The essence of life is that it’s challenging. Sometimes it’s sweet, and sometimes it’s bitter. Sometimes your body tenses, and sometimes it relaxes or opens. Sometimes you have a headache, and sometimes you feel 100 percent healthy.
From an awakened perspective, trying to tie up all the loose ends and finally get it together is death, because it involves rejecting a lot of your basic experience.
Pema Chodron, The Wisdom of No Escape
We do not search for love because it is absent
it seems to be absent because we search for it
Rupert Spira, Transparent Body, Luminous World.
Our soul – with its insistence on finding the still point from which it keeps rising – carries us through the seasons of our lives. This still point under all that keeps moving waits under every season we can imagine. It is the silent center that keeps us sane. We all have different names for this immovable ground, but I call it spirit.
Each passing year, we are asked to return to the ground of our spirit in order to go on. Each passing year, we are asked to listen like the seed for our crack of light in spring, to listen like the brook for our soft gurgle in summer, to listen like the leaf for our orange face in fall, to listen like the snow for a quiet place where we can powder down and rest
Mark Nepo
Wisdom is not about knowing more facts but about knowing which facts matter.
Life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived.
Rachel Naomi Remen, Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal
Every morning I walk like this around
the pond, thinking: if the doors of my heart
ever close, I am as good as dead.
Mary Oliver, The Book of Time
When the mind is calm and spacious, we see things more clearly. Instead of being caught in habitual reactions, we have the freedom to pause, to breathe, and to choose how we respond. That space between stimulus and response is where wisdom arises. It’s where we remember that we don’t have to be ruled by every passing thought or emotion. In that spaciousness, kindness and clarity can emerge, and we can meet life with greater ease.
Sylvia Boorstein
Mindfulbalance 