Patience and Focus Win Every Time

[sabrinamari]

In 2004 I stumbled on a meditation group in Princeton, NJ. At one of the first sessions I attended, I saw a videotape of a workshop by a woman I had never heard of. Her advice was some of the best I had ever heard for growing through pain and tumult; in my personal world, I contextualized it as a detailed guide for walking through the challenges of Neophyte and Second Degree.

As I went back each week for the next session, the guidance kept getting better and better, and more and more spot-on. At the end of 2004 my marriage ended, and these teachings were a core resource for me as I sought to walk through the chaos of The Tower with integrity and wisdom.


I told myself that I would find these tapes and buy them, and make them---or parts of them---available to myself and to any Blue Star people who wanted to work with me on personal growth (especially Neophytes, Second Degrees, and anyone facing The Tower).

The problem: these tapes were rare and hard to get. They were available only to members of the monastic order to which this woman belonged. I looked online, I asked around, but to no avail. "They are very expensive," a Buddhist nun told me, "and usually available only to Buddhist study groups",

I will get them, I thought to myself. Eventually, I will find them and I will get them and I will figure out how to use them to help myself and anyone who works with me in the future.

Every six or seven months, I scanned the net for them. No luck.

Today, I found them, They are still expensive. But they are now available on DVD. I found them through a "coincidental" series of links arising from my enrollment in Pema's Omega workshop. Or perhaps, they found me.

Interestingly:

They are a perfect incentive to get me started on my business(es). I have decided that if I earn the money to buy them from work outside of my daily job, I can acquire them. Regular pay, however, will continue to go towards necessities, building a larger emergency fund and retirement investing.


The lessons I take from this experience:

1. The primary tool for progress is patience and a refusal to give up. Just be careful that you are refusing to give up on the *right things*!

2. If you keep yourself aimed at a clear goal (I want to learn THIS THING....I want to be happy and fulfilled in THIS PARTICULAR WAY...and you stay aimed on your goal, but remain flexible about how you get there, you will get there.

Comments

[eoma-p.livejournal.com]

The word I thought of was synchronicity, but I'm not sure that's quite what I mean.

The internet is an amazingly potent tool for navigating paths to the right place at the right time. I think things come into our lives at the right time, even if it's not clear why this time is write.

[sabrinamari.livejournal.com]

Good point!

[treadwells.livejournal.com]

Hi, I would be keen to know what they are - feel free to email me if you don't want to list the title here (I'm on christina - AT - treadwells-london.com). Thanks for your postings on this stuff, like goals and focus and money. I find it really inspiring. You even prompted me to look at my credit card interest rates, and I discovered they charge ALOT for cash withdrawals, which I did not know a few years ago when I would use it like a cash card. I also discovered I am carrying a cash balance at that high rate! I am fixing this pronto. Thanks for being a beacon of courage and sanity around earth issues.
C
PS. We have never met but I was an old friend of George Marvil, Kenny and Tzipora in the mid 1980s.

[sabrinamari.livejournal.com]

Christina,

I know of you well. You were very important to Geo, and much beloved by him, so I count you as a friend.

I have no problem posting the link to these tools, but I must warn you: they are Pema's modern Western interpretation of a one thousand year old text, "The Way of the Bodhisattva," by Shantideva. Read on its own, the book contains some sections that are difficult to comprehend for someone not born a thousand years ago in another cultural context. For modern readers, a guide is frequently necessary (in my opinion).

With Pema's guidance via her taped workshops, opaque passages become as clear and pragmatic as the daylight, and it is all too easy to understand how they relate to everyday life.

About the DVDs: it would be crazy for me to hold back advice designed to help the world over a thousand years ago! So the link to Pema's interpretive DVDs is here:

http://pemachodrontapes.org/videos.htm

The particular ones I am speaking of are V95, V99, V110 and V115. I saw only parts of the first two, but my intent is to buy them all.

IMPORTANT: I probably wouldn't start here if I had never encountered Pema, though. I would start by reading one of her own books or listening to it on audio tape. Two especially good ones are:

"The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times," and

"When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times"

You can find them here:

http://pemachodrontapes.org/books.htm

You can also find them very inexpensively here, along with reader reviews:

The Places that Scare You:

http://www.amazon.com/Places-That-Scare-You-Fearlessness/dp/1590304497/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1203944483&sr=1-1

When Things fall Apart:

http://www.amazon.com/When-Things-Fall-Apart-Difficult/dp/1590302265/ref=pd_bbs_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1203944565&sr=1-3

Specific advice for confronting and overcoming negative habitual patterns and addictions of all kinds:

http://www.amazon.com/Getting-Unstuck-Breaking-Habitual-Encountering/dp/159179238X/ref=pd_bbs_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1203944625&sr=1-2






Good luck!

[sabrinamari.livejournal.com]

And thank you very much for your positive feedback. It encourages me to continue, and makes me very happy. Thank you!

I am delighted at the financial victory you describe, by the way. :)