Compassionate Warrior’s Guide to Living

Your results:
You are Spider-Man
You are intelligent, witty,
a bit geeky and have great
power and responsibility.






This is a fun quiz to see what superhero you are most like!

This video features an amazing individual, Chris Abani, a former political prisoner and poet, who talks about simple powerful acts of humanity. You can not help but be moved and realize how powerful simple acts of compassion can be. He uses humor and emotion to share stories from his life that exemplify this. He first talks about his mother and about the one time he saw her cry not when she was standing up to the soldiers in Nigeria who tried to take her eldest son to be a soldier, but when a complete stranger gave her all the clothes and toys in her suitcase, because she saw she needed them.
As his mother said, “You can steel your heart against any kind of trouble, any kind of horror, but the simple acts of kindness from a complete stranger will unstitch you.” If you cannot view this video go here: Chris’ Talk

Recenty I went to Starbucks and was stopped by a kind, elderly woman named Pat who was sitting outside the coffee shop with her lap dog. She saw that I had my dogs in the back of my car and asked me if I was going to the park. I told her yes and we then conversed for about 15 minutes about various doggy topics. I noticed she was feeding her dog from a small Starbucks cup and asked her if she gave her dog coffee. She explained that it was a puppacino. If you order a coffee from Starbucks and a few other coffee shops, they will give you a free puppacino on request for your dog. A puppacino is the steamed milk foam left over. She gave me some local dog magazines and treats for my dogs. I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation and really appreciated the fact that she stopped me to chat. I wish I was able to do that with complete strangers. It is something I would like to do. I think most people would be willing to engage you in a short conversation, all you have to do is initiate it. In that way, it is possible to connect with others in a small way and find out about surprising things like puppacinos at Starbucks.

I spent time this week trying to identify my strengths and weaknesses. Last weekend I took the Clifton Strengths Finder test to identify strong areas for me. Although this test is called a Strength Finder, it actually assesses your talents and more specifically your talent themes. The online assessment poses a series of paired statements and you must choose the one you identify more strong with of the pair and how strongly you identify with it based on a richter scale. You only have 30 seconds to answer each question as the idea is to get your gut reaction. From this 5 talent themes were identified for me. I felt that these themes were a correct assessment of my talents. Here they are with an explanation of each:

1. ACHIEVER- People who are especially talented in the Achiever theme have a great deal of stamina and work hard. They take great satisfaction from being busy and productive.

2. LEARNER-People who are especially talented in the Learner theme have a great desire to learn and want to continuously improve. In particular, the process of learning, rather than the outcome excites them.

3. INTELLECTION-People who are especially talented in the intellection theme are characterized by their intellectual activity. They are introspective and appreciate intellectual discussion.

4. INPUT-People who are especially talented in the input theme have a craving to know more. Often they like to collect and archive all kinds of information.

5. EMPATHY-People who are especially talented in the Empathy theme can sense the feelings of other people by imagining themselves in others’ lives or others’ situations.

Doing this assessment was enlightening to me because as of late I’ve thought my drive to know more and work hard were almost flaws that were making me a workaholic. But in actuality what I think I need to do is make sure I use these talents in all areas of my life instead of just work or education. In this way, I can use these skills to have balance and really live a high quality life.

In addition to doing the above mentioned assessment. I also took my magnifying glass to the classroom to identify my top 3 strengths and weaknesses which are as follows:

STRENGTHS
1. Helping people understand and learn new concepts
2. Finding and creating new curriculum that is engaging
3. Seeking out new technology and utilizing it to make things more efficient and engaging

WEAKNESSES
1. Having to motivate or discipline students who are unmotivated or undisciplined
2. Having to enforce or do things that I perceive as irrelevant to educating students
3. Grading Papers

The key now is to be strategic about playing to my strengths and managing my weaknesses so I can enjoy my job to the fullest. I only have one week left of school, but I will apply this to the preparation work I plan to do this summer as well as in my position at Virtual High School.

Having finished A New Earth last week, I have started a new book by Marcus Buckingham called Go: Putting Your Strengths to Work. The purpose of this book is to help you discover your strengths so that you can find a satisfying career or refocus your energy at work so that your current job is more fulfilling. An interesting concept of this book is that your strengths are not necessarily what you are good at, but more precisely what your are good at and what you enjoy doing. As Buckingham puts it, “Strengths are the activities that make you feel strong and conversely, Weaknesses are the activities that make you feel weak or drained.” As this school year comes to an end, I am looking forward to shifting my focus quite a bit at school so I enjoy it more. I don’t feel the drive to change careers, but I do want to enjoy my current job more.

Buckingham has come up with an acronym to help us identify our strengths

Success- How effective you feel at an activity
Instinct- An activity you feel yourself drawn to
Growth- You want to grow in this area because it’s interesting to you
Needs- You feel the need to do this activity to be fulfilled

This week I will be identifying my strengths and weaknesses at work so I can be the most productive, innovative, resilient and focused me. How exciting! Once I’ve discovered my strengths, I will need to be strategic to find ways I can increase the amount of time I play to my strengths at work each week.

This past week I finished reading A New Earth and watched the last of Oprah and Eckhart’s webcasts. I really enjoyed the series and felt that it really shed light on how I need to live my life. Now, it’s a matter of staying committed to practicing living in the present moment and getting better and better at it. As Oprah said, it’s a matter of building your spiritual muscle. In Ch. 10 of A New Earth, Tolle speaks of 3 actions we must apply to all of our experiences– acceptance, enjoyment, or enthusiasm. There are many things in life that we have to do even though we don’t want to and things in our lives and the world that are upsetting to us. The key is not to be passive or condone those things, but to accept what is. From that place and only from that place can you make powerful change. Enjoyment as Tolle states “will replace wanting as the motivating power behind people’s actions.” So many people including myself are waiting to live, but if you can be content in the present moment your quality of life will increase tremendously. Joy comes from deep within not from something external to you.

Tolle goes on to say “Enthusiasm means there is deep enjoyment in what you do plus the added element of a goal or vision you work toward.” With enthusiasm staying in the present moment becomes all the more critical. It’s easy to get caught up in the future of a better life and then wanting things to be different. However, if you can stay in the present and enjoy things as they come up, the desire or longing is replaced with a sense of satisfaction, purpose and creativity.

“The remnants of pain left behind by every strong negative emotion that is not fully faced, accepted, and then let go of join together to form an energy field that lives in the very cells of your body.”
-Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth

The above quote is a good definition of the pain body. The pain body keeps us anxious, angry, depressed because it feeds on negative emotions and needs them to survive. Pain bodies love drama and the pain body loves family and loved ones because this is where it often finds situations where it can get fed. Tolle describes it as a psychic parasite. It works with the ego to create an obsessive, anxious mind where you become a slave to your thoughts.

I thought some interesting observances about the pain body are the way, people feed their pain bodies through negative news and violent movies. It is a relief that I don’t enjoy those things, yet there are many things I can think of that feed my pain body. It is evident that I drive people away, that I am a workaholic that strives for perfection and I feel anxious or tired most of the time.

Another interesting point comes from the quote on page 155
“If the balance between male and female energies had not been destroyed on our planet, the ego’s growth would have been greatly detailed. We would not have declared war on nature, and we would not be so completely alienated from our being.”

Men are far more entrenched in the ego than women according to Tolle. I can definitely see that not only in my personal experience, but also in global events. Men are much more likely to get totally absorbed in their ego and also have a harder time letting go.

Another great quote from page 159-160:

“Even if blame seems more than justified, as long as you blame others, you keep feeding the pain-body with your thoughts and remain trapped in your ego. There is only one perpetrator of evil on the planet: human unconsciousness. That realization is true forgiveness. With forgiveness, your victim identity dissolves, and your true power merges–the power of Presence. Instead of blaming the darkness, you bring in the light.”

On the week 6 webcast, Oprah said some things that really spoke to me. Ultimately she said that we have to shake ourselves of that desire for thing to be different than they are because that only produces stress in us. When it comes to pain bodies, she said this:

You have to:
Feel it
Accept it
Allow the feeling to do whatever it is going to do to you…make you feel sad, angry, etc.
Then choose to do something or not
***Realize you are not the emotion
Eckhart urges us to be vigilant in our awareness of our thought and feelings. As he says, when you become aware, you no longer identify with the pain body and therefore it cannot renew itself. Furthermore when you are able to be present, the pain body begins to dissolve and the energy in that pain body is transferred to your awareness.

The message of the book is so powerful and simple. I am delighted every week with new insights from Oprah and Eckhart. It is an incredibly important book for me right now.