Author Archives: thevsstudioblog

“Nothing in the world is as soft and yielding as water. Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible, nothing can surpass it.” -Tao Te Ching by Lao-Tzu (Stephen Mitchell translation) “Be like water my friend.” -Bruce Lee Take the most amazing, miraculous, purest element in the world–water–yet remove it’s ability to flow, and it tooContinue reading “Stagnation”

Towards the very end of the movie “Saving Private Ryan”, Captain John Miller (played by Tom Hanks) who’s about to die, tells the young Private James Ryan (played by Matt Damon) to “Earn This…Earn it.” Make no mistake, we’re here because of the sacrifices so many people made that came before us. In some cases,Continue reading “Earn This”

“I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?” -Ernest Hemingway “Sleep is the best meditation.” — Dalai Lama Put away the ice cream, turn off the television and the phone and go the f*ck to sleep. And when you wake up in the morning, read this excellentContinue reading “Go The F*ck To Sleep”

“For unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax. There is no point whatever in making plans for a future which you will never be able to enjoy. When your plans mature, you will still be living for some other future beyond. You will never, never be ableContinue reading “Peaks & Valleys”

“It’s more than a feeling (more than a feeling)When I hear that old song they used to play (more than a feeling)I begin dreaming (more than a feeling)” -Boston, “More Than A Feeling” “That time of year thou mayst in me beholdWhen yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hangUpon those boughs which shake againstContinue reading “More Than A Feeling”

“Sal, we gotta go and never stop going ’till we get there.’‘Where we going, man?’‘I don’t know but we gotta go.”― Jack Kerouac, On the Road When it comes to making your art, either go fast or go slow. Nothing in between will do. When you go fast, you’ve got energy on your side. YouContinue reading “Fast Or Slow”

So many of the greatest books ever written from the Bible to “Meditations” to “War And Peace” to “Man’s Search For Meaning” share a common theme. That is: we can’t control our circumstances, we can only control our response. If that’s true, shouldn’t we spend far less time insulating or distracting ourselves from circumstances? AndContinue reading “Circumstances”

“We can spend our whole lives escaping from the monsters of our minds.” -Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times One of the central tenets of Buddhism is an emphasis on being present to our experiences in the here and now. The problem though is that .we’re almost always somewhere else.Continue reading “Be Present To Presence”

“There is nothing more important to true growth than realizing that you are not the voice of the mind – you are the one who hears it.” -Michael Singer, The Untethered Soul “We are all unreliable narrators, not just in the way we tell our stories to others, but how we tell them to ourselves.”Continue reading “That Annoying Roommate”

“When the archer shoots for no particular prize, he has all his skills; when he shoots to win a brass buckle, he is already nervous; when he shoots for a gold prize, he goes blind, sees two targets, and is out of his mind. His skill has not changed, but the prize divides him. HeContinue reading “No Prize”