Welcome to this week's edition of Mindful Life! Today, I bring you a nice selection of posts encouraging us to appreciate the best of life, even in places or among people we don't necessarily find agreeable, and also to take responsibility for our actions and their consequences, knowing that self-love and the love toward our world is inextricably bound to that sense of discipline.

I've learned a lot about discipline through many practices, most recently Historical Fencing, but it wasn't until I read Frank Herbert's "Dune" series for the first time last year that I equated it with Freedom. Yes, it's a paradox, but Love reconciles all paradoxes. It turns out that when we know what we're supposed to do in this world, when we know our Purpose, we can follow it unerringly to greater expansion, ease and wonder. That absolutely requires that we hold ourselves accountable for our actions, so the path we follow compels us but, if we choose to see this as service and not as burden, if we meet our task with gratitude and not complaint, the world opens to us. Here you can read @netizen01's own perspectives on this topic Freedom.

One of the many ways in which Dune approaches the concept of discipline is through the Fremen, the semi-nomadic inhabitants of the eponymous desert planet where most of the novels take place. Seamlessly adapted to their extreme environment, they're masters of conservation of water, specifically its more diffuse form, moisture. They use condensation devices outside their underground communities in order to catch the moisture of the air, and wear special suits that perfectly recycle the body's own moisture, even urine and feces. Water waste is a crime punishable by death, for every person owns their own flesh, but their water belongs to the tribe. I think we could learn a lot from the Fremen now, because water is indeed a scarce resource, as countries with poor or battered infrastructure like mine, can attest. Take a look at this stupendous contribution by @emiliomoron on the subject of water waste in Venezuela and the world at large, an issue that we should be quite mindful of.

Vibrationally, the element of water is an expression of the primordial essence of the Universe, of Life itself, and the Emotion that fuels it. Water is quite literally Love, the source of everything that changes, flows and breathes. When we strengthen our discipline, we also flow better with the world at large, and realize the worth of everything around us. Every form of life deserves our reverence and respect, and by providing it, we also revere and respect our essence, bringing greater peace to our inner waters and thus navigating reality more thoroughly and joyfully. See what @evernoticethat has to say about respecting life, be it a bug, a tree or a person, and also helping others see the relevance of this in a healthy fashion.

When we flow better, we love more. When we love more, we can feel love everywhere and therefore, our gratitude rises. Often we assume that taking responsibility for our actions means just assuming the consequences of poor choices or mistakes, but fortunately, it also means taking full credit for our successes and the growth we've achieved! That's where gratitude truly starts to take root in our everyday life. I've talked a lot about my country and I'm sure many readers have had more than their fair share of information about it due to the overwhelming presence of my compatriots here. Most Venezuelans will tell you that this place is a ruin and yet, objectively speaking, there's a huge mess to resolve, but I've fallen in love with living here again, and much more deeply than ever before. Despite all the things that have gone wrong, I find great and increasing beauty all around me. That's what @misslasvegas is experiencing too, because in spite of her disagreements with Irish culture, she finds majesty in the country's wondrous landscapes.

Gratitude necessarily stems from a connection to the whole, a connection which water represents tangibly. Emotions make us one entity, at any moment we can sense what others are feeling, experience it within. Despite common belief to the contrary, there aren't people who lack empathy, only people who have managed to find some terribly costly way of repressing it. Make no mistake, these people still experience their emotions and those of others, they just exteriorize them in often hurtful ways instead of accepting and internalizing them. We all do that to some extent, actually, and those reactions are typically related to defense mechanisms of our egos. The ego is merely a narrative with which our minds attempt to define who and what we are. It can be a tool, but more often than not, we lack the training to use it effectively and are unaware of its existence. The more we let our egos unchecked, the harder it is to see ourselves and therefore, the less responsible, thankful and joyous we are. I decided to end this curation with an insight on the matter, so you can read this contribution by @bayuismail, where he discusses how letting our egos run wild can develop into selfishness that separates us from others and makes us bitter inside.