A couple of days ago I was sitting under a tree, enjoying the grass and the breeze, and thinking about activities for my upcoming workshop when three earnest young people knelt by my side and asked me my beliefs about cleanliness and the Bible. I nicely said, “I do not want to talk about the Bible today, thanks though.”

The girl who was closest to me looked as if she was going to cry – her heart was breaking to see that I will surely be going to hell. She asked me if I would “read something then”, and I said, “sure” and she held it tight, “Do you promise?” and I replied, “Yes, I promise,” more out of not wanting this young woman to cry than out of any real desire to read her tract.

Sadly, just as I suspected, their version of God is damned mean and impossible to please. And ironically, the tract is in the form of a check (I’m not sure Jesus would be into that) with a message of fear on the back. It begins with hell – and goes on, ” . . . To please God, one cannot be clean enough or good enough. Every person, man or woman, is equally guilty of sin before God . . . ” and then, after all that disdain from the Creator, ” . . . the greatest commandment is to love God.”

Whatever happened to, “God is Love”? The version of God these sweet kids bought into seems like agreeing to be in a super confusing, unhealthy, co-dependent relationship for eternity. No thank you! To base your life on guilt for being alive seems like a painful and heavy way to exist.

I propose:

Love yourself. Love your body. Love Mama Earth. Love one another. Love. Remain in your body, meet the world in Love. 

What do you want to make real? You have the right to be here – what do you want to do with your physical time on the planet?

~ ~ ~

The right to exist is a very basic right – and it’s what Muladhara Chakra is all about. Below are first chakra ideas found floating in the ethers and written in books:

“The whole point of Jesus’s life was not that we should become exactly like him, but that we should become ourselves in the same way he became himself. Jesus was not the great exception but the great example.” – Carl Jung

“Look at the sky: that is for you. Look at each person’s face as you pass them on the street: those faces are for you. And the street itself, and the ground under the street, and the ball of fire underneath the ground: all these things are for you.”  ~ Miranda July

“This is the world as it is. This is where you start.” ~ Saul D. Alinsky

“The purpose of life is to be alive.” – Charlotte Kasl, If the Buddha Got Stuck

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.” — Mae West

“Take care of your body. It’s the only place you have to live.” — Jim Rohn

“The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection.” – Johann Harri

“The last taboo is the myth of civilisation.” –Paul Kingsnorth, The Dark Mountain Project

“Few men realise that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings.” – Joseph Conrad

“You are one of the ones of the One…” ~ Bill Attride

“I feel like a citizen [—] it’s time to go and come back a drifter.” Jean Michel Basquiat – from The Notebooks

“We are this close — this close! — to losing our democracy to the mercenary class. So close it’s as if we’re leaning way over the rim of the Grand Canyon waiting for a swift kick in the pants.” – Bill Moyers

“Young folks today . . .  are placed on a conveyor belt and expected to achieve as quickly as possible, to make big life decisions before they are ready.” – Penny Arcade, New York Times, Penny Arcade is Still a Force in Edinburgh

“In every out thrust headland, in every curving beach, in every grain of sand there is a story of the earth.” ~ Rachel Carson

“And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair” ― Khalil Gibran

“Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself” Khalil Gibran
“I’ve had a problem feeling real all my life.” – Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking

“PLEASE BELIEVE ME. I’M REAL. NO REALLY, IT HAPPENED. IT HURT.” – Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking

“I don’t know what belonging means… I can only use my brain and intellectualize. I really wouldn’t able to tell you from the heart what belonging means… My memories of that place are my link to the place — memories of your experience in a place is your link… All people belong to the world. There is no exclusivity in that… The soil from America can differ from the soil in Malaysia, but its soil, it’s still the same. And the color of people’s skin can differ from place to place but it’s still skin. And, in that regard, there is no difference. People must belong to the earth and a traveller must belong to world somehow and the world must belong to her or him somehow. But, you know, then there’s the social level — that’s just the archetypal level, people usually live in the social level.” —Jeff Buckley

“We do not exist in isolation. Our sense of community and compassionate intelligence must be extended to all life-forms, plants animals, rocks, rivers and human beings. This is the story of our past and it will be the story of our future.” ~Terry Tempest Williams

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”~ Emma Lazarus

“Enjoy your body, use it every way you can. Don’t be afraid of it, or what other people think of it. It’s the greatest instrument you’ll ever own.” – Kurt Vonnegut

“Security represents your sense of worth, your identity, your emotional anchorage, your self-esteem, your basic personal strength or lack of it.”  —Stephen Covey

“If kids grow kale, kids eat kale. If they grow tomatoes, they eat tomatoes. But when none of this is presented to them, if they’re not shown how food affects the mind and the body, they blindly eat whatever you put in front of them.” ~ Ron Finley

“Poetry is my native land.” ~ Marina Tsvetayeva

“We travel like other people, but we return to nowhere/We have a country of words.” ~ Mamoud Darwish

Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people. As members of such an economy, we have all been programmed to respond to human difference between us with fear and loathing and to handle that difference in one of three ways: ignore it, and if that is not possible, copy it if we think it is dominant, or destroy it if we think it is subordinate. But we have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals. As a result, those differences have been misnamed and misused in the service of separation. ~ Audre Lorde Sister Outsider (1984)

“It is in the shelter of each other that the people live.” ~ Irish proverb

“Our cities with their swollen populations and cliff dwelling high-rise buildings are breeding places for loneliness . . . In a world of wheels, old and comfortable groupings of people have disappeared.” ~ Allan Fromme

“The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted, uncared for and deserted by everybody.” ~ Mother Theresa

“’Should’ is a bad place to live, but boy, do we set up a lot of tents there.” ~ Saul Bass

“One has just to be oneself . . . The moment you accept yourself as you are, all burdens, all mountainous burdens simply disappear. Then life is a sheer joy, a festival of lights.” ~ Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

“If all you can do is crawl, start crawling.” ~ Rumi

“The important thing is to be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.” ~ Charles Dubois

“You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too. No, I think there was too rigid a pattern. You came out of an education and are supposed to know your vocation. Your vocation is fixed, and maybe ten years later you find you are not a teacher anymore or you’re not a painter anymore. It may happen. It has happened. I mean Gauguin decided at a certain point he wasn’t a banker anymore; he was a painter. And so he walked away from banking. I think we have a right to change course. But society is the one that keeps demanding that we fit in and not disturb things. They would like you to fit in right away so that things work now.” ~ Anais Nin

“Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself.” ~ Anais Nin

“Our entire biological system, the brain and the Earth itself, work on the same frequencies.” – Nikola Tesla

“Here is your country. Cherish these natural wonders, cherish the natural resources, cherish the history and romance as a sacred heritage, for your children and your children’s children.” ― Theodore Roosevelt

“I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape-the loneliness of it-the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it-the whole story doesn’t show.” ~ Andrew Wyeth

“If anything is sacred the human body is sacred.” ~ Walt Whitman

“Yoga does not remove us from the reality or responsibilities of everyday life but rather places our feet firmly and resolutely in the practical ground of experience. We don’t transcend our lives; we return to the life we left behind in the hopes of something better.” ~ Donna Farhi

“Enjoy your body, use it every way you can. Don’t be afraid of it, or what other people think of it. It’s the greatest instrument you’ll ever own.” – Kurt Vonnegut

“I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.” — Henry Miller Tropic of Cancer

“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” — Jim Rohn

“Welcome to the world—I’ve been waiting for you!” — John Bradshaw

“Happy Birthday!”

“I CELEBRATE myself,
And what I assume you shall assume, for every atom belonging to me
as good belongs to you.” — Walt Whitman

“When I was five years old my mother told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.” – John Lennon

“Life is a beautiful magnificent thing, even to a jellyfish.” ~Charles Chaplin

“STAY IN SHAPE! SOMETIMES A MUSICIAN WAITS FOR A GIG, & WHEN IT COMES, HE’S OUT OF SHAPE & CAN’T MAKE IT.” – Thelonious Monk

“You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.”  ― Charles Bukowski, Women

“Hard times require furious dancing. Each of us is proof.” ~ Alice Walker