Dropping Ashes on the Buddha: Teachings of Zen Master Seung Sahn by Stephen Mitchell

This person is suffering from a mistaken view.  You must help him understand the truth: that all things in the universe are just as they are.

In all these experiences, outside and inside have become one.  This is Zen mind.

Original nature has no opposites. 

Zen is keeping the mind which is before thinking.

If you want the easy way, this is desire.  But if you want the difficult way, this too is desire.  Zen is letting go of all your desires.  Then you will find the true way.

Desire, anger, and ignorance cover up our clear mind.  If we cut off all thinking and return to empty mind, then your mind, my mind, and all people's minds are the same.  We become one with the whole universe.

Make Art Everyday: A Weekly Planner for Creative Thinkers by Katie Vernon

When we don't take care of ourselves, the excuses to not make art are easier to find and add up over time.

Give the color red ten new names.

Jewish Dharma: A Guide to the Practice of Judaism and Zen by Brenda Shoshanna

Usually when we suffer, we look around for someone to help or save us from what we’re going through.  During illness, we expect the doctor to take control of the disease and make us well again.  But from the Zen point of view this attitude is part of the original disease.  Behaving in this manner, you relinquish your part on the illness and deny that it has come to you for a reason.  It’s up to you to stop, listen, and discover the meaning and the lessons it brings.

Times of loneliness, confusion, doubt, or separation come for a powerful reason – so we can stop our usual way of being and discover where true strength, connection, and understanding lie.  These difficult times are actually a blessing, removing us from preoccupation with externals and inviting us to embark on a journey into the heart and meaning our lives.

Your attention is your life force.  What you attend to increases; your attention feeds it energy.  What you withdraw your attention from inevitably fades.

When you are cold, freeze.  When you are hot, burn.  When you’re sad, grieve.  Whatever comes, welcome it 100%, nothing left over.  Leave no traces.  Do not escape your experience.  Do not avoid it in any way.  This is mindfulness taken to its fullest extent.

What you are at this moment contains the whole message of what you were.

When you become you, zen becomes zen.

Marriages are spiritual partnerships, and each couple serves in a way given to them.

1929: The Year of the Great Crash by William K Klingaman

Senator Charles ("Call Me Charlie") Curtis of Kansas, the Republican vice-presidential nominee … had been by raised by his grandmother, a full-blooded Kaw Indian princess, on a reservation outside of Topeka until he was eight years old, was the first American of Indian ancestry to obtain such an exalted political office.

In one of the more bizarre fads to sweep across the city in recent years, Berliners in early 1929 had begun to collect baby alligators, which sold for 25 marks (about $6), and meat-eating snakes, particularly coral snakes from southern United States.

The foundation of the empire that brought Capone $100 million worth of profits annually (in 1928, this syndicate reportedly grossed $105 million) was always booze.

In his final weeks in office, [President] Coolridge was swamped with so many requests for autographed photos that he had to omit his usual midday nap for nearly a week to sign them all.

Although it has been statistically proved that, contrary to popular legend, there was no sudden leap in the suicide rate in America in the autumn of 1929, there is no question that a number of men and women did kill themselves because they had lost heavily in the stock market. 

I Only Want to Get Married Once: The 10 Essential Questions for Getting It Right the First Time by Chana Levitan

In a loving relationship, each wants the other to be maximized. Each takes joy in the other’s success.

If you want to learn to trust your inner voice, you have to learn to pay attention.

If you’re feeling defensive, figure out why – there’s a chance you might be in denial.

When people are scared for us, chances are they’re tuning in to a real problem.

Trust is the bedrock of intimacy; it’s the ability to rely on someone because you believe that he or she has your best interests at heart.

The irony is that only when people are accepted and loved for who they are will they be open to change.

People only change when they themselves realize the futility or destructiveness of their own behavior.

If you don’t want to be another divorce statistic, if you do want to be a marriage success story, the first thing you need to internalize is that love is an activity: it’s a verb.

When those initial feelings of love start to fade, the only way to regenerate them is through loving actions.

The choice of love is to act lovingly: to give, to nurture, to support.

When married couples start complaining that they just don’t feel the love anymore, it’s typically because they’re not making the right choices.

Since love is a verb, the person must act lovingly in order to experience love.

A marriage is meant to be a dynamic process.

Every human being has the constant choice to choose love, to choose dedication, to choose loyalty.

Love… is rooted in knowing rather than imagining. Love is not lost in fantasy; it can take a step back, evaluate itself, and see a bigger practice.

When you act from love, you’re more likely to make responsible decisions.

Compromise cannot mean losing oneself or compromising one’s values or emotional health. Real compromise comes from the choice to give up something you treasure for someone you love.

Indians Playing Indians: Multiculturalism and Contemporary Indigenous Art in North America by Monica Siebert

Simultaneous admiration for the glorious Indian past and willful disregard for contemporary Indigenous realities.

Multicultural misrecognition consists in the substitution of cultural meanings for political meanings of indigeneity… by transforming Indigenous peoples into Native Americans, multicultural misrecognition equates them with other ethnic minorities to sustain the myth of America as a refuge to the world’s emigrants.

Multicultural misrecognition erases the multidimensional political history of indigeneity.

Today’s indigenous peoples experience a disjunction between, on the one hand, their knowledge of their unique legal status and the status’ acknowledgment in current political discourse and legal practice, and, on the other, popular discourse’s insistence on understanding indigeneity as merely cultural identity.

The 5 Second Rule: Transform Your Life, Work, and Confidence with Everyday Courage by Mel Robbins

If you're searching for that one person who will change your life look in the mirror.

When you act with courage, your brain is not involved.  Your heart speaks first and you listen.

Forget motivation; it's a myth.

It's not the big moves that define our lives: it's the smallest ones.

Picasso created nearly 100 masterpieces in his lifetime.  But what most people don't know is that he created a total of more than 50,000 works of art….  That's two pieces of art a day. Success is a numbers game.

You make decisions based on how you feel.

When you hit the snooze button it has a negative impact on brain function and productivity that can last up to four hours!

Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World -- And Why Things are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, and Anna Rosling Ronnlund

"Poor developing countries" no longer exist as a distinct group…. Today, most people, 75 percent, live in middle income countries.

Only 9 percent of the world lives in low-income countries.

In 2016 a total of 40 million commercial passenger flights landed safely at their destinations.  Only ten ended in fatal accidents.

In the United States, the risk that your loved one will be killed by a drunk person is nearly 50 times higher than the risk he or she will be killed by a terrorist.

There was extreme poverty in Sweden 90 years ago.

In the third century BC, the world's first nature reserve was created by King Devanampiya Tissa in Sri Lanka when he declared a piece of forest to be officially protected.

When people tell me we must act now, it makes me hesitate.  In most cases, they are just trying to stop me from thinking clearly.

Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day by Todd Henry

Give yourself permission to not know things.

Everything in life is a trade-off.

You cannot pursue greatness and comfort at the same time.

You must ensure that your need to be recognized for your work doesn’t replace the doing of the work.

Healthy, well-functioning relationships don’t happen by accident.  They result from consistent effort, argument, celebration, and resolution. 

Cell-Level Healing: The Bridge from Soul to Cell by Joyce Whiteley Hawkes

Living systems show fractal patterns that appear to grow from within themselves expressing the same themes over and over again at their outer edges.  Patterns large and small lead us to consider the wonder of our bodies and our inherent qualities for growth, renewal, and healing.  Consider the fern, growing in a forest, its leaf pattern repeating again and again. 

Cells are so small that 10,000 fit on the head of a pin, yet each cell does its part for the health of your body. 

We share this mysterious oneness at a deep level of structure, function, and consciousness. 

Within each cell there are trillions of molecules composed of trillions more atoms.  Like the spaces between stars, which contain huge amounts of energy, the ultrasmall nano-spaces inside of the atoms team with energy to constantly manifest new creation. 

The cell is the interface between ordinary and nonordinary reality; possibilities exist here that we have barely begun to understand or develop. 

Spiritual connections are not dependent on spatial proximity. 

Powerful Transformation: The Alchemy of the Secret Heart Essence by Chokgyur Lingpa

"Inner obstacles are imbalances in the nadis, pranas, and bindus -- the channels, energies and essences, also call the structuring channels, the moving winds, and the arrayed essences.  These can be distributed in varieties ways.  The channels can be constricted, the winds or energies can be reversed or moved in the wrong way, and the essences can be deranged.  Essence here means mainly the white and red elements obtained from the father and mother.  These three serve as the blueprint, the basic structure, for the human body". Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, chapter: Overview of Yidam Practice

"The minds of sentient beings are caught up in fixating on perceiver and perceived.  This is the very core of samsaric existence". Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, chapter: Overview of Yidam Practice

"The only weapon that can subjugate and destroy aggression or hatred is compassion".  Orgyen Tobgyal Rinpoche, chapter: The Practice of the Single Form of Vajrakilaya: According to the Teaching of Sangtik Nyingpo.

"We take refuge because, when we look at ourselves, we don’t have the omniscient knowledge, the great compassion, or the capacity to benefit others.  So we make a request for help to those who possess those qualities of wisdom, compassion, and capacity". Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, chapter: Vajrasattva Preliminaries

A Map to the Next World: Poems and Tales by Joy Harjo

When Europeans first observed my people and the respect we had for the sun they interpreted our reverence as sun worship.  It wasn’t sun worship, rather a respect for a gifted being who decided to stay here and take care of us, though it had other possibilities for its life.

It’s not just humans who sing for rain, make poetry as commentary on the meaning of life.  We aren’t the only creatures, or the most likely to succeed.

Protocol is a key to assuming sovereignty.  It’s simple.  When we name ourselves in this dignified manner then we are acknowledging the existence of our nations, their ultimate purpose, insure their continuation.

We are constantly being defined from the point of view of the colonizer.

No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering by Thich Nhat Hanh

If we can learn to see and skillfully engage with both the presence of happiness and the presence of suffering, we will go in the direction of enjoying life more.  Every day we go a little farther in that direction, and eventually we realize that suffering and happiness are not two separate things.

Consciousness is a field with every possible kind of seed in it: seeds of love, compassion, joy, and equanimity; seeds of anger, fear and anxiety; and seeds of mindfulness.  … To live in peace, you have to be aware of your tendencies – your habit energies – so you can exercise some self-control.

An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth by Chris Hadfield

Success is feeling good about the work you do throughout the long, unheralded journey that may or may not wind up at the launch pad.  You can’t view training solely as a stepping stone to something loftier.  It’s got to be an end in itself. 

The Innovative Team: Unleashing Creative Potential for Breakthrough Results by Chris Grivas and Gerard J Puccio

The faster things change... the stranger your creative thinking and problem-solving skills need to be. 

Seek to understand rather than assume you know the answer.

You have to first try to be aware of what you are doing and second you have to name it when you see it.

Healing Through the Dark Emotions: The Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair by Miriam Greenspan

PART THREE

Emotional toxicity keeps us stuck in the same place or moves us into downward spirals that take us further and further away from emotional alchemy.

Without grieving our losses, listening to our fear and despair, we become lifeless and loveless, anxious and depressed, angry and destructive.

Through family conditioning and religious teachings, and in the culture as a whole, we are schooled to endure, deny, bypass, avenge, and escape painful emotions.  These five common ways of coping have their strengths and weaknesses, but for the most part they aren’t conducive to healing and transformation.

Endurance is the ability to withstand suffering without collapsing.

Denial is unconscious detachment from emotion and the truth that emotion holds.

To transcend suffering authentically, we must be willing to live it fully.  To rise above, we must go through – without any guarantees of what we’ll find on the other side.

In visions of vengeance, we find some small relief for feelings that are intolerable.

Americans are the most addicted people in the world – and our primary addiction is to feeing good.

We learn not to feel through what we think, not to think through what we feel.

Conscious awareness is not something promoted in our culture, while avoidance, distraction, and escape are.

People who chronically suppress their emotions need to have their emotions artificially stimulated.

Without the free flow of emotional energy, we’re all deader than we want to be, and like any addict, we want a fix that makes us feel better – something that allows us to feel more alive and cellulary connected to emotional energy.

Emotional flow is the state in which one is connected to the energy of emotion yet able to witness it mindfully. We ride the wave of emotion on the surfboard of awareness. When we do this skillfully, emotional energy in a state of flow naturally moves toward healing, harmony, and transformation.

To attend to the dark emotions is to sense them in the body, focus your awareness on them, and name them accurately.

The dark emotions are attention grabbers, goading us into awareness.

Attending to emotional energy is a bodily-grounded awareness. It means knowing how to feel your feelings, as opposed to knowing how to describe them without feeling them.

You can’t be emotionally flabby and expect to come to a place of emotional transformation and spiritual power.

To befriend the dark emotions, your intention must be to get close to what you want to run away from.  You need to take your time and give yourself permission to let yourself feel whatever you’re feeling without shame, doubt, analysis, or condemnation.

You surrender by moving into what hurts, with awareness as your protection.

Connected detachment: staying connected to emotional energy mindfully. The detachment comes from being mindful, not from disconnecting.

Awake at the Bedside: Contemplative Teachings on Palliative and End-of-Life Care by Ogyen Trinley Dorje Karmapa, Koshin Paley Ellison & Matt Weingast

The minute you start rationalizing, you know that it’s not okay.

Meditate Your Weight: A 21-Day Retreat to Optimize Your Metabolism and Feel Great by Tiffany Cruickshank

Can you broaden the gap between craving and filling your mouth?

Become more aware of what is triggering the cravings, so you can feed your body what it actually needs instead.

The secret to overcoming self-limiting expectations that root down into beliefs is simply becoming conscious of them.

Just being able to ask where a feeling came from and see how it is expressed in our lives grants us the ability to let it go.

What Smart Couples Know: The Secret to a Happy Relationship by Patricia Covalt

Being the right person is much more important than finding or being with the right person.

Your feelings are often the result of your thoughts.  It is your appraisal or evaluation of a situation that causes a particular feeling and not always the situation itself.

If you want to be mentally healthy (and who doesn’t?) you can learn to shape your reality in a direction that builds your self-esteem, gives you a belief in your personal efficacy, and helps you have an optimistic view of your future.

Appropriate conflict management usually requires taking ownership and being able to apologize when you have been wrong, hurtful, or out of line.

[Self-efficacy] means you believe you are in charge of most of the outcomes of your life and have a sense of personal power to reach your goals and overcome obstacles.

Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient: Reflections on Healing and Regeneration by Norman Cousins

Wisdom consists of anticipation of consequences.

Life is an adventure in forgiveness.

The art of healing is still a frontier profession.

Teaching Spirits: Understanding Native American Religious Traditions by Joseph Epes Brown

Words are not merely symbols that point to things, they call for the reality and power of the being mentioned.

To the Western mind, the spoken word is conceived as symbol.  The relationship between the spoken word and its meaning is based on a somewhat arbitrary consensus.  Such separation of experience is not possible in Native American languages, in which a mysterious identity between sound and meaning.  To name a being, or any aspect of function of creation, actualizes that reality.

The Crow word for talk is translated in English as “breaking with the mouth”.  It is understood that once a word has left the mouth, it has consequence in the world.

The Navajo language:  there are more than 300,000 distinct conjugations of the verb “to go” and only two or three conjugations of the verb “to be”.

The Eskimo believe not only in the succession of souls but also the simultaneity of souls.

Move Your DNA: Restore Your Health Through Natural Movement by Katy Bowman

How you feel is the earliest indicator of your health on a cellular level.

You don't need a lot of money to make a disease of behavior. When the basics of life (food, clean water, and shelter) are so easily obtained, nature takes over.  It is completely natural to avoid work (movement, in this case)…. Diseases of behavior arise in situations where the quality of the food being consumed is poor, stress levels are elevated frequently, and the work performed by the body is low and unvarying.

Before we lived in the age of convenience, movement of the human body was necessary for sustaining life.  Finding, capturing, and collecting food and water required all-day, lifelong frequencies of movement.

The twenty-pound weight is not the load. The load is the experience created by carrying it.

Your body is never "out of shape"; it is always in a shape created by how you have moved up to this very moment.

The first step to radically improving your health is to let go of the notion that movement is exercise.

Being strong or healthy in one specific way doesn't transfer over to being strong or healthy in every way.

Having strong, regularly used parts next to underused or (overused) weak ones can actually increase tissue damage.

Exercise is movement, but movement is not always exercise. 

The difference between a non-exerciser and someone who works out regularly is about three hundred minutes a week.