The Seat of the Soul by Gary Zukav

Each choice of fear -- anger, jealousy, vengefulness -- is a choice to evolve unconsciously through the painful, destructive consequences that fear creates.

From the perspective of the universe, the language of comparison is not the language of lesser and better, but of limitation and opportunity.

The insecurity which underlies the perception of power as external cannot be healed by the accumulation of external power. 

When we align our thoughts, emotions, and actions with the highest part of ourselves, we are filled with enthusiasm, purpose, and meaning.  Life is full and rich.  We have no thoughts of bitterness…. This is the experience of authentic power.

An authentically empowered person is incapable of making anyone or anything a victim.

Your personality, like your body, is the vehicle of your evolution.

Only the personality can judge, manipulate and exploit.  Only the personality can pursue external power.  The personality can also be loving, compassionate, and wise in its relations with others, but love, compassion and wisdom do not come from the personality.  They are experiences of the soul.

Your soul is not a passive or a theoretical entity that occupies a space in the vicinity of your chest cavity.  It is a positive, purposeful force at the core of your being.

Creating authentic power requires experiencing within us the differences between fear and love and choosing love no matter what is going on inside us.

Competition for external power lies at the heart of all violence. 

Multisensory perception is your ability to see beyond what the five senses can detect.

Every action, thought, and feeling is motivated by an intention, and that intention is a cause that exists as one with an effect.  If we participate in the cause, it is not possible for us not to participate in the effect.

In order to become whole, the soul must balance its energy.  It must experience the effects that it has caused.

Non-judgmental justice is the freedom of seeing what you see and experiencing what you experience without responding negatively.

Actions and reactions in the physical arena set energy into motion, forming our experiences and revealing in the process the lessons that the soul has yet to learn.

The framework of karma and reincarnation is impersonal, and provides for each soul, in response to the actions of its personalities, the experiences that it requires in order to evolve. 

We see Life as cheap.  This perception pervades all of our perceptions…. We look upon each other as prey to satisfy our emotional and physical needs.

When we curse a competitor or strive to disempower another person, we absent ourselves from reverence.  When we work to take instead of to give, we labor without reverence. 

A disempowered person is a frightened person.

The decision to approach Life with reverence means acting and thinking as a spiritual person in a world that does not recognize spirit.

Impatience is the desire to have your needs met first.

Reverence is connecting with the true power and essence of what a person is or what a thing is.  It is a holy perception.

When we close the door to our feelings, we close the door to the vital currents hat energize and activate our thoughts and actions.

If we are not intimate with our emotions, we cannot perceive the dynamics that lie behind emotions, the way that these dynamics work, and the ends that they serve.  Emotions are currents of energy that pass through us.  Awareness of these currents is the first step in learning how our experiences come into being and why.

Reverence is not an emotion.  It's a way of being.

Only through your emotions can you experience the force field of your own soul. 

A splintered personality experiences the circumstances within its life as more powerful than itself.

At each instant you make decisions in the form of your attitudes.

Your dispositions, aptitudes, and attitudes reflect your intentions.  If you are angry, fearful, resentful, or vengeful, your intention is to keep people at a distance.

If you attend to the negative aspects of life, if you choose to focus your attention on the weaknesses of others, on their faults and shortcomings, you draw to yourself the lower frequency energy currents of disdain, anger, and hatred.  You put distance between yourself and others.  You create obstacles to your loving.

If you direct your energy into criticism of others with the intention to disempower them, you create negative karma.

You cannot choose your intentions consciously until you become conscious of each of the different aspects of yourself.  If you are not conscious of each part of yourself, you will have the experience of wanting to say, or to intend, one thing, and finding yourself saying or intending something else.  You will want  your life to move in one direction, and find that it is moving in another. 

The choice not to choose is the choice to remain unconscious and therefore, to wield power irresponsibly.

Each decision requires that you choose which parts of yourself you want to cultivate, and which parts you want to release.

A responsible choice is a choice that takes into account the consequences of each of your choices.  In order to make a responsible choice you must ask yourself, for each choice that you are considering, "What will this produce? Do I really want to create that? Am I ready to accept all of the consequences of this choice?"

A disagreement between two friends, for example, is not so much a disagreement as aspects of each surfacing in order to be healed.

The splintered personality is not content.  The contentment that it feels in one moment is replaced by anger or fear or envy in the next moment as conflicting aspects of itself struggle with each other.

When you struggle consciously with a choice between the wants of your personality and the needs of your soul, you enter a dynamic through which you are enabled to evolve without creating negative karma. That is the dynamic of temptation…. Temptation is a dress rehearsal for a karmic experience of negativity.

Temptations are not traps.  Each temptation is an opportunity through which the soul is able to learn without creating karma, to evolve directly through conscious choice.

Temptation is the gracious way of introducing each individual to his or her power…. With each choice that you make to align yourself with the energy of your soul, you empower yourself.

Responsibility is a sacred word.  It means the ability to respond from love rather than automatically reacting from fear.

When you struggle with an addiction, you deal directly with the healing of your soul.

Addictions are the strongest frightened parts of your personality.

Our species is no longer humble.  It has no reverence…. We take from the Earth and from each other.

If you wish the world to become loving and compassionate, become loving and compassionate yourself.  If you wish to diminish fear in the world, diminish your own.

What is in one is in the whole, and therefore, ultimately, each soul is responsible for the whole world.

When energy leaves you in fear or distrust, you experience physical pain in  your body near the energy centers that are losing power.

How to Thrive in Challenging Times by Sandra Ingerman

Change comes from the state of being we hold in life rather than from doing something.

Be Like Water: Practical Wisdom from the Martial Arts by Joseph Cardillo

Close your eyes.  Eyes can be deceptive.  You have to learn how to see with your skin. 

Life is constantly demanding solutions to one thing or another.  Nevertheless, stay calm, control your urges, and actively wait: go for a jog, take a drive, chop wood, listen to music, wash and put away dishes, sweep a floor – anything you can do to slowly get your mind off the urgency.  If you have to, act as though you have already taken care of the problem, until you actually do – just to get your mind off of it.

Always identify your priorities, whether you are conducting a business transaction, dealing with personal relationships, or considering matters of physical, emotional, and spiritual health.  Consider the net gains of your actions.  Don’t become anxious.  Don’t move just to move.  Stay cool.   Look for the real targets.  Pick your move. 

It is better to harmonize yang (hardness, fullness, action, productivity) with yin (softness, emptiness, nonaction, reproductivity) and redirect.

Always identify your priorities, whether you are conducting a business transaction, dealing with personal relationships, or considering matters of physical, emotional, and spiritual health.  Consider the net gains of your actions.  Don’t become anxious. Don’t move just to move.  Stay cool.  Look for the real targets.

Anger is your enemy. Avoid assumptions about yourself and others.  Don’t assume you know what’s going to happen before it does.  Be alert and widen your vision.  Practice active nonaction. Generate positive energy.  Trust yourself.

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport

Talent is not a commodity you can buy in bulk and combine to reach the needed levels: There's a premium to being the best.

Two core abilities for thriving in the New Economy: 1. The ability to quickly master hard things; 2. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.

To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration or a single task free from distraction.

Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not.

Using busyness as a proxy for productivity.

Your will, in other words, is not a manifestation of your character that you can deploy without limit; it's instead like a muscle that tires. 

To succeed with deep work you must rewire your brain to be comfortable resisting distracting stimuli.

For many, there's a comfort in the artificial busyness of rapid e-mail messaging and social media posturing, while the deep life demands that you leave much of that behind.

The Clarity Cleanse: 12 Steps to Finding Renewed Energy, Spiritual Fulfillment, and Emotional Healing by Dr Habib Sadeghi

Each one of us lives within our own energetic frequency, which is self-generated by individual thoughts and feelings.

[Integrative PsychoSynthesis] is the photosynthesis of human consciousness, where we draw what we need to renew ourselves from the invisible energy within and around us.  This involves much more than merely visualizing a healthy body.  It's about recognizing and releasing a way of thinking and being that hasn't only become detrimental but unconsciously addictive.

Because each person's circumstances are different, what's more important than the fact that they became sick is why they became sick. 

Although I couldn't lead the charge to fight the cancer within me, it could lead me.  For this to happen, I needed to go within myself and see what my cancer was trying to tell me.

The cancer wasn't trying to kill me -- it was trying to bring attention to the fact that I had adopted some serious misperceptions about myself and my world.

By learning how to create clarity for myself, I was finally able to consciously create a life that was worthy of me.

Achieving clarity requires honoring all your emotions - the positive, the negative, and the in-between.  By honoring them, you integrate them into the clear space inside you that's your true being.  Once integrated, they empower you to both discover and express the power, perfection, and love you already are.

Clarity is the cup.  The experiences we have and the things we do are the tea leaves and water that go into the cup…. A potter creates a cup by knowing which parts of the clay to keep and which to discard as she forms her vessel.  In much the same way, clarity is what allows us to take from any experience the lessons we can use -- those elements that help us learn, grow, and expand our consciousness.

In order for us to process our thoughts and feelings fully and effectively, we must first be able to contain them.  This is the opposite of what most of us instinctively do with uncomfortable or unhappy feelings, which is to ignore, dismiss, or try to change and control them.  Containing means being able to gather and hold what we're feeling, being present with it so that we consciously experience it in a nonjudgmental and empathic way.  As we process it in this way, we enable it to pass through us.

Our biography dictates our biology.

Having clarity doesn't mean having all the answers all the time.  Instead it means having a kind of internal GPS so you always know how to figure out what to do and where to go, no matter what you're facing.

Our society supports, even promotes, an oversaturated, over-cluttered, overstressed, and hence confused state of being.

The rushed nature of modern life isn't conducive to clarity. Clarity requires space. It requires that we slow down so we can hold our thoughts and feelings rather than rush past them or to the next thing.

The subconscious doesn't judge the quality of our beliefs.  It simply trusts that we are the expert when it comes to knowing what is best for us, then guides us toward people and situations that validate our deepest beliefs.

None of us likes the way problems make us feel, which is why we reject them through blame or denial. 

Most of us can't achieve emotional clarity because we fear suffering.  Suffering leaves us feeling things we don't like to feel.

The hardships we've endured in our lives leave us with guilt, shame, anger, and resentment.  These negative feelings cloud our vision and keep us unconsciously thinking and acting in ways that may run counter to who we are and what we want. 

Feeling disempowered fills us with uncertainty and apprehension about the future.

Doubts are natural, but they are also barriers that keep us from moving forward.

Anger and resentment are among the most common emotional attachments related to cancer.

Once we've taken what we can use from the experience of suffering, the next step is to move past it.  We do this by giving meaning to our suffering.

We want to hold feelings that don't make sense to us and sit with our reaction long enough for us to identify and understand what we are experiencing.  Only then can we decide what these feelings mean to us.

When we access the functionality of an experience, we give it meaning.

When we view things as if they were inherently good or bad, seeing them in a polarized way, we are coming from a place of judgment and misunderstanding. 

Despite the fact that forgiveness is challenging, it's essential.  It completes the cycle of suffering, processing feelings, deciding what meaning to give to our experiences, and finally letting go. 

Clarity isn't a single moment of inspiration but a long and winding path that requires many acts of courage along the way -- to see things in new ways, to let go when something isn't serving us, to create change even when we aren't sure how things will turn out.

If we want to heal -- psycho-spiritually from past trauma or current difficulties, or physically from discomfort or disease -- we need to learn how we can make ourselves feel better.

A life of clarity is a life of balance.

Buddhist Boot Camp by Timber Hawkeye

Just as we habitually hoard old birthday cards and souvenirs, bank statements and receipts, clothes, broken appliances and old magazines, we also hang on to pride, anger, outdated opinions and fears.

Dig deep to find the root of your fear.  Only then will you be able to finally let go of it so that fear no longer limits your possibilities.

Your mind is like a spoiled rich kid! You have raised it to think whatever it wants, wherever it wants to and for however long, with no regard for consequences or gratitude.

First things first: stop granting yourself everything you crave.

May we all close the gap between what we believe and how we act in the world. 

Focus on the teachings, not the teacher.

Spiritual practice doesn't make your life longer; it makes it deeper.

Disagreements aren't conflicts unless pride and ego get involved.

Tolerance does Not mean accepting what is harmful.

Scan your mind for viruses called fears, anxieties, judgments, doubts, hatred and despair.

A nine-to-five job is not the only way to spell success.

You never make the same mistake twice. The second time you make it, it's no longer a mistake; it's a choice.

Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City by Tanya Talaga

Nearly half of Ontario's Indigenous communities have a boil water advisory at any given time.

For nearly a century, the Manitoba city of Winnipeg has used an aqueduct to suck away water from the Northwestern Ontario Indigenous community of Shoal Lake 40 to provide the city of nearly 700,000 people with drinking water.  Meanwhile, the water left for the residents of Shoal Lake 40 is laced with bacteria and a boil water advisory has been in place for nearly twenty years.

The Indian Act has been described as a form of apartheid, a piece of legislation designed to control and tame the Indigenous population.  The act has historically outlined every aspect of life for an Indigenous person in Canada.

The Crown used the treaties not only to take land from the Indigenous people, but also to absorb the next generation into Canadian society.

Again, the numbers of kids who were sexually and physically abused will never be truly known.  Only now are survivors coming forward.  As of the end of January 2015, the Independent Assessment Process, created under the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, received 37,951 abuse complaints.  By the end of 2014, 30,939 cases had been settled and $2.69 billion paid out in compensation.

In 1996, the last residential school was finally shut down. About 150,000 children had been sent to these schools, passing down the horror and trauma of the experience to their children, grandchildren, nieces, and nephews.

In traditional Indigenous culture, it was rare for people to take their own lives -- and it was especially rare for children to do so.  From 1986 to 2016, there have been more than five hundred suicides in the Nishnawbe Aski Nation territory alone.  A staggering seventy of these suicides were of children between the ages of ten and fourteen and more than two hundred were youth between the ages of fifteen and twenty.

Meditation in Action by Chӧgyam Rinpoche Trungpa

One fails to see life as it is because one tends so much to build up one's own version of it.

We don't have to search for the answer, because the question contains the answer in it.

You have to start with ego, and use ego, and from there it gradually wears out, like a pair of shoes.

Fear is one of the weapons of ego.  It protects the ego.

The teacher acts as a kind of mirror, the teacher gives back one's own reflection.  Then for the first time,  you are able to see how beautiful you are, or how ugly you are.  

The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali by Swami Vivekananda

The world is the great gymnasium where we come to make ourselves strong.

You are the only sentient being; mind is only the instrument through which you catch the external world.

The Shadow Effect: Illuminating the Hidden Power of Your True Self by Deepak Chopra, Debbie Ford, and Marianne Williamson

Packaged inside every feeling is a tale: “I am this way for a reason”.  Be open to the story that comes out, no matter what it is.  Every past trauma you have ever experienced has deposited its remains in the shadow (emotional debt to the past).  Having heard the story, be accepting.  Tell yourself that you had a valid reason for holding on to negativity.  You have no choice because it was secretly deposited and then remained hidden.  Therefore, you did nothing wrong.  Your old feelings stuck around to protect you from having the same wound repeated.  Make peace with this now. 

The only ones who conquer the shadow don’t fight it; they transcend it.  When you transcend, you go beyond.  In everyday life we transcend all the time.  For example, when a mother sees her young child being cranky and demanding, she doesn’t meet the child on those grounds.  She realizes that he’s tired and needs to sleep.  What has she done?  She has transcended the level of the problem, moving to a different level to find the solution.

Quit labeling, blaming and judging.  Give up fantasies of showing the world that you are right and others are wrong.

Our shadow is everything that annoys, horrifies or disgusts us about other people or about ourselves.  

Why Good Things Happen to Good People by Stephen Post and Jill Neimark

Giving is the one kind of love you can count on, because you can always choose it:  it's always within your power to give.

Giving in high school predicts good physical and mental health all the way into late adulthood.

Teens who volunteer make healthier life choices.

Forgiving others improves health more than being forgiven.

Our first response to harm is to protect ourselves, seek safety, and find ways to conserve our well-being.  Anger, fear, hurt, and resentment are actually emotional coping techniques that help us do just that. 

Understand forgiveness as a form of enlightened self-interest, a gift that you give yourself by learning whatever good lessons you can from an event. 

Apologies heal because they restore self-respect and dignity for both individuals.

Marriage can flourish only if we are giving.

Color: A Practical Guide to Color and Its Uses in Art by Walter Foster

Color is a phenomenon of perception…. Colors are actually wavelengths of light.

Light is the source of all color.

The colors that we see when light strikes an object are the result of certain wavelengths (individual colors) being absorbed by the object while other wavelengths are being reflected back to us.  Those reflected back to us are the colors that we see.

A hue is a color in its purest form, a color plus white is a tint, a color plus gray is a tone, and a color plus black is a shade. 

Just as white is considered the opposite of black, red is the opposite of green.

When used within a work of art, warm colors seem to advance toward the viewer, and cool colors appear to recede into the distance.

To begin understanding how light affects an object, think of it as though it is made up of three basic parts:  lights, local color, and shadows.

The eye processes yellow first.

Violet is the most difficult color for the eye to pick up, because it has the shortest wavelength in the light spectrum. 

During Roman times, it took 4 million crushed mollusk shells to produce one pound of purple pigment.

The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks

When people are not expressing their full potential, they often get illnesses that have vague, hard to diagnose symptoms.

Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy by Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant

Resilience is the strength and speed of our response to adversity.

Recovery does not start from the same place for everyone.

There are two different emotional responses to the pain of others:  empathy, which motivates us to help, and distress, which motivates us to avoid.

Labelling negative emotions makes them easier to deal with.  The more specific the label, the better.

Pueblo Crafts by Ruth Underhill

Pueblo people feel that clay and rocks, like animals and plants, have their own feelings, and that man must live on kindly terms with them. 

In many pueblos, making moccasins for the girl he was to marry came to be the sign of a young man's competence.

Any skinworker already had deer brains boiled and put away.  These were removed as soon as an animal was killed, boiled a short time, then wrapped in cornhusk so they would keep.

30 Essential Yoga Poses by Judith Hanson Lasater

A teacher cannot teach any differently from how she practices.

Midnights With the Mystics: A Little Guide to Freedom and Bliss by Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev and Cheryl Simone

Your body is on loan from the planet.  All the countless numbers of people who have lived on this planet before you and me have all become topsoil, and so will you. This planet will collect back atom by atom what it has loaned to you. 

Love is not what you do. Love is what you are.

The moment your mind says that someone or something is not okay, you cannot love.

If you want to live sensibly and joyfully, it is extremely important that you do not fool yourself. 

There is no you; there is just an accumulated past. 

Who you are right now, your whole personality, everything that you are, is a complex accumulation of your impressions of life itself.  This is like your software.  This is what is referred to as karma.  It is the volume of your impressions.  Everything you have perceived has imprinted itself on your mind and even on your energy.  The very way your body behaves, the very way your energies behave, is a result of the past impressions of your karma. 

If you stop gold plating your limitations, if you stop seeing your shackles as ornaments that you wear and are proud of, then it is very simple and you are on fulltime.  Please see how many deceptive ways you seek support for your limitations from the people around you.

Most people who claim to be adventurous avoid adventure every chance they get.

Life around you will respond and create itself to match the way you are and not the way you or the people around you think you are.  What you think about yourself is existentially irrelevant.

Cultivated devotion is not devotion, just deception.

Without grace nobody really gets anywhere. 

What is really meant instead of “I love you” is “I have some needs I want to fulfill”.

Most people don’t want truth.  They just want solace.