Simone de Beauvoir

"I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties
through my love for truth; and truth rewarded me."

Happiness

"Happiness is an attitude. We either make ourselves miserable, or happy and strong. The amount of work is the same." ~ Francesca Reigler

Leo Tolstoy

"If you want to be happy, be."

Raku Kichizaemon

"Not to narrate, nor express
Neither to be concerned about being traditional or contemporary
Nor again to strive for originality
What matters is to drop a plumb-line into the depths of my being
And grope my way downward
Into the cave of my existence, crammed with the totality of
Past, present and future."

The Terma Collective

"What in your life is calling you?
When all the noise is silenced,
the meetings adjourned,
the lists laid aside,
and the wild iris blooms by itself
in the dark forest,
what still pulls on your soul?

In the silence between your heartbeats
hides a summons.
Do you hear it?
Name it, if you must,
or leave it forever nameless,
but why pretend it is not there?"

dwelling

house
friends
heart
feeling
happiness
fears
hope
family
healing
faith
home

adapt

refine
ideas
change
dreams
restart
acceptance
remorse
grief
growth
change

creature

wild
running
breathing
eating
spirit
searching
seeking
light
meaning
birth

acceptance

life
movement
positioning
growth
rebirth
directing
orchestrating
building
new life

Agathon

"Even God cannot change the past."

Leonard Cohen

“Sometimes when you no longer see yourself as the hero of your own drama, expecting victory after victory and you understand deeply that this is not paradise. Somehow, especially the privileged ones that we are, we somehow embrace the notion that this veil of tears, that it’s perfectible, that you can get it all straight. I found that things became a lot easier when I no longer expected to win. When you understand that, you abandon your masterpiece and you sink into the real masterpiece.”

Rumi

“You are not a drop in the ocean but the entire ocean in one single drop”

God Seed

"The seed of God is in us. Pear seeds grow into pear trees, nut seeds into nut trees, and God seeds into God." ~ Meister Eckhart

Elbert Hubbard

"The line between failure and success is so fine that we scarcely know when we pass it: so fine that we are often on the line and do not know it. How many a man has thrown up his hands at a time when a little more effort, a little more patience, would have achieved success. … A little more persistence, a little more effort, and what seemed hopeless failure may turn to glorious success. There is no failure except in no longer trying."

Gandhi

"In a gentle way, you can shake the world."

Shawshank Redemption

"Get Busy Living or Get Busy Dying."

Sarah

"I am always provided with everything I need in life."

Alan Watts

"To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float."

Anne Lamott

"No" is a complete sentence.

Buddha

"Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own unguarded thoughts."

Hippocrates

“The soul is the same in all living creatures although the body of each is different”

William Shakespeare

"This above all:  to thine own self be true"

St Francis of Assisi

"Not to hurt our humble brethren, the animals, is our first duty to them, but to stop there is not enough. We have a higher mission - to be of service to them whenever they require it... If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men."

Landslide

"I took my love and took it down
I climbed a mountain and I turned around
And I saw my reflection in the snow-covered hills
Till the landslide brought me down

Mirror in the sky, what is love?
Can the child within my heart rise above?
Can I sail through the changing ocean tides?
Can I handle the seasons of my life?

Well, I've been afraid of changing
'Cause I've built my life around you
But time makes you bolder
Even children get older
And I'm getting older too

I take my love, take it down
I climb a mountain and turn around
And if you see my reflection in the snow-covered hills
Will the landslide bring you down
And if you see my reflection in the snow-covered hills
Will the landslide bring you down,
The landslide bring you down"

 ~Stevie Nicks~

Rudyard Kipling

"For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack."

St Francis of Assisi

Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace;
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is discord, harmony;
Where there is error, truth;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
And where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master,
Grant that I may not so much seek To be consoled as to console;
To be understood as to understand;
To be loved as to love.
 For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

A Gift

Your Erroneous Zones

"Take a look at the way the world works.  To put it succinctly, you can never please everyone.  In fact, if you please fifty percent of the people, you are doing quite well.  This is no secret.  You know that at least half of the people in your world are going to disagree with at least half of the things you say.  If this is accurate (and you need only to look at landslide elections to see that forty-four percent of the population still voted against the winner), then you will always have about a 50-50 chance of getting some disapproval when you voice an opinion.

Armed with this knowledge, you can start to look at disapproval in a new light.  When someone disapproves of something you say [do], instead of being hurt, or instantly shifting your opinion [behaviour] to gain praise, you can remind yourself that you've just run into one of those folks in the fifty percent who don't agree with you.  Knowing that you'll always get some disapproval for everything you feel, think, say or do is the way out of the tunnel of despair.  Once you expect it, you won't be inclined to hurt yourself with it, and you'll simultaneously stop equating the repudiation of an idea or a feeling with the repudiation of you."

~ Wayne Dyer ~

The Bhagavad Gita

"Oh, Krishna, the mind is restless, turbulent, strong and unyielding.   I consider it as difficult to subdue as the wind."

t.s. eliot

“I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, but the faith and the love are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”

Thich Nhat Hanh

"If you truly get in touch with a piece of carrot, you get in touch with the soil, the rain, the sunshine. You get in touch with Mother Earth and eating in such a way, you feel in touch with true life, your roots, and that is meditation. If we chew every morsel of our food in that way we become grateful and when you are grateful, you are happy."

it's all irrelevant

"Those who know do not talk.
Those who talk do not know."

~Lao Tzu~

Maya Angelou

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” 

You will never be forgotten.

Dyer

"Give without expecting and Don't be victimized by the expectations of others."

The Strawberry

"A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger after him. Coming to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him. Only the vine sustained him.

Two mice, one white and one black, little by little started to gnaw away the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted!"

 Buddhist Koan

Pantanjali

“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.”

Emily Bronte

"Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same."

Heather Flores

“The amount of electricity you use is directly proportionate to the long-term damage your lifestyle inflicts upon your ecology. Cultivate an outdoor life, rich in experience rather than gadgetry. Go outside and garden. Go for a walk. Stretch. Sing. Play an instrument. Write poetry. Tell jokes. Talk to your neighbors. Daydream. Hang out with dogs and cats. Watch birds, go swimming. Take a nap. Cook. Read. Play with children. Dance. Make. Love.”

Sameet Kumar

"Happiness is not a light switch. You can't turn it on and leave it on. It's more like a candle in the breeze. Frequently extinguished, it needs to be relit over and over again."

Dr Sara Gottfried

"Your skin is a mirror of your life."

Helen Keller

“The unselfish effort to bring cheer to others will be the beginning of a happier life for ourselves.”

James Joyce

"Our secrets sit silent in the dark recesses of our hearts, but even they weary of their tyranny, willing and wanted to be dethroned."

Carrie Brown

“If I can’t ever tell anyone the true story . . . then no one will ever know me.”

Miss Beautiful Tulip

"You can't make unreasonable people be reasonable." it is worth repeating

John Lennon

“When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.”

B.K.S. Iyengar

"Yoga teaches us to cure what need not be endured and endure what cannot be cured."

Allen Ginsberg

“Concentrate on what you want to say to yourself and your friends. Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness. You say what you want to say when you don't care who's listening.”

Desikachar

"It is not enough to know how to climb a tree; we must also know how to come back down."

Krishnamacharya

"Where is the conflict when the Truth is known,
Where is the disease when the mind is clear,
Where is the death when the breath is controlled,
Therefore, surrender to Yoga."

VIvekananda

“Was there ever a more horrible blasphemy than the statement that all the knowledge of God is confined to this or that book? How dare men call God infinite, and yet try to compress Him within the covers of a little book!”

Francis Bacon

"the mind can be enlarged, according to its capacity, to the grandeur of the mysteries, and not the mysteries contracted to the narrowness of the mind"

Swami Vivekananda

"We are what our thoughts have made us; so take care about what you think. Words are secondary. Thoughts live; they travel far."

Samuel Johnson

"The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good."

Tiny House

"In dwelling, live close to the ground. In thinking, keep to the simple. In conflict, be fair and generous. In governing, don't try to control. In work, do what you enjoy. In family life, be completely present."

Lao Tzu

Tim Robbins

"Worry is just a meditation on shit"

Buddha

"Go forward without a path 
Fearing nothing, caring for nothing,
Wandering alone like the rhinoceros
Even as a lion, not trembling at noises,
Even as the wind, not caught in a net,
Even as the lotus leaf, untainted by water,
Do thou wander, like a rhinoceros!" 

Ray Long

“Patanjali, the patron saint of Yoga, said that mastery combines the balance of science and art. Knowledge of science is like the colors on an artist’s palette — the greater the knowledge the more colors available.  The body is the canvas and the Asanas are the art we create.”

Sat~Nam

softly lit
     barely audible

my arms outstretched
     two fingers point away
     thumbs circling back in

a room full of strangers
     and you

Chanting
     Sa
          Ta
               Na
                     Ma

I can feel the vibration
     of your voice

and then I am lost…

eyes closed
     yet gazing
          upwards

floating past the
feeling I am meant
     to release

Seven Minutes
     my arms reach out
I give and take
     in equal measure

I am the universe
     breathing.
pain searing
     my arms

mara is taunting me.

he is dancing in
     front of me
whispering,
          put down your arms

I resist
     breathing in
          through my
               teeth
releasing through my nose

Chanting
     I am.
          Sat~Nam.

Seven
        Six
            Five
                  Four
                       Three
                               Two
                                    One

Our arms collectively fall
     my body
begins to shake

I can feel
     the sobs
         coursing through me

tears silently sliding
     down my cheeks

I hear my teacher
     sigh

and we sit
     I am not the
          only one
               uplifted

the group has been elevated

we float on our vibrational cloud

joining
     compounding

open your eyes

You have opened my eyes.

You see my tears
     and smile

Knowing that I am
     moved.

Knowing that you moved
      me.

Your being moved with all.

We smile.
                   Namaste'

Osho

"With self-remembering you cannot eat meat, impossible. It is impossible to be so violent if you
remember. It is impossible to harm somebody when you remember, because when you remember
yourself, suddenly you see that the same light, the same flame is burning everywhere, within each
body, each unit. The more you know your inner nature, the more you penetrate the other. How can
you kill for eating? It becomes simply impossible." 

Dhyana

"As water takes the shape of its container, the mind when it contemplates an object is transformed into the shape of that object." ~Iyengar~

Swami Satchidananda

"We are not going to change the whole world, but we can change ourselves and feel free as birds. We can be serene even in the midst of calamities and, by our serenity, make others more tranquil. Serenity is contagious. If we smile at someone, he or she will smile back. And a smile costs nothing. We should plague everyone with joy. If we are to die in a minute, why not die happily, laughing?"