If you free yourself from the comparing and jealous mind, your creativity opens up endlessly. Just as water springs from a fountain, creativity springs from every moment. You must not be your own obstacle. You must not be owned by the environment you are in. You must own the environment, the phenomenal world around you. You must be able to freely move in and out of your mind. This is being free. That is my belief.
Jeong Kwan, Buddhist nun and chef of Korean cuisine
To know what you’re going to draw,
you have to begin drawing.
Picasso
You are uneasy riding the body?
Dismount. Travel lighter. Wings will be given.
Be clear like a mirror, reflecting nothing.
Be clean of pictures and the worry that comes with images.
Gaze into what is not ashamed or afraid of any truth.
Contain all human faces in your own without any judgment of them.
Be pure emptiness.
What is inside that? you ask. Silence is all I can say.
Lovers have some secrets That they keep.
Rumi
The transformation of fear does not mean that we no longer have fearful responses. It means that we no longer believe that those responses are who we are. This is what practice is about: learning to stop believing that our deep-seated reactivity is who we are. Who we really are is much bigger than any of our fear-based conditioned responses. When we can really experience fear, we can see through this false identification, perhaps even glimpsing a vaster sense of Being.
Ezra Bayda, Being Zen
One day I finally realized that I no longer needed a personal history and just like drinking I gave it up, and that, and only that, has made all the difference.
Carlos Castenada, Don Juan
It is always hard to believe that the courageous step is so close to us, that it is closer than we ever could imagine, that in fact, we already know what it is, and that the step is simpler, more radical than we had thought:
which is why we so often prefer to live in an almost world, why we prefer the story to be more elaborate, our identities to be safely clouded by fear, why we want the horizon to remain always in the distance, the promise never fully and simply made, the essay longer than it needs to be and the answer safely in the realm of impossibility.
David Whyte “Beginning” in Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.
Mindfulbalance 