Illumination by Alberto Villoldo

All quotes from Alberto's book

Once you make your vows of love, you may never go back to your old ways.  The price you pay for doing so is death – whether the loss of your life or of a relationship you were not fully ready to commit to.

Genuine power lies in the ability to practice peace when confronted by someone else’s fury.

When we give in to anger we continue to foster the situations that feed the rage.

Peace may cost you, but it’s the price of war that bankrupts the soul.

We don’t have to live in a world of competition, accumulation, and scorekeeping.

A creator doesn’t crush opponents.

It’s our purity of intent that attracts emotionally healthy partners.  To practice purity of intent is to have a willingness to trust, and to enter partnership with truthfulness and curiosity.

We all love to be on the inside track of the latest bit of gossip, but be mindful:  even listening to gossip is participating in an act of violence against the person you are hearing about.

When you practice temperance, you don’t squander your energy – or overload your credit card.  You find creative and more sustainable ways to operate.  You recognize when the party has stopped being fun and turned ugly.

Humility conquers pride.  The two extremes of self-absorption – too much focus on your individuality and lack of self-awareness – disappear.

In the rite of marriage, integrating your old single self with your new partnered self and taking the plunge into deep intimacy are the tests you face.

If you see that you’re an essential, indispensable part of creation, you understand that you’re responsible for creating your experience in this life.

Wishing for world peace is no excuse for being inconsiderate to your neighbours.

If you resist initiation, the universe will conspire to bring you face to face with the end of a stage in your life in some other way.  Resistance is futile.

We discover that although it is very difficult to change the world, it is not difficult to change our own world.

Life will drag us kicking and screaming to our destiny if we try to escape it. Our choice is to be delivered in grace and beauty, which happens when we say yes to our initiation.

To understand the role of emotions, it’s useful to distinguish them from feelings.  When someone cuts in front of you on the highway, you get upset at that driver.  Your spontaneous reaction of anger is a feeling that passes because your nervous system resets itself. … Feelings are authentic.  By contrast, emotions are like viruses infecting our primitive neurocomputer.  If you’re still angry days or years after an upsetting incident, what you are experiencing isn’t a feeling but an emotion stored in your neural network.  You rationalize this emotion, and you come to believe, for example, that your spiteful behaviour toward your boss is justified and feel you have a right to be angry and wrathful.

You are the author of the dream or nightmare you are living.

In higher organisms, evolution favors the most cooperative.

Humans as a species have yet to discover what bees know: that survival of the individual depends on the well-being of the hive.

Paradise is a brain state, not a place.

Make peace a conscious choice.

The only person who can serve as your programmer is you.  But first you must change the notion of God as the ultimate rescuer who can be wooed, appeased, and coaxed into saving you from suffering.  In fact, you must drop the notion of God altogether, because it is a uniquely human creation.

The shaman recognizes that like everyone, she has a spark of the Divine but is not the fire itself.

We find the courage to be generous when we know that if there seems to be a shortage of something in our lives – whether money, love or time – it’s our perception that’s flawed.

The human brain is made up of four anatomically different subcomputers that developed over millions of years of evolution.

Once you free yourself from your primitive brain’s limited perceptions of what you can accomplish, you discover your greatness.  You realize that you’re both an immaterial speck and an all-important element of the universe.

We think that we’re much too valuable to have our identity and all that we’ve worked for swept away.

The Mother Factor by Stephan B Poulter

All quotes from Stephan's book

Overnight change takes fifteen years.

It isn’t the issues we’re aware of that cause us all the personal heartache, but the ones that are just outside our conscious field of vision and reach.

You can’t let go of what you don’t know you’re holding.

Remember that unless you are willing to try something new, nothing new is going to happen in your life.

 All addictions, self-destructive behaviors, and choices are driven by the need for love, acceptance, and emotional support.

Being clear about and responsible for your actions and emotional responses is the pathway to secure and powerful relationships.

Defensiveness keeps the changes from happening in your life.

No one can approve, love, or accept you, unless you do it first.

Can you be calm, clear, and confident of your own empowered approach to your relationships?

Pausing and rethinking your emotional “hot spots” will give you the control and clarity that you crave.

 Verbalizing our feelings is one of the quickest ways to go around our defense mechanisms.  Our inner thoughts and emotions tend to come out only when we start to talk about our pain.  Thinking and speaking are two very different psychological processes that access different parts of our emotions and repressed feelings.  There is only one way to get your story out of your head: begin to tell the unedited story.

It is very difficult for a deprived adult to be patient or calm when she is feeling neglected or unimportant.

Life has a way of pointing out our blind spots, and it is our responsibility to take action on these new insights when we understand them.

We only consider change when our pain threshold is exceeded.

A Big New Free Happy Unusual Life by Nina Wise

All quotes from Nina's book

We often try to push reality aside, thinking that whatever is occurring in our lives at the moment should be different from what is actually happening.  In this work, what is arising moment to moment is the source of our movement, sound, images, and speech, is the source of our material.  Push nothing aside.  

When we are true to ourselves, each of us becomes a light for another to follow. 

When we become quiet enough, the universe displays a panaoply of wonders that until then have been masterfully camouflaged as the most mundane of events.

Surrender to doing what we actually feel like doing.

Remember: resistance is part of the game and never completely disappears.

The inner self is not at all interested in the level of our talent, but only concerned that we engage and express.

Peace is not a steady state, but must be created over and over again.

Prayer is a sacred technology for awakening to Presence, to the radiance of our innate state of freedom.  Prayer is a sacred technology for dispelling delusions that cloud our hearts and minds so that we can reside in openheartedness, trust, and caring.

The path to what is holy is an unfolding and fluid process, created, discovered, invested and revealed, moment by moment by moment.

Surrender.  Let go of believing that you are in charge of the way your life goes.

Like life, art making is not a static event occurring in safe space, but a dynamic unfolding of new possibilities.

When you fail in your efforts, congratulate yourself for you courage and vitality.

Commit to what you are doing with the gift of energy.  You don’t have to believe in what you are doing, you simply have to do it. 

The Seventh Sense by Joshua Cooper Ramo

All quotes from Joshua's book

In a world of markets, each of us – our labor, our ideas, our capital – is a commodity.  We are liberated, but only to compete.

In our age of connection, everyone of us is a node.

Someday soon, drones will demand the redesign of our cities as automobiles did in the last century.

Yang is the thunderstorm; yin is the peace that comes afterward.

That yin-yang balance helps us understand the power split on a network is not really split.  Network power is wild at the ends, with all the creative energy of the world filled with devices, empowered human dreams, and the violent slips of old balances.  Yang.  But at the center it is dense, still, and even quiet, with the silently cranking algorithms of massively concentrated power.  Yin.

"Anyone can connect” marks our age as much as Luther’s “anyone can speak to God” characterized the Reformation or Kant’s “dare to know” defined the Enlightenment.

Massive, widespread connection changed everything, including how a phone works.

Robert Morris Sr, a cryptographic and security genius who towered over NSA code-breaking programs for decades in the last century, compressed his lifetime of experience cracking machines into three golden rules of computer security.  Rule one: do not own a computer.  Rule two: do not power it on.  Rule three: do not use it.

All around us today, huge power accumulates in certain irreplaceable cores.  Giant search engines, certain algorithms, database or communications protocols over master us. Imagine life without search.  Or a link to friends.

When everyone links to a core, that core links to everyone – like a country with a single airport. Every evil thing beats in the potential of these central nodes.

Systems can be fast, open, or secure, but only two of these three at a time.

The faster your speed, the less distance matters.

The acceleration from horseback to train to plane speed happened over a period of 150 years.  Each new acceleration diminished the impact of distance.

In a wagon train you might have contemplated the desert with fear; by car you’d merely consider it with care. In a plane it is irrelevant.

The faster links of transportation, whether they are trains or planes or data connections, now lie, blanketlike, atop that slower-moving geological layer.  These high-velocity networks are a new geography.  Mathematicians and architects call the landscape they represent a topology. … Geographies are pretty much constant; topologies can change in an instant.  In geographic terms, Moscow and Saint Petersburg are always 400 miles apart. In topological terms, they are as far apart as the fastest connection between them – about 0.3 milliseconds on a light-speed fiberoptic cable.

If you want to make a fortune or a revolution (or both) – if you hope to shatter some barrier of tools or ideas between you and a dream, or to lead a religious revival, or to spread an infection of hate or revolution or insidious computer code – then, fundamentally, this is what you have to consider: where are the gates? How do you smash them? How do you build your own?

The world should expect that the opening attacks of future wars – directed at the United States or allies that it must defend – will come invisibly and silently through networks or from space, not from noisy land invasions or bombing runs.

While it’s tempting to call the twenty-first century the Urban Century, in fact the billion-people-a-decade rush into cities is a symptom.  A larger hunger for the constant knitting of lives together, for fresh and efficient connection, drives us.

Scientists who study networks call this sort of change “explosive percolation” by which they mean an instant shift in the nature of a system as it passes a threshold level of connectivity.  This melding of many nodes in a single fabric – think of the way phones tie together to make a telephone system – is not unlike the linking of water molecules, one to another, as the temperature drops.  One moment you have something you can drink; the next you hold ice.  So one day you have a few connected users; the next, a billion people are on facebook or youtube.  A new entity has formed.

The great insight of the Enlightenment was that the nature of an object – a person, a piece of land, a vote, a share – changed when it was liberated from fetters of tradition, ignorance, habit or fear.  A peasant pulled from serfdom became a citizen, which changed his politics, his economic hopes, his ability to learn and teach. That shift triggered centuries of disruption. The world realigned itself. 

Protocols are rule books.  On the Internet, for example. Protocol rules place each bit of data in a reliable, predicable order, just as diplomatic protocol might seat ambassadors at a negotiation. This is why computers can speak to each other.  But protocols are about more than bits. They can be used to organize trade networks or stock markets too.  Designing and controlling a protocol, then, means that you can control almost everything important about a system. 

The pre-network instinct to fear Chinese! or fear Spanish! is the wrong one. As is the idea to teach the world Chinese or Spanish as a source of power.  Or, eventually, to demand that everyone in the United States speak English.  Rather, can we control this turbo-smart connected language protocol? is the right question.  Many of the threats we worry about today have been similarly simplified and misunderstood. Fear deflation? Fear Isis? Fear the RMB? Such fear reflects a blindness.  Finance, terrorism, and currency change when they are connected. It’s the network we should be nervous about.

It’s hard to let go of old notions, not just because we’re attached to them, but because in many cases what we’re being asked to hold on to next makes no sense to us.  We honestly don’t understand what network connections can do to a market or a military enemy any more than figures of hundreds of years ago knew what steam engines might do to sailing.

Many of the most unsettling forces in our world are ones we encourage.  If I had said to you a decade ago, “I’m going to record all your movements so that you can spend less time in traffic”, is that really a deal you would have accepted?  But if you use a GPS mapping system on your phone, you have done just that.

Connected forces can move like a capricious monster, smashing businesses or national economies or ecosystems with little warning and merciless efficiency.  Connected terrorists have cost trillions to fight; linked-up businesses have demolished trillions of dollars of profits from old sources with their cold, clicking efficiency.  Skype didn’t steal hundreds of billions of dollars of long-distance telephone fees, for instance.  It made them disappear.

When we say that ours is a revolutionary age, it’s not because you can watch videos on your phone. It’s because of why you can watch videos on your phone – and what that implies for the old, nervous structures around us.

Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss

All quotes from Tim's book

The “normal” systems you have in place, the social rules you’ve forced upon yourself, the standard frameworks – they don’t work. 

Fortunately, 10x results doesn’t always require 10x effort. Big changes can come in small packages.

It’s the small things, done consistently, that are the big things. 

If you decide to flip past something note it, return to it later at some point, and ask yourself, “Why did I skip this?” Did it offend you? Seem beneath you? Seem too difficult? And did you arrive at that by thinking it through, or is it a reflection of biases inherited from your parents and others? Very often, “our” beliefs are not our own.

The superheroes you have in your mind (idols, icons, titans, billionaires, etc) are nearly all walking flaws who’ve maximized one or two strengths.

You don’t “succeed” because you have no weaknesses; you succeed because you find your unique strengths and focus on developing habits around them.

If you win the morning, you win the day.

Meditation simply helps you channel drive toward the few things that matter, rather than every moving target and imaginary opponent that pops up.

It’s not what you know, it’s what you do consistently.

Lack of time is lack of priorities.  If I’m “busy”, it is because I’ve made choices that put me in that position.

Being busy is a form of laziness – lazy thinking and indiscriminate action.  Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.

In a lowered emotional state, we only see the problems, not the solutions.

The stories we tell ourselves can sometimes be self-defeating.

“Success” need not be complicated.  Just start with making 1000 people extremely, extremely happy.

We can be sure of a few fundamental realities: 1. You’re not nearly as good or as important as you think you are; 2. You have an attitude that needs to readjusted; 3. Most of what you think you know or most of what you learned in books or in school is out of date and wrong.

The more we associate experience with cash value, the more we think that money is what we need to live.  And the more we associate money with life, the more we convince ourselves that we’re too poor to buy our freedom.

Life favors the specific ask and punishes the vague wish.

Love Sense by Dr Sue Johnson

All quotes from Sue's book

Love, to so many of us, seems a bewitchment – a force, powerful and dangerous, that strikes us without our bidding. 

Erosion of a bond begins with the absence of emotional support.

The way we perceive our partner and the meaning we attribute to his or her actions depends on our sense of emotional connection.

A tsunami of loneliness, anxiety, and depression is sweeping through Western societies.

We are designed to deal with emotion in concert with another person – not by ourselves.

Love relationships aren’t meant only to be joyrides; they’re also restorative and balancing meeting places where negative emotions are calmed and regulated.

Loving connection is the natural antidote to fear and pain.

Once we are balanced, we can turn to the world and move in it with flexibility, open to learning and able to look at the choices available to us in any situation.

Our feelings guide us in issues large and small; they tell us what we want, what our preferences are, and what we need.

The inability to touch or name emotions leaves us aimless, without an internal compass to steer us toward what we need.

Love, at its best, brings a cornucopia of good things: joy and contentment, safety and trust, intense interest and involvement, curiosity and openness.

The better you are at listening to and distilling your emotions and sending clear emotional signals, the better your relationships will be.

See if you can find the trigger – the body sensation, the catastrophic thought… -- and the action impulse that appeared with it.  Did you want to run, to turn and fight, to crawl under the rug? … What did you do?

Paying attention to the way your emotions unfold in interactions with your partner can reveal important patterns.  Once you recognize a sequence, you can exert more control over how you react.

Open responsiveness shows us that we are cared for and valued.

It is repeated experience that turns genes either off or on.

When love begins to erode, what is missing is attunement and the emotional responsiveness that goes with it.

The Awakened Family by Shefali Tsabary

All quotes from Shefali's book

We are operating out of the feeling of lack created by our missing self.  In the absence of our real self, we rely on our ego for an identity, which of course consists of layers of programming picked up in our childhood. 

Our lost self is always present in our reactivity to others.

Rather than judging others for triggering us, we need to express gratitude for the situations that allow who we really are to reveal itself, for this is our golden opportunity to go within and integrate that which has never been addressed.

You can’t get rid of fears by willing it to disappear.  The only way it will naturally fade is by holding it in your awareness, which means you neither wallow in it, act it out, or suppress it.

Unless you become aware that all your reactions stem from the past, you will constantly be deluded into thinking someone or something is causing them.

We create entire scripts for our life based on our unmet needs and pain from the past we haven’t addressed.

Simply accept ourselves as a work in progress, allowing life’s lessons to show us the many ways we have yet to grow from within.

It takes becoming parents ourselves for us to discover how immature we really are.

It may not be easy to see how fear is the driver of our reactions, since it is a master of disguise.  It wears many

masks, such as anger, frustration, inauthenticity, control, and sadness.

Where there’s no fear, we never react.  Instead, we formulate a mindful response to the present moment.

The feeling of fear sets off an alarm that instantly triggers our emotional blueprint.

Fear can be transformed into consciousness.  It requires us to be bold in our willingness to explore it.

Our growing awareness of how the past influences the present allows us to shed stereotypical ways of being and reacting and instead create carefully attuned responses to all of life as it manifests in the here and now.

Our emotional patterns are inherited over generations and can be broken only through present moment awareness.

If we find ourselves reactive and overwhelmed, it’s because some aspect of our past is interfering with the present – either an emotion that was left dangling and unintegrated, or a fear-based myth we were conditioned with that’s now paralyzing our ability to act in an empowered way.

If we dare to ask ourselves why our current situation is overwhelming us, the present can be a powerful portal for transformation.

We need to take responsibility to raise ourselves to a higher level of maturity.

Enlightenment comes from letting go of our dependency on others to fill the void we feel within.

The liberated self doesn’t emerge overnight.  It arrives as layer after layer of our ego gets peeled off and replaced with mindfulness and the wisdom that comes with it.

Every moment is a new one, and the key to navigating any situation is to listen to the messages embedded in each moment.

Entering the present moment means joining with the “as-is” of a situation without resistance.

Acceptance of the present moment doesn’t mean you are passive or resigned to things.  It simply means that the sting of emotional charge is taken out of the situation.

Grounding ourselves in the present means we enter each moment in a state of aliveness and receptivity.

The universe responds to the belief systems we harbor within.

Acceptance of the “as is” of a situation brings grace, surrender, and most of all gratitude.

If anything is to change in our life, we need to have zero negativity about our “as is” reality.

Your desire to feel differently is stopping you from living in the now.

To shift from believing that life happens to us, to understanding that life happens for us and with our participation, enables us to find the jewel in every experience.

Most of us prefer to blame someone for what we encounter in our external world instead of picking up on what’s being mirrored back to us about ourselves.

To talk from the heart instead of the head means to say little.

Although our desire may be strong, things take time to manifest in the physical universe.  Nothing happens before its time.  For this reason we can’t rush life in order to assuage our insecurity and anxiety.  In fact, the more insecure and anxious we are, the more we interfere with the positive vibes we send out and the longer things take to manifest themselves.

All the beautiful things in nature require time and space to emerge.

When we feel our feelings, we don’t have time to engage in reactive emotions.  We tune in and allow the feelings to speak to us, wash over us, and transform us.  Aware that we are under waves of feeling, we do the opposite of emoting.  We hush up, become still, and allow the significance of the feelings to grow us up.

Our feelings are barometers of our soul, whereas our emotional reactions are indicators that our ego has become activated.

Consumed with a mythical standard of “how things should be”, we often feel we have no choice but to react.  We are compelled.  However, by examining each reaction and identifying which myth is driving it (and often it’s more than one), we can begin to tame our reactivity.  All that’s required is to observe what we tell ourselves in such situations.

By allowing your fear to be as it is and recognizing it for what it is, you integrate it.

Painful experiences have the potential to deepen us in a far more profound way than “happy” experiences often do. By putting us in touch with our limitations or fallibility, they remind us of our common humanity, dispelling all need for one-upmanship.

When we truly feel empathy for another, there is no agenda.  A genuinely empathic response immediately recognizes that the other is in a state that’s vastly different from our own, and that in order to connect with them we will have to forgo completely our own agenda. This swift letting go requires an alive presence that understands how connection with another is an engagement in which energy flows back and forth moment by moment with no guarantee in how things will end up.

Anxiety is normal, so don’t worry about the fact that you are anxious.  Treat it just like you do excitement or happiness. Just allow it to be, neither denying it nor resisting it.  When we neither deny or resist it, anxiety turns rogue.  Better to face it in its raw and natural state.  Then, in its own time and way, it will diminish. Not because we have driven it away by force, but because we have grown out of it with grace.

Awareness is fundamentally different from having an internal dialogue with yourself.

When we are mindful, we simply observe our internal dialogue, but we don’t get involved in it.

Awareness is transformative, whereas self-talk is debilitating, since we can never talk ourselves into a more effective way of living.

How did our ego develop?  Although it often represents itself violently – against either the self or others – it really develops out of a quiet desperation of spirit.

Most of us had to develop false ways to cope with our childhood realities, ways that started out as protecting us from the pain of parental rejection but ultimately became the chains that kept us bound to them even more.

Fear is the reason our parenting somehow manages to produce results that are the exact opposite of what we were aiming for.

The experiences of our childhood create a template upon which we build our life.  From this template emerge our current patterns of behavior.

All disciplinary issues with children occur because of a lack of discipline within the parent.

The more immature we are emotionally, the more our children will present us with complexes, insecurities, and behavior problems.

Aggression is actually a form of defensiveness.

It’s a mistaken idea that conflict needs to be adversarial.

Relationships are partnerships, not dictatorships.

If we didn’t already carry pain within us from our own upbringing, we wouldn’t react unconsciously.

Awareness requires us to hold a dual lens, one facing inward and the other outward.

Our insatiable need to direct, encourage, improve, and manage ruins wonderful moments of potential closeness.

The more ungrounded and insecure we are, the more insensitive, rigid, and righteous we are likely to become.

Our children come into our life to present us with an opportunity to raise ourselves, growing ourselves up.

Every moment in the parenting process serves as a wake-up call for us.

When we look closely, we see that a child’s “goodness” is masked by how easily the child’s behavior fits into our life… We love “good” children because they allow us to feel in control.

Parenting involves a lifelong commitment to changing and growing on a moment-by-moment basis.

Love… is the ability to fully see, accept, and honor the other person for who they are.  To love someone consciously is to harness the ability to step outside of our own self and consistently connect with the other.  It means we don’t ask the other to love us back, and neither do we set conditions for how they should love us if they choose to do so.  In other words, our feelings don’t come into the mix.

We equate happiness with the outcome of events, not the process.

The key is to … stay in touch with [your] inner power and not feel defeated by how life presents itself to [you].

Dispel all illusion that it’s [anyone’s] fault when I react.

I don’t see… behaviors as triggers.  I see my own wounding as my trigger, and [the] behavior as just the match that enflames it.

Understanding what enflames our inner wounds is important and fundamental to stopping our outer reactivity.  But we need to come to this understanding without judgment or blame.

Intention Heals by Adam McLeod

All quotes from Adam's book

Beliefs are the mental constructs which are the integration of all influences.  Our beliefs act as a filter for all incoming information. 

Your subjective experience is linked to how your awareness interacts with all that you think and feel, including your perception of the passage of time.  You determine how you respond to your environment.

Our belief system is our own unique individual filter through which we view the world.

We perceive our reality in a way which most closely meets our needs.  Therefore, our world is what we have asked it to be.