You must stop talking to yourself. Every one of us does that…..we repeat the same choices over and over until the day we die, because we keep on repeating the same internal talk over and over until the day we die. A warrior is aware of this and strives to stop his talking. This is the last point you have to know if you want to live like a warrior.
Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan
Last Sunday, my friends and I spoke about the gift of learning to observe ourselves impartially. We spoke of using the constantly changing flow of sensory feeling in the body — keeping it simple, just knowing pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral in the body. Breaking our experience down in this way — sunlight, pleasant, shadow, unpleasant – can help us glimpse the flowing, changing nature of our experience. But turning our attention to the moment-by-moment experience of the life of body can accomplish something much greater. It can help free us from an obsessive identification with a small, embattled self. It can be the key to living a much bigger life — a good life in the deepest sense.
Tracy Cochran, Pay Attention, for Goodness Sake
Of one thing I am pretty sure,’ he resumed, ‘that the same recipe Goethe gave for the enjoyment of life, applies equally to all work: “Do the thing that lies next you.” That is all our business. Hurried results are worse than none. We must force nothing, but be partakers of the divine patience…All haste implies weakness. Time is as cheap as space and matter.
George MacDonald (1824-1905), Scottish poet, novelist, and Minister, Robert Falconer
Happiness and the cause of happiness can arise only through loving-kindness and insight into the nature of things. There is no other way.
Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche
On this ever-revolving wheel of being
The individual self goes round and round
Through life after life, believing itself
To be a separate creature – until
It sees its identity with the Lord of Love
And attains immortality in the indivisible Whole.
The Shvetashvatara Upanishad , ancient Sanskrit text, c 5th Century BCE
Just for a little while, stop thinking about all the problems, crises, tasks. everything that’s pulling and pushing on us.
Be in that quiet space.
After all these years, some of us still need permission to let go.
Melody Beatty
Mindfulbalance 