Evocateur – Page 11 – a blog by John P. Schuster

Letting Go in the Land of Stuff

October 25, 2011 John Schuster Self development, Sustainability

We live in a world of acquisition. We measure ourselves by our numbers, like they say in the ING television commercial showing people walking around with their net worth under their arms—clever ad, and surely sad. What if they instead walked around with their happiness, spiritual or emotional bank account numbers, the lasting wealth of life, under their arms? With acquisition being our culture’s mega-measure, is it any wonder that letting go is difficult for[…]

View and share this daily dose of beauty and love:

October 1, 2011 John Schuster The Power of Your Past

Our souls require a daily diet of beauty and love. I think you will find this 2-minute video part of today’s hit of beauty. The team at Berrett-Koehler did a great job on the visual and musical poetry. I added the words for retrieving fragments of our soul by working with our yesterdays. There is an offer at the end for a free chapter of The Power of Your Past. Do a promotion favor and[…]

Stay in Time

September 19, 2011 John Schuster Past and memory

Remember: we live in time. I gave the mindfulness movement, the fans of the now, credit in my last blog. Now I want to take issue with one of their leaders, Eckhart Tolle, who wrote The Power of Now about 10 years ago and Oprah helped him sell about a jillion copies of his books. He is a good spiritual thinker. I give him credit for much, and you can check him out on YouTube[…]

Stand In Wonder

September 12, 2011 John Schuster Past and memory

Have you done some real thinking lately? Sure you have had thoughts, but more likely than you having them, they have been having you. Thoughts have a life of their own, and sort of stream through our heads of their own accord. I give the mindfulness movement great credit for reminding us how little we really think our thoughts, and how often our thoughts are thinking us. The point of The Power of Your Past[…]

Making room for the spiritually unbidden

August 10, 2011 John Schuster Self development, Sustainability

Our congressmen and women today are locked in idealogical warfare that resembles trench warfare in WWI: endless attacks and no movement. One of the transcendentalists who “hung out” with Emerson and Thoreau (I can picture that with these people) was the chaplain of the US Congress. His words need to be heeded for today: To live content with small means; to see elegance rather than luxury and refinement rather than fashion. To be worthy, not[…]

Fight the battle to be you

July 24, 2011 John Schuster Uncategorized

My dear friend Jeanne Coyle, up in Portland Oregon, where I arrived yesterday for some coaching work, had a very self-made, un-culturally compressed husband, Jim. At his funeral a few years back she read this e. e. cummings quote, one that is at the root of my thinking on differentiating through harvesting our history: “To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing it’s best to make you everybody else, means to fight[…]

What is within makes, or it breaks

June 29, 2011 John Schuster Self development

There is an apocryphal Gospel of St. Thomas. If you don’t know “apocryphal,” it is the word for unofficial ancient scripts, the ones that did not get included in the Bible when the church defined it. So, of course, many of us want to consider these unofficial writings to see what got mistakenly left out. This phrase from St. Thomas is one that rattles my cage: If you bring forth what is within you, what[…]

Spiritual Lessons from Tornado Alley

June 6, 2011 John Schuster Past and memory, Self development

This is heavy tornado time in the land known as tornado alley. Such sadness south of us at Joplin. Amazingly enough, some people will be strengthened by the tornadoes. The will find a way through even mega-trauma, to tap inner resources they have never had to muster before and literally end up giving thanks for the calamity that hit them because it made them somehow bigger or better. They will enlarge themselves through the challenge.[…]