Hi everyone 👋 Please help me welcome @Ivy Salon to our wonderful community 🙏🏻

Hi Everyone 👋 Please take a few minutes to relax and read through this post, as it means so much to me, and I hope it will for you too ❤️ I wrote the first version of this post in 2015. I was younger then. Not in years, maybe...but in how I thought change worked. I believed if I just loved hard enough, wrote clear enough, stood firm enough, the world would tilt toward peace. It hasn’t..... Not yet. Some days it feels like we’ve gone backwards. But here’s what eleven more years of Buddhism and Daoism have taught me….The goal was never to fix the world. The goal is to keep showing up inside it without closing my heart. I still run a blog in the format of Skool. I still try to live compassionately, in how I speak, how I spend my money, how I fail and try again. But I no longer pretend it’s easy. The negative comments still come. Sometimes crueller than before. The world is louder now. Meaner in some corners. And I have days where I want to shut it all down and walk into the woods and never read another argument about things that should be simple, like feeding the hungry, or not bombing children. But I don’t shut down. Not because I’m strong. Because I’ve learned something from sitting still. Anger is not my enemy. Burnout is. So I practice wu wei, not laziness, but knowing when to push and when to let the river carry what it will. I practice metta, starting with myself, because you can’t pour from a cracked bowl. The wars haven’t stopped. Poverty hasn’t ended. The environment is bleeding faster. And yet. And yet, I see more people waking up than I did in 2015. Young people who refuse to accept this as normal.Communities sharing food, not just recipes. Strangers on the internet choosing kindness in the middle of a flame war.... That’s not nothing. That’s the dharma moving through sneakers and hashtags and tired parents posting at 2am. So here’s what I actually believe now, not what sounds hopeful, but what keeps me getting up... We may not see peace in our lifetime.

We all want a life that feels full.....happy, joyful, meaningful. But here's the thing.... we only get a few decades. Take out sleeping, eating, the usual daily fog… and what's left isn't that much time. So what matters? I think we each have something I call a sacred task. Not religious necessarily, but real. It's the reason you showed up. For some people it's raising kids well. For others it's teaching, healing, building, or just showing up for a friend who's stuck. Most of these tasks involve serving something bigger than your own ego. Here's what I've noticed.... when someone is quietly working on their task , not chasing fame or approval, just doing the thing they're meant to do, you can see it. They're not always happy in a loud way, but they're… settled. Joy shows up as a side effect. So does satisfaction. When they look back....They smile. Not because everything was perfect, but because they did what was theirs to do. A hundred out of a hundred? Maybe not. But enough. That's a complete life. So have you found yours yet? Not the big Hollywood answer. Just the quiet pull. The thing you keep coming back to. If not, don't force it....... Just pay attention. What uses your talents and helps something outside yourself........ That's probably it. That's your first step. Food for thought my friends, food for thought. With Love ❤️ Always Mark

Hi Everyone 👋 Ummm....🤔 You know what's funny? We talk a lot about loving-kindness toward others, but here's the part nobody admits.... Sometimes I don't want to be kind to myself. Sometimes the voice in my head says "you should be doing better" and part of me agrees with it. Like being hard on myself is the only thing keeping me from falling apart. And when someone says "just be compassionate with yourself"....honestly? That makes me want to roll my eyes and make me want to say (...k o..) Because it sounds nice, but it doesn't feel true to how I actually operate and live my life. So here's what I'm wondering today… What if loving kindness isn't about being soft and sweet? What if it's actually fierce? What if real compassion looks like... "I see you messing up again, and I'm not leaving. Deal with it." Not indulgent. Not fake-positive....... Just… staying 😊 Because the people I've actually learned from, the ones whose presence changed me, they didn't give me easy answers. They didn't walk away when I was being ...just.. ,me! So here's my messy question for you... Is there anyone in your life, including yourself, that you've stayed with, even when they weren't being lovable? Not because you had to. Because you chose to. I'd love to hear about that. The real version...... Not the Instagram version 🤣 With Love ❤️ Always Mark

Hi Everyone 👋 The last couple of days I've created posts on Loneliness and Anxiety, so today's post is continuing that theme with a post on Not Being Heard... You speak. And it's like the room eats your words. There's a specific kind of loneliness that isn't about being alone. It's being in a group. Maybe even people you like. And you say something. A real thing. A thing that took courage to say. And nobody hears it. Or they glance at you and then keep talking over you. Or someone else says the exact same thing two minutes later, and everyone nods like it's brilliant. And you just… shrink in total disbelief 🤬 So you stop offering. You tell yourself they don't care what I think anyway. You start rehearsing conversations in your head before you have them, trying to find the magic combination of words that will finally make people listen. I've been there. Still go there sometimes. Here's what I've learned, slowly, painfully..... Not being heard doesn't mean you have nothing to say. It usually means you're in the wrong room. Or the wrong season. Or you're surrounded by people who are too full of themselves to notice anyone else. That doesn't fix the hurt. But it shifts it off your shoulders a little. If you've felt invisible this week, drop a comment below. Let's be unseen together for a minute.🙌 With Love ❤️ Always Mark