The space [within] by Michael Neill

All quotes from Michael's book

When I say “God”, I’m not talking religion.  I’m simply pointing as best I can to the impersonal energy and intelligence behind life that causes grass to grow, cuts to heal, rain to fall, and inspiration to strike.

Look past the illusion of our own thinking.

If we want to achieve great things in life, it is necessary to spend at least as much time, if not more, attending to our base camp as we actually do in climbing mountains.

We live in a world of unrecognized thought.

Your thinking doesn’t matter as much as you think.

The harder we work to get rid of our thinking, the more thinking there is to get rid of.

We are not our thinking, we are the space where thoughts arise.

Feelings are no more (or less) than the shadows of the thoughts that pass through our mind from moment to moment.

There is no such thing as a solution to a feeling.

When it’s okay to feel good when you feel good and bad when you feel bad, recognizing that as thoughts change, the feelings change with them, there’s no need to prefer one feeling over another, let alone attempt to fix it.

No matter how “spiritually enlightened” I might get, I’m always going to have to deal with my very human psychology.

We live in the feeling of our thinking, not the feeling of our circumstances.

Peace of mind is both the path and the goal of the spiritual journey.

When and if I need to know, I’ll know; if I don’t need to know, I probably won’t.

Peace is our natural state.

In order to forgive, you have to already have judged.

True forgiveness is when you can feel the same way about the person as you did before anything ever happened.

The less you have on your mind, the higher your level of performance.

Resilience, wellbeing, confidence, learning and creativity are already built into the human system.

Our experience of life is really an experience of thought.

The Inside Out Revolution by Michael Neill

All quotes from Michael's book

Ironically, what we`re seeking is all around us all the time.  Right where you`re sitting now is the infinite whole made manifest in the divine specific.  You could no sooner be `not enough` than a tree could be the wrong color.  And you don`t have to become worthy of love, because love is what you're made of. 

I know two things for sure: I seem to be part of a larger whole, and I`m not in charge of how things unfold.  If you want to call that larger whole or great unfolding `life` or `the universe` or `spirit`, I`m okay with that.  If you want to call it `God`, I`m okay with that too. 

Knowing that I`m feeling my thinking and not my life makes all the difference in the world. 

Feelings are real but the way you`re seeing your life isn`t. it`s just a trick of the mind, like a mirage.

One of the great ironies of the human condition is that we seem most motivated to make dramatic changes at precisely the moments when we`re least equipped to do so.

No matter how hard a surfer works, the ocean is doing most of the heavy lifting. 

You’re not the pilot on this mission.  You’re the plane.

In any situation we have a nearly infinite range of choices.

Everything the body does is designed to return itself to a state of natural health and equilibrium.

By recognizing three fundamental principles at play behind every human experience, it becomes possible to tap into a deeper intelligence behind life that informs our mental health, supplies us with ongoing wisdom and guidance, and allows us to unleash incredible creative power into the world.

Experience always follows thought, regardless of what’s going around.

Our endless pursuit of “not this” is driven by our deepest fear: that there’s something wrong with us and we’re not enough.

There is an energy and intelligence behind life.  This ever present but is not “in control” – it has no inherent morality or apparent point of view.

We create our individual experience of reality via the vehicle of thought.

There is no end of you finding beauty, love and understanding in this world.

The more you look in the direction of what’s creating experience and away from the content of that experience the easier it is to hear the quiet wisdom that can lead to a quantum leap of consciousness.

We’re only ever one new thought away from a completely different experience of being alive.

Once you realize that it’s only your over thinking that you’re experiencing, the thinking loses much of its hold over you.

The moment we stop fighting with ourselves and others about what to think and instead focus on the miracle we are thinking, the details of life begin to work themselves out, all by themselves.

We’re living in the feeling of our thinking, not the feeling of the world.

Stress, fear, and difficulty are perceived to be primary characteristics of the situation, not of our own thinking.

The nature of thought is both creative and arbitrary.

Instead of trying to explain why we think what we think by looking for evidence in the world or in our upbringing, we recognize that mind is not so much a camera as a paintbrush and, consciously or unconsciously, we are the artist.

We don’t experience money; we experience our thinking about money.