A wise man needes not blush for changing his purpose.
I understand your higher and lower tendencies. There is something beyond all of this nonsense. There is a wonderful glitter that you can follow in life.
The balance and patience factors are much more critical in surfing than they are in snowboarding. . . if you're out surfing serious waves and you wipe out, you don't land on soft snow. It's usually either very sharp coral, or you get raked across the beach gravel and sand while you're tumbling underwater.
As the kundalini energy increases, as the energy of the psyche becomes more pronounced, which it does as thought becomes eclipsed by silence, all the variant mind states burn away.
Energy is gained by giving energy. When we give energy, we gain energy. This is different than having someone manipulate you and take your energy.
The Winter Solstice is the time of ending and beginning, a powerful time -- a time to contemplate your immortality. A time to forgive, to be forgiven, and to make a fresh start. A time to awaken.
Samadhi is not going to take away your humanity. It will give it to you. You will become more cosmopolitan, more conscious, and more infinite.
. . . it is up to us to add labors to labors in order to go from strength to strength (Ps. 83:7), and to come to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ (Eph. 4:13)?
If you have a faith, it is statistically overwhelmingly likely that it is the same faith as your parents and grandparents had. No doubt soaring cathedrals, stirring music, moving stories and parables, help a bit. But by far the most important variable determining your religion is the accident of birth. The convictions that you so passionately believe would have been a completely different, and largely contradictory, set of convictions, if only you had happened to be born in a different place.
Photographing is an emotional thing, a graceful thing. Photography allows me to wander with a purpose.
I think when one becomes very close to another person, it can mean loving and intimacy, but on the other hand, there's also the danger of one destructing another under the name of love. I think that is the scariest thing for me in various relationships.