“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
The world is a beautiful place to be born into if you don’t mind happiness not always being so very much fun if you don’t mind a touch of hell now and then just when everything is fine because even in heaven they don’t sing all the time The world is a beautiful place to be born into if you don’t mind some people dying all the time or maybe only starving some of the time which isn’t half so bad if it isn’t you Oh the world is a beautiful place to be born into if you don’t much mind a few dead minds in the higher places or a bomb or two now and then in your upturned faces or such other improprieties as our Name Brand society is prey to with its men of distinction and its men of extinction and its priests and other patrolmen and its various segregations and congressional investigations and other constipations that our fool flesh is heir to Yes the world is the best place of all for a lot of such things as making the fun scene and making the love scene and making the sad scene and singing low songs of having inspirations and walking around looking at everything and smelling flowers and goosing statues and even thinking and kissing people and making babies and wearing pants and waving hats and dancing and going swimming in rivers on picnics in the middle of the summer and just generally ‘living it up’ Yes but then right in the middle of it comes the smiling mortician
“It all boils down to this: That all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied together into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. We are made to live together because of the interrelated structure of reality. Before you finish eating breakfast in the morning, you’ve depended on more than half the world. This is the way our universe is structured, this is its interrelated quality.
We aren’t going to have peace on Earth until we recognize the basic fact of the interrelated structure of reality.” Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.
“I was no longer needing to be special because I was no longer so caught in my puny separateness that had to keep proving I was something. I was part of the universe like a tree is, or like grass is, or like water is. Like storms, like roses, I was just part of it all.” Ram Dass
Pose of The Week:
The Buddhist goddess Kuan Yin is the perfection of compassion, mercy and kindness and is often shown sitting in the “Posture of Royal Ease.” This posture is more of a “bhava” than asana and brings about an immediate state of grace, dignity and confidence. While there are many different spellings for the world Kuan (Guan, Kwan) Yin is always spelt the same and in this context means one who hears, who observes the cries of humanity. This week we did the Posture of Royal ease as a means for getting into Anantasana (Vishnu’s Couch Pose.) Kuan Yin was originally depicted as a man in China but later morphed into a female goddess. Most images of Kuan Yin are actually gender-neutral.