Ordinary Sacred: The Simple Beauty of Everyday Life by Kent Nerburn

At the edge of our emotions life approaches prayer.

The world is not something that happens to us; we are something that happens to the world.

Transitions: Prayers and Declarations for a Changing Life by Julia Cameron

Spirit understands adversity as opportunity.

I remember that “God” is the shorthand for “good, orderly direction”. 

Elders walk before us.  The young follow behind.  Ours is a caravan of consciousness.

When outward events jostle me with their velocity and turbulence, I must actively turn within, seeking higher perceptions.

We are like jewelers.  At the start of any day, we have before us the beautiful beads of differing choices.  Choice by choice, moment by moment, I build the necklace of my day, stringing together the choices that form artful living… Moving through my days with conscious grace, I connect to the web of life.  I, too, am a bead in a larger pattern.

I resolve with a loving heart to accept appropriate endings.  I do not grasp at straws when the reality is difficult but clear.  Instead, I release the past, bless it and turn with resolution to the future.  I listen to the dictates of my conscience, knowing that its voice calls me home.

Problems bear the seeds of their solutions.

Sometimes we are less a person than a place for those we love.

Meditation and Its Practices: A Definitive Guide to Techniques and Traditions of Meditation in Yoga and Vedanta by Swami Adiswarananda

PART TWO 

Each individual is like a leaf on a tree.  Leaves come and go, but the tree continues to exist.  This Absolute Reality is our true identity.

The only way to overcome the maladies of life is to establish contact with the Ultimate Reality, and the only way to make contact with It is through meditation. Meditation leads to direct perception of the Ultimate.

Meditation is a mental process by which the meditator becomes one with the object of meditation.  Concentration (Sanskrit dharana) is the preliminary stage of this process; when concentration becomes effortless and continuous, it takes the form of meditation (dhyana), in which the mind flows continuously toward its object.  The culmination of meditation is total absorption (samadhi) in the object of meditation.

Meditation is a technique for gaining mastery over the mind.  Mind controlled is our best friend; uncontrolled, it is our worst enemy.

The harvest of egotistic living is fatigue and failure, anxiety and frustration. 

Life is action, participation, interaction, and communication.

When the mental focus is not conscious and deliberate, it is considered a lower type of concentration…. Such subconscious, lower concentration dissipates psychic energy to a great extent.

Worry, anxiety, and mental restlessness deplete psychic energy.  Further, subconscious concentration on diverse subjects creates scattered channels of energy that are not regular and straight.  Such haphazard concentration creates endless whirlpools in the mind and body.  Meditation restores this energy balance.

Ritualistic worship and prayer merge in the Gayatri, which is the highest and most concentrated prayer of the Vedas.  The Gayatri then becomes further concentrated into the sacred word Om, from which all words emanate; and finally, Om merges in the profound silence of Samadhi.  Meditation is thus the culmination of all worship, the state before the final revelation.

There are three components of every form of worship: the object of worship, the act of worship, and the worshipper. 

It is not that the seeker attains the state of meditation, but rather the opposite: he or she is taken over by it.

The Upright Thinkers: The Human Journey from Living in Trees to Understanding the Cosmos by Leonard Mlodinow

As late as the 19th century, the Reuters news service was still using carrier pigeons to fly stock prices between cities.

Our creativity is constrained by conventional thinking that arises from beliefs we can’t shake, or never even think of questioning.

On Becoming an Alchemist: A Guide for the Modern Magician by Catherine MacCoun

Magic is the practical application of what the soul perceives.

When you become infatuated with someone you hardly know, what you have actually fallen in love with is an unrealized potential in yourself.  You have a big crush on what you yourself secretly wish to become.

The subtle is that which cannot be perceived by the ordinary senses because it is pre-physical.

Dreams and waking metaphors are how your subtle body conveys what it knows to your rational mind. 

If you think of attention as a form of wealth (a currency we rightly speak of "paying"), the average American gets robbed several times a minute.

"Boredom" is just a negative way of labeling free attention.  It's what we say we're feeling on those increasingly rare occasions when our attention doesn't know what to do with itself.

Self-knowledge is extremely important when you begin to encounter other beings in the subtle world.  It's how you distinguish self from other when there are no physical bodies to define who's who and what's what.

The subtle world is just that: subtle.  Nothing there can be seen, heard, or touched.

What most of us are used to calling our "will" is actually a form of thinking: our conscious intention.  What we call "willpower" is our effort to make that intention stick, to force ourselves to act in accordance with our thought.

The Great Work is a process of reincarnating into your own life.

You can't eliminate pain, but you can alleviate suffering by subtracting the fear, which comes not form loss itself, but from our anticipation of loss.

Misfortunes aren't accidents.  They are lessons, specifically designed to teach you something you need to learn.

When fear is transmuted into confidence, the suffering of others stops freaking us out.  We no longer have to distance ourselves by blaming the victim.  When passion is transmuted into devotion, we don't have to identify with others in order to care about them.  Instead of imagining what they are feeling, we perceive it directly.  When territoriality is transmuted into integrity, we don't have to borrow our strength from the weak.  We respect the autonomy of those we are trying to help.

Whatever is confused, neurotic, and unfinished in you is its prima materia. 

Take your dark night as a compliment.  It is a mark of progress, not a sign of a screwup.

The Power of Receiving: A Revolutionary Approach to Giving Yourself the Life You Want and Deserve by Amanda Owen

Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are a good person is a little like expecting the bull not to attack you because you are a vegetarian.

"Trouble is a part of your life, and if you don’t share it, you don’t give the person who loves you a chance to love you enough". Dinah Shore

How to Awaken Your Potential by Paramahansa Yogananda

Mind is the source of all your troubles and all your happiness. 

Your success in life depends not only upon natural ability; it also depends upon your determination to grasp the opportunities presented to you.

Never suggest to your mind human limitations of sickness, old age, or death, but constantly remind yourself, “I am the Infinite, which has become body".

Never let yourself think the work is too much for you.

Your habits are not you.

Deep, alert attention with feeling is the needle that cuts grooves in the record of your memory cells.

It is just as easy to be peaceful and joyful as to be worried and disturbed.

All Our Relations: Finding the Path Forward by Tanya Talaga

Elders remind us who we are and where we need to go.

The Spirit created the universe by forming a circle from heart and mind.  The circle is a fundamental concept of Indigenous Intelligence, underscoring how everything is interrelated and life operates in a circular pattern.

The name Mississaugas derives from the Anishnaabemowin Missisakis, or "many river mouths".

In Ojibwe and Cree culture, leadership didn't mean power; it meant caring.

Before an Anishinaabe women gives birth to a child, Elder Sam Achneepineskum tells me, she sings to them.  She speaks to them when she is in a good place, and she thanks them for coming into the family's life.

In Indigenous cultures, family units go beyond the traditional nuclear family living together in one house.  Families are extensive networks of strong, connective kinship; they are often entire communities.

Profound trauma serves to isolate everyone from each other and everything they know, leaving them in a state of disrepair, feeling lost and unknowing.  The isolation, the loneliness of having no belonging, is almost like a force field that surrounds you; you can't reach out, and no one can reach in.  You can't talk to anyone or bring anyone into your world of grief, and the only time you feel safe is when you are alone, when you are completely isolated and cut off from everyone else. These feelings shatter any chance of creating healthy human attachments.

Through the Indian Act, the Canadian government controls nearly all health, education, and social services for Indigenous people.  A 2 percent funding cap put in place in 1996 as a temporary fiscal restraint has never been lifted, even though the First Nations population has increased by more than 25 percent.

Doing nothing is not an option, yet Canada is the only G8 country without a national suicide strategy.

"So far in this country, we haven't seen any movement towards recognizing Indigenous rights as human rights.  Our rights to clean drinking water, our rights to housing. They're not considered as human rights in this country".  Romeo Saganash

Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence by Esther Perel

In the course of establishing security, many couples confuse love with merging.

We all need security: permanence, reliability, stability, and community.

Love, beyond providing emotional sustenance, compassion, and companionship, is now expected to act as a panacea for existential aloneness as well.

Modern life has  deprived us of our traditional resources, and has created a situation in which we turn to one person for the protection and emotional connections that a multitude of social networks used to provide.

While love promises us relief from aloneness, it also heightens our dependence on one person.  It is inherently vulnerable.

We tend to assuage our anxieties through control.

Passion in a relationship is commensurate with the amount of uncertainty you can tolerate.

When we love we always risk the possibility of loss-by criticism, rejection, separation, and ultimately death -- regardless of how hard we try to defend against it.

Introducing uncertainty sometimes requires nothing more than letting go of the illusion of certitude.

The mechanisms that we put in place to make love safer often puts us more at risk.  We ground ourselves in familiarity, and perhaps achieve a peaceful domestic arrangement, but in the process we orchestrate boredom.

Love nests on two pillars:  surrender and autonomy.

Dynamics in relationships are always complementary -- both partners contribute to creating patterns.

Erotic intelligence is about creating distance, then bringing that space to life.

Our ability to tolerate our separateness -- and the fundamental insecurity it engenders -- is a precondition for maintaining interest and desire in a relationship. 

Intimacy has shifted from being a by-product of a long-term relationship to being a mandate for one.

Intimacy has become the sovereign antidote for lives of increasing isolation.

In our overcommitted lives there's a temptation to simplify our existential complexities.  We just don't have the time and patience for open-ended reflection.  We prefer instead to be proactive and thereby reaffirm our sense of control.

It takes two people to create a pattern, but only one to change it.

Trouble looms when monogamy is no longer a free expression of loyalty but a form of enforced compliance.

We live in a world that offers us little help with staying put or making do.  In our consumer culture, we always want the next best thing.

Start Here: Master the Lifelong Habit of Wellbeing by Eric Langshur and Nate Klemp

The key move is to learn to distinguish between sensation and story.

Flow doesn’t arise when things are easy.  Quite the opposite.  Flow arise when we push our skills and abilities to their very limit.

We are running complex software on prehistoric hardware.  The machinery of our mind and body was built for running from lions.  It was designed to handle intense momentary stress followed by longer periods of rest and recovery.  It was not designed to handle the constant low-grade stress we navigate every day.

Adopt an attitude of nonjudgmental awareness toward even the most uncomfortable sensations. 

Meditation practice will help you train your mind for increased emotional fitness.  Meditation is to the mind what aerobic exercise is to the body.  Just as running improves cardiovascular function, meditation trains the mind in ways that enhance mood, emotional resiliency, and even immune system function.

Meditation offers a way to create sacred moments in the midst of our ordinarily profane day-to-day lives.

To not meditate is to miss out on a more focused, productive, happy life, with less stress.

 [With meditation], frequency is more important than duration.

Beneath every stressful emotion sits a thought – a thought that may or may not actually be true.

Stress often arises from stories made up of the mind.

Presence is meditation in movement.

If you really want to live a longer life, presence – not drugs, healthy eating, or any other strategy – is the best solution.

Noticing is the magical moment of being.

Great At Work: How Top Performers Do Less, Work Better, and Achieve More by Morten T Hansen

A good redesign delivers more value for the same amount of work done.

A micro-behavior is a small, concrete action you take on a daily basis to improve a skill.  The action shouldn't take more than fifteen minutes to perform and review, and it should have a clear impact on skill development.

To vanquish opposition in the workplace, you must do more than persevere.  You also need to tailor your tactics to neutralize opposition from people.

Grit at work is not about putting your head down and bulldozing through successive walls of resistance.  Smart grit involves not only persevering but also taking into account the perspective of people you're trying to influence and devising tactics that will win them over.

Unity is not something you "enforce".  You need true commitment, not mere obedience.

The goal of collaboration isn't collaboration.  It's better performance.

The Millionth Circle: How to Change Ourselves and the World by Jean Shinoda Bolen

Begin the circle with something that centers it.

Each needs to go to the center for wisdom and discernment, for compassion and courage.  Each needs to speak up and name the problem that it is, for herself.  When there is a problem in the circle, if one woman speaks her truth there is a strong possibility that she speaks for others who are silent or speaks for a silenced part in others.

Rituals, altars, celebrations -- whenever there is ceremony there also must be vigilance against obligatory, empty form.  It is not what is done, but the spirt in which it is done that makes all the difference.

Turning Confusion Into Clarity: A Guide to the Foundation Practices of Tibetan Buddhism by Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche

Awakening is more like discovering yourself.  If you have a handful of diamonds but don’t realize what they are, you treat them like pebbles.  Once you recognize them as diamonds, you can use their precious qualities.  Becoming a Buddha is like discovering a diamond in your hand.  You are discovering yourself, not getting rid of yourself.

Don’t confuse relaxed behavior with mind.  Today the sun is shining.  It’s not too cold, not too windy.  The circumstances for this shepherd could not be better.  What happens if they change?  What happens to mind if the owner sells these goats?  To know true freedom of mind, we must meditate in order to recognize the nature of mind itself.  Then we will not be carried away by thoughts, emotions, and circumstances.  Stormy weather or sunshine, the mind stays steady.

Your mind’s habit prevents you from seeing the emptiness of the table, and until you can see it, the subjective perception of solidness will block your hand.

Emptiness is like light, like sun.  Although you are thinking, “nothing, nothing, nothing”, actually nothing is everything.  If you understand that this nothing is emptiness, then wisdom blossoms.

Inside the Now: Meditations on Time by Thich Nhat Hanh

What you see is yourself.

Love that doesn’t grow is love that is already beginning to die.

Not a creation but a manifestation.

Dreaming Yourself Awake: Lucid Dreaming and Tibetan Dream Yoga for Insight and Transformation by B. Alan Wallace

We humans are observer-participants who co-create the world of our experience, while uncritically assuming that it already exists out there, independent of our participation.

If you don’t have a natural curiosity about your sleeping and dreaming, think about this: should you live to the age of ninety, about thirty years--- an entire 1/3 of your life – will pass in your sleep.

How are spiritual awakening and lucid dreaming connected? In both cases you are poignantly aware of the unfolding of your experiences in the present moment.  You are not carried away by distractive thoughts and emotions.  You can observe their appearance, continuity, transformation, and fading with perfect clarity.  Like a chess master, your mind is fully focused – sure and unclouded.

Enlightened Vagabond: The Life and Teachings of Patrul Rinpoche by Matthieu Ricard

Don't you get it? If you've got money, you've got money problems.  If you have a house, you have house problems.  If you have yaks, you have yak problems.

He finally understood that all inner and outer phenomena are inherently empty of nature and that all are equally unreal from the point of view of ultimate reality.

The Fourth World: An Indian Reality by George Manuel and Michael Posluns

Leaders who call their people apathetic because there is too little response to their leadership are likely pointing in the wrong direction.

There is no single Trail of Tears that can be drawn on Canadian maps as it must be drawn for the Cherokee Nation.  We were not banished from our land.  It is as though the land was moved from under us.

It had been estimated that the average European at the time of Columbus was five feet tall.  One out of ten Europeans in those days was deformed in some way due to insufficient diet. … At that time North American Indians were cultivating 600 different types of corn; all the different kinds of beans know today (except horse and soy beans, which came from China); potatoes; peanuts; and a host of other foodstuffs…. East Coast Indians taught Europeans to enjoy such dishes as clam chowder, oyster stew, baked pumpkin, cranberry sauce, and popcorn, and introduced them to squash, celery, buckwheat, maple sugar, pepper, chocolate, and tapioca. … If our instruments of war had been as highly developed as our social structures, our agriculture, and our medicine, the result might have been still different again.

At this point in our struggle for survival, the Indigenous peoples of North America are entitled to declare a victory.  We have survived.  If others have also prospered on our land, let it stand as a sign between us that the Mother Earth can be good to all her children without confusing one with another.  It is a myth of European warfare that one man’s victory require another’s defeat.

 The fact of the matter is that there was never a time since the beginning of colonial conquest when Indian people were not resisting the destructive forces besetting us: the state through the Indian agent; the church through the priests; the church and state through the schools; the state of industry through the traders.