Category: Inner Life

Sunday Quote: Thirst

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Another morning and I wake with thirst
for the goodness I do not have.

Mary Oliver

Choose either love or fear

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Happiness, anxiety, joy, resentment — we have many words for the many emotions we experience in our lifetimes. But deep down, there are only two emotions: love and fear. All positive emotions come from love, all negative emotions from fear. From love flows happiness, contentment, peace, and joy. From fear comes anger, hate, anxiety and guilt.

We have to make a decision to be in one place or the other. If you don’t actively choose love, you will find yourself in a place of either fear or one of its component feelings. Every moment offers the choice to choose one or the other. And we must continually make these choices, especially in difficult circumstances when our commitment to love, instead of fear, is challenged.

Elizabeth Kubler Ross

Lost

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Whether all is really lost
or not depends entirely on
whether or not I am lost.

Vaclav Havel

How we speak to ourselves

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I tell mindfulness practitioners to listen to the tone their inner voice uses to comment on their experience. I ask them to consider whether, if they had a friend who spoke that way, they would keep that friend.

The moment in which people discover they are not holding themselves in compassion, not speaking kindly, is often startling and always sad. That awareness is sometimes enough to cause the critic’s voice to soften, and the soother’s voice to be heard.

Sylvia Boorstein, I’m Not ok, you’re not ok  – and thats ok

Within the heart

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There are different wells within your heart.
Some fill with each good rain,
Others are far too deep for that.

Hafiz

Our dreams

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But there is suffering in life, and there are defeats.

No one can avoid them.

But it’s better to lose some of the battles in the struggles for your dreams than to be defeated without ever knowing what you’re fighting for.

Paulo Coelho