Life on Earth is like living in a “loony bin.” If you don’t know that term, it means nuthouse or insane asylum. Not only, that, but all who comment on it are inmates themselves. The bars that divide us from ourselves are imaginary.

Since we can’t get out, we are resigned to live from mechanical emotions and they are toxic.

We have gotten used to our mechanical emotions and have tried to stop up the leaks with sugar, drugs or useless repetitive emotions.

This is how we live our human lives. Pets are not burdened with human toxicity; instead they are healers for us.

I have been on the path for a long time and I have learned nothing from books that I didn’t already know myself. Books are a distraction from the imperfect Now.

I also use chocolate, since I don’t have a pet. I dislike phone conversations, so I can’t lose energy by talking to people through a device. I am writing this from a device, but I don’t have to talk to it.

Right now I am inspired to write this essay. Earlier I had way too many cookies with a cup of indifferent tea.

Politics is like eating junk food; no one remembers that it is always one-sided. We put our emotions into it and come out all the worse.

If this brief essay inspires you to sigh, it has hit the mark. Don’t ask what you can DO about it. Instead, just realize that words, like sighs, are of the moment. And the moment is just a blip in consciousness.

Be a blip; it is quite enough for an already bloated and unwieldy world.

Love would have us know that we are fools, but it loves us anyway. And “anyway” is a powerful word.

Vicki Woodyard

I had an awful day yesterday due to my neuropathy. I told my friend that it is an invisible disease. No one can relate to you except someone else that has it.

These days I am trying not to fall, and mostly, I have succeeded.

I am useless as a spiritual guide except to be a bad example. But hey, the world is always in need of bad examples, right?

I stayed offline most of yesterday. Someone came to spray for the Carpenter Ants eating the wood on our back deck.

My writing feels so labored to me now. The usual inspiration is not available to me, for some reason.

I am preoccupied with the constant limits I am under. How to rise above them? The first step is to see the situation, as Vernon Howard used to say. Then you can see the solution.

There is only one solution for millions of situations and all of you already know what it is. The problem is that we forget that we can let go on the mental and emotional levels. The body is temporary housing. In youth we are unable to consider that. In middle age, we begin to have the feeling that the body is not our home. Approaching old age, we realize that has always been true.

Vicki has to move more slowly to avoid a fall. She has to accept that neuropathy affects everything that she does. When she is able to write, she only wants to piss and moan.

Her sense of humor comes through when she begins to write word after word about how she is doing. I suggest that there should be another Olympic event: Trying to get through the Eye of the Needle, for that is where I am right now.

I want to enter the kingdom of heaven, but I also want to have a decent quality of life. For this, I need to remember what needs be remembered.

I am That, and that’s that!

Vicki Woodyard

I

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I had an awful day yesterday due to my neuropathy. I told my friend that it is an invisible disease. No one can relate to you except someone else that has it.

These days I am trying not to fall, and mostly, I have succeeded.

I am useless as a spiritual guide except to be a bad example. But hey, the world is always in need of bad examples, right?

I stayed offline most of yesterday. Someone came to spray for the Carpenter Ants eating the wood on our back deck.

My writing feels so labored to me now. The usual inspiration is not available to me, for some reason.

I am preoccupied with the constant limits I am under. How to rise above them? The first step is to see the situation, as Vernon Howard used to say. Then you can see the solution.

There is only one solution for millions of situations and all of you already know what it is. The problem is that we forget that we can let go on the mental and emotional levels. The body is temporary housing. In youth we are unable to consider that. In middle age, we begin to have the feeling that the body is not our home. Approaching old age, we realize that has always been true.

Vicki has to move more slowly to avoid a fall. She has to accept that neuropathy affects everything that she does. When she is able to write, she only wants to piss and moan.

Her sense of humor comes through when she begins to write word after word about how she is doing. I suggest that there should be another Olympic event: Trying to get through the Eye of the Needle, for that is where I am right now.

I want to enter the kingdom of heaven, but I also want to have a decent quality of life. For this, I need to remember what needs be remembered.

I am That, and that’s that!

Vicki Woodyard

Dear Readers,

I am coming and going now. Sometimes on the blog and at other times on Facebook. I am still here for you energetically!

What did that sentence mean, “I am here for you energetically.
If you think words give meaning to your life, they do not!

Energy is our contribution to life and sometimes we muddy the waters instead of calming them. I know when I do that because I fall from grace.

Grace is so huge that we cannot actually fall out of it; it is the mind and emotions that seemingly fall.

So here we are on this broken planet and it is we that have broken it.

Repentance may sound like an old-fashioned word, but it is a living reality to those who drink from its cup.

Drinking from the cup puts us back in touch with our karmic destiny. We can fall back into the arms of grace.

Vicki Woodyard

Off the Hook

Entering the Tao requires that all mile markers be erased in favor of mere presence. This seems obvious to the heart, yet the head will have none of it. I decided to spend today at rest. Once I made that decision, the silence spilled all over the room. Everything was coated in it. The phone dared not ring. The TV remained off. Well, I did turn on the radio briefly in my bedroom, but it didn’t stay on long.

The point I want to get across is that there are no points. Even on newly sharpened pencils of the intellectual variety. All points wear down or break eventually. Even the Alps and Everest are susceptible to erosion.
We are horrified when our lives break down. We scream and yell and try to “get things done” to remedy whatever situation it is. And these situations cause us unmentionable sufferings. The mind persists in trying to handle them.

For some reason, my life is preternaturally quiet right now. I am choosing silence and it is choosing me. I write these words in a quiet room. It feels new but it is ancient in its origin. It requires nothing from me because it is me.

Dear  Friends,

I am just  visiting here, as we all are. We forget that our divinity is hidden from us so that we might develop as human beings. We all have work to do, both here and elsewhere.

The problem is that we are asleep to the fact that we must evolve, must dismantle the ego and the damage that it can do.

Humility increases as we surrender to our helplessness.

Faith increases as we call on God.

The world is not our home; we come from elsewhere.

I have been writing for decades now and I have most of the issues I had when I began my search for God.

This tells me that falling from grace is happening all day long.

What counts is that we get back up.

Rise up to the divinity within us all.

Surrender to that divinity and all will be well.

Vicki Woodyard

Dear Friends and Readers,

It is time to close my website down and post on Facebook only. Times have changed and it is just as effective for me to post on Facebook.

I am a writer by nature, so I will always be writing, just not here.

I am going to miss posting here, but find me on Facebook.

Wisdom is something that we draw on in silence when our words have wounded us and others.

The heart speaks easily when with those who have ears to hear.

I have written all these years “from the Real.”

Everything is destined, of that I am sure.

Love, Vicki

“Our story is our life’s burden.” That sentence came to me while rewatching one of my favorite kdramas. Oh, our story goes through its various stages and developments, but at the end, the story is dropped while the larger universal story goes on.

I love writing essays because they are unfamiliar to me until I look at the blank page and start to type.

Yesterday I ended up in the Emergency Room after I fell in the bathroom. I have neuropathy, but it still surprised me. I told Rob that I wanted to see if I broke anything, so off we trotted. I offered an excuse, “If I don’t go, I will spend the day wondering if I should have gone.”

And so he drove me there. It took him half an hour to walk from where he parked back into the ER. It was about a 4-hour wait before they took us back into a room. Then the doctor came in and said that nothing was broken. That was a relief. Today I am much sorer than I was yesterday.

Moral to the story: Go ahead and get it over with, whatever it is that you fear doing. And that is a “memo to myself.”

I am still tired from the adrenaline rush. I have been sitting around for two days now. I am still sore.

Have you spent your life regretting your life? I have! Vernon Howard said that we all have a cover story in order to be able to function in this world. But that doesn’t make it real, now does it?

I have always been happy when no one is around and I can drop the story line, which I have been repeating for decades now. And don’t tell me that you don’t have one. We all have our individual fabricated personalities that we kick into high gear when we around others. Well, the others have stories they wish that they could drop, too.

I took to the path with spiritual alacrity a long time ago, when I thought I could become enlightened. Allow me to type “giggle” here. It is funny that we are our own best friends and also our worst enemies.

At death, we will be unburdened. But what happens if we unburden ourselves totally in our private moments? We won’t know who we are, right? And then we will know ourselves for the very first time.

Vicki Woodyard

The Everyday

We live our human lives in the Everyday, and I capitalize it on purpose. If we live in the Everyday, what can we do to simplify things?

First of all, we should appreciate the things in our lives that are working for us. So on a regular basis, we need to move towards simplicity rather than complication. If we avoid this lesson, we may have to become a witness to the endless complications that are unnecessary.

My body has its limits and so do my mind and emotions. We need to watch what is going on and ask ourselves this: “Does what is going on in my life work for me?”

Since limits are important, we need to eliminate or cut down what makes us nervous, frightened or afraid. These clues are telling us that the world has too much dominance over us. We should study our desires because desire ties us to the karmic wheel.

Yes, I am studying what Vicki wants and needs, because we are all given individual lives. Careful study shows me that simplicity reduces desire. See this for yourself.

I throw in bits of my personal life in these essays to show my own vulnerability to being controlled by the mechanical, unconscious forces of life that drive everyone.

I am free when I know my wants and needs and only do the minimum things, thus leaving time to rise above time!

Vicki Woodyard

Lately, my essays have been tapering off. Rob is almost back to normal after his kidney stone surgery. So grateful to my sister for driving down from Pennsylvania to Atlanta. She has been our fairy godmother, for sure!

One big treat was that she went to The Jerusalem Market and came home with a huge array of their specialty desserts. She also brought home a meal, but the desserts were my favorite.

If anyone wants to have me write on a certain topic, let me know. I sense that my blog may be coming to its inevitable end. This brings up the quote from Casablanca, “Here’s lookin at you, kid.” And by that I mean my readers. Some of us go back decades now.

None of us remember how important it is to do our inner work, our energy work. And should we stop doing it, our world would be much less fulfilling. What I mean by that is that we are sleeping human beings. To remember yourself “always and everywhere” is the basis of The Work.

So with a wink and a nod, I close this brief note, knowing that there are still more notes to write, just not as regularly, perhaps.

Vicki Woodyard