I’m in the process of renewing my passport again. As required, I had my picture taken. They always give you two photos but the passport office only takes one. So I put the passport left over photo in my day timer and found other photos in there from previous passports.

In a way, it’s kind of shocking. Like when you get a new driver’s license and you see the picture that was terrible already gets worse.

Getting old sucks, but it beats the alternative!

Happy Friday !

I have been practicing om meditation for 1,067 days in a row. I and I’m sitting cross-legged 95% of the time. (I have a little stool that I use if it’s raining or for some reason I’m in the house and not outside)

some days, sitting cross-legged on the floor is quite pleasant. Other days it is not. Sometimes it is a struggle to sit for the 8 minutes that I meditate for every morning.

Sitting crosslegged is called Sukhasana, a yoga pose that involves sitting with the spine upright and hands resting on the knees or in the lap. The name comes from the Sanskrit words sukha, meaning “pleasant,” and asana, meaning “pose”

Sometimes pleasant, but not always.

At the same time, I sometimes have good days where I’m able to focus and days where I’m not able to focus so well. Controlling the monkey mind is sometimes an issue.

but it takes practice. Trying to meditate his meditating. We do the effort we get the results.

Always remember to meditate for at least 10 minutes a day, unless you don’t have time. In that case, meditate for at least an hour!

Have a great day!

Bill Wilson
This is the substance of a revealing letter which Bill Wilson wrote to a close friend who also had troubles with depression. The letter appeared in the “Grapevine” January, 1953.

EMOTIONAL SOBRIETY
“I think that many oldsters who have put our AA “booze cure” to severe but successful tests still find they often lack emotional sobriety. Perhaps they will be the spearhead for the next major development in AA, the development of much more real maturity and balance (which is to say, humility) in our relations with ourselves, with our fellows, and with God.

Those adolescent urges that so many of us have for top approval, perfect security, and perfect romance, urges quite appropriate to age seventeen, prove to be an impossible way of life when we are at age forty-seven and fifty-seven.

Since AA began, I´ve taken immense wallops in all these areas because of my failure to grow up emotionally and spiritually. My God, how painful it is to keep demanding the impossible, and how very painful to discover, finally, that all along we have had the cart before the horse. Then comes the final agony of seeing how awfully wrong we have been, but still finding ourselves unable to get off the emotional merry-go-round.

How to translate a right mental conviction into a right emotional result, and so into easy, happy and good living. Well, that´s not only the neurotic´s problem, it´s the problem of life itself for all of us who have got to the point of real willingness to hew to right principles in all of our affairs.

Even then, as we hew away, peace and joy may still elude us. That´s the place so many of us AA oldsters have come to. And it´s a hell of a spot, literally. How shall our unconscious, from which so many of our fears, compulsions and phony aspirations still stream, be brought into line with what we actually believe, know and want! How to convince our dumb, raging and hidden 閃r. Hyde’ becomes our main task.

I´ve recently come to believe that this can be achieved. I believe so because I begin to see many benighted ones, folks like you and me, commencing to get results. Last autumn, depression, having no really rational cause at all, almost took me to the cleaners. I began to be scared that I was in for another long chronic spell. Considering the grief I´ve had with depressions, it wasn´t a bright prospect.

I kept asking myself “Why can´t the twelve steps work to release depression?” By the hour, I stared at the St. Francis Prayer … “it´s better to comfort than to be comforted.” Here was the formula, all right, but why didn´t it work?

Suddenly, I realized what the matter was. My basic flaw had always been dependence, almost absolute dependence, on people or circumstances to supply me with prestige, security, and the like. Failing to get these things according to my perfectionist dreams and specifications, I had fought for them. And when defeat came, so did my depression.

There wasn´t a chance of making the outgoing love of St. Francis a workable and joyous way of life until these fatal and almost absolute dependencies were cut away.

Because I had over the years undergone a little spiritual development, the absolute quality of these frightful dependencies had never before been so starkly revealed. Reinforced by what grace I could secure in prayer, I found I had to exert every ounce of will and action to cut off these faulty emotional dependencies upon people, upon AA, indeed upon any act of circumstance whatsoever.

Then only could I be free to love as Francis did. Emotional and instinctual satisfactions, I saw, were really the extra dividends of having love, offering love, and expressing love appropriate to each relation of life.

Plainly, I could not avail myself to God´s love until I was able to offer it back to Him by loving others as He would have me. And I couldn´t possibly do that so long as I was victimized by false dependencies.

For my dependence meant demand, a demand for the possession and control of the people and the conditions surrounding me.

While those words “absolute dependence” may look like a gimmick, they were the ones that helped to trigger my release into my present degree of stability and quietness of mind, qualities which I am now trying to consolidate by offering love to others regardless of the return to me.

This seems to be the primary healing circuit: an outgoing love of God´s creation and His people, by means of which we avail ourselves of His love for us. It is most clear that the real current can´t flow until our paralyzing dependencies are broken, and broken at depth. Only then can we possibly have a glimmer of what adult love really is.

If we examine every disturbance we have, great or small, we will find at the root of it some unhealthy dependence and its consequent demand. Let us, with God´s help, continually surrender these hobbling demands. Then we can be set free to live and love: we may then be able to gain emotional sobriety.

Of course, I haven´t offered you a really new idea — only a gimmick that has started to unhook several of my own hexes´ at depth. Nowadays, my brain no longer races compulsively in either elation, grandiosity or depression. I have been given a quiet place in bright sunshine.”

Bill Wilson

Attitude is Everything

God Bless You!

a month ago, on the same day a SpaceX rocket “unplannedly disassembled” and was coming down to earth in a way that looked like multiple comets, resource strange slow-moving light in the sky that look like it had a white aura around it. I was at a restaurant in many many people saw it. It was very bizarre. The above blue spiral would be amazing to see. How astronomical!

I want to reiterate the value of getting rid of the alarm clock by the side of your bed with the bright display. I sleep so much better not knowing what time it is, not monitoring the time all night.

Have a wonderful day!

PS: this was sent to me on the 26th.

Sunrise

Sunset

Happy Monday !

last night I dreamed about some guy in a trench coat with a hat carrying a small but heavy tool bag. I was asleep thinking “I have to get me a coat like that, I think I already have that tool bag. I know other people with coats like that and I have to connect with them.”

I was wondering where I left my coat and tool bag.

it was a weird dream and I don’t know why I remember it.

I freaking hate coats like that. My father’s raincoat.

And there you have it, worst post of ohe year!

March 20th is international Day of happiness once again Finland ranked first for the 8th year in a row. I’m surprised and shocked that it’s not the Cayman Islands in first place!

There’s an article about the international Day of happiness HERE .

Have internationally happy day and year

The SpaceX Dragon left the ISS about midnight Cayman time last night beginning the 17 hour trip back to Earth.

Read the article HERE .

Their 8 day trip turned out to be 9 months long.

. I hope we get to follow their journey involving their readjustment to gravity.

Welcome home Suni & Butch!

Its very cold and windy here. Buy cold I mean low 70’s⁰F

Have a great day!

I have a great life. I know it and I’m grateful every day. But why can’t I control how I feel? A couple weeks ago on a Saturday, I decided to stay home, have a lazy day, made some eggs, read my book, lay in the Sun, and I really enjoyed my day. It was wonderful, it was so wonderful that I decided to do it again on Sunday.

Sunday I was miserable. I felt like I was wasting my life I was lonely and bored. All the stuff that was wonderful yesterday sucked today. I realized that the only thing different was my mood, and wondered why I could not control my mood?

What the hell can I control if it’s not that? The inside of my own head.

I have a great time pretty much all the time, except sometimes when I’m home alone. Hence the title of the post, walking to close to the cliff. How can I avoid my home? How can I avoid being alone in my own head?

Anyway it was a great weekend, went diving yesterday. Photos below.

And I got an award from my Garmin Dive Computer Watch.

Happy Monday! Have a great week!

we had a blood moon lunar eclipse last night, I got up but it was mostly cloudy. And I went right back to bed. I could see a cookie bite taken out of the Moon but the picture didn’t come out.

today’s Friday I’m looking forward to the weekend. It seems like it’s been a very long week.

I want to reiterate how good it is sleeping without the lighted clock in the room, and how good it is having music when you swim.

have a great weekend!