When you combine acceptance with responsibility and defenselessness, your work becomes an expression of your higher purpose.
You stop wasting energy resisting office politics, stressing over deadlines, or obsessing over outcomes.
Instead, you focus on creative solutions, trusting that the universe will support your intentions when you act in alignment with truth and compassion.
Deepak Chopra, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success
trust your heart
if the seas catch fire
(and live by love
though the stars walk backward)
e e cummings, dive for dreams
Picked some ripe blackberries beside the woodland path I walked along yesterday evening. Freely given, like all of life, and not to be taken, as we say, “for granted.” The only real response is gratefulness.
Be still, my soul, and steadfast.
Earth and heaven both are still watching
though time is draining from the clock
and your walk, that was confident and quick,
has become slow.
So, be slow if you must, but let
the heart still play its true part.
Love still as once you loved, deeply
and without patience. Let God and the world
know you are grateful. That the gift has been given.
Mary Oliver, The Gift
The peace that is the nature of being is not a state of the mind; it is the nature of the mind.
It is the peace that passeth understanding –
the peace that has nothing to do with what is, or what is not, taking place in experience
Rupert Spira, Your True Home, A Meditation on Experience
To think we can control the world is an illusion.
But we can control how we relate to it.
Jon Kabat Zinn
I spent many years looking for the perfect place to live, the perfect spiritual teacher, the perfect path, the perfect career, the perfect community, and so on, before realizing that no such lasting perfection exists except as an imaginary idea.
The only real perfection is Here / Now, and it’s not about the content, it’s about the awareness and the presence that is here regardless of the content, not because of the content. I also spent many years chasing some final enlightenment event, some happy ending, believing that there was some Finish Line that I had not yet crossed.
Finally, that whole fixation and search for enlightenment fell away, not in any Big Bang event, but gradually and quietly and imperceptibly, and not because “I” became permanently enlightened at last, but because that very idea became transparently absurd.
Joan Tollifson
Mindfulbalance 