When fear makes your choices for you, no security measures on earth will keep the things you dread from finding you.
But if you can avoid avoidance – if you can choose to embrace experiences out of passion, enthusiasm, and a readiness to feel whatever arises – then nothing, nothing in all this dangerous world, can keep you from being safe.
Martha Beck
Live as if you were living a second time,
and as though you had acted wrongly the first time.
Victor Frankl
The Feast of All Saints
Our struggles are not separate from the luminous vastness within each of us.
We don’t get rid of struggle to discover this open space; nor does its discovery necessarily rid us of our struggles.
The riddle of the obstacle is solved not by pushing it away or by holding on to it, but by meeting it with silence and by discovering in this meeting that sacred ground, which upholds both joy and sorrow, both struggle and freedom from struggle.
When we realize this, we will struggle less with our struggles, and we will have solved by our own silence the riddles that guard the doorway into the silent land.
Martin Laird, Into a Silent Land
Unless there is a still center in the middle of the storm,
unless individuals in the midst of all their activities
preserve a secret room in the hearts
where they sit alone before God,
unless we do this, we will lose all sense
of direction and be torn to pieces.
anonymous monk in the Egyptian desert
Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.
Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless — like water. Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup; you put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle; you put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.
Bruce Lee, based on the Pierre Berton Interview 1971.
See if you can catch yourself complaining in either speech or thought, about a situation you find yourself in, what other people do or say, your surroundings, your life situation, even the weather.
To complain is always nonacceptance of what is.
It invariably carries an unconscious negative charge. When you complain, you make yourself a victim.
Leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness
Eckhart Tolle
Mindfulbalance 