Do Your Om Thing by Rebecca Pacheco

All quotes from Rebecca's book

Yoga is about attaining a clearer sense of who you are, how you feel, what you want, and how you interact with the world around you.

At yoga’s core, it seeks to connect us to life in a compassionate way.

Originally written in Sanskrit as chitta vritti nirodhah, the purpose of yoga is “to still the fluctuations of the mind”, per the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, a foundational yoga text written roughly 2000 years ago.  Everything else, such as the flexibility and fitness, is secondary.

There are no spiritual scorecards on the path to enlightenment.

Happier people do not live easier lives, with less hard work, grief, divorce, or financial strain than the rest of us.  They’re simply more grateful for what they have and choose to be conscious of their contentment more often.

Gratitude.  It’s the skill of taking yourself out of the tailspin of scarcity and reconnecting to contentment.

Meditation is the natural, graceful state of being yourself and knowing who that is.

Stop fleeing the moment and yourself in favor of quick comforts.

Which moments each day are you throwing away?  Remind yourself that they are real and significant.  No matter how mundane, your journey, spirit, and best self are in these moments.

Celebrate what your body does before how it looks.  Never diminish others to feel better.  Never diminish yourself.

Prioritize sensation over appearance.  How would you walk if you felt confident?

Most of us are highly conscious about the content stored in our smartphones, the content of our bank accounts, and the content of our closets, for example.  Wouldn’t it make sense to be equally, if not more, concerned with the contents of our minds?

The only way to meditate badly is to not meditate at all.

Any yogi could mediate in a dark room lit with candles and incense.  But could you meditate at the dentist?

It’s only when we’re insecure about who we are, what we believe, or what we’re practicing that we become anxious or judgmental about how others choose to live.

We don’t need more time in our day to strengthen our spirits and let the inner journey unfold.  We only need more awareness.

The easy path leads to the hard life, and the hard path leads to the easy life.

The obstacle is the deity.

Mastery of the mind is the purpose of yoga…. The first step to practicing yoga authentically is to acknowledge that you are not perfect.  You live in your life, and you are you.  Rather than a limitation or a letdown, this is a relief and a privilege.

Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming by Stephen LaBerge and Howard Rheingold

All quotes from Stephen & Howard's book

Attempt to think of all our experiences as dreams and to try to maintain unbroken continuity of consciousness between two states of waking and sleeping.

Ask: am I dreaming or awake right now--- and really ponder it.  Develop critical-reflective attitude toward your state of consciousness.

Purple Cow by Seth Godin

All quotes from Dennis’ book

The leader is the leader because he did something remarkable.

You need to be investing in the Purple Cow. Products, services and techniques so useful, interesting, outrageous, and noteworthy that the market will want to listen to what you have to say. No, in fact, you must develop products, services, and techniques that the market will actually seek out.

Criticism comes to those who stand out.

It seems that we face two choices: to be invisible, anonymous, uncriticised, and safe, or to take a chance at greatness, uniqueness, and the cow.

We’ve been raised with a false belief: we mistakenly believe that criticism leads to failure.

 The opposite of “remarkable” is “very good”.

Find the market niche first, and then make the remarkable product – not the other way around.

Consumers with needs are the ones most likely to respond to your solutions.

You need to figure out who’s buying, and then solve their problem.

Assume that what was remarkable last time won’t be remarkable this time.

You have to go where the competition is not. The further the better. 

Side Hustle: From Idea to Income in 27 Days by Chris Guillebeau

All quotes from Chris' book

A feasible idea is one that you can turn into reality using the skills, time, and resources you already have.

You don't have to be better than the competition in every way, but you should at least be different.  Become a detective and survey the landscape to understand what else is out there.

Busy people are good at side hustles, because they know how to make their time count.

At some point in their journey, longtime hustlers learn an important lesson: you can do something repeatedly, or you can do something just once.

Ashtanga Yoga by Gregor Maehle

All quotes from Gregor's book

Emotions are only a form of the mind.  To be emotional means to react to a present situation according to a past conditioning.

As the Yoga Sutra explains, every thought, emotion, and experience leaves a subconscious imprint (samskara) in the mind.  These imprints determine who we will be in the future.  According to the Brhad Aranyaka Upanishad, as long as liberation is not achieved, the soul, like a caterpillar that draws itself from one blade of grass over to the next, will, by the force of its impressions in this life, reach out and draw itself over to a new body in a new life.

The body we have today is nothing but the accumulation of our past thoughts, emotions, and actions.

Our body is the crystallized history of our past thoughts.

The body is our vehicle and the storehouse of our past.

It is through the belief that individuals exercise free will that ego is produced; and, in turn, ego produces suffering.

The entire cosmos, including our body-mind complex, is an unconscious machine operated upon by God.  Our self, who is pure consciousness, is forever inactive.  It merely witnesses.

Time is the operating system of the human mind; to go beyond time is to go beyond mind. 

Soul Cravings by Erwin Raphael McManus

All quotes from Erwin's book

When love does not come to you, it breaks your heart, but when you do not give love away, it hardens your heart.

Love reminds us that there is a knowing beyond reason.

Most of us don’t sell our souls to the devil; we just give them away.

Contrary to what you may have been told all your life, God is not offended by questions.

It may seem way too simple, but the world will change when we change.

Most of us want God to fix every wrong choice we make without taking from us our right to choose wrongly.  We want to make God into our own person pooper-scooper following right behind us, cleaning up our mess.

It was a fifteen year old boy, blinded by a tragic accident, who found 63 ways to use a 6-dot cell to communicate meaning. Imagine finding a way to make 6 dots tell any story, communicate any theory, bring meaning into a world gone dark.

When you feel something deeply, it’s a true feeling, but it doesn’t mean that it should become the basis of all reality.  Our emotions can be a turbulent ocean constantly changing in response to our circumstances.

If you conclude life is meaningless, your story ends before you do.  You may never make the connection, but the cynicism, bitterness, despair, and emptiness eating away at you have everything to do with your need to believe in something or someone.

If you were meant to fly, not even running really fast is that impressive.

To be reincarnated is not a gift, but a declaration that you have not yet lived your life well enough.

There is a reason for our existence, a reason to live, and if we can’t find it, we’ll just make it up. And if we lack imagination, then we’ll just medicate ourselves, sedate ourselves, intoxicate ourselves, indulge ourselves, deceive ourselves, or just simply come to the end of ourselves.

Without hope your life may not come to an end, but it does come to a stop.

All of us are called to a place we have not been.  Our lives were always intended to be journeys into the unknown.

Evil never looks for permission.

It’s amazing how much we can endure when we are convinced there is a purpose to our struggle.

As children we assume that greatness is within our grasp.  Whatever inspires us, we begin to dream that one day we will be the best.  It is only as we lose our childlike innocence that we begin to settle for far less.  A part of growing up seems to be acquiescing to mediocrity.  It’s easy to say that we’re just becoming realistic, that it’s just a part of growing up.  But, in fact, it’s the death of our souls.  When we stop dreaming, we start dying.

Your soul longs to become, and you can try to ignore it, but soon you will find yourself hating your life and despising everyone who refuses to give up on his or her dreams.

We’re more self-absorbed but less self-aware.  We don’t know who we are.

When we are optimistic about the future, we find the energy to create it.

Eventually it hits you: you cannot take love; you have to give it.  Love is a gift that cannot be stolen.

The farther we move from community, the closer we move to violence.

Claiming Anishinaabe: Decolonizing the Human Spirit by Lynn Gehl

All quotes from Lynn's book

Humans are pitiful in that we are most dependent on the other orders of Creation [elements, plants, animals]. 

Like an iceberg, most of who we are as human beings resides beneath the surface; our subconscious self is so much larger than what we think it is. 

The word "debwewin" translates to "a personal truth that is rooted in one's heart", and "Gdebwe na?" is a truth question that translates to "Are you speaking from the heart?", inferring a broader understanding of knowledge that involves the heart.  Said another way, the question "Gdebwe na?" is a cultural mechanism that ensures that knowledge spoken is not merely mind, or intellectual, knowledge; it is a question that ensures that knowledge is also heartfelt.

Within the Moon Ceremony we sing four songs: the Welcoming Song, the Water Song, the Kokomis (Grandmother) Song, and the Miigwetch (Thank You) Song. 

Women retain their clan affiliation and responsibilities after they marry, rather than becoming an appendage of their husbands.

Broadly speaking, Indigenous knowledge is the knowledge that predates heteropatriarchy, sexism, racism, ableism, industrialization, capitalism, corporate power, and materialism.

Hegemonic power, where personal agency is shaped and manipulated and we become complicit in our own domination -- there appears to be a little bit of choice…. We need to keep in mind that the better the oppressor, the more we will think we are free.

Canadians need to remember that humans are foremost children of the earth rather than children of nation-states.

Needed are songs that will remind us that water was here first, that it is an older sibling without whom we are unable to live.

Indigenous knowledge is non-linear, situated, wholistic, experiential, introspective, moral, emotional, rational, complex, unfolding, personal, and foremost a relationship.

We need to remember the human spirit is in two places at the same time -- both inside and outside -- and that Canada will never stop impinging on those two places as long as its goal remains the control, oppression, and spiritual death of Indigenous people.

Finding Your Own North Star by Martha Beck

All quotes from Martha's book

The shift from wanting to do something to intending to do it.  If you think this is a trivial difference, think again.  Any first year law student can tell you that if you occasionally want to kill other drivers in traffic, you’re normal – but if you really intend to kill them, you can be legally incarcerated.

All god really wants from us is an unshakable commitment to our own happiness.

Out of Control by Shefali Tsabary

All quotes from Shefali's book

Your children are here to challenge your integrity.  

Our subconscious patterns hold tremendous energy.  This energy causes us to create an atmosphere our children react to.  We could say they pick up our emotional “vibes”…. Our children don’t respond to our surface instructions.  Instead they are attuned to our subconscious script.

The key to effective parenting is to turn the spotlight away from the child as “behaving badly” to our own “badly behaving emotionality”.  Unless we identify and untangle our emotional patterns, we will unwittingly foster dysfunctional behavior in our children.  We will search high and low for ways to fix our children, not realizing there’s nothing to fix, only a need for us to grow ourselves up.

All conflicts with our children originate with our own internal subconscious conflicts.

What we think of as a need for discipline stems not from the child’s behavior but from our emotional attachment to a particular idea of “how my child should be”.

An unconscious aspect of human nature involves judging and labeling those things we don’t understand as “bad”.

Every conflict in our present lives – whatever with our children, spouse, or other adults – is in some way a recreation of our childhood.

Instead of reacting emotionally, the parent needs to calmly decipher the meaning behind the behavior and shift from the content of the child’s eruption.  The key is that the parent remain centered, not thrown off balance by the remark, so they can gently probe for the real issue.

Natural consequences are always consistent.

Learning to walk the fine line between being attuned to our children and overreacting is an art.  It requires the parent to become aware of how their own neediness may be in operation at any given moment.

Our children didn’t come into the world to be our puppets.  They came here to struggle, fumble, thrive, and enjoy – a journey for which they need our encouragement.

Each time our subconscious agenda doesn’t get met, we enter the space of a hurt child.

All negative behavior is a manifestation of hurt feelings.

Precisely at the point where it appears that our children are trying to exclude us from their lives, defy us, or manipulate us, they are signalling they need us.

To live in the grey requires differentiation, between true feelings and our emotional reactions.  They are vastly different.  A feeling comes from the heart and is a response to what’s arising in the moment.  An emotional reaction is a programmed knee-jerk from our subconscious patterns of our past.

Witnessing is about being able to connect with reality just as it is.

This isn’t about whether a particular behavior is okay.  It’s about the relationship being okay.  A child needs to be learn that it’s safe to confess their mistakes and admit their weaknesses.  It affirms for them that no matter what they do, they are still a good and valued person.

For another human to come into our life, especially into our care as in the case of a child, is a privilege.

What is it about us that led to the reaction we are getting from our child?

It’s our ability to experience the burning sting of our pain, without assuaging it, that empowers us to receive joy in all its magnificence. 

Be Here Now by Ram Dass

All quotes from Ram's book

If you feel free only when you meditate, you’re not really free. 

I would like my life to be a statement of love and compassion – and where it isn’t, there’s where my work lies. 

Relax.  You are being guided.  In fact, the next message you need in the treasure hunt is exactly where you are when you need it. The message may be in the form of a teacher or a lover or an enemy or a pet or a rock or a chemical or a book or a feeling of great despair or a physical illness or the eyes of a person you pass on the street. 

Where do we begin? The answer is simple: you begin just where you are. 

We’re all the same being and that’s the problem--- we can only move as fast as we all can move. 

Practice is like a roller coaster.  Each new high is usually followed by a new low.  There is in addition to the up-and-down cycles an in-and-out cycle.  That is, there are stages at which you feel pulled into inner work and all you seek is a quiet place to meditate and get on with it, and then there are times when you turn outward and seek to be involved in the marketplace.   Both of these parts of the cycles are a part of one’s practice, for what happens to you in the marketplace helps in your meditation, and what happens in your meditation helps you to participate in the marketplace without attachment.  At first you will think of practice as a limited part of your life.  In time you will realize that everything we do is part of your practice.

If you think you are so enlightened, go and spend a week with your parents.

It is important to expect nothing, to take every experience, including the negative ones, as merely steps on the path, and to proceed.

Your ego is a set of thoughts that define your universe.

Meditation changes your desires in the course of fulfilling them.

You have at this moment many constellations of thoughts, each composing an identity: sexual, social, cultural, educational, economic, intellectual, historical, philosophical, spiritual, among others. One or another of these identities takes over as the situation demands

Your resistances to meditation are your mental prisons in miniature.

The goal of meditation is to free your awareness from its identification with your senses and thoughts.

To travel all over looking for the perfect teacher adds more to your melodrama than your liberation.  Virtually any teacher is suitable simply to begin, and if no teacher is available, you can do much on your own.  In the end, you are your own best teacher.

Teachers and teachings are forms, and ultimately you must go beyond forms.

Solitude shows you the way your mind creates your universe.

Don’t Be A Jerk by Brad Warner

All quotes from Brad's book

If we try to run away from the reality of that things are exactly as they are, even our running away is part of the reality.  

The efforts we make right here and now will become the source of Buddha’s way for future generations.  Feeling compassion for the future, we need to value the present.

Even if the whole universe is nothing but a bunch of jerks doing all kinds of jerk type things, there is still liberation in simply not being a jerk.

Subject and object are time, practice and experience are moments of time.

Regular people experience their own causes and conditions, but what they experience is not really reality itself.  It’s just that reality itself has made regular people into its causes and conditions.  Because you think that time and existence are something other than what you are.

Just stick with what’s really happening.  Don’t mistakenly say that it’s nonexistence or existence.  Don’t just see how relentlessly time passes, without seeing that it never arrives.

People see time as leaving and coming, but nobody ever sees how it stays in one place.  If you don’t get that, how are you gonna get anything?

Time and existence are inseparable.

At every moment of every day, no matter how I feel about the situation, whether it’s mind-blowingly thrilling or completely mind-numbing, I am the totality of the universe experiencing the fullness of itself.  Even if I don’t notice it.

We are not entities who experience time.  We are time itself.

You are not a person living in a time and a place. You are the person and the time and the place all rolled into one.

The deluded mind is just the Flower of Dharma twirling.  So when we’re in delusion, we’re being twirled by the Flower of Dharma. 

We shouldn’t await some state of awareness.  And we shouldn’t assume our current state is without awareness.  Every possible state is awareness.

Try to sit quietly within our delusion until we can see it clearly for what it is.

What happens to us doesn’t happen so that we can respond to it. It just happens.

If we were to divide zazen into two parts, practice and experience, we could consider each part separately.  We could say that we practice in order to achieve enlightenment.  But your perceptions cannot be the standard of enlightenment, because deluded human sentiment cannot reach the standard of enlightenment. 

You cannot know your own enlightenment because whatever you call enlightenment can’t be enlightenment.

Pushing ourselves to practice and experience stuff is delusion.  When stuff actively practices and experiences us, that’s realization.

Just as ash doesn’t go back to being firewood, human beings, when they die, don’t come back to life again.

What you call “self” is the manifestation of everything.  You reflect and refract the universe around you in a unique way, and that unique way is commonly called “self”.  But it does not belong to anyone --- certainly not to you!

The universe/you is both complete and self-sufficient and at the same time incomplete and fully dependent on everything else.

[Reincarnation is] like lighting a candle with another candle and then blowing out the first candle.  The flame on the second candle isn’t the same flame, and yet it depends on the first flame for its existence.

Focus on this life.  Live this actual day.  Pay attention to just this very moment.  This is where it’s all happening, not in some future lifetime.

Answered Prayers by Julia Cameron

All quotes from Julia's book

What we perceive as failings, god may view as opportunities for help and growth. 

You are a story with no listener.

Attune your heart to a deeper rhythm then the daily news.  Know that for every catastrophe reported, there are a thousand averted.  Know that for every danger, there is more safety, more well-being then the news can count.

Life is an intricate dance, but you are never unpartnered.

Sophistication is difficult.  You put me at a distance.  You want to run your own life and then you wonder at its emptiness. 

The Art of Possibility by Rosamund Stone Zander

All quotes from Rosamund's book

Being with the way things are calls for an expansion of ourselves.  We start from what is, not from what should be; we encompass contradictions, painful feelings, fears, and imaginings, and – without fleeing, blaming, or attempting correction--- we learn to soar, like the far-seeing hawk, over the whole landscape.  

Speaking in possibility springs from the appreciation that what we say creates a reality; how we define things sets a framework for life to unfold.

Being with the way things are by closing the exits: escape, denial and blame.

When we dislike a situation, we tend to put all our attention on how things should be rather than how they are.

The capacity to be present to everything that is happening, without resistance, creates possibility.

What assumption am I making, that I’m not aware I’m making, that gives me what I see?

The only grace you can have is the grace you can imagine.

We perceive only the sensations we are programmed to receive, and our awareness is further restricted by the fact that we recognize only those for which we have mental maps or categories. 

Many of the circumstances that seem to block us in our daily lives may only appear to do so based on a framework of assumptions we carry with us.

I am the framework for everything that happens in my life.

A “no” can seem like a door slamming instead of merely an instance of the way things are.  Yet, were we to take a “no” less personally, and ourselves less seriously, we might hear something else.  We might hear someone saying, "I don’t see any new possibility here, so I think I’ll stick with my usual way of doing things”.  We might hear within the word “no” an invitation for enrollment. 

The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life by Robert O Becker and Gary Selden

All quotes from Robert and Gary's book

The healer's job has always been to release something not understood, to remove obstructions (demons, germs, despair) between the sick patient and the force of life driving obscurely toward wholeness.

In complex multicellular animals, there's no regeneration without nerve tissue.

"When we meet a friend we have not seen for six months there is not one molecule in his face which was there when we last saw him.  But, thanks to his controlling L-field [field of life], the new molecules have fallen into the old, familiar pattern and we can recognize his face." Harold Saxton Burr

Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear by Elizabeth Gilbert

All quotes from Elizabeth's book

 [Live] a life that is driven more strongly by curiosity than by fear.

The universe buries strange jewels deep within us all, and then stands back to see if we can find them.

It’s all about the yes. 

The more lightly you can pass that time, the brighter your existence becomes. 

It matters.  It doesn’t matter.  Build space in your head for this paradox.  Build as much space for it as you can.

I think it’s a mighty act of human love to remind somebody that they can accomplish things by themselves, and that the world does not automatically owe them any reward, and that they are not as weak and hobbled as they may believe.

All I know for certain is that this is how I want to spend my life – collaborating to the best of my ability with forces of inspiration that I can neither see, nor prove, nor command, nor understand. 

I believe that our planet is inhabited not only by animals and plants and bacteria and viruses, but also by ideas.  Ideas are a disembodied, energetic life-form.  They are completely separate from us, but capable of interacting with us – albeit strangely. Ideas have no material body, but they do have consciousness, and they most certainly have will.  Ideas are driven by a single impulse: to be made manifest. And the only way an idea can be made manifest in our world is through collaboration with a human partner.

A creative life is an amplified life.  It’s a bigger life, a happier life, an expanded life.