The Complete Game of Life and How to Play It by Florence Scovel Shinn

Fear is inverted faith.

If one asks for success and prepares for failure, he will get the situation he has prepared for.

Man must prepare for the thing he has asked for, when there isn't the slightest sign of it in sight.

Evil is a false law man has made for himself.

If you do not run your subconscious mind yourself, someone else will run it for you.

In order to demonstrate her supply, she must first feel that she had received -- a feeling of opulence must precede its manifestation.

Life is a mirror, and we find only ourselves reflected in our associates.

Doughnut Economics: 7 Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist by Kate Raworth

Economics is the mother tongue of public policy, the language of public life and the mindset that shapes society.

Pre-analytic vision. Worldview. Paradigm. Frame. These are cousin concepts. What matters more than the one you choose is to realize that you have one in the first place, because then you have the power to question and change it.

What enables human beings to thrive? A world in which every person can lead their life with dignity, opportunity and community -- and we can all do so within the means of our life-giving planet. 

Mainstream economic theory is obsessed with the productivity of waged labour while skipping right over the unpaid work that makes it all possible, as feminist economists have made clear for decades.  That work is known by many names: unpaid caring work, the reproductive economy, the love economy, the second economy.  However, as economist Neva Goodwin has pointed out, far from being secondary, it is actually the "core economy", and it comes first every day, sustaining the essentials of family and social life with the universal human resources of time, knowledge, skill, care, empathy, teaching and reciprocity. 

Wherever people are present, so too are power relations. 

The Heart of Buddhist Meditation: The Buddha's Way of Mindfulness by Nyanaponika Thera

The same old mechanism is at work again: the interaction of greed and fear…. Fear… constantly poisons the atmosphere by creating a feeling of frustration which again will fan the fires of hate.

Unsettling Canada: A National Wake-Up Call by Arthur Manuel

I know Canadians consider that they have one of the most benevolent governments in the world, and it has indeed shown benevolence in many instances, but never toward Indigenous peoples.  When our own issues are on the table, the government is ready to defy international law an even its own national laws.  When Indigenous peoples have pushed Canada to live up to its ideals and its rhetoric, the retribution has always been swift.

To say that Indigenous peoples are environmentalists is a redundancy.  We are, after all, the children and the defenders of the land.  Our Indigenous economies have been based on cultivation, herding, hunting, gathering, fishing – and their related technologies – all integrated into the natural cycles of the earth.

In the struggle to protect the land, Indigenous peoples are the first and last line of defence.

Water is not only the property of humanity, it belongs to all living things.

Canada has a colonial addiction when it comes to Indigenous peoples.

The Comprehensive Claims Policy and its obvious flaw that allows Canada to have its cake and it, too; demanding that First Nations be willing to extinguish their Aboriginal Title and Rights before they enter negotiations.  The way the policy works, Canada concedes nothing but gains everything before the negotiations ever start.  This bears no resemblance to the process of recognition and reconciliation that the Supreme Court has called for, and everything that is wrong with the negotiations flows from this.  Since Canada does not admit to the existence of Aboriginal title, there is no recognition that Indigenous peoples actually own the lands and resources within their territories.

The Canadian government has time and again proven itself lawless when it comes to Indigenous peoples.  Despite losing more than 150 legal cases on Indigenous rights over the past fifteen years, it insists that it is in control of the Indian agenda and that Indigenous peoples have no rights.

We cannot have reconciliation until the extinguishment policy is off the table and our Aboriginal title and treaty rights are recognized, affirmed, and implemented by Canada and the provinces.  Not only in the Constitution but also on the ground.  We need to negotiate the dismantling of the colonial system, not bargain for cash deals that extinguish our right and produce nothing except more debt and dependency.  We need to stand up and fight colonialism in all its manifestations.

The Canadians who fear the changes that [self-determination and land rights] will bring to this country, I can only say to them that there is no downside to justice.  Just as there was no downside to abolishing slavery.

Our path toward decolonization is clear. It is up to Canadians to choose theirs.

In almost all cases, Europeans were met, at times within minutes of their arrival, by Indigenous peoples.  There was an attempt to get around this inconvenient fact by declaring us non-human, but this was difficult even for Europeans to sustain over time.  The doctrine of discovery remained because it was a legal fig leaf they could use to cover naked thievery.

As Indigenous peoples around the world have discovered, a deal is not a deal when it comes to settler governments.

In Canada… Indigenous peoples [control] only 0.2% of the land and the settlers 99.8%.

When we speak of rebuilding Indigenous societies and Indigenous economies, we are not seeking to join the multinational on Wall St or Bay St as junior partners, but to win back the tools to build our own societies that are consistent with our culture and values.  Our goal isn’t simply to replace Settlers Resource Inc with Indigenous Resource Inc.  Instead we are intrusted in building true Indigenous economies that begin and end with our unique relationship to the land.

To a large extent, we live in separate wolds.  They live in Chase, BC, Canada.  We live in Neskonlith, Secwepenc Territory.

Many Indian individuals and communities resisted the right to vote.  They did not see themselves as Canadians but as members of sovereign nations trapped inside a country they had never sought to be part of.

For Indigenous peoples, the computer has helped break the information monopoly of the dominant society.

A large part of our struggle is simply to have governments obey their own laws in regard to Indigenous peoples.

Step Out of Your Story: Writing Exercises to Reframe & Transform Your Life by Kim Schneiderman

Our minds can be like messy desks, and we may struggle to process all the information we absorb -- to know which fragments are worth holding on to and how to properly file them so that the categories make intuitive sense and help us flourish.

This antagonist is like a personal trainer, and this conflict is the force challenging you to develop your confidence or become clear.

Consider how much of our identity is deeply intertwined with our first-person narrative -- the big "I", otherwise known as the ego.

Human beings are virtual wanting machines, desiring many things immediately and at the same time.

Once you've built a world around the people, activities, practices, and roles that define you, it can be very difficult to disengage when circumstances changes, even for the better. 

When people become discouraged, it is usually because they mistake one or more difficult chapters in their lives for the totality of their story.

How we tell our stories -- to our children and to our friends, to strangers and to ourselves -- is the determining factor in our worldview and happiness. 

The antagonist is just helping us build our strengths while further honing the underdeveloped areas within ourselves.

Sometimes vulnerabilities are simply misunderstood or unacknowledged strengths, and they signal our growing edges -- if only we would listen to them rather than avoid them.

Start Here Now: An Open-Hearted Guide to the Path & Practice of Meditation by Susan Piver

Meditation is more than a practice; it is a way of being in the world.  It is a path.

Meditation gives you the courage to be who you are.

The act of sitting down with yourself with the willingness to simply be with yourself as you are.

As it chips away at your concepts, stories, and judgments, meditation opens your heart.

Place your mind on what you are doing rather than what you think about what you are doing.

We can relax with the entire mental field by simply allowing what is there to be there.

Meditation is a precious opportunity to untether yourself from the self-improvement treadmill that many of us ride so hard.  Your practice is a time to stop trying to be a better anything and instead release all agendas and relax with yourself just as you are.

Rather than becoming more peaceful, meditation makes you more authentic.

If you want to become enlightened, you have to start with your actual life, just a it is right now, and begin by getting your personal situation in hand.

Your experience is the path; there is no other path.

The ability to make space for what you think and feel has enormous implications.

Right here is where a lot of confusion about meditation arises. It is not about avoiding your life; it is about living it fully.  It is not about becoming implacable; it is about becoming genuine.

I began to experience painful moments in a radically different way.  Instead of feeling frustrated or overwhelmed, I saw pain as nature's reminder that there is something important for me to learn. 

When you're too busy to honor your highest priorities -- which are understanding the meaning of your life, discovering your wisdom, and offering your heart -- that is a sign that you've let something slip due to laziness.

The negative stories we tell ourselves are basically made up in the first place and we should make up positive ones to replace them.

Compassion is the ability to hold pain and love in your heart simultaneously.

Thinking that relationships should be comfortable is what makes them uncomfortable.

There is nothing less safe than love.  Love means opening again and again to your beloved, yourself, and your world, and seeing what happens next.  The moment you try to make it safe, it ceases to be love. 

The practice of meditation is the practice of gentleness.  But you don't need to sit on your cushion to do it. The more gentleness you can extend toward yourself, interestingly, the more fierce and committed you will become.  Your difficult emotions are much more likely to respond to your friendship rather than your fear.

Self-Healing: The Only Introduction You'll Need by David Lawson

Physical symptoms tell us that there is something we need to learn about ourselves and something we need to change.

Positive energy boosts the immune system, maintains us in balance and makes us available for positive experiences, positive people, positive opportunities and healthy solutions.

Healthy thoughts are permissive thoughts. They permit us to be who we truly are.

When we acknowledge our fears, reassure ourselves that we are safe and release our fearful thoughts, we make ourselves available for new, safer experiences.

If we constantly think about our bodies as unreliable, ugly, hateful and inadequate then we significantly contribute to patterns of disharmony and deterioration.

A symptom is a signal that there is some underlying imbalance.

The things that we do compulsively could be a cover for unexpressed emotional needs, desires and conflicts.

Whether we blame ourselves or others, the energy of our blaming thoughts keeps us attached to our problems rather than liberating us from them.

Healing is often an ongoing process of discovering and applying a combination of solutions…. It is also important to be available for the one simple step that could change everything easily and rapidly.

We all need to take the risk of thinking, acting and responding to life in new ways.

Psychic Navigator: Harnessing Your Inner Guidance by John Holland

You must understand the mechanics of awareness before you commence your journey.

We're all born psychic.

As spiritual beings, we're able to access, receive, and transmit information that reaches beyond our physical body and our natural five senses.

When you believe you're receiving psychic information, step back and ask yourself, "Is this information coming to me or from me?" By doing so, you'll remain subjective at all times. 

Have you ever met someone for the first time, when from out of nowhere, images and feelings just poured into your mind?... In the split second during that first introduction, you get a total "download" of all sorts of information, as your mind begins to try to decipher what you're receiving.  What's really going on is that you're actually reading and interpreting the person's aura.

Your intuition isn't meant to replace reason; instead, it's meant to enhance your logic, thereby giving you a far better chance to succeed.

Heart Berries: A Memoir by Terese Marie Mailhot

Indian girls can be forgotten so well they forget themselves.

Sometimes grief is a nothing feeling.

In white culture, forgiveness is synonymous with letting go.  In my culture, I believe we carry pain until we can reconcile with it through ceremony.  Pain is not framed like a problem with a solution. 

I wasn't made to be ornamental, but it's what I wanted.  I inherited black eyes and a grand, regal grief that your white women won't own or carry.

Nobody wants to know why Indian women leave or where they go. Our bodies walk across the highway from the dances of our youth into missing narratives without strobe lights or sweet drinks in our small purses, or the talk of leaving.  The truth of our leaving or coming into the world is never told.

Thunder is contrary.  Thunder can intuit, and her action is the music caused by lightning.  She comes because we ask, and that's why falling apart is holy.

Kundalini Yoga: The Flow of Eternal Power by Shakti Parwha Kaur Khalsa

It is the birthright of every human to be healthy, happy and holy.

The essential nature of the soul is pure joy. If I'm not experiencing joy, then I'm not experiencing my soul.

Some people think of the heart center as the opening of feelings and emotions.  Not true.  Actually, it is the second chakra that opens sensory intensities, whereas the fourth chakra gives you a relationship to your feelings that changes commotion to devotion. It transforms passion to compassion.

Anger is a condition of frustration born out of the ego feeling powerless.

To be sane, two things you need to do every day: Sweat and laugh.

Prayer is talking to God, meditating is letting God talk to you.

If we're not happy, it's because we're stuck in our lower chakras and not utilizing our higher consciousness.

The Rainbow & the Worm: The Physics of Organisms by Mae-Wan Ho

With every beat the heart generates a powerful pressure wave that travels rapidly throughout the arteries, much faster than the actual flow of blood, creating what we feel as our pulse. 

Living With Your Heart Wide Open by Steve Flowers and Bob Stahl

Your experience of life is based on self-references and habits of personality that are familiar to you but restrict you from discovering a deeper and more expansive experience of who you are.

The sense of self is formed in early childhood and gradually hardens into self-concepts and beliefs, creating a personal identity that can define and restrict you for the rest of your life. 

The stories you repeat make up your personal history and identity.

Who you believe you are began in your early relationships with your caregivers, and it was in these exchanges that you decided if you were worthy or unworthy, adequate or inadequate.

Projection is a kind of trance that forms the basis of all our relationships...where we may tend to project onto our partners the unpleasant thoughts and emotions we haven't yet worked through.

We have to heal the self that was created in childhood before we can enjoy the freedom of not being confined by personal narratives.

The narrative-based self exists across time and continuously creates itself through the stories it repeats.

The immediacy-based self is not a thing but rather an active center of awareness from which you can acknowledge moment-to-moment experience.

The narrative-based self lives in a continuum of past and future, and as such is the source of wanting, dissatisfaction, and judging -- in short, suffering.

Many of the things you might discover as you feed into your long buried feelings have nothing to do with any actual inadequacy on your part.

Oftentimes the things that lead to the development of a sense of unworthiness aren't caused by some big trauma; they're just the events of ordinary life and aren't even all that noteworthy at the time they occur. The child just feels that something isn't quire right emotionally.

Just as the nose smells, the eyes see, the tongue tastes, the ears hear, and the body feels, the mind thinks.  This is just what it does -- it's a mental processing plant, but it's not you.

Reality is a single frame at a time. Because the mind likes continuity, it uses a self-story to link multiple but separate experiences of self into a cohesive story.

Thoughts and emotions are the primary building blocks of the story of deficiency you identify with.

Sometimes we can only recognize who we really are when we can take note of who we are not.

As you gain more understanding of what fuels your sense of inadequacy, shame, or unworthiness, you'll feel better.

Mindfulness practice can help you experience freedom from all that enslaves you with clinging, aversion, and unawareness.  It plays an extremely important role in mental development by giving you the ability to step back and watch the mind clearly, without distortions or misconceptions.

The moment you realize you aren't present, you're present once again.

We've all heard the advice to take life one day at a time.  Mindfulness means taking life one moment at a time.

If you weren't mindful, you wouldn't even know you'd wandered off.

When you come back into the present moment and notice where you drifted off to, you can discover elements of doubt, desire, or anger that you were caught up in.  This offers insight into hindrances and difficulties, including how the judgmental mind creates feelings of deficiency and inadequacy.

The body scan is a very concrete, non complex place to start the work of self-acceptance and nonjudging.

Years ago at an extended meditation retreat, a meditation teacher informed us that he wasn't interested in any of our stories.  We were stunned and taken aback -- until he went on to acknowledge the profound tenderness, woundedness, and pain that our stories hold but said that he wanted to help us explore possibilities that lay beyond these self-limiting definitions of ourselves.

A pervasive sense of unworthiness has core components of self-blame, self-consciousness, and resentment.  These habits of mind are all connected and stem from the habitual ways of looking at things.

Allowing is a kind and curious attitude that enables you to look more deeply into your stories and to learn from them rather than becoming entranced by them or trying to block them, both of which will leave you more stuck.

Allowing enables you to recognize that a thought is just a thought, whether you like it or not.

Witnessing is curious and nonjudging.  It doesn't cling to or avoid anything.

When you use allowing, witnessing, and acknowledging to see the storyteller at work, you can finally stop identifying with the self created by your stories.

The heart you have abandoned is still waiting where you left it, and within it is all the vitality you lost when you turned away from your  pain.

Self-compassion is giving to yourself what you would like others to give to you.

Setting a goal of a better self calls froth wanting. Wanting calls forth striving.  Striving calls forth judging.  And judging becomes a way of life that brings a critical orientation to everything.

If you want compassion to grow in your life, practice compassion. If you want criticism to grow in your life, practice criticism.

Self compassion lets you be with all of the hurt, loneliness, and fear that the narrative-based self has concealed.

Perfectionism is an effort to win the attention and approval you crave by doing everything just right.

Meditation is sometimes called a "shit accelerator".  Whether you want them or not, sooner or later you discover feelings that were squelched for one reason or another.

Seeing your ego more as a tool and less as your identity will help you free yourself from stories that constrict and limit your life.

Becoming real doesn't happen to people who are too fragile.

Anytime you feel compelled to do something impulsively or find yourself reacting in automatic ways, be very suspicious.

Habitual behaviours that arise form old stories are often driven by craving or fear.

Mind of Clear Light: Advice on Dying and Living a Better Life by The 14th Dalai Lama and Jeffrey Hopkins

Dying is a time when the deeper levels of mind manifest themselves; daily reflection also opens the door to those states. 

You are your own protector; comfort and discomfort are in your own hands. 

Taming the mind brings happiness and not doing so leads to suffering. 

Since our attitudes of permanence and self-cherishing -- held in our hearts as if they were the center of life -- are what ruin us, the most fruitful meditators are an impermanence, the emptiness of inherent existence, and compassion. 

Understand that this body, which you sustain at any cost, will someday desert you. 

As long as you have mindfulness, you must do whatever you can to keep the mind in a virtuous way. 

The continuum of this mind is what proceeds to the next lifetime. 

When you are capable of abiding forever in the innate mind of clear light without regressing through the coarser levels, there is no opportunity for the accumulation of karma. 

Afflictive emotions such as lust, hatred, enmity, jealously, and belligerence do not reside in the very essence of mind but are peripheral to it.  When the mind knows its own nature and when this knowledge is teamed with powerful concentration, it gradually becomes possible to reduce and finally to overcome the afflictive states that drive the process of repeated suffering. 

Aim in your rebirth to be reborn with a body and in a situation capable of finishing the remaining spiritual paths. 

Always adjust your motivation toward helping others as much as possible. 

Buddhas are teachers of the spiritual path; they do not give realization like a gift.  You have to practice morality, concentrated meditation, and wisdom on a daily basis. 

Physical happiness is just an occasional balance of elements in the body, not a deep harmony. Understand the temporary for what it is. 

What is performed in imitation eventually leads to what is accomplished in fact. 

Obstacles are not external but internal; they are delusions of our own mind. 

The real enemy, the destroyer of our happiness, is within ourselves. 

When something unpleasant happens and you get irritated, you are the loser, since irritation immediately destroys your own mental peace. 

Your enemy is your supreme teacher. 

The Truth Body is not a form which is visible or accessible to others but rather is a state actualized. 

The Dharma is the complete abandonment of both delusions and obscurations of the paths. 

Until we recognize that suffering is dangerous, we will make no attempt to get rid of it. 

 

No independent thing exists; everything depends on a cause. 

According to the Buddhist point of view, there are sentient beings who take part in the environment or natural habitat, and the universe evolves.  We accept beginningless continuity of consciousness.  

In order to practice genuine compassion or altruism, we need tolerance.  Without tolerance, it is impossible to practice.  Anger and hatred are the greatest obstacles to compassion and love.  To minimize anger and hatred, tolerance is the key factor.  In order to practice tolerance, we need an enemy.  The enemy will not want to help us deliberately, but because of our enemy's actions we get the opportunity to practice tolerance. 

Since death involves the separation of the body and mind, it is important to realize the nature of the “I” that is set up relative to the collection of physical and mental aggregates, as well as the nature of those aggregates themselves.  The type of body we possess is an impure entity, produced from the four elements of earth, water, fire, and wind, subject to pain from even slight causes, and like an illusion both in the sense of being here one moment and gone the next, and in the sense of appearing to exist inherently but actually being empty of such inherent existence.  By appearing to be clean if washed, and appearing blissful, permanent, and under your control, the body dwells, so to speak, in a city of misconceptions about the nature of consciousness and its objects. 

This human body is a precious endowment, potent and yet fragile.  Simply by virtue of being alive, you are at a very important juncture, and carry a great responsibility.

In order to change results you must deal with causes…. Wishful thinking alone does not produce the result.

It is helpful to know that at some point all hope for continuing this life will end.

When the mind pays attention to an object, it does so through the movement of wind, or energy.  The mind rides on wind like a rider on a horse.