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

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

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

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

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

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