Its own gifts

Enjoy each season of your life. Patiently prepare the soil, sow the seeds, and do the work, and you’ll harvest the abundant fruits of your labors. Accept both good fortune and adversity as you accept the shifting seasons. Enjoy the glazed beauty of a winter’s day and the sultry days of summer, for soon enough, each season, each day, each moment, passes into history, and its exact likeness shall not be seen again. So rather than longing for summer in the midst of a winter’s chill, or wishing for cool winds in the dog days of summer, embrace each season for its own gifts. Align yourself with the cycles of time and transformation, riding change as ships ride the waves.

Dan Millman, The Laws of Spirit

Meet it with kindness

One method I learned from my teacher, Diana Winston, is elegantly simple. In your meditation, simply add a few words to each time you notice your attention wandering: May I meet this too with kindness. Whatever comes up, repeat this phrase of loving-kindness toward your thoughts, feelings, or sensations.

See if you can notice how it feels to meet yourself with kindness instead of judgment or reaction. And then, as you move through the day, try repeating the same phrase – “may I meet this, too, with kindness” – whenever you notice you are being hard on yourself, judgmental toward yourself, or unkind in any way. Often, learning to meet yourself with kindness can feel like the medicine your heart and inner life yearns for, especially if you’re used to meeting yourself with all kinds of judgment and past conditioning.

Finally, see if you can extend this intention toward anything that happens in your day, or to anyone you encounter, especially when things aren’t going the way you would like them to. Lean into the intention to meet all that is here with kindness.

Amanda Gilbert, May I Meet This, Too, With Kindness

endless chatter

Meditation is not something apart from life. When you are driving a car or sitting in a bus, when you are chatting aimlessly, when you are walking by yourself in a wood or watching a butterfly being carried by the windthat is the moment when meditation can take place, if you are aware, if you are attentive, if your mind is not occupied with endless chatter.

J. Krishnamurti

Loose ends

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

already whole

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.

keep the heart open

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