As I go through all kinds of feelings and experiences in my journey through life — delight, surprise, chagrin, dismay — I hold this question as a guiding light: “What do I really need right now to be happy?” What I come to over and over again is that only qualities as vast and deep as love, connection, and kindness will really make me happy in any sort of enduring way.
Sharon Salzberg
If we are going to achieve our purpose in life, we must be willing to fall out of grace and accept its lessons. When we feel righteous about ourselves, or deny our brokenness, we are fighting against the higher states of grace that await us. Failure is built into grace. You cannot have one without the other. It’s like two sides of a single coin. Everyone who has achieved a state of grace is certain at some point to fall, and to have fallen many times before. Every successful person, everyone you respect, will tell you that they have mountains of failure behind them…
When we are in grace, we begin to take things for granted and we actually stop working on ourselves. Falling out of grace shakes us up. It reconnects us to the larger universe in order for us to see ourselves anew. It forces us to rediscover where our true center begins, and to learn what needs to be set aside.
Sobonfu Some, Falling Out of Grace: Meditations on Loss, Healing and Wisdom
To truly be kind to others (and ourselves for that matter), it helps to abandon time slavery and try to notice what kind of time others are keeping, to notice their face and their gesture, to know when they are ready to say something, ready to be quiet, ready to come, to go, to be led, to be followed. So many times I have been unable to listen or to notice what someone was going through or where they were headed because it didn’t meet with my schedule. Patience and timing are inextricably linked. Patience, which we can regard with such excruciation, offers a hidden reward. When we stop watching the pot, we may learn that it boils right on time.
Sometimes my father would forget to wind the big clock, the weights would fall, and time would stop. We wind the clock. It does not have to wind us.
Barry Boyce, What Time is Now?
One of the more difficult paradoxes to accept is that this abundance of gifts is always quietly present and that it is we who drift in and out of seeing it. The one recurring doorway to this vitality is our simple participation in life. When we slip into heartless watching, the abundance seems to vanish. When we dare to show up and be fully present, grace and wonder and mystery start to appear, even in the midst of pain. Not as planned dreams, or as images of lovers, or as scripts of success designed by our fantasies of ourselves. But as oddly shaped pods of vitality bursting to multiply and bring us further into the mystery of living.
Mark Nepo, The Exquisite Risk: Daring to Live an Authentic LIfe
There is a basic notion that every soul has two ‘wings.’ These’ wings of the soul ‘ are Love and Awe.
When the soul is free, fresh and open, and available for inspiration, it flies on these two wings.
With one wing it is hard to fly; you must have two.
Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Wrapped In a Holy Flame: Teachings and Tales of the Hasidic Masters
The journey of awakening happens just at the place where we can’t get comfortable. Opening to discomfort is the basis of transmuting our so-called “negative” feelings. We somehow want to get rid of our uncomfortable feelings either by justifying them or by squelching them, but it turns out that this is like throwing the baby out with the bath water. By trying to get rid of “negativity,” by trying to eradicate it, by putting it into a column labelled “bad,” we are throwing away our wisdom as well, because everything in us is creative energy — particularly our strong emotions. They are filled with life-force.
There is nothing wrong with negativity per se; the problem is that we never see it, we never honor it, we never look into its heart. We don’t taste our negativity, smell it, get to know it. Instead, we are always trying to get rid of it by punching someone in the face, by slandering someone, by punishing ourselves, or by repressing our feelings. In between repression and acting out, however, there is something wise and profound and timeless.
Pema Chodron, To Know Yourself is to Forget Yourself
