Praise
flow and change, night and
the pulse of day.

Denise Levertov

When you catch yourself absorbed by some immediate aspect of your environment, try to yield to the observation fully for a few seconds.

I swoon and recoil at the tresses blowing
in an arbor without glow
or flame. These are reprieves. Respites
in the demands of sensation
and flow. Know this: you can you can
you can you can you can.

~ Margot Schilpp

There’s something liberating about feeling at home in both the story of your life and the direct experience of living it. 

Why should we grieve that we’ve been sleeping?
It doesn’t matter how long we’ve been unconscious.

We’re groggy, but let the guilt go.
Feel the motions of tenderness
around you, the buoyancy.

Rumi

Training your attention by listening closely to words as sounds can enrich your lifelong relationship to the language you rely on to navigate your life. It might even rekindle the wordless wonder that existed before you developed the ability to comprehend words.

Confusion is a natural emotional aspect of the learning cycle. It's easy to allow this emotional discomfort to convince us that we lack the capacity to understand concepts and master skills. Steering away from the temporary experience of vulnerability can become habitual.

When it comes to developing any new skill, it is more important to be clever than to be disciplined.

What’s the difference between meditating on a problem and ruminating?

One of the things I’ve come to appreciate about mindfulness strategies is the way some core internal obstacles can be unraveled without necessarily needing to solve a related narrative puzzle.

What makes it so difficult to establish a habit even when we’re convinced of its benefits?

“Just because you've looked at something doesn't mean you've seen it.”

Jennifer Robers

This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost. 

“People don't understand that the hardest thing is to actually do something which is close to nothing. It demands all of you because there's no story to hide behind."

Marina Abramovic

Try pausing right before
and right after 
undertaking a new action

Brother David Steindl-Rast

“Every known visual system depends on movement: we see things either because they move or because our eyes do.”

Susana Martinez-Conde

"Maybe Humpty Dumpty jumped."

Rabbi Irwin Kula

“All our education might be brought to a point where it allows us to glimpse in wonder the slightest breath of life in front of us."

~ Thomas Moore

“If we sit still, like a mountain in a hurricane, if we don't protect ourselves from the trueness and the vividness and the immediacy and the lack of confirmation of simply being part of life, then we are not this separate being who has to have things turn out our way.”

Pema Chödrön

"It’s ironic that the biggest potential problem associated with focusing on emotional discomfort is closely linked to one of its most powerful payoffs: our cage may get rattled a bit before it collapses."

Shinzen Young