Remember that you’re not on this earth to be perfect.
We’re here to love well, to realize our unity and our connection.
Adyashanti
To me, this is what bearing witness is; just relaxing and settling down, and learning to be in, as Carl Jung would say “the time of your life”…
Life becomes alive only when we are expansive, and we can expand only when we learn to relax: into our seat, into our feet on the floor, into our breath and our belly. From this place of relaxation we can bear witness to anything.
Koshin Paley Ellison, Wholehearthed
Happiness floats.
It doesn’t need you to hold it down.
It doesn’t need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records . . .
Naomi Shihab Nye, So Much Happiness [extract]
The storm is over; too bad, I say.
At least storms are clear
about their dangerous intent.
Ordinary days are what I fear,
the sneaky speed
with which noon arrives, the sun shining while a government darkens
a decade or a man falls out of love.
I fear the solace of repetition, a withheld slap in the face.
Stephen Dunn, Ordinary Days
We come to realize that the universe mirrors back to us perfectly our beliefs, our intentions, our sincerity. What is is the product of the map of reality you carry inside you?
If you want to change your experience, you need to change the map.
Alberto Villoldo, One Spirit Medicine: Ancient Ways to Ultimate Wellness