American Lakota Elder on the Gifts of Silence

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“You don’t convince anyone by arguing.
People make their decisions in their heart.
Talk doesn’t touch my heart.
People should think of their words like seeds. They should plant them, then let them grow in silence.
Our old people taught us that the earth is always speaking to us, but that we have to be silent to hear her.
I can understand all the trees.
The wind.
All the animals.
The insects.
I can tell what a color of the sky means. Everything in the natural world speaks to me.
Teaching our children well.”

— American Lakota Elder

Francis Lucille on the Experience of Love

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“The experience of love is really the understanding that you and I are are the same being, that your being and my being is the same being. The understanding that there is only one reality leads to the experience of love. This is love in the deepest sense.”

— Francis Lucille

Ram Dass on Changing the Meaning of Suffering

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Joan Halifax (Santa Fe, New Mexico), CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

“When you have that level of awareness, the meaning of suffering changes and all suffering is showing you is where your mind is still clinging.”

— Ram Dass

Ajahn Brahmasovo on the Hindrances to Shamatha Meditation

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Goh, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

“Heaviness of body and dullness of mind which can drag one down into inertia and depression is considered one of the five hindrances to Shamatha meditation. Any problem which arises in meditation will be one of these five hindrances, or a combination.”

— Ajahn Brahmasovo

Thich Nhat Hahn on Right Action

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“The basis of Right Action is to do everything in mindfulness.”

— Thich Nhat Hahn

Sadhguru on the Bhagwad Gita

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“It is never what you do which entangles you. It is the expectation of what you should get which entangles you.”

— Sadhguru on the Bhagwad Gita

The Upanishads on the Ultimate Reality

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“So’ham is a Vedic mantra or chant meaning  “I am That”….”I am what She/He is” — It means identifying oneself with the universe or ultimate reality or awareness.”

— Incl. Max Müller translation of The Upanishads

Vasant Lad on Daily Habits for Healing

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“Thought is time; Prana, breath is time; ingestion of food is time. Any action is bound by time. Dinacharya (Daily Habits for Healing) teaches us how to use time – every action in proper time. This is what makes time a great healer.“

— Vasant Lad

David Whyte on the Power of Listening

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“All this petty worry while the great cloak of the sky grows dark and intense ‘round every living thing. What is precious inside us does not care to be known by the mind in ways that diminish its presence… Inside everyone is a great shout of joy waiting to be born… All those years listening to those who had nothing to say. All those years forgetting how everything has its own voice to make itself heard. All those years forgetting how easily you can belong to everything simply by listening.”

— David Whyte, The Winter of Listening

Rupert Spira on Going Back to Your Essential Nature

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“When you feel depressed, what is to be done? Simply go back to your essential nature. Trace your way back, disentangle yourself from the content of experience in which you have lost yourself—in your own activity of thinking and perceiving, like an actor who temporarily loses himself in the part he is playing. What is to be done? He just needs to trace his way back to himself. That’s all you need to do right now. Even in the midst of a deep depression, the nature of your mind is clear.”

—Rupert Spira