Take a shower, wash off the day. Drink a glass of water. Make the room dark. Lie down and close your eyes.
Notice the silence. Notice your heart. Still beating. Still fighting. You made it, after all. You made it, another day. And you can make it one more.
You’re doing just fine.
Charlotte Eriksson, American author
Calming and stilling are the willingness to commit to just being wholeheartedly present in one moment at a time,
to commit to one breath,
to commit to the sense of our feet touching the ground.
To know this, we begin to train the mind.
Christina Feldman, Blindfolding Mara
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
Mindfulbalance 