people and the myriad creatures have been doing it for a long
long time. We are dust to dust, and that's how it is, and
can't be changed. It is not terrible.

Pain is real. Your pain is clearly deep and agonizing, and I
do empathize because I have lived much of my life on the
edge of madness, peering into death, and believing in
almighty hopelessness. The pain which hurts so much
that you turn off all feeling. Hope seems like a joke
and so does the occasional happy moment, a cruel joke,
because what I'm used to is pain, that's what's familiar.

I'm not there any more, it's been a long hard climb.

There is beauty everywhere, and hope as well.
There is a ton of shitty stuff but that is NOT courtesy
of Life -- it is courtesy of human beings.

Life does stuff like turn dirt into fragrant colorful
flowers, or food, or living breathing walking creatures.

Life makes winds blow and cells dance and hearts
beat. Life recycles it all, including us, in a never-
ending cycle of compost here on earth. One day it
may all be ruined, or one day it may all be restored,
we don't know. There are millions of good people
on the planet who care and work hard to make it
good, to help. We are on that team.

If you give all of your attention to the miseries of the world,
it will fill your vision, like a swarm of enormous bugs on a
windshield. You won't be able to see anything else.

You and I have a choice about this.

If I want darkness and misery, that's what I will nourish in me.
If I want to feel suicidal and hopeless, that's what I will nurture.

Here's how:
All of my thoughts will be spent on thinking about the miserable stuff.
I will read and or watch only miserable bad news from every possible source.
I will reinforce the badness by thinking about it over and over.
The more I do, the worse I will feel, which will only prove me right.
I will let everyone else know how crappy everything is,
and reinforce my belief that this is the truth.
Whenever I do something good, or feel good, I will remind myself
that I am bad, or that happiness is false and fleeting. I
will reject hopeful thoughts and feelings, even if
they are coming from my own heart.

You're here at DU, I am guessing, because you wish for a better world.
But you must be part of it. We can't afford to lose any
of us to hopelessness. Keep some hope alive for the team.

This is a machine, this body, designed for feeling.

Without the ability to feel, we can't feel our wounds.
It's a survival instinct -- to learn not to feel --
for a threatened creature.

Threatened too often, the creature learns not to
feel, and eventually forgets how -- becoming
hostile and unhealthy, depressed, and/or more.

If we can't feel, we don't know to drink water,
or not to touch a hot fire.

If we can't feel, we can't discern hot and cold, or
feel our stomachs grumbling for food.

If we can't feel, we don't know when to sleep, or
what to eat, or how to do pretty much anything,
unless someone has programmed our brains for
us.

Human beings are meant to feel -- from the tips of
our fingers and toes, all the way into our insides,
every square inch of skin, our organs, the beating
heart, the breath, the swallow, the food moving
down the esophagus. And deep into our emotional
body, the psychic body, the subtle body, where our
emotions rush and swirl, and trigger all sorts of
chemical reactions, and we can feel these chemicals
which are our emotions not in our minds but in our
bodies, and they can instruct us. And our beautiful
breath and beating heart can ground us in their
rhythms. and they do, if we give them a chance.

We have feelers. We are feeling creatures.
Thinking creatures, yes, but foremost designed
to feel, in nearly every particle of our being.

Yeah.. we just don't know. I have a feeling it's not a good solution.

Often with depression and ptsd there is a persistent and
overwhelming desire to sleep. I used to fight this, as a sign of
something wrong with me, this utter exhaustion of body mind
and spirit that made me want oblivion.

Not accepting that sleep was what I needed, I longed for
death.

A friend who survived profound and violent abuse said
to me one day "maybe you need to sleep."
I needed to sleep, and to stop judging myself.

We pay too much attention to all the inherited voices
in our heads, and not enough to the innate, built-in
self. This includes our simplest survival urges, our most
childlike needs (which for most of us weren't met).

It includes the urge to sleep, it includes the urge
for water and food. Our bodies alone can give us
so much information for our healing.

When we lose touch with our ability to feel,
we go insane, or die, or become dangerous to
ourselves or others.

and no matter how damaged you are, it is still there, intact.

There is a part of us that this world, its dangers and dramas
and cruelties, can not touch.

All the healing I have been able to do is because of that
place inside of me -- and the help I've gotten to be able
to keep coming back.

As long as there is breath coming in and out of you there
is hope for peace and beauty in your life. It's not entirely
in our control, luckily. It's there whether we pay attention
or not.

Although likely every part of your mind may be saying
that life is shit, and hopeless, there's another message
and it's not coming from the outside. It's so quiet, it is
such a gentle voice but it is inside of you.

Try to turn down the volume of your thoughts, and listen
to this quiet voice, it is your own heart. And it is so powerful.

It has been said that while we think we are yearning
for peace, it is peace who is yearning for us.

Don't buy into the negative, it is all lies. Be kind to
yourself. Ignore the rest.

and we all know there are many scammers and crazy claims
out there.

So while Person A speaks of organic food, thinking
of the bountiful local produce at the co-op, whole
grains, free range chickens; Person B thinks of
expensive "natural" highly processed foodstuffs
from health food stores, or the late night TV
ad shows about alternative medicines, etc.

The two sides are talking about two different things
most of the time, but calling it by the same name,
and never understanding each other.

but if you let go of that, see past that, use your own
common sense, read some different sources with an open
mind, seek with humility to learn something that can
benefit humankind instead of defending things that are
poisonous to small living creatures.. just try it. It is
much more gratifying to learn something new than to
win a debate.

I didn't have the words to describe what I was thinking of,
when it comes to compassionate justice.. but it is that which,
in nature, restores balance to the whole.

Whatever is good for the whole, to restore equilibrium.
This in human society requires compassion.