“Humans are wired to avoid discomfort. Social science calls it threat rigidity: when safety feels threatened, empathy contracts, moral concern narrows, and hierarchy feels stabilizing. Complexity becomes intolerable, and disconnection is rewarded. This is why numbness spreads so easily. Systems survive by keeping people disengaged, indifferent, and dissociated.
Your choice to stay present interrupts that pattern. {Staying present is yoga, is meditation.} Every time you notice injustice without looking away. Every time you feel discomfort, without dissociating. Every time you respond from your full capacity rather than autopilot — you are intervening in the system itself. {Meditation is a radical act. It goes against the grain–viloma.}
You don’t have to fix everything. You don’t have to perform. You just have to stay human. That presence is repair. That presence is resistance. That presence makes injustice harder to justify than avoidance.” –Greg Wieting
“I meditate because
life is too short and sitting slows it down.
I meditate because life is too long
and I need an occasional break.
Sometimes I meditate
because my heart is breaking.
Sometimes I meditate
so that my heart will break.
I meditate because
I’m composed of 100 trillion cells,
and from time to time
I need to reassure them that we’re all in this together.”
—Wes Scoop Nisker
“Allow emotions, all longings, to show themselves. They cannot harm you. What creates harm is the mind turning the feelings into thoughts and stories. Watch the stories that you spin. Like a spider spinning a web, the mind creates traps for the heart. When you are longing for love, see if you are loving, being love. When you are longing for love, fall into love. Not in love. Into love. Desire for what you do not have is the nature of desire. Loving what you have is the nature of enlightenment. Desire is fine, human, natural and has a divine element. As does longing. Let your heart break. You will see what lies inside. You need nothing more than to reside with what is. What is may feel like the absence of peace. So reside in that. And peace will reveal itself as the heart of all that is manifest.” –Unknown
“Let’s talk about your comeback. All the times you fell and got back up. Let’s talk about the lessons. All the hurt you turned into healing. Let’s talk about the version of you that you haven’t met yet and all the versions of you that helped get you where you are now. Let’s talk about your survival, all the things sent to break you, and you barely flinched. Let’s talk about all of the times you doubted yourself—how you used the pieces of those moments to build yourself back up into the most certain thing you’ve ever known. You dove straight into the chaos and came out holding nothing—but peace. You—unbreakable, beautiful, strong, fierce, and brave, I see you and every version of you that carried you here. I see all of you. Let’s talk about how far you’ve come and how you’re still standing.” —Stephanie B. Henry
“You only have your mind. It’s the basis of everything you experience. It is YOU in each moment. To understand it deeply, not as a matter of theory, but to directly recognize how consciousness is, prior to thinking, reacting, or trying to change your experience in any way at all, can be the most important thing you ever learn to do. It is the most important thing I’ve ever learned in my life. There is only a choice of noticing what is arising in your mind in each moment and not noticing. And to not notice is to be merely lived by these thoughts, intentions, moods, and assumptions. And this, in turn, determines your behavior in the world, the goals to which you aspire, and the quality of your relationships. Your mind affects not only your life but those of everyone around you. Each of us affects far many more people than we tend to realize.” —Sam Harris
“I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. …Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.” Oliver Sacks
