Ten Strategies Toward Becoming Centered

1. Allow life to unfold. Be mindful with your thoughts, words, and actions. Trust others to do the same. Live your life, not the lives of others.
2. Avoid blaming. Blaming snaps us back to the past, as if re-living an event might change it. Accept this moment as the only true reality. Allow the past to pass. Be forgiving; seek kindness.
3. Relax; avoid seeking perfectionism. Accept people for who they are. To those who seem authentic and kind, invite them into your world as you choose. To those who seem to be guided by suffering (and therefore, bring suffering to others), excuse them from your life. Set boundaries.
4. Bring resolution to all conversations, conflicts, and commitments. Follow through, enjoying the sense of calm that results from feeling the resolve of tension in thoughts, actions, or promises completed.
5. Take time everyday to appreciate the interconnectedness of life. Too often we can feel constricted by a self-inflicted sense of uniqueness. As if the flaws of our being, our struggles, our traumas have happened only to us. We all suffer. We all have caused suffering. We all have been helpful. We are mostly alike. Moving toward a place that honors our ability to share our authenticity with others allows us to be free...to breathe more deeply.
6. Enjoy the candor of life. Often we're taught to deny our feelings, fears, hopes, dreams. Open up and allow your true self to be fully present.
7. Call things what they are. Don't try to dress up life, or hide. The beauty of life is found in its blemishes. Great things happen to us. And lousy things do to. Accepting reality allows us to be more fully present, not having to create a false world of how we wish things were. Accept this moment.
8. Be trustworthy in all your thoughts, words, and actions. Be sincere.
9. Allow yourself to perceive, think and interpret, feel, desire, or imagine in your own way. Extend that honor to others, too.
10. Give others space to have their own code of life. Don't assume your pathway is the right one for everyone else. We all find our way in our own ways. Extend a hand, but respect the boundaries, beliefs, dreams, and hopes of others.

Re-Centering; Taking Another Breath

Wherever I am, my inner strength is present.
Whoever comes my way is part of my learning curve.
I have the power to change how I think.

Appreciating the journey of everyone is what gives my own journey purpose.
Peaceful feelings follow peaceful actions.

I need not be attracted to the chaos of others.
No argument demands my attention, nor participation.

Acting, rather than reacting, is blissful. To witness another's journey is all I ever have to do.
My teachers are everywhere. Silence may be the best response I can make in myriad situations.

There are two kinds of business: your business and none of your business.

Taking no hostages is the surest way to peace.

Adapted from "let go now: embracing detachment"