Conscious Inklings Blog. Ideas, Insights & Ink-spiration!

How many times have you misplaced your keys only to find, after turning your house upside down, that they were in your pocket? The things we are looking for are often right in front of us, we just aren’t always receptive to them.

"When we are knocked down, we must pick ourselves up as quickly as we can and get on with the business of saving our lives before life dribbles away. When this happens, we should recognize and acknowledge that we have been wounded, but we should learn also to cauterize our wounds, to sear them shut until we have the luxury of time and the strength of heart to revisit and unseal them for examination. Our spirit and soul can drain through our wounds, if we allow." --Maya Angelou 

Someone who inspires you on a daily basis to be a better you just by being, well, them? I’ve been lucky enough to have a few of these people in my life and I have always been amazed by the way they seem to never really struggle too much with anything.  While it’s possible that these people are just really lucky and never have anything negative happen in their life (okay, actually not possible), it seems to me that somehow they have managed to figure out how to respond to whatever comes their way with an incredibly grounded sense of peace and acceptance.

We all have our domain of excellence, the unique culmination of experience, knowledge, wit and quirks we bring to the table that adds to the collective feast of human kind. It is imperative to the evolution of our species that we think differently from one another. If all of us bring the same thing to the table, we don’t really get anywhere.

As much as we try to, we simply can’t will everything into existence. Flights are delayed last minute, kids get sick, thunder lurks beneath even the brightest horizons. Sometimes things will not mold the way we sculpt them. And the solution isn’t to push down harder with the chisel--misdirected force is how we break things that did not need fixing in the first place. What if instead, we put down the chisel and worked with the clay rather than against it?

Far too many have suffered in silence for fear of the shame and judgement surrounding this issue. Teen suicide alone increased 250% in October 2020 from the previous October, and nearly 26 million American are experiencing mental illness and going untreated. In many aspects of life, vulnerability is still labeled as a weakness, and needing help seen as an Achilles heel. And as we have seen in recent years, and most notably perhaps this year, athletes have not been immune to this crisis.

We often hear that our world, and our relationships, mirror back to us how we're acting and behaving. Oftentimes, people think that this simply means what's being reflected back is our treatment of others…what some people think of as Karma, so to speak. While this may also be identified, this isn't the primary mechanism of how this "law" works.

Perfection is a lie and most of us are aware of this. But somehow this knowledge doesn't prevent us from hanging this ideal of perfection over our shoulders and criticizing ourselves for falling short of our expectations time and time again. 

I was having a conversation with a family friend recently and the topic shifted to the importance of forgiveness.  My conversation partner mentioned that she felt like she was pretty good at forgiving people and I responded by telling her that I forgive, but that first I need a resolution.  She very quickly pointed out that that was not, in fact, forgiveness because forgiveness is not conditional.  When she said this, I had an immediate physical reaction.

People are always telling us how much they love sporting our fun, inspiring, and provocative body art, and it is always such a gift to hear that people enjoy our tattoos as much as we do!

More often than not the reason why new things aren't coming in is because there isn't room for them. In order to expand in new directions, we first need to release the baggage of the past. The departure into new beginnings is a one-way flight, no carry-ons accepted. Holding on to the past only slows down our trajectory.

According to the law of thermodynamics (fancy, right?), energy cannot be destroyed, only transferred or changed from one form to another. One interpretation of how energy cannot be destroyed is why we feel so moved in the presence of art, like a beautiful painting, or exquisite architecture. The energy…this “essence" energy…from which the beautiful art was created...is still in it, no matter if 100 or 500 years have passed!