The Yoga of Relationships: A Practical Guide for Loving Yourself and Others by Yogi Amrit Desai

PART ONE

What you want in the end, you must have in the beginning.  

When others behave in a way we don’t like, we make them wrong and continually blame them until we make ourselves sick. Over and over again, we replay the story in our mind, rationalizing our position and making another the guilty party.  Despite whatever self-belief we cling to, by holding onto the conviction that someone else aggrieved us, we will never be free and will never be able to create the loving relationships we so desperately desire.

Our self-image, or ego, is conditioned over time by our parents, society and culture. We think of the self-image as ourselves.

The ego has needs; it makes demands. And when needs are not met, it leads to frustration, anger and resentment. We believe we are looking for love, but it is not love we are seeking.

Our self-image creates the world we live in. we exist in a fantasy world, not the real world. Distorted by our perceptions, our happiness morphs into sadness, loving becomes revenge, and satisfaction turns into expectations.

The “I” is needed to sustain the body. There is nothing wrong with it, but it is vastly misunderstood and overrated in terms of reliability.

As we listen to the messages of the body, we must discern what it is really telling us, all the while remembering that the mind has a mind of its own.

There is no advancement or awareness until we learn to consciously let go of the past with all its blame and shame.

Understand you did not come to this life empty-handed. You came with the baggage of unfinished karma from your past.

Justification is not figuring it out.

We have an animal body, a human mind and a divine potential.  Animal consciousness is limited to physical survival…. Our identity is based first upon safety and survival.

The human consciousness of “I” extends beyond the body into the realm of “who I am”. The sense we develop as “who I am” is a vast, definable nebula of changing self-concepts, belief systems, personal perspectives, attitudes, opinions, biases, likes and dislikes, attractions and repulsions.

Growing up doesn’t necessarily mean emotional maturity. That depends on evolving conscious self-awareness.

The first thing a relationship does is show you everything about yourself that you do not want to see.

Wherever we go, whatever we do, we do not meet life as it is. Rather we experience our expectation of how we think life should be. Expectations are silent reactions. They are conditioned by our past and re-occur in the present.

Expectations are extensions of our beliefs based on memories that exist nowhere but in the mind.

Reactions are our entry into dualistic thinking. Duality is separation.

Any feeling of conflict is the result of habitual unconscious reaction and is not real.

In the light of consciousness, we have a choice that is neither fight nor flight. The third choice is the important distinction between separation and union. This is “the gap”. 

In every moment, we are making decisions, passing judgments on others, setting ourselves apart from what we don’t like and clinging to what makes us feel better. All of these emotions come from reactions.

To be released from knee jerk reactions, one must learn the techniques that create space between what is actually happening and the formation of the reaction.

Life perpetually moves us toward self-healing.

You have to do the painful work of seeing yourself in all your expectations of the other.

How to Reclaim Your Sovereignty and Begin to Rule Your World from the Inside Out by Hiro Boga

Sovereignty is the sphere of love, personal power, appreciation and personhood, within which prosperity, freedom and relationships flourish.  You create a sovereign life through your daily choices and actions.

When you are sovereign, you establish clear, conscious, semi-permeable boundaries that are an expression of your most cherished values.  These filter out energies that are not in harmony with your well-being, and welcome those people and situations that truly love, support and enhance your life.  When you're sovereign, you craft a container of integrity and coherency to safely hold your heart, your creativity, your life, your business, and the immense power of your soul.

When you're sovereign, you're able to rule your world from the inside out.

Most of us lose and find and lose our way over and over again until we get truly clear about who we are, what we want, how we want to live, and what we are willing to do to build an authentic, regenerative life.

Make a vow, in the name of your own sacred life, to take small, consistent daily actions that will move you in your chosen direction.  Choosing your desires, and honoring your commitments to them each day, builds self-trust, confidence, strength, courage and power.  It also creates new energetic imprints that attract help and support from the subtle energy realm, re-patterns your neurobiology, and builds new neural pathways.  All of this builds momentum, which makes it easier to continue to take focused, intentional action.

The sacred becomes practical when we practice.

Often, we have no idea that the feelings we're experiencing are not our own, so we act on them, and they on us, perpetuating the suffering from which they emerge.

When we lose our individuality, we lose the very gifts that bless and transform our world.

The Future is Now: Timely Advice for Creating a Better World by The 17th Gyalwang Karmapa

Sometimes our enemies can give the best advice.  If it's helpful, take it.

What is important to know? Value knowledge that is most useful right now.  Judge knowledge by how effective it is, not by how difficult it is to acquire.

How do you decide whether or not to do something? Ask yourself how much benefit the activity is likely to bring.

The Karmapas are Tibet's great wisdom teachers, the oldest lineage in Tibetan Buddhism, going back to the 11th century, and the first to introduce the practice of identifiable reincarnation.

Everyday Holiness: The Jewish Spiritual Path of Mussar by Alan Morinis

Spiritual truths are not so much learned as recalled.  Some ideas we encounter, even if for the first time, don't strike us as new information but more like memories being reawakened within us.  It's as if our hearts innately possess these truths and so we don't need lessons, only reminders of wisdom that we already know.

Every one of us is assigned to master something in our lives.  You have already been given your assignment and you have already encountered it, though you may not be aware that what faces you is a curriculum, nor that this is the central task of your life.... What I am calling your curriculum shows up most clearly in issues that repeatedly challenge you.

Being humble doesn't mean being a nobody, it just means being no more of a somebody than you ought to be.

Humility is not the opposite of conceit.... Humility is not an extreme quality, but rather a balanced, moderate, accurate understanding of yourself that you act on in your life.

Where we get into trouble with impatience is in our reactivity.  The problem confronting you may be entirely real: You're late.  You need it now.  There will be consequences.  But whatever the problem, no matter how great or how small, it is one thing to face those life issues just as they are, and quite another to slop grief, worry, regret, impatience, and other such mental condiments over the situation.  Reactions like these only increase our burden by adding a whole extra dimension of inner suffering (and often hurtful behavior) to an already difficult experience. 

The goal is to do the work it takes to weave thankfulness deeply into the very fabric of your being.

A person whose possessions are messy is likely to have thoughts that are also jumbled.  If you are not careful about the cleanliness of your house, you are also likely to be lax about the purity of your spirit.

Honor is due to all human beings not because of the greatness of their achievements but more simply because they embody an inherently holy soul.  When you activate this inner sensibility, you want to keep things in order not just for order's sake, but also for the higher purpose of honoring the people with whom you share relationships. 

Your spiritual practice will give you many gifts, but don't expect it to relieve you of your human nature.

If you are committed to your own growth,  you won't even want your struggles to end because they are the very pathway to growth. 

Laziness thrives on rationalization.... I'd give so much to charity, if only I were wealthy.  I'd study and learn so much, if only I were smarter.  I'd be so helpful to my friends, if only I were stronger.

When we receive life through a screen of anxiety, we find that even when some worry proves to be unfounded and we can finally breathe a sigh of relief, we don't, because that anxious orientation quickly generates a perfectly functional substitute in a matter of seconds. 

The soul needs silence as the body needs sleep.  Sleep to refresh; silence to cleanse.

Because we live in a money-centric culture, we tend to think of generosity only as a question of reaching into our wallets. 

To elevate your soul in the direction of holiness, you have to become more skilled at anticipating the consequences of your actions and taking responsibility for the details in all areas where you make choices, even in the most practical and mundane sorts of ways -- or, more accurately, specifically in the practical and mundane matters you might tend to overlook or to consider other than spiritual. 

You name it (whatever "it" is), if that were the key to life, then the people who had "it" would not suffer the way the rest of us do.

[Trust] is the inner attitude that respects that whatever is happening in our lives is nothing more or less than the curriculum that God gives us.

Every experience of fear or worry that strikes you is nothing but a signal calling on you to fan the inner sparks of your [trust].  Your task is to become aware of fear, anxiety, and clinging right as these experiences are occurring within you, and to respond to them inwardly by identifying them as signs of not trusting. 

Think of and be alert to those situations where you can feel yourself teetering on the brink of a choice between one option you know to be good and another that, while bound to be attractive, isn't in the best interests of the soul.  Whenever you find yourself to be struggling in that unconfirmed no-man's-land between that which elevates and that which doesn't, try to name the territory where the struggle takes place.... What you are really looking to detect are the little tremors that take place in everyday life that are important not because they are large but because they reveal the fault lines that run beneath the surface of your life.  By becoming aware of the habits, patterns, and tendencies that are revealed in the hundreds of choices you make every day, especially in the areas that have the ripest potential for growth.

The little voice that says to you, "Not tonight" is very likely the same little voice that whispers in your ear at other times in your life, only to trip you up and send you crashing.  This seductive, destructive little voice within you is actually the adversary you need to contend with.

Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being by Martin E P Seligman

We often choose what makes us feel good, but it is very important to realize that often our choices are not made for the sake of how we will feel.

There are no shortcuts to flow.  On the contrary, you need to deploy your highest strengths and talents to meet the world in flow.

Well-being is a construct, and happiness a thing. 

Symptom relief should be a way station on the road to cure. But the road has come to a dead end at symptom relief.  Every single drug on the shelf of the psychopharmacopoeia is cosmetic.  There are no curative drugs.

Positive emotions does much more than just feel pleasant; it is a neon sign that growth is under way, that psychological capital is accumulating.

Positive mood produces broader attention, more creative thinking, and more holistic thinking.  This is in contrast to negative mood, which produces narrowed attention, more critical thinking, and more analytic thinking.

The cornerstone of all high expertise is not God-given genius but deliberate practice. 

Self-discipline outpredicts IQ for academic success by a factor of about 2.

Negative emotions warn us about a specific threat: when we feel fear, it is almost always preceded by a thought of danger.  When we feel sad, there is almost always a thought of loss.  When we feel angry, there is almost always a thought of trespass.

Positive emotions are heavy hitters in the emotional system: it is through cultivating the positive that we are able to learn, grow, and flourish.

The key to taking advantage of positive emotions is to regard them as "resource builders".

Being in a state of mental health is not merely being disorder free; rather it is the presence of flourishing.

People who believe that the causes of setbacks in their lives are temporary, changeable, and local do not become helpless.

The Hollow Tree: Fighting Addiction with Traditional Native Healing by Herb Nabigon

I won’t lie to you, suffering is part of the healing.

For until we are able to experience painful memories without pain, we have not accomplished the knowledge and wisdom of its teaching.

Elders assist us as impartial witnesses to our internal matrixes and know exactly where we have to step if we truly want to liberate ourselves.

Chasing Slow: Courage to Journey Off the Beaten Path by Erin Loechner

There are two reactions to failure.  Some people see it is a valuable experience, an opportunity for learning, a road to growth.  And some people see it as a zero on their scorecard.

The only thing worse than allowing yourself to be a victim is to resent the survivors.

Sometimes it's more important to be useful than to be happy.

Do you know what happens when we victimize ourselves?  When we hand over our power to circumstances?  We lose everything that matters.  We lose the freedom to change, the grace to rise above, the strength to get up off the couch. 

Thinking about living is not the same as living.

Where there is learning, there is always relearning.

Without grace, minimalism is another metric for perfection.

No one ever told me how much fear is hidden in love.

I used to think the opposite of control is chaos.  But it's not.  The opposite of control is surrender. 

The answer to a happy marriage is the same as the answer to a happy life.  It is simple, and it is not at all simple: Give freely.

When you edit your soul, no one wins.

Authenticity is not the watering down of your message to help someone accept your words.  Authenticity, I think, is simply trying to find the kindest way to tell the whole truth.

The thing about love is that time shifts it into new shapes, like water on a rock.  The thing about love is that everything else is sand.

When I think of love, I think of compatibility and sacrifice, of commitment and service.  Of give-and-take. But only part of this is true.  Love is not a game of take.  Love is only a game of give.

Choppy waters teach us to sail better.

We are doing ourselves no favors when we look to the crowd to tell us where we are.

Busyness is a byproduct of our culture.  It is the sacrifice we make for our religion of more, for our perfectionist tendencies, for our temptation to overschedule, overinform, overprovide.

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

PART ONE (because this book has too many incredible quotes)

The inability to bear the core triad of grief, fear, and despair is the source of much of our individual and collective emotional ills. 

Suppressed grief often turns into depression, anxiety, or addiction.

Benumbed fear can easily lead to irrational prejudice, toxic rage, and acts of violence.

Overwhelming or unconscious despair often leads to severe psychic numbing or expresses itself through destructive acts to oneself and others. 

There are no negative emotions, just unskillful ways of coping with emotions we can’t bear.

Emotions, including those we mark as negative, have a wisdom of their own, their own kind of “reason”.

The dark emotions can be our best, albeit most demanding, spiritual teachers, when we can get beyond the compulsion to control them.

In the end, life is the ultimate guru, and pain the most effective wake-up call.

To master our sorrows, we must know how to be fully immersed in emotion, yet not ruled by it.

Your life exactly as it contains just what is needed for your own journey of healing.

Without a listener, the healing process is aborted. Human beings, like plants that bend toward the sunlight, bend toward others in an innate healing tropism. There are times when being truly listened to is more critical than being fed.

The essence of healing emotional pain lies in listening to what hurts.

Listening to suffering can result in a dangerous knowing. What will we find out, if we really listen? Will we be able to bear what we then know? What will knowing ask of us? This journey takes courage.

Listening to oneself is the secret of self-healing.

Our Way Out: First Principles for a Post-Apocalyptic World by Marq de Villiers

By the time it takes you to finish reading this sentence, seven people have been added to the world’s population.

Between 2005 and 2050 the world population will grow by 2.45 billion, Earth’s entire population in 1950.

Changing how we live and how we think will be profoundly disruptive (though not as disruptive as not doing anything).

Discovering Your Soul Signature: A 33 Day Path to Purpose, Passion and Joy by Panache Desai

Start untangling our thoughts from the underlying emotions that hold them in place and give them meaning.

Our thoughts create patterns – those patterns become sticky --- and when something’s sticky, we can’t get rid of it.  And so we need to ask: what’s the underlying energy?  Thoughts aren’t an enemy.  They are an invitation.

If you are sitting in judgment, you are maintaining the illusion of separateness.  Judgment and harmony cannot exist in the same place.

Here is a revolutionary idea: you don’t have to try.

Many of us place our magnificence in the future.  Or leave it behind in the past.

It is in witnessing the breath that we come fully into the present moment and discover our magnificence.  Once we are aware of this, we enter the possibility of making our lives a living meditation therefore meditation cannot simply be compartmentalized, placed into a little box where we go and sit 45 minutes a day, or two years or two hours.  Breath and spirit are your constant companions.

Everyone in my life – everyone I encounter – is playing the role I need them to play for me. … Ultimately, what these encounters do is to provide us with opportunities to feel whatever it is that is unresolved within ourselves.

Cultivating gratitude in all things is not so much a feeling as a decision.  It is a lens through which we choose to see the world.

Life continually brings us opportunities to expand who we are.

Enlightenment is about destroying any and all false notion that you have about yourself.

What is real is always very simple.

Being human means we will experience loneliness.  We all have a hole in side --- an emptiness --- that we long to fill in whatever ways we can.  We reach for solutions.  We move away from ourselves when what we really need to be doing is moving closer.

Stop whatever it is that you’re doing.  And for a solid minute, look out the window.  It doesn’t matter whether you’re looking at a brick wall, a fire escape, a meadow, or a skyline.  What matters is the nothingness. That inactivity.  The space you’re making for your truest and deepest voice to emerge.

Everything is trying to help you; everything is trying to support you.  Absolutely everything.

Each person that crosses our path has something to contribute to us – whether or not we like the way it feels in the moment.

Life is continually trying to deliver messages to us, and the messages come in the most unlikely of forms.

My life is the feedback loop that brings me the experience of who I am.

If you’re at peace with yourself, you are already making a difference.

If you commit powerfully to serenity, you will be willing to quickly see the density that’s stopping you, and the density will begin to crumble.

Notice.  Keep an eye out.  It may happen only once today or a hundred times.  It don’t matter.  There is immense power in the ability to catch yourself, to observe your own instinctive responses and behavior.  And when you do notice, meet yourself with absolute love.  The awareness signals the end of the fight.

When we allow ourselves to be vulnerable, we are experiencing a blessing.  We are offering ourselves the opportunity to see and experience life authentically without defenses or screens keeping us from our own true nature.

When sadness arises within us, we are being given an incredible opportunity to integrate the wounds of the past.

Just for today, live in the truth that there is nothing to defend.

People who are riddled with guilt don’t dare to be abundant or happy because they fundamentally believe that something they did was heinous.  But they are thinking only of their past selves.  They forget that they were only operating from the awareness that they had at the time.

Guilt is a learned and conditioned response to what happens when we violate our own inner integrity.

The antidote for shame is intimacy.  Authentic vulnerability.

Shame is the undercurrent that keeps you living in the belief that you are unworthy of all the bounty life has to offer.

In our day-to-day experience, the key to recognizing the energy of shame is to catch yourself when you are deflecting.  As you move though this day – this one precious day, be aware of each time you deflect.  Each time you defend yourself.  It may manifest as squeamishness.  Discomfort.  Embarrassment.  A desire to flee.  You might even self-consciously laugh. … Notice how much easier it is, during the course of your day, to receive blame and criticisms rather than kindness and praise. Just for today, step into receptivity.  Your deflection is your road map.  Pull yourself out of the invisible vortex of shame that has become your default setting.

The evidence that your mind is creating is false.

We have the opportunity to become aware of and alive to our own motivations.  Our own unconscious choices.  When this happens, we can begin to choose differently.   More courageously.  More lovingly.  From a place of freedom.

Understand that your patterns are your journey.

Just for today, allow life to impact you without ducking, without scrambling for that default button.  If someone irritates you, feel the irritation.  If someone hurts you, be sad.  If joy bubbles up from within you, breathe into it. In this way, we cultivate emotional intelligence.

Consider the ache as an awakening.

Talking about the ego is a bit like handling sand.  It’s an ever-changing thing that you can’t grab hold of.

Watch yourself carefully today.  Keep an eye out to see if you do any of the following:  brag, lie, name-drop, interrupt, assert, dominate, compare, manipulate, insult, lack curiosity.  If you find that any of these less-than-stellar traits have crept into your behavior, you will know that your ego is running amok.

The most uncomfortable situations in life hold the greatest potential for growth.

Consider the possibility that your triggers have something to teach you about yourself.

Make yourself available to the discomfort.

What would happen if you were to move through your day as if you’ve already lived it? … You can glide gently through each hour as it unfolds.  Everything has already happened.  You don’t have to press.  You don’t have to fight.  You don’t have to assert yourself or you will.  You don’t have to control anything.  All you need to do is be present.

The true skill when it comes to riding the roller coaster [of life] has to do with maintaining a sense of openness to life as it’s happening, instead of trying to control the uncontrollable.

We are either in love or in fear.

Allowing does not require doing.  It is non-doing.  It is being available to whatever is.