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HELLO AGAIN! Welcome to the Fall 2005 edition of my newsletter. I hope that you got to kick back
some and enjoy your summer and that this correspondence finds you happy with yourself, your relationships and your life.
This has rarely happened to me. As a matter of fact I can think of only a handful of other occasions in my life
when I read something or words were spoken directly to me that changed me as a person on the spot. The immediate effect these" messengers and
messages from a higher place" has on me is always the same. First I feel shaken, then defensive, then released, then inspired and then transported
to a place inside me where I feel much closer to my true self, much closer to my essence.
In the lazy days of my summer vacation this year I re-read a book that has affected me in this way. It is called "Shattered Love" written by the
actor Richard Chamberlain. (Does anyone out there remember the T.V. show Dr. Kildare?) I hope you read it and gain as much from it as I did. But
if you don’t, I begin this newsletter with one small excerpt below. It may sound strange to tell you this but I experienced myself to be a better
person at the end of reading this passage than I was at the beginning.
“I loved the challenges and joys of acting, but I was starving for the glitter of worldly “status” to fill my
inner void. To paraphrase Mr. Henry: Give me applause or give me death!
In our culture, status - our state or condition in the eyes of others, our relative rank in the hierarchy of prestige - is perhaps the most
fundamental preoccupation. I bought into our society’s values and foolishly linked my well-being to the status conferred by “success” and
celebrity. If I could get enough applause from enough people, my fears would disappear and I’d suddenly be just fine inside, happy as a lark,
free as a bee.
In hitching my happiness to the slippery star of status like so many of us do, I failed to see the madness in my method. My well-being was
completely dependent on the good opinion of others who could give it
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