As you start the practice, you have a sense of your body and a sense of where you are, and then you begin to notice the breathing. The whole feeling of the breath is very important. The breath should not be forced, obviously; you are breathing naturally. The breath is going in and out, in and out. With each breath you become relaxed.
Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche
There is often an unspoken assumption that things should go smoothly in life, or that the Universe has a direct plan for us, and that it communicates it easily. Consequently, we get upset that things are not always that straightforward. When things go wrong we can often regard it as a violation of some supposed natural entitlement to order and predictability. However, if we look at the natural world we do not find complete support for this underlying assumption. The recent turbulence in the weather, and the natural disasters of this past year, demonstrate that things in nature are frequently unpredictable and disruptive. So we should not expect anything different in our lives. Bad things can happen and our lives can change, in ways that we cannot predict. Things happen in indirect ways, and reasons are not always immediately evident. Patience is needed if we wish to understand or work out what is our path.
Clouds are not spheres, Mountains are not cones,
Coastlines are not circles and bark is not smooth,
nor does lightning travel in a straight line.
Nature exhibits not simply a higher degree but an altogether different level of complexity.
Benoit Mandelbrot, French-American mathematician.
God, rest in my heart,
Fortify me
Take away my hunger for answers.
Mary Oliver
The Irish phrase Go leor can be translated in different ways in English, including the words “enough” and “plenty”. Today’s world is good at promoting and accumulating plenty. The message that we get in so many ways is that if you get more you will get happier. However, for a lot of people, this sense of “more” just seems to increase and expand – more expectations in work, more information coming at us, more decisions to make, more demands on our time. And this emphasis on plenty sometimes distracts us from where our real focus should be – on coming to see when we have enough. Thus we can find that we are less skilled at knowing when to let go and be satisfied with what we have, or how much we do. Reflecting on replacing the word “plenty” with “enough” can help us here. Deciding what is enough – and learning to be content with that – is one of the most important pieces of work that we can do.
There is no greater offence than harbouring desires.
There is no greater disaster than discontent.
There is no greater misfortune than wanting more.
Hence, if you are content you will always have enough.
Lao Tsu
Some more words from Jacques Lusseyran, who as I said in an earlier post, was blinded in an accident at age eight. He writes about the way this allowed him to develop his capacity for paying attention which goes far beyond just the ability to see and think :
[Those who can see] commit a strange error. They believe that we know the world only through our eyes. For my part, I discovered that the universe consists of pressure, that every object and every living being reveals itself to us at first by a kind of quiet yet unmistakable pressure that indicates its intention and its form. I even experienced the following wonderful fact: A voice, the voice of a person, permits him to appear in a picture. When the voice of a man reaches me, I immediately perceive his figure, his rhythm, and most of his intentions. Even stones are capable of weighing on us from a distance. So are the outlines of distant mountains, and the sudden depression of a lake at the bottom of a valley.
This correspondence is so exact that when I walked arm in arm with a friend along the paths of the Alps, I knew the landscape and could sometimes describe it with surprising clarity. Sometimes; yes, only sometimes. I could do it when I summoned all my attention. Permit me to say without reservation that if all people were attentive, if they would undertake to be attentive every moment of their lives, they would discover the world anew. They would suddenly see that the world is entirely different from what they had believed it to be.
Love is what we are born with. 
Fear is what we learn.
The spiritual journey is the unlearning of fear and prejudices and the acceptance of love back in our hearts.
Love is the essential reality and our purpose on earth.
To be consciously aware of it, to experience love in ourselves and others, is the meaning of life.
Meaning does not lie in things. Meaning lies in us.
Marianne Williamson
Mindfulbalance 