Love Warrior: A Memoir by Glennon Doyle

Every girl must decide whether to settle for adoration or fight for love.

Quiet reverence is the world’s response to my mother’s beauty.  When people see her, they pause and wait, full of hope, until her eyes rest upon them.  Her eyes always do.  My mother takes her time with people.  Strangers giver her their attention and she returns it.  She is a queen who reigns with kindness. This is why people stare.  They look because she’s lovely, but they stare because she’s love.

Being loved for beauty is a tenuous situation for a girl. 

My weaknesses are my needs.

Getting ready is my constant; it is the ritual that grounds me.

Indigenous Birth Knowledge and Stories for My Baby by Seventh Generation Midwives with Well Living House

The traditional Anishinabek calendar year follows a similar thirteen-moon lunar cycle.

The Anishinabek named each lunar cycle according to the seasonal changes that come with it.  This was to remind our communities when the best time for harvesting, hunting, gathering, and ceremonies was.

Within the Anishinabek Nation, the moon is called Nabageesis, Grandmother Moon.  It was believed that as she watches over all the waters of the Earth, like women watch over the waters of the people and those of her own body.

Being in one's moontime is considered sacred and can be a ceremony.  During a woman's moon time many believe she is being cleansed mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually as her body prepares for new life.  It is a powerful time in a woman's cycle when she is thought to be closest to Creator.

Our stories hold knowledge on creation, history, gender, values, customs, laws and ceremony that are sometimes thousands of years old.

Many Indigenous people have been using traditional tobacco for thousands of years for ceremonial or sacred rituals, relationship building, knowledge exchange, and healing and purifying.

When Nabageesis Grantmother Moon is full, women can do a ceremony to honour, pray and seek guidance.  The ceremony can be simple.  A woman can sit on the ground and ask Grandmother Moon to replenish her body with new energy.  She takes water with her which she prays for the Moon to bless. That water then becomes her medicine.

Around the full moon, women on their moon time can also become very intuitive.  It is also an opportunity for women to take time for themselves to help foster their intuition and to have strong dreams.

Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness by Sharon Salzberg

The integrity we develop on a spiritual path comes from being able to distinguish for ourselves the habits and influences in the mind which are skillful and lead to love and awareness, from those which are unskillful and reinforce our false sense of separation.

As wisdom reveals to you that we don't need these reactions [fear, anger, grasping], we can abandon them.

An awakened life demands a fundamental re-visioning of the limited views we hold of our own potential.

We must move from trying to control the uncontrollable cycles of pleasure and pain, and instead learn how to connect, to open, to love no matter what is happening.

To be undivided and unfragmented, to be completely present, is to love.

Much of the time, rather than feeling whole, we may feel unfragmented and disconnected, and therefore unhealthy on one level or another.

"To reteach a thing its loveliness" is the nature of metta.

Passion gets entangled with needing things to be a certain way, with having our expectations met.  The expectation of exchange that underlies most passion is both conditional and ultimately defeating.

It is fear of pain that provokes and sustains this splitting off of parts of ourselves.

When we practice metta, we open continuously to the truth of our actual experience.

When we feel love, our mind is expansive and open enough to include the entirety of life in full awareness.

The heart of skillful meditation is the ability to let go and begin again, over and over again. 

If we look very carefully, we realize that after our basic needs have been met, what we really want are certain mind states.  In fact, when we talk about having a lot of money, we are really talking about mind states such as security or power or freedom.

We discover when we reality accurately that our mind states are actually a function of our being; they are not a function of how much we have or what we have.

Desirelessness --detachment -- is not a cold, hard state in which we do not care what is going on.  The opposite of attachment is not a sullen withdrawal from things or an attitude of indifference.  It is very full, very alive, and very open.

Forgiveness is an inner relinquishment of guilt or resentment.

All beings want to be happy, yet so few know how.  It is out of ignorance that any of us cause suffering, for ourselves or for others. 

Fear is the primary mechanism sustaining the concept of the "other", and reinforcing the subsequent loneliness and distance in our lives.

Compassion is not at all weak.  It is the strength that arises out of seeing the true nature of suffering in the world.

When we deny our experience, we are always moving away from something real to something fabricated.

Compassion means taking the time to look at the conditions, or the building blocks, of any situation.

Compassion enjoins us to respond to pain, and wisdom guides the skillfulness of the response, telling us when and how to respond.

So much of our unhappy condition as living beings comes from the constricting effect of our negativity toward each other.  We limit ourselves, and we limit others.

To be nonjudgmental means having flexibility of mind and the ability to let go of our attachment to what seems right to us.

At the center of the comparing mind is competition.

The willingness to feel goodwill only toward those we like is a powerful impediment to developing sympathetic joy. 

The practice of equanimity is learning deeply what it means to let go.

Equanimity is a spacious stillness of the mind, a radiant calm that allows us to be present fully with all the different changing experiences that constitute our world and our lives.

People who are generous awaken in us openness, love, and delight.

Generosity's aim is twofold: we give to free others, and we give to free ourselves.  Without both aspects, the experience is incomplete.

The movement of the heart in generosity mirrors the movement of the heart in letting go on the inner journey.

Letting go -- abandoning, relinquishing -- is actually the same mind state as generosity.

Generosity is the mind's gesture recognizing both that there is nothing solid for us to hold on to and that our actions are meaningful.

Moral conduct is the reflection of our deepest love, concern, and care.

Since all karma is said to rest up on motivation, it is very important that we become increasingly aware of the intentions that drive our actions.

What We Say Matters: Practicing Nonviolent Communication by Judith Hanson Lasater

When we have an unspoken demand, it is about power.  To make a true request, we need to remain open to the outcome and open to allowing the other person to say no.

Just slow down and notice what is going on inside you.  Without this self-awareness, we forget that what we say is always about ourselves, especially about our feelings and needs, and is never about the other person, because whatever we say is coming out of our perception of what is.

Whether I am making a request or a demand is not determined by the way my sentence sounds.  Instead, I know the difference by how I feel inside my body if the request or demand is refused.

Strategies are ways of getting needs met, and needs are never in conflict; only strategies are in conflict.

Many people are reluctant to ask for their needs to be met because they believe their needs are a burden to others.

Another way to listen in a new way to your inner voice is to hear whatever anyone says to you as a request. Specifically, translate everything anyone says to you as either a “please or a “thank you”.

When we choose to hear the other’s statement as “please hear my pain”, we have the choice to act in a way that will connect us with them.

Anger, along with shame, guilt, and depression, are a special class of feelings that arise out of judging how the world should be.

If we are living our own anger, we tend to attract it in others.

You cannot be angry unless you believe you are right.

Anger is a wall that keeps us dead to what is really going on within us.

When we have enemy images, we make a moralistic judgment about ourselves or others, believing that they or we are evil.

When you want to change some circumstance, first use self-empathy to connect yourself to your needs, and then act in a way that furthers the social change you value.

Make no mistake: acknowledge our enemy images, choosing to transform them by finding the need behind the judgment, and getting help to do this is not work for the fainthearted.  Society supports the habits of thinking and talking using enemy images.  But if we are committed to self-transformation and the transformation of the world, we will learn to speak from a place without enemy images.

Minute by minute, we all shape our internal environment, and from that comes the happiness or suffering of our lives.

To practice spiritual speech is to hear not what someone thinks, but to hear the feelings and needs behind the words.

We feel safer when our partner reveals what he is feeling, because unexpressed feelings are often received as aggression.

What if we acted as if our requests to each other were actually giving a gift?

All criticism is the tragic expression of unmet needs.

All spiritual practices are fundamentally about the same thing: being present and living with an open heart.

One strategy that can strengthen connection is to consistently celebrate how the other person is enriching your life.  Build the celebration into your relationship structure; create a space to do it every day.

When your child is facing a difficulty, ask yourself: is it my problem as a parent, is it the child’s problem, or is it a problem for both of us to solve…. If it is your problem, you get help for it.  If it is your child’s problem, you support them in solving it.  If it is a problem for both of you, you figure out a way to solve it together. The difficult part is discriminating whose problem it is.

Children, even young children, have choice about their feelings and their thoughts.  They may do what we want on the outside, but they will do what they want on the inside.  The most successful relationships with children are based on recognizing that they also have power.  This does not mean that we give up our responsibility to protect and guide, but rather we understand that they are part of the process.

One of the reasons that power over does not give us what we want is that it does not recognize or respect the fundamental requirement for a good relationship: respect for the others autonomy.

People sometimes seem to talk as a way to figure out what they want to say instead of figuring it out first and then saying it.

If you find yourself irritated or dissatisfied, first connect with your own unmet need that generated the irritation.

In order to create the kind of world we want to live in and leave to generations to come, we need to help the suffering person who may be near us, beginning with ourselves.

Without awareness of the power of our language, we continue to reinforce the patterns, both emotional and psychological, that contribute to our suffering and the suffering of others.

The heart of spiritual practice begins with remembering at all times to be present with my inner states. 

I am not my thoughts.  I have thoughts, but they are a manifestation of my being and not who I am.

One of the best ways to remember that I am not my thoughts is to cultivate the habit of being present first with myself and then with my speech, both internal and external.

The practice of being connected with yourself in a visceral non-cognitive way is powerful.  We are unlikely to connect to another human being unless we are connected with our own needs.

As part of the conditioning process, as we lose touch with our own needs, we learn to protect ourselves from criticism, avoid punishment, and redirect blame.  Learning to connect at the level of needs is a way of learning to step out of our habitual ways of reacting.

Simply inquire about what needs were and were not met and what might be better ways to meet them.  Thus inquiry, which is at the heart of the practices of yoga and Buddhist meditation, can be brought into our daily interactions and activities.

By being connected with our own needs, our intention is clarified moment by moment.  This is speech as a spiritual practice.

Feelings are signals shouting from the depths of the unconscious mind, alerting us that we need to pay attention.

Spiritual practice is not the asana but the act of noticing during the practice of the asana.

When our needs are unmet, our fundamental humanness is denied, and when that happens, we cannot be fully human, fully happy, or fully healthy.

We run into trouble when we confuse strategies with needs. Most of us do this all the time.  We think the need is to get into a specific university or to get a certain job or to learn a certain yoga pose.  But these are all strategies for getting our needs met.

What Makes You Not a Buddhist by Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse

One is a Buddhist if he or she accepts the following four truths: All compounded things are impermanent; all emotions are pain; all things have no inherent existence; Nirvana is beyond concepts.

Hardly anything we do in the course of a day -- neither in our thoughts nor in our actions -- indicates that we are aware of how fragile life is.

Subconsciously we are lured by the expectation that we will reach a stage where we don't have to fix anything ever again.  One day we will reach "happily ever after".

All form, including our flesh and bones, and all our emotions and all our perceptions, are assembled -- they are the product of two or more things coming together. When any two components or more come together, a new phenomenon emerges…. This end product doesn't have an existence independent of its parts.

Every change contains within it an element of death.  Today is the death of yesterday.

We are afraid of the unknown.  The mind's craving for confirmation is rooted in our fear of impermanence.  Fearlessness is generated when you can appreciate uncertainty.

Hopelessness -- just like its opposite, blind hope -- is the result of a belief in permanence.

True liberation comes from appreciating the whole cycle and not grasping onto those things that we find agreeable.

Wealth, health, peace, and fame are just as temporary as their opposites.

Buddhists don't believe that there is an almighty creator, and they don't have this concept that the purpose of life has been, or needs to be, decided and defined.

On both personal and cultural levels, we adopt foreign or external methods to achieve happiness and overcome suffering, seldom realizing that these methods often bring about the opposite of the intended result.  Our failure to adapt creates a new set of miseries because not only are we still suffering, but we also feel alienated from our own lives, unable to fit into the system.

At the moment that Siddhartha found no self, he also found no inherently existing evil -- only ignorance.

Ignorance is simply not knowing the facts, having the facts wrong, or having incomplete knowledge.  All of these forms of ignorance lead to misunderstanding and misinterpretation, overestimation and underestimation.

When we act with no understanding or incomplete understanding, there is no ground for confidence.  Our basic insecurity arises and creates all these emotions, named and unnamed, recognized and unrecognized.

Habit makes us weak against the self.

The self loathes suffering and loves the causes of suffering.

There is always this constant nagging feeling that there is more to life, and this discontent leads to suffering.

Everything we see, hear, feel, imagine, and know to exist is simply emptiness onto which we have imputed or labeled a certain "trueness". 

Happiness is a flimsy premise upon which to base one's life.

People are more inclined to sit straight in a quiet place on a meditation cushion than to contemplate which will come first, tomorrow or the next life.

The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom: Practical and Spiritual Steps So You Can Stop Worrying by Suze Orman

Money is very much like a person, and it will respond when you treat it as you would a cherished friend -- never fearing it, pushing it away, pretending it doesn't exist, or turning away from its needs, never clutching it so hard that it hurts.

Freedom starts to happen when what you do, think, and say are one.

Your new future begins with your new truth.

My greatest periods of genuine growth came from the not-so-good times.

Kindling the Native Spirit: Sacred Practices for Everyday Life by Denise Linn

Being home means looking beneath the surface of life… and tapping into the powerful natural forces that dwell there.  Native people understood how to access those streams of energy to gain vitality and significant insight into their lives.

To a native person, spirit heals, right actions heal, and living in harmony with the land heals.

One of the most powerful ways to move into harmony with your life is to spend time in nature.

He said that the trees were sacred to our people.  He called the trees "The Standing People" and said they were our brothers and sisters.

Smudging calls upon the spirit of the plant to restore harmony.

Anytime you see a feather, stop and take a moment to be still.

A medicine bag isn't something you purchase already full; instead you put items in it that are meaningful to you. 

What More Do You Want: Zen Questions, Zen Answers by Albert Low

We see that everything happens through the lens of the sense of self and, since this as been going on all our lives, we take it for granted that experience must always be colored by the sense of self.  This is why awakening is so important: we can no longer take the sense of self for granted because with awakening we see a clear alternative to the sense of self. 

Violated expectations occur when two realities clash: the expected reality and the transpired reality.  

We know that our life is not satisfactory because, at some level we know that our life is artificial, unnatural.  This knowing – knowing that artificiality, that meaninglessness of so much of what we do – drives us to practice.

You are all that happens. You are not a happening; you’re not something within the happening.

In life pain comes to us…. Our choice is really not whether we are going to suffer or not, whether we are going to have pain or not.  Our choice is merely between pain and pain, whether we are going to face it intentionally or whether we are going to be a victor of it.

Awakening does not grow on high, dry ground, but on the mud and swamps.

We are always looking for what we understand, or for what we feel we can do or cope with.  Or, we look for something that we feel is going to benefit us in some way.  In other words, our practice is a way by which we are constantly looking for some easy path.  When the practice becomes easy, we feel “this is good, now at least I’m getting somewhere”.

Humiliation undoubtedly is the greatest ally of a person who is serious in his practice can have.  It truly has no parallel. Used wisely and without cowering, it corrodes the ego like acid.

Our relationships often have an “ego affirming aspect”.

Our need to be the center is paramount, whether as the center of power or the center of attention.

As long as you insist on your way of feeling the situation ought to unroll then you will suffer the feeling of injustice accompanied by frustration, resentment and all the other emotions arise out of an unreconciled conflict.

Nothing needs to be done.  But unless you have practiced as though your hair were on fire you will never know this for yourself.

Any truth you get from books, from teachers or from Buddha or Christ, is the reflection of your own truth.

Thoughts themselves are not the problem.  The problem is that we take them seriously.

Awakening itself does not bestow any kind of power, wisdom, compassion, or any magical capability.

Realize that the feelings of wonder, joy, clarity that you will find, all come from you: none of it comes from the teacher.

The personality is based on separation, and separation is a wound in being. The scar tissue—hatred—covers up the wound, and makes it possible to live more comfortably. As we practice, hatred is melted down, and we are exposed to the suffering of the wound in being.

To attain the Great Way of the Buddha is to see that there is no Great Way of the Buddha to attain.

The greatest hindrance to using pain in a creative and beneficial way is that most of us do not suffer one pain but two pains.  There is, for example, the pain in the legs, but there is also the pain “I hurt”: it is the pain of self-pity; this pain is supported by the feelings of the “injustice” of the pain.

Allow what is happening to happen. This is difficult to do, because when we open ourselves to what is happening we drop our protective devices, and so the confusion and conflicts in our life begin to emerge.

To allow things to happen is only possible if we understand that all our endeavors to control situations end sooner or later in more conflict and confusion, and more discomfort and pain.

There are two sufferings: the inherent pain of life and the “I hurt”.  The “I hurt” is evident when one complains about the pain, when one feels that it is unfair: the one should not have to suffer in this way, that it is other peoples’ fault, or the fault of circumstances.

There is no contradiction between being present and suffering intensely.  One simply allows the suffering to be.  Unfortunately, many people, even people who have practiced some form of the spiritual way for a long time, believe that it is, or should be, a free ride.  These people practice what the masters called dead void sitting, or sitting in the cave of pseudo-emancipation.

The depth of the realization will not depend on your trust in me: it will depend on your trust in me and in the trust you have of your own conviction.  “I am spiritual” is half the truth; “I am not spiritual” is the other half.  You must go beyond both for the complete truth.

Inanimate things preach the dharma.  “Being” is what you are teaching.

We cannot choose whether we are going to suffer or not.  Life determines that.  What we can choose is how we are going to suffer: walking with head high or on all fours like a dog.

As we practice it becomes ever more clear that we are the agents of our own pain, that situations are not painful, but our attitude towards them makes them so, and this realization in turn becomes painful.

We are not part of the whole; each is the whole. It is like a holograph.

People who come to practice seem to doubt everything – about how to proceed, about their own authenticity, about their ability to pursue “the way” – and all they ever seek is to soothe this inner wound.

Awakening is sudden, unmistakable and cognitive.  It is not an experience, but a change in the way you experience.  If it is deep enough, it will be accompanied by an experience.

You could look upon thoughts as something similar to waves on a lake.  What is important is that the lake should become deeper, not that the surface should become calmer.

The fear comes because the sense of self is under threat: the threat comes from the practice that we are doing and from the truth that is emerging.

Most people try to find some way out of the pain of life by doing things or getting things, by trying to be important, to have power or to get the admiration of others.  But some grow weary of this kind of life and yearn for something more, without really knowing what this “something more” would be.  The yearning for something more is the basis of practice; that “not knowing” is the question. 

Cease being interested in your thoughts; but do not strive to get rid of them. 

You Are Your Choices: 50 Ways to Live a Good Life by Alexandra Stoddard

The good life demands that we make the right choices most of the time, no matter how difficult they may be.

You are unique.  You ought to do what no others can do, fulfilling your needs in vastly different ways.  Your destiny is not predestined.  You create your destiny every day, not by chance, but by choice.  Destiny is an achievement.  The power to achieve it is in your choices.

A well-lived life is not an accident.

Never mistake your choice to live a good life for selfishness.  This is what all of us ought to be choosing.

Be honest with yourself and learn the difference between your needs and your wants.  All of our real needs are good for us.

Say yes to the best choice while remaining flexible.  Stay attuned to whether your choice continues to be appropriate and in your best interest.

Our power and strength lie in our ability to discipline our passions, to react in the right manner as we meet circumstances head on.  You are choosing your ideal way of life, breath by breath, choice by choice.

Use No as your teacher.

Until you exercise your power to be honest with yourself and others, you are going to feel trapped, believing you have little control over your destiny.

When you say no to something, someone else will gladly embrace saying yes.  The universe will provide for everyone who makes sincere choices.

What you don't do is as important as what you do.

A well-lived life is not always about winning or losing, but playing the game, doing our best learning from the process, and accepting that there is grace and dignity in being a good loser.  The good life doesn't require us to be number one. 

When you greet life choice by choice, detail by detail, aware of how much more happiness you can experience when you deliberately make the most of every human experience, you will be living a good life.

When we ritualize our life, we expose goodness and hidden beauty everywhere.

There's no place to go and hide in life.  Your job, your duty, your responsibility is to make the most you can of you.

Life is going to naturally cause us discomfort over the years, no matter what our choices.

We can change our life by as much as 50% by retraining our minds and attitudes.

The world may or may not be a good world overall, but it is possible, in fact it is vital, to make that part of the world where you live as good as it can be. 

There is always a bigger picture than we are aware of.  We never see the complete picture, though through thoughtful contemplation of the ultimate mysteries, we experience a more spacious awareness.

Opportunity comes to us in times of chaos and crisis.

A ten-minute brisk walk produces positive feelings and increased energy for up to two hours afterward.

People who participate in an aerobics class 2-4 times  a week for 8 to 10 weeks have an increased set point of happiness and reduced clinical depression and anxiety.

The most intelligent way to move in the direction of a good life is to live each day, each experience, as authentically as we can, with integrity, honesty, and courage.