Pre-Marital Program with Dr. Todd Sojonky

Happy to invite you or someone you know to our pre-marital training program.   Through eight one hour sessions you will learn the keys to having and maintaining a wonderful marriage.   

Statistically couples who complete a pre-marriage training program have a significantly higher success rate of long and happy marriages.   Contact Dr. Sojonky to start you program now!

Self Worth

Just a reminder that a flower can go on never being noticed, acknowledged or appreciated.  Yet it still maintains it's beauty, fragrance, and purpose.

Remember that acceptance and approval from others is not a necessity for happiness and self worth.

Meditation

When people begin to meditate, they often say that their thoughts are running riot and have become wilder than ever before. But I reassure them and say that this is a good sign. Far from meaning that your thoughts have become wilder, it shows that you have become quieter and are finally aware of just how noisy your thoughts have always been. Don’t be disheartened or give up. Whatever arises, just keep being present, keep returning to the breath, even in the midst of all the confusion.    ---Rigpa

Messy Mondays: Ten Tips for a Happy Marriage

Life is right now - Jon Kabat-Zinn on Mindfulness

My Brother and Mother's Death's

I wrote this last Christmas and had some requests to re post

 so here it is.  Peace and goodness to all.

Life

It’s Saturday night after a week of listening to stories in therapy and reflecting on who I am as a therapist. We carry our experience with us and it contributes to how we interact with each other. Often the stories I hear are painful ones. Many times people find it hard to let go. I find it hard to let go. It’s been nearly five years since I watched my brother die at 49. Held his hand as he took his last breath. Then four months later my mom died. Died, I guess, of a broken heart. She shut down and went away.

It doesn't mean I know what you feel. It doesn't mean that I understand. Instead it informs my ‘Toddness,’ my sense of ‘I am’. Their deaths as painful as they were became a part of the tapestry which is me. And in that me I can be happy. Happy that they are a part of the fabric of my life. So when I listen I do not know what you feel, but all of me which is colorfully made listens with a careful ear.   Peace. Todd

The Importance of Play

Play energizes us and enlivens us. It eases our burdens. It renews our naturalsense of optimism and opens us up to new possibilities.- Stuart Brown

We don’t stop playing because we grow old;we grow old because we stop playing -George Bernard Shaw

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct -Carl Jung.

Play is the highest form of research. -Albert Einstein

We forget that the imagination at play is at the heart of all good work. -Julia Cameron

Grasping...

Grasping is the source of all our problems. Since impermanence to us spells anguish, we grasp on to things desperately, even though all things change. We are terrified of letting go, terrified, in fact, of living at all, since learning to live is learning to let go. And this is the tragedy and the irony of our struggle to hold on: Not only is it impossible, but it brings us the very pain we are seeking to avoid.

The intention behind grasping may not in itself be bad; there’s nothing wrong with the desire to be happy, but what we try to grasp on to is by nature ungraspable.

The Tibetans say that you cannot wash the same dirty hand twice in the same running river, and “no matter how much you squeeze a handful of sand, you will never get oil out of it.”   ---Rigpa

Happiness and Intimacy

7 Deadly Habits...

The Seven Deadly Habits of Truly Miserable People

Punishing, Complaining, Blaiming, Threatening, Nagging, Criticizing, Bribing!!!!!

Do these things and you will make everyone around you nuts! Dr. William Glasser believes that most of the emotional turmoil we experience is directly caused by our use of these seven deadly habits. We seem to have our wiring crossed. We spend half our lives trying to control the people and the institutions which fill our lives and it is sick! As we try harder to control those around us they quite naturally become resistant and resentful and soon our relationships are broken and disappointing. Although Glasser's theory (Choice Theory) seems quite simple it has worked well in therapy with thousands of people. Diagnosis and labelling (DSM-IV) are seen as damaging hostile tools that only hurt our relationships further. Instead Glasser says we simply need to replace the seven deadly habits with the seven habits of truly caring people.

Supporting, Encouraging, Listening, Accepting, Trusting, Respecting and Negotiating Differences!!!

If you work and live with these habits most of your problems will disappear. Try googleing the Glasser Institute to find out more. Peace. TJS.

Thanksgiving

“To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and to endure the betrayal of false friends. To appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded."   ---Ralph Waldo Emerson

Meditation

Everything can be used as an invitation to meditation. A smile, a face in the subway, the sight of a small flower growing in the crack of cement pavement, a fall of rich cloth in a shop window, the way the sun lights up flower pots on a windowsill. Be alert for any sign of beauty or grace. Offer up every joy, be awake at all moments, to “the news that is always arriving out of silence.”

Slowly, you will become a master of your own bliss, a chemist of your own joy, with all sorts of remedies always at hand to elevate, cheer, illuminate, and inspire your every breath and movement.

---Rigpa

Consider Others

Considering others to be just the same as yourself helps you to open up your relationships and give them a new and richer meaning. Imagine If societies and nations began to view one another in the same way; at last we would have the beginnings of a solid basis for peace on earth, and the happy coexistence of all peoples. -Rigpa Quote of the Day

Get Happy in 5 Minutes

Spiritual Practice

“If you spent one-tenth of the time you devoted to distractions like chasing romance or making money to spiritual practice, you would be enlightened in a few years!”     ---RAMAKRISHNA

Ram Dass - You Never Know

Life offers experiences that challenge our perception of happiness. What Ram Dass is saying is that all experience is a blessing. TJS

How we think of others...

One powerful way to evoke compassion is to think of others as exactly the same as you. “After all,” the Dalai Lama explains, “all human beings are the same—made of human flesh, bones, and blood. We all want happiness and want to avoid suffering. Further, we have an equal right to be happy. In other words, it is important to realize our sameness as human beings.”   Ripga Quote of the Day.

Happiness

A client and I were talking about how she was struggling to find meaning in her life. She had worked diligently to find a good job, purchase a nice home and find a charming husband. She had succeeded in all three but was still feeling 'alone.' I asked her to take time each day (10 min.) to breathe slowly in and out to the count of seven and to imagine caring for herself; as if she were holding a child. I then asked her what she saw in the child. She said, 'her soul, her spirit, her perfection.' All that found within! It is a place we neglect. It is a place we should all go. TJS.


In North America "we are taught that the way to achieve happiness is to change our external environment to fit our wishes. But this strategy doesn't work. In every life, pleasure and pain, gain and loss, praise and blame keep showing up, no matter how hard we struggle to have only pleasure, gain and praise. Buddhist psychology offers a different approach to happiness, teaching that states of consciousness are far more crucial than outer circumstances." ---Kornfield

Satisfaction

In Tibetan, the word for “body” is lü, which means “something you leave behind,” like baggage. Each time we say lü, it reminds us that we are only travelers, taking temporary refuge in this life and this body. In Tibet, people did not distract themselves by spending all their time trying to make their external circumstances more comfortable. They were satisfied if they had enough to eat, clothes on their backs, and a roof over their heads.

Going on, as we do, obsessively trying to improve our conditions, can become an end in itself, and a pointless distraction. Would people in their right mind think of fastidiously redecorating their hotel room every time they checked in to one?


-Rigpa Quote of the Day

The Seven Deadly Habits of Truly Miserable People

Punishing, Complaining, Blaming, Threatening, Nagging, Criticising, Bribing!!!!!

Do these things and you will make everyone around you nuts! Dr. William Glasser believes that most of the emotional turmoil we experience is directly caused by our use of these seven deadly habits. We seem to have our wiring crossed. We spend half our lives trying to control the people and the institutions which fill our lives and it is sick! As we try harder to control those around us they quite naturally become resistant and resentful and soon our relationships are broken and disappointing. Although Glasser's theory (Choice Theory) seems quite simple it has worked well in therapy with thousands of people. Diagnosis and labelling (DSM-IV) are seen as damaging hostile tools that only hurt our relationships further. Instead Glasser says we simply need to replace the seven deadly habits with the seven habits of truly caring people.

Supporting, Encouraging, Listening, Accepting, Trusting, Respecting and Negotiating Differences!!!

If you work and live with these habits most of your problems will disappear. Try googleing the Glasser Institute to find out more. Peace. TJS.