Milt Greek's Blog: The River of Life - Posts Tagged "circle-one-empowering-yourself"

In these hard times, it is essential that sensitive people empower ourselves. Written in the mid to late 1990s after meeting my wife, Source for Sensitive People details a personal spiritual revolution for me. I envisioned living in a more life-affirming way during my psychosis and my wife was a catalyst for a powerful leap forward, giving me more than I could imagine. The book itself is more or less notes on what I learned from that journey and my wife’s wisdom applied to my life.

I want to help people like my wife and I, who have an emotional depth and ideals of peace, love, harmony, beauty and intimacy that make it difficult for us to navigate the harsh and unfeeling constraints of warfare society. I wrote it knowing that whoever reads it will have their own personal world, their own interpretation and their own dreams that I cannot know.

To empower ourselves, we must change our personal world, build on the positive and reduce the negative. Through changing our personal web-of-life, we can overcome traumas, abuse, bad relationships, addictions, loneliness and other challenges that we commonly face. Source for Sensitive People was written concisely as possible, encouraging the reader to focus on her or his face-to-face web of life, learn from those around him or her and gain emotional strength through a happy, healthy face to face community.

After writing it, I set it aside, not particularly interested in bringing attention to myself through publishing. Instead, I continued to apply the ideas to my own life. Part of these ideas were to practice good works and acts of charity in my personal and the larger world. Eventually some of the mental health work I did on that path brought me to the attention of some people outside my community. While on a sabbatical beginning in 2014 from mental health work, I decided to publish writings to help sensitive people like my wife and our family. Using material that mainly developed decades ago, I am now beginning to publish the Small Gifts for Sensitive People series that this book is a part of.

In the two decades since Source for Sensitive People was written our lives have flourished, despite many crises in the world around us. Every few years I reviewed it to see what I would change, which has been very little. Two decades after I wrote it, I would say that my mistakes were mainly times when I failed to apply it. In the meanwhile, I’ve had many happy times and personal successes in my face-to-face community, ranging from gaining many friends to having a positive effect on my community to attaining a deep spiritual understanding of my personal path. When I’ve carried out the practices, I’ve also experienced many times of deep contentment, happiness and bliss.

I’ve gained a deep gratitude for all the gifts I’ve received, which includes everything that Westerners might call “my” accomplishments. I reflect on tremendous good fortune that I can only ascribe to luck, my dear wife and the crucial kindness of strangers.

I do not know if the path I have taken will help you in your personal web of life and with your journey. Ultimately, if someone chooses to read it, it is up to each person to measure it by his or her own life and apply or reject it however seems appropriate. All I can say is that the principles in it have helped me tremendously. I hope it and the other essays and short books in the Small Gifts for Sensitive People series will do the same for you.

Amazon Kindle version: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07J5MKNXQ/...

Smashwords E-book version: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view...

Fulfillment, the second short book in the Empowering Ourselves as Sensitive People trilogy, is being prepared to be published soon. The book proved daunting to me to write, in part because of my busy schedule, and in part because I realized that the claim to have experienced fulfillment is justifiably rare. I had to consider if I really could claim I have and needed to place the experience within the context of the many events outside myself that created and affects it. In doing this, I spent an extra year and a half rewriting and revising the book, including when my wife made the very important observation that the “final” draft was written in the wrong voice, causing me to extensively rewrite it.

The short book describes the key elements supporting fulfillment, which I more-or-less stumbled onto experiencing. The path that led to fulfillment was described in Source for Sensitive People, which I wrote in the late 1990s, following the revolutionary changes in my life brought about by meeting my wife. It was eventually published in 2018 as the first in the series; Fulfillment describes the next step following Source for Sensitive People.

Though some in the mainstream culture might think of this way of life as an unrealistic retreat from the challenges of the contemporary human world, it actually led me to profound personal and spiritual experiences. Fulfillment describes the experience of completing the life lessons that my childhood challenged me to attain and the deep bliss that I’ve experienced as part of attaining it. That journey continues on in my life, with cycles away from and back to those lessons, as well as new challenges that have arisen since then. Once Fulfillment is available, I will publish the links here.

The final book in the trilogy, Creating a Spiritual Center will hopefully be published in about a year, completing the Empowering Ourselves as Sensitive People circle. That book will focus on the lessons of the first two books in the series and sees spiritual centers emerging from how we live our lives.