“Linguists say that language comes after music
and we sang nonsense syllables

before we invented a rational speech
to order our days.”

~ Jim Harrison

“I’m slowly learning how to bring anthropology and mindfulness together. I think they complement each other beautifully, but how to talk about it is a whole other thing. I think it comes down to excavation – what you do physically to understand where people come from. That’s a process of discovery and insight.”

Dr. Michael J. Kimball

“There usually isn’t a quick fix to what makes our lives so challenging, and that’s okay. A meditation practice, even as brief as a couple of minutes a day, can teach us how to accept the discomfort instead of trying to calm it down.”

~ Jinger Moore

Making sense is our second language.

Sensing comes first.

"Dive in with your eyes closed
For the life you were born to claim
And the water will be paralyzed
By the courage you contain
And the flutter of your earnest heart
It will fill the silent seas"

~ Ryan O'Neal 

"Holiness is reached not through effort or will, but by stopping; by an inward coming to rest; a place from which we can embody the spirit of all our holy days, a radical, inhabited simplicity, where we live in a kind of ongoing surprise and with some wonder and appreciation."

~ David Whyte

"It’s a very difficult principle to grasp, this idea that actually, what I don’t know matters enormously, and what I can’t see matters enormously."

~ Daniel Kahneman

"What we’ve been doing for thousands of years is just trying to piece by piece get some understanding of where we came from, where the universe came from, and where it’s all going. So, to me, that is not distinct from what the poet does or what the philosopher does or what the great writer does or the composer does. They just do it in a different language."

~ Brian Greene

"What is home?"

~ Pádraig Ó Tuama

"Half of what’s about to occur is unknown, both inside you and outside you."

~ David Whyte

How still we became,
witness and thing seen

~ Dorothy Walters

"I'll never be the fastest teenager, and I'm okay with that. It doesn't matter if I'm better or worse than someone. It just matters that in a year from now, I'm stronger, I'm faster, and I'm a better person."

~ Cole Cooper

But do not ask me where I am going,
As I travel in this limitless world,
Where every step I take is my home.

~ Dogen Zenji

When I first started practicing mindfulness, I saw internal words — aka verbal thoughts — as my opponents. Like most people, I thought the point was to not think. When verbal thoughts were present, I was obviously not. Start over. Try harder.

There's just one problem with this approach. It is normal for the mind to think in words.

"We cannot receive love, however, if we are not open to the raw and tender experience of wanting it. Suppressing or denying desire shuts down our openness to receiving nourishment, and thus only intensifies our hunger."

~ John Welwood

To live is to be
uncertain.
Certainty comes
at the end.

~ Erica Jong

Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination.

~ Leslie Jamison

Stories cannot demolish frontiers, but they can punch holes in our mental walls. And through those holes, we can get a glimpse of the other, and sometimes even like what we see."

~ Elif Shafak

"We are not at home in the world because we imagine it is as we have become, full of nothing but yearning and forgetting and hoping for something so raw we can't describe it."

~ Simon Van Booy

Inside everyone
is a great shout of joy
waiting to be born.

~ David Whyte