All starts with thoughts

Watch your thoughts, they become words.
Watch your words, they lead to actions.
Watch your actions, they create habits.
Watch your habits, they build your character.
Watch your character, it becomes your destiny.

Upanishads


Everything that happens today is a blessing

It is not easy to be open to everything that happens in a day, either outside us or within us, still less to see them all as “blessings”. Here Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, reminds us to do so, maybe from the perspective of her work with people in the last moments of their lives, when they have let go of some of the things which assumed great importance during their lives. Her words remind us today that life has a richness to be experienced and is not just to be managed or gotten through. Every aspect of this day can teach us, if we have eyes to see.

Learn to get in touch with silence within yourself, and know that everything in this life has purpose.

There are no mistakes, no coincidences, all events are blessings given to us to learn from.

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

Today, send out goodness

If you send out goodness from yourself, or if you share that which is happy or good within you, it will all come back to you multiplied ten thousand times. In the kingdom of love there is no competition; there is no possessiveness or control. The more love you give away, the more love you will have.

John O’Donoghue

Do not try to become anything

Sometime go outside and sit,
In the evening at sunset,
When there’s a slight breeze that touches your body,
And makes the leaves and the trees move gently.
You’re not trying to do anything, really.
You’re simply allowing yourself to be,
Very open from deep within,
Without holding onto anything whatsoever. Don’t bring something back from the past, from a memory.

Tsogni Rinpoche

Do not try to become anything. Do not make yourself  into anything.

Do not be a meditator. When you sit, let it be. When you walk, let it be.

Grasp at nothing. Resist nothing.

Ajahn Chah

……Just watch stuff go by

I came across a definition of meditation that it comes from the root meaning ‘right balance.’ That rang true for me because, personally, my attention is often so fragmented, egocentric, narcissistic or self-concerned that there isn’t a whole lot of inner balance or alignment with what is. Rather, I am stuck in a state of nonbalance. Right balance is when my mind is not spinning out endless movies and delusions, or maybe it still is but I am just not so attached to believing them. Meditation is when I can watch stuff go by and the part of me that usually interrupts and says, ‘That’s a good story, or that son of a bitch, or I’m guilty and awful,’ that part sits back and sees it as just one more story but without attachment to it.

Joan Borysenko, quoted in Oprah Magazine

Where we choose to focus

Both abundance and lack exist simultaneously in our lives, as parallel realities.

It is always our conscious choice which garden we will tend … when we choose not to focus on what is missing from our lives but are grateful for the abundance that’s present — love, health, family, friends, work, the joys of nature and personal pursuits that bring us pleasure — the wasteland of illusion falls away and we experience heaven on earth.

Sarah Ban Breathnach