with a crisis remember the Chinese symbol: crisis and opportunity are one. 

There seem to be two ways of spirituality which at first glance appear to be contradictory and mutually exclusive. One person may be on the path to enlightenment; for him or her, the goal of life is final liberation, freedom from all bondage and all pain and sorrow. This person seeks, as the Buddha put it, "the end of sorrow." Another person may be seeking salvation, to have his or her soul saved from sin. It's interesting that sin is sometimes defined as: the state of separation from God. And the seeker of enlightenment is seeking liberation from all the veils of illusion which keep him from union with God or ultimate reality. So even though on the surface the quest for salvation and the search for enlightenment may seem very different, it may simply be that, though the approaches may differ, the end— oneness with Ultimate Reality or Truth or God— may be the same. 
 

Jean Cocteau once said, "The moment is the only thing that counts." What in this now moment is calling, is beckoning, to us? This moment is always the moment in which we can have our breakthrough, our realization, our insight. There's always a choice in how we spend our now moments. We can refuse the moment, let it pass into a vague dream of the future or a regret of the past, or we can boldly, fearlessly enter this moment and allow it to reveal its hidden discovery to us. Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote, "We live in the past or the future to escape the brutal reality of the present." But the present only seems brutal when we are resisting whatever is trying to reach out to us in the present. When we let go to this present moment now, we find ourselves coming into agreement with what is actually happening both within ourselves and within our lives. Let's decide to live in this moment and let it reveal to us its hidden splendor. 

Picasso said, "It takes a very long time to become young," meaning that we each have to go through a gradual process of learning to be innocent. It is not the sophisticated cynic who is deeply in touch with the heart of life; it is the person who has come into a child-like receptivity and openness to the beauty and goodness of this world. We can become so cultivated and entrenched in opinions and viewpoints that we miss this gift of simple openness. If we are too artificial, we miss the genuine and natural in life. If we are too detached and analytic, it's difficult for us to find the place of the heart. Let's surrender ourselves to an innocence that sees this life with eyes fresh, young, open and sensitive. 
As William Blake says: "To see the world in a grain of sand And Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold infinity in the palm of your hand And eternity in an hour." 

When we reverse a pair of binoculars by looking through them from the wrong end, even things that were close appear far away. When we turn the binoculars around and look through the correct focus, things are seen clearly in all their immediacy. Sometimes in our life, our vision of people and things is distorted, and we are seeing as if through reverse binocular lenses— everything looks distant and out of focus. When this is happening, it may look to us as if people and situations we are seeing are being aloof and distant from us— but it may just be our own viewpoint which needs to change. A woman was remarking to a friend how streaked and dirty her neighbor's laundry was. The friend pointed out, "It's not her laundry that is dirty, it is your window." When we clear our vision, it's surprising how many problems and obstacles melt away and how that which seemed so far from us becomes close at hand, warm and friendly. As Blake said, "When the doors of perception are cleansed, everything appears as it is— infinite." And, we might add, close, warm and friendly. 

Dylan Thomas, the poet, once said, "Somebody's boring me...I think it's me." Sometimes we feel, both inwardly and outwardly, that we are continually confronting resistances. And our solution to resistance can be like that of the horse in George Orwell's book, Animal Farm. When conditions seem to be deteriorating around him, the horse's response is always, "I will work harder." Yet in trying to overcome resistance by working harder, we find that we may just be digging our hole deeper. Someone once said that a problem can never be solved on the same level of consciousness on which it exists. Einstein said, more simply and elegantly, "To solve a problem, go to where the problem is not." We overcome resistance neither by fighting it nor by repressing it, but by discovering another way of being right in the midst of it. As David Carradine once wrote, "There's always a third way, and it's not a combination of the other two ways. It's a different way." The way to overcome resistance, either inner or outer, is to find the third way, the way that releases us to our freedom. Discover your way. 

Idries Shah cites this Sufi saying: "He who has made a door and a lock, has also made a key." At times we have all made a door and a lock, a mental image that locks someone up in our mind. We have all held someone in our mind in such a way that we can't imagine her or him being different from the view we hold. We all know the door and the lock; perhaps we also need to remember the key: we can "set the prisoners free" of our mental image of them. We don't need to hold anyone in the bondage of our mind. Anyone we are troubled by because "he won't change" we can release from our mental construct. When we set the people in our lives free from our images and expectations of them, we feel a tremendous sense of release and relief and realize what a heavy burden we have been carrying. People really do very well once we release them from the pressure (conscious or subconscious) of our expectations. Set everyone free now, and notice how good you will feel. 

Sometimes we get too comfortable in our arrival. We can be resting too long on our laurels and discover that we are stuck in complacency. Then it's time to redecide to deepen our inner commitment to our spiritual journey. There's a great difference between reaching the point of just coping with our lives and of deciding to allow ourselves to be transformed. Spiritual transformation means that we can catch on fire with a new feeling of energy and wonder and joy within us. All of our relationships begin to change. We suddenly feel excited and empowered as each day we awaken to a dawn of new and creative possibilities. And as we are changed and transformed, so is our world transformed; peace replaces strife, sorrow dissolves into joy and doubt melts into certainty. 

There is a Hasidic story about two young spiritual aspirants who are having an argument about the true path of spiritual unfoldment. One student argues that the path consists of struggle and strenuous effort to overcome one's human defects. The other student says, "No, the path is one of surrender, release and letting go." Unable to resolve their differences, they bring the matter to their spiritual teacher. The first student says, "Isn't the path one of struggle and persistence?" The teacher says, "You're right." "But Rabbi," says the second student, "isn't the path the way of surrender?" "You're right," says the teacher. An onlooker says, "But Rabbi, they both can't be right." "You're right, too," says the teacher. There's a point where we quit arguing with our life and come into agreement with all things. We discover that each is right at the level of his understanding. We really don't have to waste time and energy trying to convince others of our truth— instead, we can affirm their truth as true for them and our truth as true for us. 

Many times we really want to let go of a situation or a way we're feeling about ourselves, but we just can't seem to do it. Perhaps we can't let go because we are still clinging to our concern about the outcome. If we let go completely of something, what will happen? What will happen to me? Will I win? What if I lose? What if I don't get anything out of it? What if I let go, and then nothing else comes along for me? Letting go implies a kind of trust that life will take care of us, that we won't be abandoned or forsaken. It's the same kind of trust we have that when we go to sleep at night, and we let go to sleep, we'll be taken care of, and we will awaken in the morning. We trust that as we walk along this earth, we won't fall off. We trust that the air we breathe and food we eat will support and sustain and nourish us. So why not let go and trust that this life is our friend and is always there for us? 

A paradigm is a new way of perceiving reality. Whenever something comes along in our lives which alters the way we see things or do things, we are experiencing a paradigm shift. For instance, many of us now have TiVos or other devices that allow us to record programs which we can then see whenever we want. Most people also have cell phones which allow us to transact our business while outside the house or office. It's interesting that these paradigm breakthroughs in technology all alter the way we experience time. We don't have to wait at home for a phone call or to watch a certain TV program— we have creative options available which give us choices as to how we will manage our time. As great and significant as these outer paradigm shifts are, there is an even greater paradigm shift that can occur within each of us. We can have an inner awakening that profoundly changes our perception of reality by opening our heart to the oneness of all life. 

When we get too accustomed to our everyday life, we need a surprise of some kind to give us a feeling of happy wonder at the sheer fact of just being alive. When we feel like we know everything that is going to happen today, our life becomes too certain of itself. It's like knowing the conclusion of a mystery movie long before we reach the end. We become bored and disenchanted when we know too much about the outcome— that's why the director creates a surprise ending. So with our day. If we anticipate how it is all going to go for us, we have already made up our minds: everything is predictable— we know that we know that we know— it all. There is a weariness that comes from too much calculation. It's better to be open to the unexpected windfall, the happy surprise, filling our day with joyous anticipation of the new. 

A coffee store owner once said, "Coffee is my religion," meaning that he had such total dedication to his profession, he put so much of himself into it, that, for him, it was like a spiritual calling. We think of David, who danced before the Ark of the Covenant "with all his might" to show his love of God. What we do with our whole heart, our total being, there is how we express our religion, our deepest spiritual perception and understanding. Idries Shah tells the story of a meatball seller who, when he saw a great spiritual sage take a bite from a meatball, fainted and fell to the ground on the spot. When he was revived and asked what had happened, he said that he had been selling meatballs and watching people eat them for thirty years. He could tell the manner of the person's inner nature by how he eats a meatball. When he saw that man take a bite from the meatball, he was overcome with spiritual ecstasy. Never had he seen such spiritual perfection in the eating of a meatball. What you do reflects who you are -- do it with excellence. 

Why not let ourselves be awakened in our hearts this Easter season. Sometimes we go along mechanically, one day to the next, without even noticing the changes in the season. Everything around us is vibrant and pulsating with new life. We too can have an inner renewal right now. This is a perfect time for our hearts to come alive in a new and unexpected and joyous way. This Easter, as we celebrate religious renewal, let's also celebrate and affirm a personal sense of renewal from way down deep inside of ourselves. We are, after all, children of this life. As nature undergoes a profound and dramatic transformation from winter to spring, so too do each of us undergo a similarly profound inner transformation. All the beauty of spring in nature exists in our hearts; let's have a joyous heart awakening to the real, the good, the beautiful and the true this Easter season.