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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dalai Lama