It is strange. So strange. If you don’t give your all, you can’t be fulfilled. If you hold back, you hold back on yourself. I don’t know how to explain this. It is just an experience that I have a sudden insight about as I am typing this. Every time I try to brain something or try to manage the work I am doing, it never satisfies fully. It is when I am ready to be open and risk my whole, that it feels fully satisfying.

Perhaps life embraces us only when we are able to give our all. When we are ready to give our whole heart to the people and environments in our lives. In order to risk something that we are most fearful of discovering – our whole selves.

Peng-Ean Khoo
April 4, 2016

In everything that we do, I think we can’t do it if we are not having fun. Fun, for me, is the forming of meaning. It is the engagement with life that has an order that makes sense. It makes you laugh out loud. And it is safe and secure. Fun allows you to be exactly who you are and be accepted for exactly who you are.

When a certain community work or activity gets too serious, growth is stifled. So, relax a little and enjoy the moment, rather than be too anxious to arrive at the final outcome.

If there is such a thing as a final outcome….

Peng-Ean Khoo
April 4, 2016

Patience, for me, looks like this. I am holding on to dear life. But actually, as long as you are aware you are going to lose it, you are already halfway in de-escalating the tension. So I think of something else. Actually, I don’t really know what to do about being patient.

I think perhaps it is in the readiness to mop up the explosion of anger that gets us through holding a relationship or family or community with patience. So perhaps it comes with forgiveness. The quality of non-judgment rather than the stillness of non-action.

Peng-Ean Khoo
April 4, 2016

When we are participating in a community of care, it is important to know our own limitations. Honesty protects us from unnecessary misunderstandings and quarrels. Most times it is simply fatigue which is the trigger and not this or that or that. We tend to over analyse situations, when, if you take a step back, it is simply fatigue, and the resulting anxiety that arises from the over stretch.

So when that happens, it is wise to take a break, or simply say, “I don’t know.”

“I don’t know” is a valid an answer as I know. If the honesty is there, “I don’t know” will survive the situation.

And then maybe, there is an answer. And maybe, there isn’t.

It is how safely and securely we respond that saves our peace. Not the answer.

Peng-Ean Khoo
April 4, 2016

I believe the act of giving restores us. It heals us back to our innate state of feeling good about ourselves and the state of the world. I believe giving integrates and also releases the areas of our lives which are ready to be freed. So as we gift, we become more and more free. It is paradoxical. But giving is about releasing scarcity and welcoming abundance. It is like a homecoming, a meeting of our original birthplace – of our freedom, creativity and open possibilities.

Generosity seems for me the original calling of our humanness.

A big heart is a happy heart that translates into a big grin on our faces.

Peng-Ean Khoo
April 4, 2016

It is very important to find your own voice in your life journey. Sing a song. Sing it in the shower. Sing it in the living room. Sing it with your family. Sing it with your friends. Sing in a global choir.

Your voice is beautiful. Sing.

Peng-Ean Khoo
April 4, 2016

Celebration is the triumph of the human spirit over all the adversities of life. Life will necessarily invite us to grow and create, and renew. Sometimes it catches us by surprise and the growth becomes very difficult. Inner human development is necessarily a struggle as it is a personal, unique, universal creative response to the invitation of life for us to respond in our own personal meaning and offering to life. It is an opportunity for us to be courageous especially when we are feeling deeply unsure.

So when we actually get through the deep pain and struggles, it is an amazing moment. It is a moment of triumph over doubt, stagnation and stuckness. So life becomes a series of celebration if we have an inner and outer ordering to respond to the calling of inner and outer growth.

I believe if we begin to frame our experience of life as one of discovery and celebration, the joyous impetus moves us beyond the inertia. But perhaps, there is always a moment where we need to stand still, for an internal silent synthesis to take place, while we figure it all out.

When that is happening, remember to celebrate – you are courageously growing an internal stable order of joy and peace. So even if you are in a deep struggle, you already are in a triumphant moment.

Even if the form is unrecognisable, keep staying in the moment of believing, and don’t lose heart.

Peng-Ean Khoo
April 4, 2016

A stable peace requires trust. Trust in ourselves. Trust in others. Trust in the environment. Trust in life.

Trust, to me, is this feeling of good. This deep feeling of believing in the goodness of everything. I believe in the infinite goodness of humanity. And with that, I just trust in the daily process and commitment to meaningful work, especially the ones that move and foster peace, unity and freedom. In situations when things look hairy, I always just pause. The pause is the space. The space of choice.

The space to always make the right choice for peace, in any unexpected situation.

So trust holds peace.

Peng-Ean Khoo

April 4, 2016

How strange. I was looking at all my art work (to select a photo for this blog) and it suddenly occurs to me how isolating all my work has been. How egocentric they have been. Gulp. I couldn’t weave, I could only make isolated pieces and put them together.

Friendship requires a sense of acceptance of our own selves truly in our own unique, individual spaces before we can be confident to truly engage. This makes contemplation or spaces of solitude equally as important as spaces of celebration or togetherness or in community.

So space is a very important consideration to foster good and robust friendships.

Peng-Ean Khoo
April 4, 2016

I open with Sharing. I feel sharing our lives is not really about story-telling. It is really more about opening our hearts to one another, sharing our insecurities, and then first, comforting and calming each other, and then later, thinking about how we can use our collective moral imagination, to improve the situation of challenge.

There are so many dimensions to insecurities that there really isn’t really one solution. It requires countless rounds of dialogues, iterations of thinking and actioning, that there can come a point where we can see the connectivity of the challenges presented.

It requires one page of observations and another page of openness.

And it requires pure belief to proceed.

To keep going, in order to keep discovering.

This is really the heart of One Love. It hopes to serve as a place of honest dialogues and mutual actions, to keep committing to a world that is kind and gentle, and one that remembers the joy of the gift of togetherness in living life.

Peng-Ean Khoo
April 4, 2016