Meridian Qigong Exercises: Combining Qigong, Yoga, and Acupressure by Dr Jwing-Ming Yang

All quotes from Jwing-Ming's book

In Chinese medicine, the muscles/tendons that wrap around the torso are considered an organ called triple burner. 

Qi and blood circulation is the crucial key to getting rid of the body's toxins, especially when done in the early morning, right after waking up.

In Chinese medicine, it is recognized that smooth qi circulation is the key to preventing or treating cancers.

Feeling is a language that allows your mind and body to communicate through the nervous system and qi (energy) circulation.

Chinese people still refer to the weather as heaven qi. Every energy field strives to stay in balance, so whenever heaven qi loses its balance, it tries to rebalance itself. Then the wind must blow, rain must fall, and even tornadoes and hurricanes become necessary in order for heaven qi to reach a new energy balance.

The Chinese believe earth qi is made up of lines and patterns of energy as well as the earth's magnetic field and the heart concealed underground.  These energies must also bein balance; otherwise, disasters such as earthquakes will occur.

Within earth qi, each individual person, animal, and plant has its own qi field, which always seeks to be balanced.

Qi is also commonly used to express the energy state of something…. When something is alive it has vital qi; when it is dead, it has dead qi or ghost qi.

Air is called kong qi, which literally means "space energy".

The Art of Extreme Self-Care by Cheryl Richardson

All quotes from Cheryl's book

When you catch yourself saying things such as “I never have time to do what I want to do”, what you’re really saying is “I don’t take time for my needs”. 

When you insist “I always end up doing everything myself”, the truth of what you’re really saying is “I don’t ask for help”.

When you hear yourself complaining “no one appreciates the things I do”, what you most likely mean is “I take on way too much, hoping that someone will notice and tell me how good I am or how grateful they are”.

There is nothing wrong with standing in someone’s shadow.  It can be a great way to learn.

When you put relationships before results, live with integrity, and care about how our actions affect the greater community, you too add spiritual value to the world.

When you realize that you are in charge of your life and your time is limited, your choices become more important. 

A high-quality life starts with a high-quality you!

If you want to live an authentic meaningful life, you need to master the art of disappointing and upsetting others, hurting feelings, and living with the reality that some people just won’t like you.

When hit with an unexpected life challenge, most of us revert back to the old coping strategies that kept us safe as kids.  For example, you may have taken refuge in your bedroom to avoid dealing with parents who always fought.  As an adult, when faced with a chaotic situation such as losing a job or dealing with challenges in your own marriage, you now find yourself isolating from others as a way to escape the stress.  You don’t ask for help.  You don’t reach out for emotional support.  And you don’t admit to yourself or others the way you really feel.  Instead, you suffer in silence.

Extreme self-care challenge:  discovering where you feel deprived.

Peace and Plenty: Finding Your Path to Financial Security by Sarah Ban Breathnach

All quotes from Sarah's book

Fear is always a future-based phantom and a conscious choice.

When we're spiritually tuned in, everything is a clue pointing us in the right direction.

Health is the first wealth.

Worrying about money had squandered my most precious natural resources -- time, creative energy, and emotional resilience.

No matter whether you are rich or skint, the secret of financial security seems to be balancing your personal perceptions to life's daily portion.  It's never the amount of money that will save the day; it's the amount of fear that needs to be calmed to get through the day.  

Learning to consciously shift our own destructive energies to emotionally positive ones is how we learn self-preservation in the best sense. 

Worrying about money repels, rather than attracts prosperity.  Worrying about money shuts down our creativity and sends toxic signals -- fear, lack, deprivation, despair, anger, frustration -- which is exactly what you attract.  And when we're in this mood, it's very difficult to feel grateful. 

When cultural and economic change arrives, resilient people are versatile and find ways to reinvent themselves or repackage their experience into new careers. 

I have come to believe that if something scares me, it's probably a Divine prompt for me to go ahead, not run away, for this "teaching opportunity" is sent to heal me.

Anyone who says money doesn't matter never had to live without it.

Money.  Or your own natural energy field…. You are your own money. 

Anxiety feels the same as creativity before it ignites.

There are some occasions in life when the Universe gives us the opportunity to revisit how we are spending the most precious commodity we have of all: our time.  If we are not spending the majority of it doing what we love and being with the people we love, we're going to get a wake-up call that we can't ignore.

Often the lack of money pushes us where we really want to go, but didn't have the courage to go on our own.

Money solves so many problems, especially if you don't have any.  And if you do, money creates problematic situations you're meant to solve with your other precious natural resources -- time, creative energy, emotion, as well as money.  As soon as there is money available, we forget that.

When we make choices today, they will influence the tomorrow of a year form now, five years, a decade, or forever.

Every relationship we have in our lives is a reflection back to us of the relationship we have with ourselves, especially our relationship with money.

What's done and lost can be ransomed back with deliberation, compassion, and kindness.

While it's true that the past asks only to be remembered, that doesn't mean you need to entomb your regrets.

Making money is your ability to serve God in this world.  Try this affirmation, "Money is a blessing in my life and I share this blessing with others."

Calming Your Angry Mind: How Mindfulness and Compassion Can Free You from Anger and Bring Peace to Your Life by Jeffrey Brantley

All quotes from Jeffrey's book

Anger in its many forms can be like this, an old habit energy suddenly appearing in the present moment with alarming intensity.  Given the reality of neuroplasticity, this raises two important questions: Do you "practice" being angry? What would happen if you practiced being mindful?

The way you use your mind changes your brain.  In other words, just as you have to exercise your muscles properly in order to stay healthy and for those muscles to do what you ask them to do, you also have to exercise your brain properly in order o cultivate the qualities that are important to you and to let the ones that are not helpful or constructive fade away. 

Thoughts and emotions like anger, hostility, scorn, and dislike are not your permanent identity.  They are only temporary and depend on each other and many other equally temporary conditions in order to arise and be present in this moment.

Just as nonjudging can be practiced by simply noticing when judging is present, nonstriving can be practiced by noticing the feelings of pressure and urgency  to change or escape from what is here and now, and simply allow them to be.

Many studies have linked mindfulness meditation training to feeling less stressed, less anxious and depressed, and to reduced overall levels of psychological distress, including less anger and worry.

Mindfulness practice helps grow self-awareness of the inner "stories" and habits of thinking that influence your self-concept and sense of self-worth. 

Practicing mindfulness enables you to enter a dimension of life in each moment that provides more choice and real freedom. 

The chaining of thoughts (creating and adding more and more thoughts to the original arising emotion of anger) actually feeds the feelings of anger and your internal upset.

If you want to control your anger  instead of letting it control you, learn to recognize anger when it is present in your life.  It helps to know that your anger can actually take on many faces and can appear as ill will, dislike, aversion to what is present, or even boredom.

Beneath anger is fear, and beneath fear is a fixed belief or idea.

Intention can be understood as the "command" you give your brain to move in a particular direction in response to what happens in the present moment, including what's happening in your mind, body, and the world around you.

Anger is not you but is a temporary condition that depends on many other conditions, much like a rainbow or a cloud depends on other conditions in order to appear.  Anger does not actually come from "out there" but arises when a stimulus or situation you meet triggers a complex set of conditions that live in you -- conditions such as beliefs, fears, perceptions, and physical reactions. 

Remembering that mindfulness is about "being and not doing" can be very helpful.

When negativity is present -- as a feeling of fear or alarm, perhaps -- it often appears as a memory of a threatening experience from the past, or a misperception that something happening now is like a threatening experience or situation from the past. 

Resentment is the sense of hurt or indignation that arises from feeling injured or offended.

Anger-- like the cloud, the shoe, or the ice cream -- is a temporary coming together of required and particular conditions. In other words, the condition or emotion that we call anger is made up of "non-anger" elements.

When you are angry, sulking, steaming, or otherwise filled with ill will and aversion for what is present in this moment of your life, it is very easy to misunderstand someone else.  

The Toronto Carrying Place: Rediscovering Toronto's Most Ancient Trail by Glenn Turner

All quotes from Glenn's book

There are dwarf cedar living on inaccessible parts of the Niagara Escarpment that are believed to be over 1,300 years old.

By accident or design, Baby Point [Toronto] has obliterated the fact that it was raised on graves and birch-bark longhouses. 

The Secret Language of Your Body: The Essential Guide to Health and Wellness by Inna Segal

 The quote from Inna's book

Feelings hold the key to your well-being.  They tell you what is honoring you and what is not.

Know Where You're Going: A Complete Buddhist Guide to Meditation, Faith, and Everyday Transcendence by Ayya Khema

All quotes from Ayya's book

Words are concepts, which can be twisted out of shape.  Our minds are magicians and are capable of transforming one thing into another.

When we sit down to meditate, we are trying to transcend our everyday consciousness, the consciousness used to transact ordinary business…. It is our survival consciousness…. Our everyday consciousness is neither unique nor profound, just utilitarian…. In order to attain the kind of consciousness that is capable of going deeply…we need a mind with the ability to remove itself from the ordinary thinking process.  Attaining this sort of mind is only possible through meditation.

[Meditation] is a means to change the mind's capacity in such a way that it can perceive entirely different realities from the ones we are used to.

There's only one way of dealing with suffering when it arises, and that's to drop the wanting; suffering will then disappear.

Being mindful means that mind and body are in the same place.

Meditation is the means by which we can practice mindfulness to the point where insight becomes so strong that we can see absolute reality behind the relative. 

Only people who never meditate believe what they are thinking.

"Awareness, no blame, change" is an important formula to remember: become aware of what is going on within, but do not attach any blame to it.

All our sense contacts generate feelings…. From touch contact arises feeling, and from that comes perception, the realization that "this is painful" or "this is not nice".  Let's say that we call it "pain". Then comes the immediate, impulsive reaction in the mind (which is also karma-making): "I don't like it," "I've got to move"…. The mental formations (sankhara) are also our karma formations.

We make karma first by thought, then by speech, and lastly by action.

Purification of emotions brings clarification of thought.

The whole of the spiritual path is one of purification, which means a constant letting go.

Our suffering comes from our resistance, from wanting people and situations to be different.

Attachment creates partiality, holding us back form transcending our judgmental attitudes.

We need to remember that karma is always initiated in the mind and then followed up by speech and action.  We only have these three doors: thought, speech, and action.  Since all starts in the mind, that's our first and foremost focus of attention. 

When we realize that the mind is the one paddling the boat, with the body as a passenger, then we have a much better insight into our priorities.

Another reaction to suffering is self-pity, which is fairly widespread but quite useless and counterproductive, since it generates more unhappiness.  Once self-pity has set in, the next step is near at hand, namely, depression.

There is no way to say goodbye to [suffering] unless and until we have transcended our reactions.  This means that we have looked suffering squarely in the eye and have seen it for what it is -- a universal characteristic of existence and nothing else.

Liberation goes beyond personal existence, but within personal existence, unsatisfactoriness is.  If we accept that fully, we don't have to suffer.

There's no cause for mental pain unless there's something inside oneself that is reacting to that trigger.

Fear is the first and foremost hindrance to going deeper.

In the beginning, fear is the greatest obstacle.  The remedy is perseverance.

Joy comes from our inner understanding that, because of impermanence, there is nothing to hang on to, nothing to worry about, nowhere to go, nothing to be done.

When there is sloth and torpor, the mind has no strength at all, not even enough wakefulness to fix itself on the subject of meditation.  The more often we put our mind to the subject of meditation, the more we counteract torpor.  A mind without clarity also creates sloth in the body.

Skeptical doubt is the enemy of faith and confidence, and therefore of practice; the mind can provide all sorts of ideas, doubts, and excuses --- "There must be an easier way", or "I'll try something different", or "I'll find a better teacher or a better monastery", or "There must be something that will really grip me."  The mind is a magician: it can produce a rabbit out of any hat. 

Continuity covers up impermanence but certainly doesn't alter the fact of it; again and again we are fooled into believing ourselves to be a solid entity.

Rigidity of the body is detrimental to expansion of the mind.

Inner happiness depends on concentration and not on someone else's approval.

When there is no desire, no craving, then there is also no suffering, and that brings peaceful contentment.

Unsatisfactoriness is masked by change, by movement.  Sometimes we run away from it, distract ourselves, or move our body.

Observing pleasant or unpleasant feelings and our reactions to them helps us to realize the circumstances involved in creating "me".  Knowing this clearly, we can make use of this understanding in daily life.  We no longer have to believe what our mind concocts, but we realize it is caused by a condition, a trigger.  It is up to us to turn the mind in wholesome directions.

Suffering is not only pain, grief, and lamentation, but it is also unsatisfactoriness and nonfulfillment.  We also need to remind ourselves that the past is irrevocably gone, the future is just a concept, a hope, and that we have only this one moment in which to realize our aspirations.

In order to grow spiritually, we need to understand that a trigger has generated a reaction, indicating to us that this emotion is one of the weeds growing in our heart, which we need to attend to. 

A Cree Healer and His Medicine Bundle: Revelations of Indigenous Wisdom; Healing Plants, Practices, and Stories by Russell Willier, David Young and Robert Rogers

All quotes from Russell, David and Robert's book

A lot of times the spirits tell you to use a particular combination.  You don't select it; you are told what to use.  You don't question it.  But if the combination is passed on from a human, you really have to check.

The circumference of the [Medicine Wheel] circle represents the sweetgrass trail, around which the individual travels as he seeks to pass through life successfully and eventually return to the Great Spirit. 

The primary role of a healer is to help people who approach him in the correct way, asking for healing and guidance from the Great Spirit.  Since the Great Spirit is too holy to be approached directly, the healer must work with Spirit Helpers, the Grandfathers.  The Grandfathers carry requests from the healer to the Great Spirit and return to the healer with information and spiritual power.  The healer then channels this assistance to those who have requested it.

Rocks are some of the most important Grandfather spirits, as they have been here from the beginning of the world and will be here long after people, trees, and plants have gone.

Each species of animal, plant, fish, and insect has its own Grandfather spirit, of which all members of that species are living expressions. 

Everything that works for good in the world is duplicated by an equivalent set of spirits that work for the bad…. The only exception to this dualistic worldview is the Great Spirit, which does not have an evil counterpart. 

An important task of a good healer is to diagnose which problems are caused by curses as opposed to problems due to natural causes.

There are a lot of predictions that people laugh at, such as that a time will come when money is no good or that the trees will be very important…. People will try to survive.  But they will need a different kind of building that can withstand the winds. 

An individual is composed of three elements: physical, emotional, and spiritual.  Illness upsets these elements and thus has spiritual, psychological, and physiological manifestations.  Regardless of the etiology of an illness, treatment must address itself to all three of these elements.

Your 3 Best Super Powers: Meditation, Imagination and Intuition by Sonia Choquette

All quotes from Sonia's book

Intuition is not a faculty of your brain.  It is a function of your heart, the feeling and sensing part of your nature.

The Purpose of Your Life by Carol Adrienne

All quotes from Carol's book

Sometimes we choose to see an obstacle in order to justify not taking a new step.  We voluntarily give up our power.  The obstacle gives us a good excuse not to face our truth.  Most people hold on to their confusion, never allowing themselves to make any tentative steps towards change because it’s never “quite the right time”.

Anytime you feel stuck, listen to what you are thinking.  Those thoughts are perhaps more responsible for your outward dilemma than any external obstacle.

The Dance of Anger by Harriet Lerner

All quotes from Harriet's book

Our anger may be a signal that we are doing more and giving more than we can comfortably do or give.

De-selfing means that too much of one's self (including thoughts, wants, beliefs, and ambitions) is "negotiable" under pressures from the relationship.

We all recognize intellectually that repeating our ineffective efforts achieves nothing and can even make things worse.  Yet, oddly enough, most of us continue to do more of the same, especially under stress.

Repeating the same old fights protects us from the anxieties we are bound to experience when we make a change. Ineffective fighting allows us to stop the clock when our efforts to achieve greater clarity become too threatening. Sometimes staying stuck is what we need to do until the times comes when we are confident that it is safe to get unstuck.

Opposites do attract, but they do not always live happily every after.

When emotional intensity is high in a family, most of us put the entire responsibility for poor communication on the other person…. We disown our own part in the interactions we complain of, and, with it, our power to bring about a change. 

Venting anger does not solve the problem that anger signals.

Anger is a tool for change when it challenges us to become more of an expert on the self and less of an expert on others.

If we feel chronically angry or bitter in an important relationship, this is a signal that too much of the self has been compromised.

Recognize our lack of clarity is not a weakness but an opportunity, a challenge, and a strength. 

Our anger can be a powerful vehicle for personal growth and change if it does nothing more than help us recognize that we are not yet clear about something and that it is our job to keep struggling with it. 

Diagnosing the other person is a favorite pastime for most of us when stress is high.

All of us inherit the unsolved problems of our past; and whatever we are struggling with has its legacy in the struggles of prior generations. 

We begin to use our anger as a vehicle for change when we are able to share our reactions without holding the other person responsible for causing our feelings, and without blaming ourselves for the reactions that other people have in response to our choices and actions. 

There is nothing wrong with giving another person advice ("This is what I think…"or, "In my experience, this has worked for me") as long as we recognize that we are stating an opinion that may or may not fit for the other person.  We start to overfunction, however, when we assume that we know what's best for the other person and we want them to do it our way.

If we are dealing with depressed or underfunctioning individuals, the least helpful thing we can do is to keep focusing on their problems and trying to be helpful.  The most helpful thing we can do is begin to share part of our own underfunctioning side.

Don't expect change to come about from hit-and-run confrontations.

Distinguish between privacy and secrecy. 

Most of us react to other family members, but we do not know them.

The Power of Why by Amanda Lang

All quotes from Amanda's book

Innovation is simpler than you think. 

70 percent of creativity is related to environment, which means that it's entirely possible for just about anyone to learn to think more innovatively. 

The reality is that before anyone can do anything innovative or original, there's got to be a sense of wonder or at least a spark of interest, and a whole bunch of questions. 

Curiosity requires the courage to risk being wrong -- which, in the end, doesn't require all that much courage if you don't view being wrong as catastrophic. 

Curiosity doesn't determine a particular path in life; it just makes it more likely that you'll choose the one that's right for you rather than doing what you think you ought to want to do, or what will win approval from others. 

Our natural instinct, particularly when a problem is serious, is to find a fix and try to implement it right away.  But the risk is that we never get to the questions that will deliver the real payoff: the big, essential insights that point to a new path forward. 

Even when risk is unavoidable, human beings tend to prioritize security and predictability. 

Don't conclude that the problem as it's first presented, or as you first perceive it, is indeed the actual problem. 

If you don't know what you're good at, it's hard to know how or where to begin trying to make yourself even better, or how to take advantage of new opportunities.  Self-knowledge clarifies ways to stretch and improve, by highlighting strengths that are being underutilized or could be used to achieve different ends (and revealing blind spots and weaknesses that may be derailing progress).  

Failure promotes success only if you actually take the time to analyze your mistakes. 

The less willing you are to make mistakes, the more likely you may be to make them because you've narrowed your mind and drastically reduced your openness to new opportunities. 

Easier is sticking with the status quo.  Getting to "more interesting" requires stretching past what's safe and predictable and venturing into the unknown, to learn something new. 

Try to see the world through your customers' eyes (even if you don't have any customers). 

Thinking about what other people need from you as a job you are trying to perform can help you figure out the little changes that will make a big difference. 

"What do others need from me?" is a question that, in the business world, drives successful innovation. 

Curiosity is the antidote to complacency, but only if you act on whatever it is you discover. 

Comfortable with Uncertainty by Pema Chodron

All quotes from Pema's book

Compassion -- our ability to feel the pain that we share with others.  Without realizing it we continually shield ourselves from this pain because it scares us.  Based on a deep fear of being hurt, we erect protective walls made out of strategies, opinions, prejudices, and emotions. 

Ordinarily we are swept away by habitual momentum.  We don't interrupt our patterns even slightly.  With practice, however, we learn to stay with a broken heart, with a nameless fear, with a desire for revenge.  Sticking with uncertainty is how we learn to relax in the midst of chaos.

Meditation practice isn't about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better.  It's about befriending who we are already.

We should never underestimate our low tolerance for discomfort.

Refraining is very much the method of becoming a dharmic person.  It's the quality of not grabbing for entertainment the minute we feel a slight edge of boredom coming on.  It's the practice of not immediately filling up space just because there's a gap.

We might as well stop struggling against our thoughts and realize that honesty and humor are far more inspiring and helpful than any kind of solemn religious striving for or against anything.

When things fall apart, instead of struggling to regain our concept of who we are, we can use it as an opportunity to be open and inquisitive about what has just happened and what will happen next.

Connecting with our experience by meeting it feels better than resisting it by moving away.  Being on the spot, even if it hurts, is preferable to avoiding.  As we practice moving into the present moment this way, we become more familiar with groundlessness, a fresh state of being that is available to us on an ongoing basis. 

Openness doesn't come from resisting our fears but from getting to know them well. 

We don't sit in meditation to become good meditators.  We sit in meditation so that we'll be more awake in our lives.

Pain is not punishment; pleasure is not a reward.

When we say, "I take refuge in the Buddha", it means I take refuge in the courage and the potential of fearlessness, or removing all the armor that covers this awakeness of mind.

The basic instruction is simple: start taking off that armor.  That's all anyone can tell you.  No one can tell you how to do it because you're the only one who knows how you locked yourself in there to start.

Now-- that's the key.  Mindfulness trains us to be awake and alive, fully curious, about now.  The out-breath is now, the in-breath is now, waking up from our fantasies is now, and even the fantasies are now.  The more you can be completely now, the more you realize that you're always standing in the middle of a sacred circle.

Wholeheartedness is a precious gift, but no one can actually give it to you.  You have to find the path that has heart and then walk it impeccably.

When you start to want to live your life fully instead of opting for death, you discover that life itself is inconvenient.

Begin with being willing to feel what you are going through.  Be willing to have a compassionate relationship with the parts of yourself that you feel are not worthy of existing.

The idea of karma is that you continually get the teachings you need in order to open your heart.

The causes of aggression and fear begin to dissolve by themselves when we move past the poverty of holding back and holding on.

Clarity and decisiveness come from the willingness to slow down, to listen to and look at what's happening.

The more you're willing to open your heart, the more challenges come along.

As long as you're wanting yourself to get better, you won't.

Noticing where we open up and where we shut down -- without praise or blame -- is the basis of our practice.

Gloriousness and wretchedness need each other. One inspires us, the other softens us. They go together.

Patience is not learned in safety.  It is not learned when everything is harmonious and going well.

Be curious about the neurosis that's bound to kick in when our coping mechanisms start falling apart.

This is the path we take in cultivating joy: learning not to armor our basic goodness, learning to appreciate what we have.