Me Artsy by Drew Hayden Taylor

Later in my life, the government came into the picture, and because we didn't have family names and they could not say our given names properly, we were given Inuit numbers.  Mine is E5-1613.

(chapter: Zacharias Kunuk, Story of My Life)

In 1981 there was still no television in my community.  This was because back in 1975 our community voted for no TV, and again in 1979.  (chapter: Zacharias Kunuk, Story of My Life)

Indigenous cultures recognize the need for performance and repetition.  Back in the day, just about everything was performative --whether it was planting, making fire, paddling canoes, going through rites of passage on taking part in large gatherings at sacred sites where clans and nations came together. (chapter: Monique Mojica, Verbing Art)

To this day, the war against Indigenous peoples, our lands, our women and children remains largely unacknowledged, along with the ways in which racial and gender violence are inextricably bound to settler/colonial greed and to those who continue to benefit from it. (chapter: Monique Mojica, Verbing Art)

I do not know if in my lifetime I will see a day when we, as Indigenous artists, can simply create because, as artists, we must.  What would we create if we were not perpetually "in reaction to" the colonizer? (chapter: Monique Mojica, Verbing Art)

Mimicking the butterfly motion, fancy shawl dancers infuse intricate footwork and sweeping arm movements to transform colourful, patterned fancy shawls into wings.  The dancers find balance in repetition and moving in various directions. (chapter: Karyn Recollet, For Sisters)

When an oppressed people get their voice back, one of the first things they write about is their oppression, the reasons for it and the continuing effects of it. (chapter: Drew Hayden Taylor, Once Upon a Medium)

Being a storyteller is like being God, but in a non-sacrilegious manner.  It's the ability to create universes and people. (chapter: Drew Hayden Taylor, Once Upon a Medium)

Everyone loves a great ghost story and a sweet love story.  Everyone loves hearing a story about how someone beat the unbeatable. (chapter: Richard Van Camp, Uncle Richard Van Camp's Storytelling Tips)

The Values Factor: The Secret to Creating an Inspired and Fulfilling Life by Dr John DeMartini

Any time you find yourself saying, "I should…", "I need to…", or "I really must…", you can be pretty certain that you are talking about social idealisms or the values of some external authority instead of expressing your own true highest values. When you hear yourself saying, "I desire to…", "I choose to…", or "I love to…", then you know that you are talking about a goal that is truly valuable to you.

If there is something that you believe you would love to have in your life -- such as a more fulfilling career, a life partner, or greater financial freedom -- I can tell you that the reason you don't have it in that particular form is almost certainly that you don't truly value it enough.  There is something else you value more, and that is where your energy, time, money, and focus have gone, whether you are aware of it or not.  When you truly value something, you are constantly on the lookout for opportunities to fulfill that value.

Your highest values determine your attention, retention, and intention: what you notice, what you remember, and what you intend or act upon.

Rather than being driven by passion, truly fulfilled human beings will follow their mission, inspired by their highest values and most integrated being.

Our lives are constantly demonstrating what matters to us most.

Your life never lies.  What you value most is what your life will reveal.

How do you know whether you are living by your own values or by someone else's? There are two simple ways to tell: 1. Whenever you try to live according to someone else's values, you find yourself saying "should", "ought to", and "have to".  2. When you fail to do what you thought you "should", you experience the ABCD's of negativity -- anger, blame, criticism, and despair -- directed toward yourself.

Whenever I hear someone say, "I tried to do it, but I just didn't seem to get around to it", I understand that what they have "tried" to do isn't really all that important to them.  What was truly more important to them was what they kept doing instead!

People make time for things that are really important to them and run out of time for things that aren't.

You find money for things that are valuable to you, but you don't want to part with your money for things that are not important to you.  So your choices about spending money tell you a great deal about what you value most.

We bring order and organization to things that are important to us and allow chaos and disorder with things that are low on our values.

The secret to living an inspired life, then, is to focus on those challenging voids that inspire us to stretch beyond our limits and create new visions, new possibilities, and new selves.

Hell is not someplace you go.  Hell is a state of mind that emerges when you try to live with unrealistic expectations such as ease without difficulty, support without challenge, pleasure without pain.  If that is what you truly seek, your life will disappoint you.

Your highest values tell you what you love and what matters most to you.  And your highest value -- the thing you love most and that matters to you most -- is your life's purpose. 

People often fail to recognize that every quality and action is a spiritual expression, even those that are conventionally seen as mundane, trivial, or even sinful.  

Anything that speaks to your highest value is part of your spiritual path and helping you fulfill your destiny.

Another key Buddhist concept is dharma --wise behavior or "right" action, which moves you toward fulfillment, nirvana, or personal liberation.  In a sense, dharma might be seen as "purpose".  So when we live according to that which is most important to us -- when we live teleologically, with meaning and purpose -- we are living with dharma and not karma…. We are living with inspiration, not desperation.

Your life automatically demonstrates your present life's purpose.  So what is your life demonstrating? What do you do everyday or nearly every day? What is it that you love doing that nobody ever has to remind you to do? 

The purpose of any relationship -- including a marriage -- is to make sure we get both support and challenge.

Nobody is missing their life partner.  All of the character traits of your life partner are with you throughout your life. When you perceive that you are missing your life partner, it is because you have a somewhat incomplete understanding of what a life partner is.

Ingratitude occurs when you assume that the balanced world around you is supposed to offer you more support than challenge, and more positive than negative.

Ingratitude is the result of an imbalanced, limited perception. 

Kaandossiwin: How We Come to Know by Minogiizhigokwe, Kathleen E Absolon

Aboriginal epistemology (the ways of knowing our reality) honours our inner being as the place where Spirit lives, our dreams reside and our heart beats.  Indigneous peoples have processes in place to tap into this inner space and to make the unknown-- known.

I begin by locating my self because positionality, storying and re-storing ourselves comes first.

Decolonization and Indigenizing is about both knowing and having a critical consciousness about our cultural history.

Colonizing knowledge dominates, ignorance prevails, and we internalize how and who the colonizers want us to be.

Decolonizing is arduous work and full of contradictions.

Indigenist re-search promotes Indigenous knowledge and methods.  As we re-search, we re-write and we re-story ourselves.

The animals, the earth and Creation are the original teachers of the Anishinaabek.

The legacy of colonizing knowledge has created a disconnection of people from their traditional teachings, people, family, community, spiritual leaders, medicine people, land and so on.

You can try to deconstruct or decolonize a western research methodology, but it is still a western paradigm and inseparable from the originating paradigm.  To indigenize is to position your Indigenous worldview as the centre.

Indigenous knowledge is knowledge that is wholistically derived from Spirit, heart, mind and body.

Indigenous forms of knowledge production accept intuitive knowledge and metaphysical and unconscious realms as possible channels to knowing. 

Indigenous knowledge comes from ancestral teachings that are spiritual and sacred in origin.  It exists in our visions, dreams, ceremonies, songs, dances and prayers.  It is not knowledge that comes solely from books but is lived, experiential and enacted knowledge.

Indigenous knowledge occupies itself with the past, present and future.  The past guides our present, and in our present we must consider the generations to come.

Indigenous re-search is about being human and calls all human beings to wake from the colonial trance and rejoin the web of life.

Paradigms are the understandings that ground us in the world, and our knowing, being and doing are guided by these.  There can be many paradigms, and paradigms can shift.

A worldview is an intimate belief system that connects Indigenous people to identity, knowledge and practices.  Indigenous peoples' worldviews are rooted in ancestral and sacred knowledges passed through oral traditions from one generation to the next.  It is how we see the world.

Indigenous peoples' worldviews are rooted in traditions, land, language, relations and culture.

Our original teachers are the plants, animals and sacred ones in Creation.  Our philosophies are earth-centred, and we originally looked to the animals and earth for our teachings.

Our medicine bundle is our own life.

Self in Indigenous methodology has no time barriers and will always travel with us as we journey in and out of searches for knowledge.

Oral history, Winona [Stevenson] says, is unique from literate traditions because "they are as much about social interaction as they are about knowledge and transmission".  She says that oral traditions are living, interactive and participatory by nature.

In Indigenous contexts location does matter.  People want to know who you are, what you are doing and why.

Our worldview, including belief in Spirit and ancestors is revealed in our ability to trust process. 

Indigenous methodologies raise Indigenous voices out of suppression.

Because the Anishinaabe language is very descriptive, it takes conscious thought and effort to articulate an Anishinaabe concept in english.  For example, the term for a "heat bug" translates roughly in english as "singing for the berries to ripen".

Indigenous knowledge sets are perceived and received with antagonism.  Michael Marker states: "The efforts to make education serve the status quo have often made the place based knowledge and identity of Indigenous people seem like an antiquated and sometimes contentious perspective". 

You must contextualize yourself and own the location from which you research.

As First Nations, our responsibilities are to factor in accountability, not just measurability, of our relations with all of Creation and to follow our original instructions as they were orally passed on.

Our awareness of our place in Creation is our responsibility.

Our ancestors' legacy is in the lands, languages, traditions and cultures that they safeguarded.  These enabled our ancestors and us today to survive genocide, assimilation and attempted annihilation. 

There isn't so much dissonance about our process when the methodologies honour who we are as Indigenous peoples.

Pam Colorado derives four dynamics that she says we ought to attend to in our methodologies: feelings, history, prayer and relations.  If we are to conduct research that is ethical, humane, relevant and valid, our methodologies must be culturally congruent.

Prayers, ceremony and dreams are concrete manifestations of how Spirit has a presence.

Ceremonies provide a channel to heal, cleanse, seek knowledge and gain insight.

To become progressive Indigenous re-searchers we have to become conscious of the history and impact of colonizing methodologies and oppressive theories.  We have to learn our cultural history and knowledge.  We have to undertake a journey of learning, unlearning and relearning, and this journey is difficult because we are inundated with the continuing effects of colonialism every moment of every day.

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle

Love isn’t how you feel. It’s what you do.

The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters by Priya Parker

Shift your perception so that you understand that people who aren't fulfilling the purpose of your gathering are detracting from it, even if they do nothing to detract from it.

Protecting your guests is, in short, about elevating the right to a great collective experience above anyone's right to ruin that experience.

We all wear masks, and that while masks have uses, taking them off can allow for deeper connection, shared growth, and more fruitful collaboration. 

Stop Caretaking the Borderline or Narcissist: How to End the Drama and Get on With Life by Margalis Fjelstad

A healthy relationship gives you energy, helps you feel relaxed, and makes you feel wanted and comfortable just the way you are.

Personality seems to be the sum total of our genetic and learned experiences and the way we put millions of pieces of experience together to form a whole sense of self.

Since personality is a constant building-up process of adding more and more awareness and skills to a base, those children with a weakened or incomplete base will just not fully learn all that they need to as they grow up and what they learn may be distorted by their upsetting experiences.

To become a Caretaker, you need to be highly intuitive of the needs of the BP/NP, intelligent enough to learn the distorted and contradictory rules the BP/NP needs to function, observant enough to keep track of all the nuances of the fast-changing emotional family environment, and creative enough to find ways to calm and appease the BP/NP but also with a low enough self-esteem to not think that you deserve better treatment, more consideration, or equal caring in return.

Caretakers try hard to be compliant, nice, and agreeable.  You learn to bury your own needs, feelings, and opinions, sometimes even from your own awareness. 

When you bury your thoughts, ideas, wants, and needs too long, you no longer know what you like, want, or feel.

"Never give up" could be the Caretaker's motto.  To you it seems disloyal, selfish, and unloving for you to even consider giving up on any relationship. 

Manipulated by anger means that you are giving up your power in the relationship.

General ways of setting boundaries include saying "No", making decisions and choices of your own, staying with your own feelings even when someone you care about has different feelings, solving only your own problems, and using your beliefs and opinions to structure and direct your life.

Setting boundaries is a significant step toward moving from caretaking into self-care.

The most important action that you need to take to quit caretaking is to break out of the Drama Triangle.  This means you are going to quit taking on the roles of victim, persecutor, and rescuer.  All of these roles require one person to be superior, right, good, and better than the other person.  

When you start feeling overwhelmed, unable to cope, depressed, and wanting to isolate, you are moving into the victim role.

Don’t automatically trust your feelings.  Ask yourself if your feelings are based on present reality, on past experiences, or on fears you have about the future.  Only then can you decide what actions you want to take to deal with the feeling. 

The past may not be a helpful prediction of the present.

You need to learn to identify feelings that are based on present facts rather than memories, rules or delusions, and manipulated experiences from the past. Feelings based on manipulation, past responses from others, and past traumatic experiences are identifiable by their "over-the-top" expression.  That is, they are too strong and too dramatic to be a response to a present feeling.

Feelings from the past that come into the present are called transference.

Your emotional buttons are often the negative things you secretly think about yourself that you try to ignore or even pretend that you don't really think. 

Feelings are actually a combination of emotions and thoughts blended together. Raw emotion is really a physical reaction caused by a chemical release in the body.  Feelings are the result of observing that emotion and making some kind of sense out of the reaction.

Fear, obligation, and guilt will continue to be the BP/NP's favorite tools for pulling you back into the Drama Triangle.

Radical Self-Love: A Guide to Loving Yourself and Living Your Dreams by Gala Darling

Radical self-love is treating yourself the way you would treat your very best, most treasured friend.

The most important thing you can do every day is feel good, because when you do, all good things will be attracted to you.

Words filter into our subconscious and form the basis of the stories we tell ourselves.

Dale Carnegie used to say that unjust criticism was a disguised compliment, because it meant that you had made someone jealous or envious.

Remembering the Future: The Path to Recovering Intuition by Colette Baron-Reid

Intuition is the link to our soul's inner wisdom, but it can be blocked by unresolved emotional and psychological baggage.

I believe that life is love -- not the kind that you read about in romance novels, but love in its true creative form.  It allows the Divine to take shape in an expression of life that's an ever-sustaining circle. We're given life by this love that lives through us to create more life.

The only limit to intuition is the mind that it's filtered through.

By developing your intuition, Me organically becomes We -- but not the We that's comprised of a group of individual Mes.

Intuition is the sixth sense that everybody possesses, although it varies in degree from person to person.

Intuition is like a radio that picks up transmissions from a vast cosmic radio station -- a living consciousness that's sending out news of everything that's happened, is happening, and will (or potentially could) happen…. We allow the boundaries of Me to include more than Me, sometimes just for seconds, and we intuitively hear this information (clairaudience).  Alternatively, it might translate into spontaneous knowing (claircognizance), emotional sensing (clairsentience), or an inner vision or prescient seeing (clairvoyance).  I liken it to music that we can hear, experience, or tune into once we learn how to turn on the receiver.

To begin the process of recovering your innate gift of intuition, it's crucial that you become conscious of how you perceive the world.  How much are yo in your bubble?

The process of regaining your intuition is all about ego deflation.

There are 7 main Spiritual Keys to tap in to: Truth, Reverence, Humility, Courage, Forgiveness, Stillness, and Love…. The Keys all lead to connection and serve to reduce the separated sense of self.

The intuition filter becomes clogged because of the ego's need to only acknowledge local reality as truth.

Simply put, being Me is about living in a story.  Objectively getting to know your story, including what's influenced it and why, will help you clear your filter.

The act of telling the truth about who you are to yourself and others is hugely important because it results in clarity, which is essential if you want to tune in to a greater awareness.

When we're humble and accept life exactly as it is, our intuition provides us with clarity.

Our shadows define us in silence, but speak loudly through us nonetheless -- sometimes subtly, sometimes blatantly -- turning us into unknowing puppets manipulated by invisible strings.

We're called many times to have courage in our lives, and often we pretend that we don't hear.  Who will we be if we're no longer who we were?

When forgiveness is forgotten, the same hurts find new ways of showing up in our lives over and over?

Love Does: Discover a Secretly Incredible Life in an Ordinary World by Bob Goff

Faith isn't about knowing all of the right stuff or obeying a list of rules.  It's something more, something more costly because it involves being present and making a sacrifice.

Gin Das Winan: Documenting Aboriginal History in Ontario by Dale Standen and David McNab

Our life goal can be described as follows: we did not inherit a legacy from our ancestors.  We hold in trust for our future generations.  Dean M Jacobs (Chapter: "We have but our hearts and the traditions of our old men": Understanding the Traditions and History of Bkejwanong)

At the time of first European contact in the 17th century, there were at least 34 First Nations settled around the Great Lakes.  Bark canoes, some measuring over 30 feet, capable of carrying up to 18 people, and powered by paddles and sails traversed these water highways.  Victor P Lytwyn (Chapter: Waterworld: The Aquatic Territory of the Great Lakes First Nations)

There is evidence to show that First Nations exacted tolls from Europeans who wished to travel across certain waterways.  For example, the Kichesipirini Algonquin who lived along the Ottawa river routinely obtained gifts form missionaries and fur traders who used that river.  The Rainy River Ojibway also forced fur traders to pay them tolls for using the river as a trade route.  Victor P Lytwyn (Chapter: Waterworld: The Aquatic Territory of the Great Lakes First Nations)

The mind is still the most sophisticated recording and preserving device that humans have found. It's storage capabilities have not been fully tested.  It is portable, does not need much temperature and humidity control, and is capable of complex storage, retrieval and correlation tasks.  Knowledge stored in the mid can be transmitted or transferred to other minds, and that knowledge invests those other minds with abilities to use and understand the information.  Most important, a matter that is kept in the mind is also kept in mind.  Matters kept on paper are more easily stored and forgotten. Paul Williams (Chapter: Oral Tradition on Trial)

Of nearly three hundred Ojibway warriors who went to Niagara to fight for the British in the War of 1812, only six came back. Paul Williams (Chapter: Oral Tradition on Trial)

The Way to Love: Meditations for Life by Anthony De Mello

Each time you are anxious and afraid, it is because you may lose or fail to get the object of your attachment, isn’t it?

Think of the numerous times you were tossed about by your emotions, that you have suffered the pangs of anger, depression, anxiety, when in every instance it was because your heart became set on getting something that you did not have, or on holding on to something that you had, or on avoiding something that you did not want.  … to put it briefly, the moment you pick up an attachment, the functioning of this lovely apparatus called the human heart is destroyed.  If you want to repair your radio, you must study radio mechanics.  If you want to reform your heart, you must give serious, prolonged thought to four liberating truths. … The first truth: you must choose between your attachment and happiness.  You cannot have both. … The second truth: where did your attachment come from?  You were not born with it.  It sprang from a life that your society and your culture have told you, or a lie that you have told yourself, namely, that without this or the other, without this person or the other, you can’t be happy. … The third truth: if you wish to be fully alive you must develop a sense of perspective.  Life is infinitely greater than this trifle your heart is attached to and which you have given the power to so upset you.  … And so the fourth truth brings you to the unavoidable conclusion that no thing or person outside of you has the power to make you happy or unhappy.  Whether you are aware of it or not, it is you and only you who decides to be happy or unhappy, whether you will cling to your attachment or not in any given situation. 

Look at your life and see how you have filled its emptiness with people.  As a result they have a stranglehold on you. See how they control your behavior by their approval and disapproval.  They hold the power to ease your loneliness with their company, to send your spirits soaring with their praise, to bring you down to the depths with their criticism and rejection.  Take a look at yourself spending almost every waking minute of your day placating and pleasing people, whether they are living or dead. 

How many activities can you count in your life that you engage in simply because they delight you and grip your soul? Find them out, cultivate them, for they are your passport to freedom and to love. 

The Princess Diarist by Carrie Fisher

I confide in everyone.  I have no restricted private self, reserved specifically for certain trusted special people.  I trust and mistrust anyone.

What am I getting myself into that I don't want out of?

The term "blockbuster", in fact, was born because ticket lines would come to the edge of the street, pause for that asphalt interruption, and then begin again enthusiastically on the next block.

Consciously Female: How to Listen to Your Body and Your Soul for a Lifetime of Healthier Living by Dr Tracy W Gaudet and Paula Spencer

I learned not to dismiss the moodiness, not to wait out the sadness and the irritation, but to value these bleaker moods as authentic messages from my unconscious.

It's easy to fall into unconsciousness because we are driven to it.  Our culture and our daily demands conspire to claim every waking hour.

The Information Age is the Age of Unknowing when it comes to having a real understanding of who we are in our own skins.

Being Consciously Female means meeting yourself where you are.  It means accepting yourself no matter what so that you can find your own best path to your own best self.

Consciousness is a tremendously powerful tool for helping your body perform at the peak levels it was designed for.  In an oversimplified nutshell:  Be aware, be well.

How do you make the body's natural healthfulness and healing capabilities work for you? That's where consciousness comes in.  You need to be aware of the needs of your body and soul at any given time and you need to be aware of when they are depleted.

Being Consciously Female is largely a matter of paying attention -- of watching and listening to what your body and soul have to say to you.

Unless you actively process a problem -- for instance, by having a symptom checked out, by self- treating, or by venting an emotion -- you will wind up having to deal with it later, because it will eventually express itself again (or continue to express itself), and very likely in a more intense and significant way than it did at first.

Living unconsciously means living through things as though they are not really happening to you.  You disconnect from the experience physically and emotionally.  You pretend there's no there there.

The body has its own awesome capacity for healing.  If you strengthen your system -- fuel it, not drain it -- you can help to maintain its healing capacity at its greatest.

Mind Before Death by Dzogchen Ponlop

Leaving this life is similar in many ways to going on a long trip.  In this case, the trip we are

making is a journey of mind.  We are leaving behind this body, our loved ones, our possessions, and all our experiences of this life, and moving on to the next.

Beyond death there is mind; and where there is mind, there is uninterrupted display: spacious, radiant, and continually manifesting. 

We think, “Oh, now I am starting to get angry,” or “now I am feeling really jealous”.  We can see the emotion coming and we can control it.  And, gradually, transcend it.

Contemplation is the bridge between our conceptual understanding and everyday experience and the nonconceptual experience of meditation.

The experiences of contemplation may be very powerful and may seem to be experiences of realization; however, we should not mistake them for actual realization.

When an emotion appears, you observe the emotion without stopping it or indulging it.

If we do not become familiar with our emotions, then we will always fear them – even more so in the bardos of death.

In the bardos after death, this kind of spontaneous movement is not pure fantasy or speculation.  Sudden shifts of consciousness bring about corresponding shifts in the environment.  When the mind jumps from one thought to the next, we go along with it.

Develop our mindfulness, awareness and stability of mind.  To the degree that we can accomplish this, we will possess the equanimity and strength of mind that allow us to reflect with awareness on whatever appearances arise for us without reacting to them in any repetitive, habitual way.

Whatever mental stability and insights we develop in this life will unfailingly guide and support us through the bardos of death.  Likewise, those habitual negative tendencies that we have not overcome will condition our experiences at the time and become reliable supports for the continuation of our suffering.

Preparing for [death] experiences begins with simply being who we are and where we are in this very moment.  If we want to be successful in terms of experiencing our death and journey after death, then we have to master the experience of nowness. Whatever we are going through, this is who we are in the moment.

Meditation is not meditating on anything; rather, it is simply a process of familiarization – familiarizing ourselves with the nature of our mind.

The inner essential nature of mind … is the basis for the development of the inner essential body.  The inner essential body is in turn the basis for the development of the coarse body.

Once we have identified our strongest emotion, then we can focus on the practices that will alleviate it.

When we look carefully at our experience, we can see that we often function as though we were half asleep; we simply react to whatever is in front of us, just as we do in dreams.

It is the union of space and awareness that is the source of all phenomena.

Buddhist teachings tells us that the best, most potent time in our practice is the time when things go completely wrong and we hit rock bottom.  It is in such difficult moments that we are most able to look deeply into our lives and find a true connection between what we are experiencing and our practice.

We have to train our minds not only to hear the sound of words, but also to notice how we connect their meaning with our thought processes and concepts.  In this way, we will come to see how we mingle sound and our thoughts about sound together to make a solid world, a solid reality.

Thoughts appear to our minds; they arise, abide for a fleeting moment and then they cease.  What is the nature of these thoughts? They are not physical phenomena.  They are mental events, the movements of mind itself.

When death occurs, we will be faced with our own fear and uncertainty as we go through the process of the dissolution of our consciousness. … In each of the bardos of the death and after-death states, we will be faced with the challenge of meeting our own mind at every turn in the form of unfamiliar and vivid experiences.

Our dream experiences, like our daytime experiences, arise from our habitual tendencies.  The formation and reinforcement of these tendencies is linked to the accumulation of karmic seeds acquired in the past that condition our way of perceiving, thinking and acting in the present.

If it is aggression that appears, we think, “I should not have this aggression! I should be experiencing the nature of mind”. Consequently, we push the aggression away and try to find the nature of mind else where. However, there is nothing to be found elsewhere.  There is nowhere we can find the nature of mind outside the aggression we are experiencing now.  Therefore, we have to look at that aggression as straightforwardly as possible.

Look straight at whatever is there in any moment of consciousness, without labelling it or altering it.

We will realize the nature of mind only when we have the courage and awareness to look directly at the present moment of our experience – whether it is a virtuous thought, a perception or a negative, disturbing emotion.  It does not matter. The nature of mind is right here.

In order to uproot our anger, in order to fully transcend it, we need to be present with the full experience of that emotion and penetrate its essence.

We need to overcome one of our greatest problems, which is our habitual tendency to dwell in a poverty mentality – a state of perpetual dissatisfaction.

The heart chakra has a strong relationship to the functioning of the mind.

Chakra: a point along the central channel of the subtle body where the three primary nadis intersect to form a specific configuration, or “dharma wheel”.

During our life, the generative essences that we have received from our parents abide within the central channel in the form of two spheres of luminous bright light, or bindus.  One of these dwells at the top of the central channel at the crown chakra… and the other abides at the lower end of the central channel…. When death is about to occur, the two bindus begin to move toward one another. After the white and red bindus meet at the heart center and envelop one’s intrinsic awareness, giving rise to the “black experience”.  Then consciousness dissolves into space and space itself dissolves into luminosity, into the buddha wisdom, or alaya-jnana, at the heart center.

When we are approaching death, when our consciousness is leaving our body, our consciousness senses that there are nine gates through which it can leave.  Of these nine, eight are gates that will lead us to take rebirth in one of the three realms of samsara: the desire realm, form realm or the formless realm. In speaking of these gates, we are referring to body orifices; the eyes, the ears, the nose, the mouth, the navel, the urethra, the anus and the spot between the eyes. The one gate that will lead us to liberation is located at the crown chakra at the top of the head. It is the door of the central channel, and it is this opening that is regarded as the gateway to the direct realization of mahamudra.

Poverty mentality results in our mind become distracted and neurotic. The whole point of this spiritual journey is to develop a sense of sanity and to have a clear, one-pointed mind as opposed to having a mind that is split into many directions due to our narrow understanding.

When our mind is under the influence of confusion, we perceive the natural energy or expression of the five buddha families as the five poisons or kleshas: passion aggression, ignorance, jealously and pride. When we are free from confusion, the essence of the five poisons is realized as wisdom and we perceive the five buddha families.... Whenever we experience the brilliance and intensity of our emotions, we are meeting these buddhas. 

Dealing with kleshas is like riding a wave.  When you ride a wave, if you try to change it, it is not going to work. But if you ride it naturally, if you go along with the wave and become one with it, then there is a sense of grace and beauty. 

If you want to speed up your progress, push the accelerator of compassion, love and bodhichitta. If you want to slow down your discovery, put more focus on "self" -- on self-liberation, individual salvation, or individual freedom.

The bardo of becoming begins when we regain consciousness after having fainted in the bardo of dharmata.

Continuity itself is relative.  From the absolute point of view, there is no time, so there is no notion of continuity or of discontinuity. ... It is this moment-to-moment sense of continuity that becomes the basis for the imputation of a "self". As soon as we perceive this "self", we also perceive "other" and duality is complete.

One of our strongest habitual tendencies as sentient beings is that of moving, or being unstill.  We do not have a very strong habitual tendency of stillness or resting.  This is said to be the root of all confused habitual tendencies: not abiding or resting within the all-basis wisdom. 

No one is born a scholar or a sage.  We must study and work hard. Even geniuses need to read books, if only once.

It is actually much easier to work with our mind when we are free of pain, have a stable environment and possess the ground of a physical body.  We should focus on achieving the realization of the nature of mind here and now.

Either keep attacking this problem on the level you have been, being whipped around by emotions and circumstances, or you can dig deep within yourself and step back from the internal storm.  There is also another path-- feeling and being with it all as it flows but this takes immense fortitude and self-compassion.