Words of Wisdom

“We spend precious hours fearing the inevitable. It would be wise to use that time adoring our families, cherishing our friends and living our lives.” - Maya Angelou 

“We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.” - Maya Angelou

“If someone comes along and shoots an arrow into your heart, it’s fruitless to stand there and yell at the person. It would be much better to turn your attention to the fact that there’s an arrow in your heart...” - Pema Chödrön

“The most fundamental aggression to ourselves, the most fundamental harm we can do to ourselves, is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly and gently.” - Pema Chödrön

“You are the sky. Everything else – it’s just the weather.” - Pema Chödrön

"Mindfulness is the energy that sheds light on all things and all activities, producing the power of concentration, bringing forth deep insight and awakening." - Thích Nhất Hạnh 

“To be beautiful means to be yourself. You don’t need to be accepted by others. You need to accept yourself.” - Thích Nhất Hạnh

“People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar.” - Thích Nhất Hạnh

“For things to reveal themselves to us, we need to be ready to abandon our views about them.” - Thích Nhất Hạnh

“If you love someone, the greatest gift you can give them is your presence.” - Thích Nhất Hạnh

“If we do not know how to take care of ourselves and to love ourselves, we cannot take care of the people we love. Loving oneself is the foundation for loving another person.” - Thích Nhất Hạnh

“To think in terms of either pessimism or optimism oversimplifies the truth. The problem is to see reality as it is.” - Thích Nhất Hạnh

“I would not look upon anger as something foreign to me that I have to fight... I have to deal with my anger with care, with love, with tenderness, with nonviolence.” - Thích Nhất Hạnh 

“Compassion is a verb.“ - Thích Nhất Hạnh 

“We have more possibilities available in each moment than we realize.”

“In mindfulness one is not only restful and happy, but alert and awake. Meditation is not evasion; it is a serene encounter with reality.”

“When you begin to see that your enemy is suffering, that is the beginning of insight.” 

- Thích Nhất Hạnh

“We often cause ourselves suffering by wanting only to live in a world of valleys, a world without struggle and difficulty, a world that is flat, plain, consistent.” - bell hooks

“Only love can heal the wounds of the past. However, the intensity of our woundedness often leads to a closing of the heart, making it impossible for us to give or receive the love that is given to us.” - bell hooks 

“Love is an action, never simply a feeling.” - bell hooks bell hooks

“I am often struck by the dangerous narcissism fostered by spiritual rhetoric that pays so much attention to individual self-improvement and so little to the practice of love within the context of community.” 
― Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“The awareness is not part of the darkness or the pain; it holds the pain, and knows it, so it has to be more fundamental, and closer to what is healthy and strong and golden within you.” - Jon Kabat-Zinn

“Perhaps we just need little reminders from time to time that we are already dignified, deserving, worthy. Sometimes we don't feel that way because of the wounds and the scars we carry from the past or because of the uncertainty of the future. It is doubtful that we came to feel undeserving on our own. We were helped to feel unworthy. We were taught it in a thousand ways when we were little, and we learned our lessons well.” - Jon Kabat-Zinn

“Mindfulness, also called wise attention, helps us see what we’re adding to our experiences, not only during meditation sessions but also elsewhere.” - Sharon Salzberg

“You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.” - Henry David Thoreau

“Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness.” - Eckhart Tolle

“Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it.” - Eckhart Tolle

“If her past were your past, her pain your pain, her level of consciousness your level of consciousness, you would think and act exactly as she does. With this realization comes forgiveness, compassion and peace.” - Eckhart Tolle

"When you recognize that there is a voice in your head that pretends to be you and never stops speaking, you are awakening out of your unconscious identification with the stream of thinking. When you notice that voice, you realize that who you are is not the voice — the  thinker — but the one who is aware of it. Knowing yourself as the awareness behind the voice is freedom." - Eckhart Tolle

“Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.” - Lao Tzu  

“We may tell ourselves that love is not really available. but the deeper truth is that we don’t entirely trust it, and therefore have a hard time fully opening to it or letting it all the way into us. This disconnects us from our own heart, exacerbating our sense of love’s scarcity.”

— John Welwood

“The less you demand total fulfillment from relationships, the more you can appreciate them for the beautiful tapestries they are, in which absolute and relative, perfect and imperfect, infinite and finite are marvelously interwoven. You can stop fighting the shifting tides of relative love and learn to ride them instead. And you come to appreciate more fully the simple, ordinary heroism involved in opening to another person and forging real intimacy.”

— John Welwood

“Not knowing that we can be loved for who we truly are prevents us from trusting in love itself, and this in turn causes us to turn away from life and doubt its benevolence.”

— John Welwood

“A soul connection not only inspires us to expand, but also forces us to confront whatever stands in the way of that expansion.” 
-- John Welwood

"The light of unconditional love awakens the dormant seed potentials of the soul."
--- John Welwood

"To allow yourself your own experience is the greatest act of self-love." - John Welwood

"The light of unconditional love awakens the dormant seed potentials of the soul." - John Welwood 

“These pains you feel are messengers. Listen to them.” ― Rumi

“I will soothe you and heal you,

I will bring you roses.

I too have been covered with thorns.”

― Rumi