Undisturbed calmness of mind is attained
by cultivating friendliness toward the happy,
compassion for the unhappy,
delight in the virtuous,
and indifference toward the wicked.
Patanjali, Yoga Sutras
What makes a calm mind
Tag: heart
A wonderful day
The purpose of life is to be defeated by ever greater things.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Never once in my life did I ask God for success or wisdom or power or fame.
I asked for wonder, and he gave it to me.
Rabbi Joshua Herschel
Healing the heart
If the purpose of life is to ‘feel the rapture of being alive,’ and if our capacity to feel is crippled by old wounds and a lack of emotional education, then it follows that an important part of the spiritual path is to heal the heart and to become emotionally intelligent. As we work on opening the heart, we will confront, over and over, our fearful habit of closing to pain. The price for staying heart blind is a life unlived. The Dalai Lama has gone as far as saying that ‘the tendency to avoid problems and the emotional suffering inherent in them is the primary basis of all human mental illness.’ Heartfulness work is the cessation of avoidance. Jung said, ‘What is not brought to consciousness, comes to us as fate,’ and nowhere is this more true than in the realm of the heart
Elizabeth Lesser
The greatest gift we can give today
From William Stafford, A Ritual to Read to Each Other:
If you don’t know the kind of person I am
And I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.
For there is many a small betrayal in the mind….
Seeing a person free of everything we thought of him or her is a most extraordinary event. Things become luminous. We realize our common nature of no-nature. This is seeing from the heart – compassion.
Katherine Thanas, The Truth of This Life
Sunday Quote: This year….
A New Years motto….
We are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love.
William Blake, The Little Black Boy
Really drinking tea
When you sit in a café, with a lot of music in the background and a lot of projects in your head, you’re not really drinking your coffee or your tea. You’re drinking your projects, you’re drinking your worries. You are not real, and the coffee is not real either. Your coffee can only reveal itself to you as a reality when you go back to your self and produce your true presence, freeing yourself from the past, the future, and from your worries. When you are real, the tea also becomes real and the encounter between you and the tea is real. This is genuine tea drinking.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Mindfulbalance 