I asked the Chief Priest at my Buddhist temple recently how to avoid suffering.  It seemed like a very logical question. Why would you want to suffer?

He told me that suffering was part of life.  The idea of being truly happy means that you know you can experience anything and still be OK.

The part that you can’t skip: you have to be truly happy first.

There are a zillion ways to raise the vibration of your life.

Burn some sage. Tell people you love them. Clean your house. Make lots of art. Embrace adventure. Feed yourself well… This blog is packed with enormous handfulls of higher-vibe lifestyle ideas. Use them. Well.

But the awesomeness of this quote, and of the idea of not avoiding suffering, is that you still have to live.  Live in ways that make you proud. Challenge yourself. Dare to really experience intimacy. Become more OK with losing.  Love more. Risk more.

Expanded lives are not just a drum circle and handful of confetti.  To expand,  you might fall. Not a single person I admire has a life that is impervious to discomfort.  Its happens to allof us. The trick seems to be to make the heartbreak, the disappointment and the failure be the exception, to find the excitement and the lesson in it…. and to keep going with the happy…!  xoxo Dana