If you feel that your dreams aren’t coming true, you might think that you need to do more, or to think and strategize more.
In fact, what you might need is less – less noise coming to you from both inside and outside -so that you have the space for your heart’s truest intention to germinate and flourish
Thich Nhat Hanh, Silence
Contentment isn’t about getting what you want – it’s about being at peace with what is.
When you stop measuring life by your preferences,
the heart settles into a natural ease.
Ajahn Sucitto, Kamma and the End of Kamma
What we need to know is already known within.
Sometimes life circumstances require [that] a therapist…embodies the permission-granting authority figure, the simulacrum of an empowering parent, but even that does not always work.
Sooner or later, a person has to understand and revisit the basics: we are accountable for the life we have lived or not lived; we are summoned to choice, courage and perseverance in living this life. From that recognition, the necessity of permission becomes more than obvious; it becomes the vital oxygen we must breathe or we choke to death on the fumes of the unlived life
James Hollis, Living an Examined Life: Wisdom for the Second half of the Journey
Both the poetic and the literal translations have something to provoke reflection
Can you step back from your own mind, and understand all things?
Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, 10 (Mitchell translation)
[literally Can you comprehend everything without depending on knowing]
I think there is only one subject worth my attention and that is the precognition of the spiritual side of the world and, within this recognition, the condition of my own spiritual state.
Mary Oliver, Winter Hours
We in the West think that the mind is everything, but all Eastern practice is to get beyond the mind to the point of the silent witness, where you’re witnessing yourself, where you’ve gone beyond the ego, beyond the self. The Indian tradition rests on what the West has largely lost: that there are three levels. There is the level of the body and the level of the mind, which the Western world thinks is the end. But beyond the body is the spirit. It’s the Atman, the pneuma of St. Paul, another dimension where we go beyond the mind, the senses, and the feelings, and we’re aware of the transcendent reality.
And that is the goal of life, to get to that.
Bede Griffiths
We tend to focus on, and speak about the soul life of an individual in terms of spiritual comfort and deep nourishment, qualities which are a central, and abiding dynamic of its presence,
but the equally unsettling and disturbing quality about this strange, often wild and courageous faculty of belonging inside us we have come to name ‘the soul’ is its ruthless, and almost tidal wish to find its own way to a full union with the world.
The soul is a planner’s nightmare, the career counsellor’s central surprise, the biographer’s conundrum, an internal abiding spring that is both a source and a continual unstoppable flow, an internal stranger at the door of our outer life about to break everything apart and leave;
a pilgrim suddenly more in love with the horizon than its home; and most disturbingly, someone who is willing to fail, often spectacularly, at their own life rather than succeed drably, at someone else’s
David Whyte
Mindfulbalance 