Do I honor my thirst to be alone for a while, or do I follow the longing in my heart to be together with friends and family?

For years I believed intimacy meant being together with my beloveds – all the time! Everyone I knew suffered greatly from my youthfully exuberant misunderstanding! It seemed natural for my life to revolve around the notion of ‘we’. Unfortunately, it did so without my knowing the ‘I’ that made up my part of the duo.

When I realized I could meet this ‘me’ by being alone with myself, I was relieved and scared. I didn’t know the notions of ‘alone’ and ‘together’ were sweet lovers quietly creating an unyielding partnership. From this perspective, I could see they were both equally essential ingredients for the intimacy I sought.

Without being aware ‘together’ and ‘alone’ were interdependent, I wreaked havoc in all my relationships. It never occurred to me that one couldn’t exist without the other—or that each defined itself, paradoxically, by the absence of the other and thus could never be separated!

Eventually, I was overjoyed at this insight – as were all my loved ones!

It is incredibly empowering to understand the interrelatedness of these two human experiences—for they are what build bridges between us.

But when you are polarized to one as better than the other (it doesn’t matter which one), neither being alone nor being together generates the joy and pleasure they can offer your heart.

I thought intimacy meant togetherness alone. I had an unconscious stand against aloneness as bad, and threatening to relationship. When you make one experience better than the other (it doesn’t matter which), the balancing between them is disrupted. Then a power struggle ensues, sapping your energy, exhausting your mind, and wounding your heart.

The need to be alone is a deep and pulsing urge to move inward. The need to be with others is a deep and driving push to move outward. By design, your nature embraces both—each a path to wisdom and counsel – one inner and one outer.

Knowing how to be both alone and together allow you to relax. You accept the texture, timbre, and feel of each experience for exactly what it is – part of nature’s circle of completion. This plays out again and again through the need to commune and the need to communicate – with others and with your own deepest Self.

Relating is an amazing opportunity to explore being truly alone – and being truly together. Embracing what unfolds within you, and between you and others, simply means being Present to what is happening.

Aloneness offers communion with the Whole. Togetherness offers communication with Its Parts. Knowing both, you can glimpse the Whole in all the Parts, and see every Part as essential to the Whole. From that moment on, the dilemma of aloneness vs. togetherness can never again be quite the same. What do you think?

Much Love,
Ragini

On the other side of the coin, John Assaraf of The Secret fame (book and movie) purports that expectation, through continued imagination of the desired goal, is the key to successful manifestation and bringing your dreams alive.

These two guidelines create confusion for anyone who wants both wealth on the material plane and freedom on the spiritual plane. You can’t follow both guidelines at the same time because they require opposite actions and relationships to expectation.

It would seem the only way to resolve the dilemma is to choose either one approach or the other. But this leaves you feeling unsatisfied and wondering what to do with the unfulfilled longing you didn’t choose.

And more importantly, if you’re not careful, you find yourself polarizing and perceiving the option you left behind as the enemy, hiding out in all kinds of places, just waiting to catch you off guard and finally grab your attention away from what you’ve determined as the right avenue to follow.

Marketplace Mystics usually want both material freedom and spiritual freedom, and aren’t too willing to give up either. But how do you come by both with these confusing directions? I’d say you really can’t—unless you know how to embrace this dilemma as a paradox. That just means allowing both seemingly antagonistic options to co-exist as one seamless, organic whole.

When you can embrace this kind of paradoxical dilemma, you can relax with both desires and walk down both paths at the same time. Doesn’t make sense logically, does it? And that’s because it’s a paradox. The trick is remembering that life isn’t logical, and all kinds of illogical things can and do occur. After all, isn’t that what magic is all about—the impossible becoming possible right before your eyes?

This is a mighty good reason to learn how to embrace paradox. In my experience, it makes the predicaments in life much easier to embrace and navigate with ease and success. What do you think?

From my heart to yours,

Ragini

If you’re really striving to be positive, present, and optimistic, and feel frustrated with your progress—but won’t quit trying—you may belong to the new breed of what I call ‘marketplace mystics’. When I discovered (with a deep sigh of relief) that this was where I finally ‘fit’, I got a lot happier, more accepting of myself and—my daily life became a lot more workable.

Could the same be true for you? I invite you to check it out. Here are a few defining characteristics of the ‘marketplace mystic’. See if any of them fit you, but you don’t need them all to be a member of this emerging community:

• You want practical wisdom for living your everyday life with greater awareness infused with a deep connection to life’s mystery as daily sustenance for your soul.
• Neither monastic living, 4 hours of meditation a day, nor surrender to a guru, is your cup of spiritual tea.
• You desire to embody your spiritual values in daily life through conscious living, presence, and understanding from the heart.
• You believe the external world and its challenges are equally important to the internal world and its challenges.
• You sense there must be some path through the paradoxes of our day that can bring social, political, and spiritual potential into a seamless and creative partnership.
• You are concerned with how to consciously live in the moment’s mystery with presence, understanding and acceptance of your role in it.
• You want to open your heart and release its capacity for true compassion.
• You’re curious about how to be both a human being and a divine being simultaneously – at work, at home, and in the privacy of your mind.
• You want to shape a better world by fulfilling your purpose as a human being and a spiritual being.

If you sense there’s something here for you, please come back again. Read—comment—question. I’d love to know what’s up in your quest for living consciously, and from the heart, in a way that’s practical for daily life.

I’m going to share a lot of what I’ve learned about the easiest way to fulfill these desires effectively and efficiently—and that’s by traveling through the land of Paradox.

Yep. Paradox! It’s so prevalent in our daily lives that it’s almost required to sit down and have a cup of tea together. I can tell you Paradox has a lot of wisdom and guidance to share. But you have to stop for a minute and give her a chance to share her secrets. You know, cozy up and get some rapport so she’ll start talking!

So I invite you to come back and visit as I share some of the amazing gems of wisdom and guidance I’ve learned from hanging out with Paradox. She’s a little confusing at first, but when she finally senses that you ‘get’ her, there’s no stopping her amazing outpouring of wisdom that starts to make everything clearer—and most important—more workable in daily life.

Much love,
Ragini