Wholeness does not mean perfection: it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life. Knowing this gives me hope that human wholeness — mine, yours, ours — need not be a utopian dream, if we can use devastation as a seedbed for new life.
Parker Palmer
Meanwhile, here we are, missing the fullness of the present moment, which is where the soul resides. It’s not like you have to go someplace else to get it. So the challenge here is, Can we live this moment fully? When you ask a group of people to spend five minutes watching their own breaths moving in and out of their bodies, just as an experiment, they discover that their minds are like bubbling vats, and it’s not so easy to stay on the breath. The mind has a life of its own. It carries you away. Over a lifetime, you may wind up in the situation where you are never actually where you find yourself. You’re always someplace else, lost, in your head, and therefore in a kind of dysfunctional or nonoptimal state. Why dysfunctional? Because the only time you ever have in which to learn anything or see anything or feel anything, or express any feeling or emotion, or respond to an event, or grow, or heal, is this moment, because this is the only moment any of us ever gets. You’re only here now; you’re only alive in this moment.The past in gone, and I don’t know what’s coming in the future. It’s obvious that if I want my life to be whole, to resonate with feeling and integrity and value and health, there’s only one way I can influence the future: by owning the present.
Jon Kabat Zinn
photo kevin higgins
The main object of religion
is not to get a man into heaven
but to get heaven into him
Thomas Hardy
photo from Glendalough by katzegoesireland
There is a permanent amnesia planted in us,
which just as we keep forgetting our dreams,
we sometimes keep on forgetting our reality.
Isaac Bashevis Singer, Nobel Prize winning author.
photo johann jaritz
It is not uncommon for people to spend their whole life waiting to start living
Eckhart Tolle
photo european people’s party
When you are content to be simply yourself
and don’t compare or compete,
everyone will respect you.
Lao Tzu
photo sander van der Wel
Mindfulbalance 