If time is a circle,
as the Indigenous world view presumes,
the knowledge we need is already within the circle.
Robin Wall Kimmerer 1953 – Author and Director of the Center for Native Peoples & the Environment at the State University of New York, Ancient Green
Inside the Great Mystery that is,
we don’t really own anything.
What is this competition we feel then,
before we go, one at a time, through the same gate?
Rumi
Even though at times we find daily work a challenge, life itself is the deeper reality flowing through us. Have we become too numb to notice this?
Though we strain
against the deadening grip of daily necessity, I sense there is this mystery:
All life is being lived.
Who is living it, then?
Is it the things themselves, or something waiting inside them,
like an unplanned melody in a flute?
Is it the winds blowing over the waters?
Is it the branches that signal to each other?
Is it flowers interweaving their fragrances,
or streets, as they wind through time?
Rainer Maria Rilke
Stress is an alarm clock that lets you know
you’ve attached to something not true for you.
Byron Katie
Happiness is in the quiet, ordinary things.
A table, a chair, a book with a paper-knife stuck between the pages.
And the petal falling from the rose, and the light flickering as we sit silent.
Virginia Woolf, The Waves
All Eastern traditions agree that constant striving for a future state is the root of our unhappiness. No surprise then that the West, with its focus on achievement, has such high levels of anxiety and depression.
.Our society is very result-oriented, that’s why we are so competitive. That’s why we are always stressed, because we are always looking at something in the distance.
If you are always looking at the top of the mountain you are climbing, you cannot be aware of the grass and flowers growing at your feet.
We are always looking ahead, aren’t we? And then the actual thing, the actual living, passes us by. We are locked inside our brains, cut off from the present moment, always centered on something beyond our reach.
Tenzin Palmo, Reflections on a Mountain Lake
Mindfulbalance 