However you slice it, Intensity is always relative. Like the story of how to boil a frog, it depend on what you are used to experiencing. If you are used to a lot of drama and hardship, less intensity will feel foreign, boring, perhaps even dangerous or sad. If you are used to a peaceful life, intensity may be measured in how beautiful the sunset was tonight, and not in how many gunshots were heard near your home.

Intensity has a volume control knob of a sort, but it goes in multiple directions. Intensity is a multidimensional experience, and it all depends on where you stand. Not everyone enjoys intensity, but most people have a kind of intensity they enjoy, or a level at which they feel more alive. Intensity in and of itself is neutral, but the experience of it is always subjective.

When you are looking for intensity, it is easy to ramp it up. If you can’t find it in one place, you can keep moving until you find it somewhere else. If you cannot find the intensity of love or joy or pleasure, you can find the intensity of anger or mischief or running for your life. You can strike out at various targets, intentionally or with whatever comes to hand.

Be aware of the level of intensity you seek, and how you inspire it. Ask yourself what it is you are hoping to find.

You may actually be looking for love. You may be seeking inspiration. Perhaps you are hoping for a response to you, any reaction at all, just to tell you that you are alive, you are visible, you are seen. But be cautious – who do you want to see you, acknowledge you, and why?

Consider both the source and the purpose of your intensity, and notice the methods by which you engage, and the outcome of your approach. When you are easily overwhelmed, intensity finds you without being invited, and you may need to consider better protection for your psyche. When you are looking for just a thrill, you might ask yourself what you are running from, which of your gifts you are avoiding, what inner self you are forsaking in your quest.

There is enough intensity in life for life to flourish. If you have not found your way to harmony with all of it, and to your ability to calibrate for your particular needs, keep experimenting. It is a process without end. ❀

What we mean by this is to include your whole self in your regard. Include others’ whole selves as well, the parts you agree with and the parts you do not. The parts that annoy you and the parts that attract. The parts you find acceptable and the parts that repel. Include it all.

You are more than the sum of your parts, but without the entirety of your self, you will never be all of yourself. Making particular demands on yourself in order to include aspects in your regard is called conditional love, and believe us – It Does Not Work.

Nobody responds well to rejection, which is exactly what exclusion is. When you decide to only love your body at a certain weight or fitness level or functionality or behavior on command, that is excluding entire huge swaths of your own very human condition. It is unreasonable and unnecessary and it does not get positive results.

Have some curiosity about aspects of yourself you have rejected. What if it is included, in the package of you, to have warts? What if it is included to sometimes belch? Are you allowed to get older and wrinkled? Are you allowed to have folds in your skin at all? There is no stretching and growing and becoming without those folds, so you might want to include them in your inventory of things you cannot live without.

To include the whole kit and kaboodle, of yourself and of others, is to accept a cosmic invitation to a mysterious and intriguing joy ride. You can be prickly and sweet. You can be intelligent and also not bright. You might mean well and do poorly by someone.

Each human is a walking box of paradox, and the sooner you can accept all your bits and pieces, the sooner they will seem to fit together. And that makes you whole. And that makes you greater than the sum of all your parts. Even the ones you dislike. They have something to offer as well, you know.

Some people feel that anger is a distasteful thing. Now to be angry all the time for no reason and to take it out on others, that is an annoying habit that will not get you anywhere. But mostly this kind of thing happens when a person rejects their own anger, vowing that it has no home, it is bad, it is wrong.

When anyone is excluded like that, they are liable to bang on the door. Anger does have a place in the world, and in the human experience. There are plenty of times it is called for and it brings, ultimately, protection. So it requires inclusion for any human to be whole

Bring your whole self with you, wherever you go. ❀

The emotion of delight is often confusing for humans. There are so many elements to feel all the time, about feelings one is having and whether or not one should. For some reason, over time, humans seem to grow shy about the simple, deep directness of delight.

Delight is fundamental. It is simple. It is safe. It is a blossoming sensation, arising from within the heart and mind. It can be as easy as a laugh, breaking forth in spontaneous combustion of the soul, a little blip of joy escaping and then bursting like a bubble in air.

Delight is sometimes anticipated, which can either increase or decrease the actual experience of delight. Your choice. Your view. Your perspective.

Allowing yourself to be surprised by the world – for some people, that is a challenge. But for the moments when you rest in confidence of the space the world holds for you, any beauty, any connection, any glimpse of the holy nature of existence can bring delight.

It is not often thought of in scripture, but simply to be in the world is the delight of the gods, who cannot fully incarnate because of their nature. They find delight everywhere on Earth. They do not, as some worry, delight in the suffering of mortals. But they do wonder, occasionally, at the lack of delight mortals show.

When did you all become jaded, and tired, and spent? Do you not glance up in your dusty cell to note the fragile beauty of the new-spun spider’s web? And do you not, when she catches a fly, delight? Not for the woe of the insect entrapped, but for the demonstration of the arachnid’s art, and of course, the prospect of their supper. And do you not, for that moment of delight, forget the sorrow of being yourself, trapped in the world?

Delight is the path to liberation, spiders, flies, et al. ❀