Rest when you’re tired. Take a break when life stales. Take time to recharge your battery. Energy isn’t something you have—it’s something you are. To give and give and give, to put out without taking in, depletes your battery. It drains you, runs you down.
Catalog
Quotes tagged ‘The Art of Awareness’
All human activity is prompted by desire. There is a wholly fallacious theory advanced by some earnest moralists to the effect that it is possible to resist desire in the interests of duty and moral principle. I say this is fallacious, not because no man ever acts from a sense of duty, but because d…
The real me isn't the person I describe, no the real me is the me revealed by my actions.
I like to say that meditating is the mind’s way of looking in the mirror and cleaning itself up. Except the mind won’t do this on its own volition. Just sit in silence with your eyes closed. Focus on the breath. Give your mind a chance to correct itself. Watch your life slowly transform into somethi…
Instead of meditating to become better at your job, rid yourself of addiction, or solve some sort of problem in your life, meditate to meditate. The act of meditating every day will carry over into everything else you do. People find themselves magically quitting smoking, drinking less, fighting les…
Meditation allows us to rearrange the entire mental fabric of living. This makes perfect sense, since it’s been proven to change the brain chemistry of regular practitioners. The mind is able to recalibrate itself and focus on what really matters: present scenery and circumstances.
The scale of circumstance is not ‘happiness’ and ‘unhappiness’. There are a lot of ‘happy’ people in this world and a lot of ‘unhappy’ people, but this doesn’t matter. Chasing happiness rearranges your life so that you prevent yourself from taking the risks and enduring the suffering that’s likely t…
Many people have a narcotic attitude towards suffering. It terrifies them and makes them uncomfortable and so instead of building a tool set for overcoming it, they aim to stifle it. The sheer popularity of entertainment, junk food, porn, video games and all these other modern distractions is testam…
It’s a weird specific type of human arrogance to think that people can offset the great universal balance of positive and negative. It’s like trying to split an atom; we all know what happens when you do that. There are thousands of books out there trying to convince people that the secret to their…
The truth is that the key to relaxation and finding inner peace doesn’t rely much on work, culture, or consumption. This should be a huge relief, since regardless of where you live, what you believe, or who you are, your stress is probably the result of one of the below factors... The world does stu…
Getting the fuck over it does not mean you ignore your feelings. They are not the same thing. Getting the fuck over it means I see you, emotion that could have the power to devastate me and paralyze me for the day, or week, or year. And I am choosing to put my energy elsewhere. It does not mean you…
As soon as you fear losing someone, you dehumanize them. Remember: they don’t belong to you. No one belongs to anyone. Instead, be grateful for the presence of others in your life while they are around.
Only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being.
If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.
A wise man rules his passions, a fool obeys them.
Pleasures will never make you whole.
How do you know the difference between acknowledging pain and wallowing in it? There's no precise test. But if talking about or "explaining" or "understanding" your pain has become an excuse you use to avoid doing what you need to do, then you are probably wallowing.
Standing at sea level, an ax in your hand feels like a feather. At twelve thousand feet, hours from the summit, an extra pound in your pack feels like an anvil. In the same way, words have value.
A masterful warrior carries everything she needs and no more, just as a masterful painter uses all of the paint that she needs and no more, and a master chef uses all of the ingredients that she needs and no more. In the same way, a masterful philosopher will use all of the words that she needs and…
Culture was originally a word for the tilling and tending of the land. Later, people made an analogy and suggested that you could cultivate yourself. So culture also came to mean the things that you could see, listen to, read, learn, try and practice in order to make yourself better and to live a fu…