These few words are enough. If not these words, this breath. If not this breath, this sitting here. This opening to the life we have refused again and again until now. Until now. When flowing water meets with obstacles on its path, a blockage in its journey, it pauses.
It increases in volume and strength, filling up in front of the obstacle and eventually spilling past it. You do not belong to you. You belong to the universe. The significance of you will forever remain obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your significance if you apply yourself to converting all your experience to the highest advantage to others. You should sit in meditation for twenty minutes every day - unless you're too busy - then you should sit for an hour.
Conversations begin with a question. Mindfulness is about being fully awake in our lives. It is about perceiving the exquisite vividness of each moment. We also gain immediate access to our own powerful inner resources for insight, transformation, and healing. If you think of your body as a musical instrument, the body scan is a way of tuning it. If you think of it as a universe, the body scan is a way to come to know it.
If you think of your body as a house, the body scan is a way to throw open all the windows and doors and let the fresh air of awareness sweep it clean. The range of what we think and do Is limited by what we fail to notice And because we fail to notice There is little we can do To change Until we notice How failing to notice Shapes our thoughts and deeds. Laing -.
The practice of meditation is not really about establishing inner stillness The moments of stillness are one of meditation's byproducts, not the practice itself. If the heart wanders or is distracted, bring it back to the point quite gently And even if you did nothing during the whole of your hour but bring your heart back, though it went away every time you brought it back, your hour would be very well employed.
Francis de Sales -. Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. You can have compassion for yourself - which is not self-pity. As simple, and difficult, as that! To listen is to lean in softly With a willingness to be changed By what we hear. If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. First, we all have an inner teacher whose guidance is more reliable than anything we can get from a doctrine, ideology, collective belief system, institution, or leader. Second, we all need other people to invite, amplify, and help us discern the inner teacher's voice. Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken. It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.
Cummings -. For a seed to achieve its greatest expression, it must come completely undone. The shell cracks, its insides come out and everything changes.
To someone who doesn't understand growth, it would look like complete destruction. This is not an answering machine. This is a questioning machine. You think you understand one.
You think you understand two, because one and one make two. But, you must also understand "and". I am not nearly so interested in what monkey man was derived from as I am in what kind of monkey he is to become. We ourselves cannot put any magic spell on this world.
The world is its own magic. There is no enlightenment outside of daily life. There's no problem so great it can't be solved. If it can't be solved, it's not a problem, it's reality.
Most of the calls we receive and ignore are Our lives are measured out The great breakthroughs in our lives generally happen only as a result of the accumulation of innumerable small steps and minor achievements. We're called to reach out to someone, to pick up an odd book on the library shelf, to sign up for a class even though we're convinced we don't have the time or money, to go to our desks each day, to turn left instead of right. These are the fire drills for our bigger calls.
When I do not know who I am, I serve you. When I know who I am, I am you. Perhaps ultimately, spiritual simply means experiencing wholeness and interconnectedness directly, a seeing that individuality and the totality are interwoven, that nothing is separate or extraneous. If you see in this way, then everything becomes spiritual in its deepest sense.
Doing science is spiritual. So is washing the dishes. Hillel the sage, who was asked to relate the whole of Torah while standing on one foot: "Do not do to others that which is hateful to you. All the rest is commentary. Now go study. The saints are what they are, not because their sanctity makes them admirable to others, but because the gift of sainthood makes it possible for them to admire everybody else. Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn, A cool breeze in summer, snow in winter.
If your mind isn't clouded by unnecessary things, This is the best season of your life. Today like every other day We wake up empty and scared.
Don't open the door of your study And begin reading. Take down a musical instrument. Let the beauty we love be what we do There are hundreds of way to kneel And kiss the earth. Tell me what you pay attention to and I will tell you who you are. I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither; then I awoke. Now I wonder: Am I a man who dreamt of being a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming that I am a man? But if they ask me, "Why were you not Zusya?
It is only with the heart that one can see rightly: what is essential is invisible to the eye. When I look inside and see that I am nothing, that's wisdom. When I look outside and see that I am everything, that's love. Between these two my life turns. We are not troubled by things, but by the opinions we have about things. Stand still. The trees before you and the bushes beside you are not lost. Wherever you are is a place called Here, And you must treat it as a powerful stranger, Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. It answers, I have made this place around you, If you leave it you may come back again saying Here. No two trees are the same to Raven. No two branches the same to Wren. If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you, You are surely lost. The forest knows Where you are. You must let it find you. Security is mostly a superstition.
It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Buckminster Fuller himself was fond of stating that what seems to be happening at the moment is never the full story of what is really going on. He liked to point out that for the honey bee, it is the honey that is important.
But the bee is at the same time nature's vehicle for carrying out cross-pollination of the flowers. Interconnectedness is a fundamental principle of nature. Nothing is isolated. Each event connects with others. I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, most of which never happened - anonymous sometimes attributed to Mark Twain -.
We see things not as they are, but as we are. Tomlinson -. The birds have vanished into the sky, and now the last cloud drains away. We sit together, the mountain and me, until only the mountain remains. Ram Dass tells of a student who went to a Zen master. Not a dead Zen master. As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again.
To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives. Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift. First I was dying to finish high school and start college. And then I was dying to finish college and start working.
And then I was dying to marry and have children. And then I was dying for my children to grow old enough for school so I could return to work. And then I was dying to retire. And now, I am dying And suddenly realize I forgot to live. I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is like an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.
In my walks, I would fain return to my senses. What business have I in the woods if I am thinking of something out of the woods? Our bodies know they belong, It's our minds that make our lives so homeless. Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It's a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.
Could we have no agenda when we walk into a room with another person, not know what to say, not make that person wrong or right? Could we see, hear, feel other people as they really are? But true communication can happen only in that open space. Holiness comes wrapped in the ordinary. There are burning bushes all around you. Fortunately, there are still plenty of good—and accurate— Twain quotes to go around. BY Emily Petsko. Twain wrote a response, part of which made it into the article that ran in the Journal on June 2, Mark Twain was undecided whether to be more amused or annoyed when a Journal representative informed him today of the report in New York that he was dying in poverty in London History News Words.
Subscribe to our Newsletter! It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.
Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. He had not flinched or made a single move to stop Harry demolishing his office. His expression was calm, almost detached. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up.
And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down, through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things.
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