Monday 28 December 2015

Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.


Mary Oliver



Sunday 27 December 2015

You were born with potential.
You were born with goodness and trust.
You were born with ideals and dreams.
You were born with greatness.
You were born with wings.
You are not meant for crawling, so don't.
You have wings...
Learn to use them and fly.

Rumi


Wednesday 23 December 2015

Meditation on Acceptance

Please put your attention on the breath for a few moments. Find patience and acceptance in your heart for your own difficulties, your own mistakes, for all the things that you think about yourself which you might not like. Find the acceptance and the patience to endure that in your heart. Let the patience and acceptance grow so that they fill you from head to toe, a feeling of ease. And with that love arises and you can surround yourself and embrace yourself with love. Pick out one person and accept that person fully. And with the acceptance have patience for that person. No demand. No pressure. No wanting. Just acceptance. Fill that person with that acceptance, with that non demanding patience , and then surround him or her with love. Now think of your parents. Fill them with your acceptance. Non demanding patience. Surround them with your love. Now think of those people who are closest to you. Those you might live with. Patience and acceptance. Lovingness. Embrace them with those. Fill them with those. Nothing else works. Now think of your good friends. Accept them exactly the way they are. Do not wish them to become other. Let patience with them arise, which is non demanding, and non judgmental. Fill them with that and then embrace them with your love. Now think of neighbors, acquaintances, relatives, people at work. Accept them exactly as you know them. Fill them with that acceptance, with that non demanding patience and non judgmental attitude, and then embrace them with your love . Now think of anyone whom you find difficult. Accept that person exactly the way he or she is. With non demanding patience. Fill him or her with that acceptance and patience. Then embrace him or her with love. Now have a look inside to see if there is anyone or anything that you dislike, whatever it maybe, whoever is may be, small or large, and then accept that the way it just is, or accept the person or the ideas or the situation. Just accept it and have patience with whatever it is. Reach out with that acceptance and patience to the person or situation involved. And now imagine that your acceptance and your patience is like a rose colored cloud coming from your heart and going far and wide, giving people joy and peace by seeing this lovely patience and acceptance that comes to them on this rose colored cloud which can reach very far. First to people around here and then further and further afield. Bringing patience and acceptance and love onto this planet, into this universe. Now put your attention back on yourself and feel yourself filled with patience, acceptance, and love. Let that be your inner being. The warmth of the love. The peacefulness of the patience and acceptance with yourself. May all beings have patience with each other.

Ayya Khema


Sunday 20 December 2015


You need nothing more than the experience you are having right now. It is enough. It is plenty. It is perfect just as it is. It was designed for you, given to you for your experience. All you have to do, and all you have ever had to do is accept this gift. Take it and let it in. Let yourself experience the present moment just as it is. It doesn't get any better than this. This is the simple truth the ego refuses to accept, and it will suffer as long as that is the case.

Gina Lake


We don’t fear physical closeness because we fear proximity itself. Most of us earnestly want physical contact with those who love us. Rather we fear what we will feel when we get too close. The real fear, then, is of ourselves. This fear is not something to rebuke ourselves for. It is our deepest vulnerability, the very quality that makes us most lovable.

David Richo


Friday 18 December 2015

I will never leave this house of light,
I will never leave this blessed town
for here I have found my love
and here I will stay for the rest of my life.
If this world turns into a sea of trouble
I will brave the waves and steer the ship of my mind
To the safe shore of love.

If you are a seeker looking for profit,
Go on and may God be with you,
But I am not willing to exchange my truth;
I have found the heart and will never leave
This house of light.


Rumi


Wednesday 16 December 2015

First you realize the place that you’re in right now, whether you think it’s good or bad, whether you think you’re happy or sad, whether you think you’re rich, or poor, or sick, or healthy, the place where you’re in right now is your right place.
That’s the beginning.

You stop trying to be someone else.
You stop trying to change your life.
You’re in your right place, right now, just the way you are.

If you can become happy and peaceful in the place where you are right now, all of a sudden you will find circumstances will change in your favor, and then again you will be in your right place. Whatever change comes along as far as your body-mind is concerned, you are in your right place.
The more you can see that, the more you can look at what I just said intellectually, intelligently, the more peaceful you become, the more the karmic patterns begin to break away and you begin to awaken.

It may be gradual at first.
You notice that things that used to annoy you, no longer annoy you. You notice that people that you live with, the conflicts you’ve had, they stop because you’ve stopped.
There’s no more trying to get even.
There’s no more trying to win your point.
There’s no more trying to find the right book, or the right teacher, or the right anything.

You remain centered.
You remain free.

Robert Adams_ Sitting in the Silence


Tuesday 15 December 2015

You can never love another person unless you are equally involved in the beautiful but difficult spiritual work of learning to love yourself. There is within each of us, at the soul level, an enriching fountain of love. In other words, you do not have to go outside yourself to know what love is. This is not selfishness, and it is not narcissism; they are negative obsessions with the need to be loved. Rather this is the wellspring of love within the heart. Through their need for love, people who lead solitary lives often stumble upon this great fountain. They learn to whisper awake the deep well of love within. This is not a question of forcing yourself to love yourself. It is more a question of exercising reserve, of inviting the wellspring of love that is after all, your deepest nature to flow through your life. When this happens, the ground that has hardened within you grows soft again.
This makes you independent. You are now able to come close to the other, not out of need or with the wearying apparatus of projection, but out of genuine intimacy, affinity, and belonging. It is a freedom. Love should make you free. You become free of the hungry, blistering need with which you continually reach out to scrape affirmation, respect, and significance for yourself from things and people outside yourself. To be holy is to be home, to be able to rest in the house of belonging that we call the soul.
John O'Donohue, from ‘Anam Cara’


Think of the problems you think you have. Why are they a problem? What difference does it make? There is nothing in this world that it’s important for you to want to feel badly, where you want to get revenge, or you’re afraid that something will happen to your body, you’re concerned about a loved one, you’re worried about the world situation. When you’re like that, you are assuming responsibility for these things. After all you didn’t ask to really get born. You didn’t ask to get born into the family where you were born, into the nationality, into the religion that you were born into, into the city and state and country that you were born into. The power that takes care of that knows how to take care of you. Don’t you see? There isn’t anything you have to do to help.

In other words, God doesn’t need your help. All you have to do is to take a deep breath and say, “Take it God. I’m finished with it. I will never worry again. I will never be upset over anything again.”



Robert Adams


Wednesday 9 December 2015

Beyond anything else, listen to yourself. You are meant to discover reality from inside and to direct your life in this way. As you begin to live according to your own guidance and your own daring, everything changes completely.

Barbara Marciniak


Monday 7 December 2015

Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled —
to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking

into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing —
that the light is everything — that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.

Mary Oliver



Sunday 6 December 2015

Of course I’ll hurt you, of course you’ll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, from The Little Prince




Friday 4 December 2015

It is as though you have an eye
That sees all forms
But does not see itself.
This is how your mind is.
Its light penetrates everywhere
And engulfs everything,
So why does it not know itself?


Foyan




Tuesday 1 December 2015

When we accept what is in this very moment, without pushing or pulling, when there is no running after or running away, we find in our practice a level of deep acceptance and peace.

Michael Stone


Wednesday 25 November 2015

The world is not something separate from you and me; the world, society, is the relationship that we establish or seek to establish between each other. So you and I are the problem, and not the world, because the world is the projection of ourselves, and to understand the world we must understand ourselves. That world is not separate from us; we are the world, and our problems are the world's problems.

J. Krishnamurti, The Book of Life


Sunday 22 November 2015

We can never obtain peace in the outer world until we make peace with ourselves.

Dalai Lama



Live the Four Seasons in a Day

Is it not essential that there should be a constant renewal, a rebirth? If the present is burdened with the experience of yesterday there can be no renewal. Renewal is not the action of birth and death; it is beyond the opposites; only freedom from the accumulation of memory brings renewal, and there is no understanding save in the present.
The mind can understand the present only if it does not compare, judge; the desire to alter or condemn the present without understanding it gives continuance to the past. Only in comprehending the reflection of the past in the mirror of the present, without distortion, is there renewal.
If you have lived an experience fully, completely, have you not found that it leaves no traces behind? It is only the incomplete experiences that leave their mark, giving continuity to self-identified memory. We consider the present as a means to an end, so the present loses its immense significance. The present is the eternal. But how can a mind that is made up, put together, understand that which is not put together, which is beyond all value, the eternal?
As each experience arises, live it out as fully and deeply as possible; think it out, feel it out extensively and profoundly; be aware of its pain and pleasure, of your judgments and identifications. Only when experience is completed is there a renewal. We must be capable of living the four seasons in a day; to be keenly aware, to experience, to understand and be free of the gatherings of each day.

J. Krishnamurti, The Book of Life


Thursday 19 November 2015

Don’t go outside your house to see flowers.
My friend, don’t bother with that excursion.
Inside your body there are flowers.
One flower has a thousand petals.
That will do for a place to sit.
Sitting there you will have a glimpse of beauty
inside the body and out of it.
Before gardens and after gardens.


Kabir


Saturday 14 November 2015

YOUR OTHER HALF IS WITHIN

These days, so many people are searching for a partner, a soul mate, their ‘other half’. They feel incomplete, ‘single’, without that ‘special someone’ in their life.

But you are not half of a whole, friend. That is the lie. You have never been half of a whole. You are whole; that is your true nature.

If you are searching for a partner, or staying in a relationship, because you feel ‘half’ of a whole, incomplete when alone, unhappy with your own solitude, fearful of the void, you will be bringing a partner into your field of unhappiness, and anxiety will rumble underneath the relationship.

Find your happiness within. Make happiness the field in which you live and have your being. Discover the joy of your aloneness. As long as you run away from your aloneness, you will always be lonely, however crowded your life is, because you will be running away from yourself, and that is the greatest pain of all.

Find joy within. Be the one you have always sought. Then, when and if you are ready, allow another dear one into that field. Let them hang out, play, stay if they stay, and leave if they leave. Take delight in their freedom. Connect deeply. Notice when you are happy, and notice when you are unhappy, but do not blame them or credit them for either.

Help them learn to love their own aloneness too.

Maybe you will call them your friend, your partner, your lover. Maybe you will marry, maybe you will live together, maybe you will start a family, maybe you will never see each other again. In the joy of deep connection, the labels will not matter so much, and the future will take care of itself.

And you will have found your other half within yourself. And the fear of loneliness will disappear into sunsets.

Jeff Foster


Friday 13 November 2015

Few cross over the river. Most are stranded on this side. On the riverbank they run up and down. But the wise man, following the way, crosses over, beyond the reach of death. He leaves the dark way for the way of light.

Buddha



Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless - like water. Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup, you put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle, you put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.
Bruce Lee


Keep your face to the sun and you will never see the shadows.

Helen Keller


Thursday 12 November 2015

If you don't get what you want, you suffer; if you get what you don't want, you suffer; even when you get exactly what you want, you still suffer because you can't hold on to it forever. Your mind is your predicament. It wants to be free of change. Free of pain, free of the obligations of life and death. But change is a law, and no amount of pretending will alter that reality.

Dan Millman


If you go deeper and deeper into your own heart, you'll be living in a world with less fear, isolation and loneliness.

Sharon Salzberg


Monday 2 November 2015

To move, to breathe, to fly, to float,
To gain all while you give,
To travel is to live.
To roam the roads of lands remote,


Hans Christian Andersen


The ego-shell in which we live is the hardest thing to outgrow.


D.T. Suzuki


Friday 30 October 2015

Meditation is not
A way to enlightenment,
Nor is it a method 
Of achieving anything at all.
It is peace and blessedness itself.
It is the actualization of wisdom,
The ultimate truth 
Of the oneness of all things.

Dogen




Wednesday 28 October 2015


There are two aspects of individual harmony: the harmony between body and soul, and the harmony between individuals. All the tragedy in the world, in the individual and in the multitude, comes from lack of harmony. And harmony is the best given by producing harmony in one's own life. 

Hazrat Inayat Khan


Tuesday 27 October 2015

My soul is full of longing
for the secret of the sea,
and the heart of the great ocean
sends a thrilling pulse through me.


Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


Sunday 27 September 2015

How much of everything you’ve held dear are you ready to have shattered, without running away? How ready are you to think of something unfamiliar? The first reaction is one of fear. It’s not that we fear the unknown. You cannot fear something that you do not know. Nobody is afraid of the unknown. What you really fear is the loss of the known. That’s what you fear.

Anthony de Mello


Friday 25 September 2015

How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses, who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.
So you must not be frightened, dear Mr. Kappus, if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloud-shadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. . . .


Rainer Maria Rilke