May I be at peace.
May my heart remain open.
May I know the beauty of my own true nature.
May I be healed.
May I be a source of healing in the world.

—Tibetan prayer

"In Tibet we say that many illnesses can be cured by the one medicine of love and compassion."

—Dalai Lama

"Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them."

—Henry David Thoreau

"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."

—AnaÏs Nin

"I have to sing it my way. I don't know any other way."

—Billie Holiday

"True yoga is not about the shape of your body, but the shape of your life. Yoga is not to be performed; yoga is to be lived. Yoga doesn’t care about what you have been; yoga cares about the person you are becoming. Yoga is designed for a vast and profound purpose, and for it to be truly called yoga, its essence must be embodied."

—Aadil Palkhivala, preface of Fire of Love

"Our lives are really full. Unless yoga is causing a shift in our life, it is one more drain [on our energy]. How can we make yoga count?"

"We cannot do yoga if we are holding the burden of the world on our shoulders," he said. "Most of you are extremely heavy."

"Knowledge changes nothing"

—Aadil Palkhivala

"One of the best mantras is WOW. It breaks your conditioned responses."

"Why are we so sure of our limitations?"

"Once you find the truth, no one can hurt you. You can let them off the hook. That is hard! Until then, keep distance, preserve the peace. Eventually it’s like you weren’t hurt."

—Erich Schiffmann

ENOUGH

Enough. these few words are enough
If not these words, this breath.
If not this breath, this sitting here.

This opening to the life
We have refused
Again and again
Until now.

Until now

SELF-PORTRAIT

It doesn't interest me if there is one God
or many gods
I want to know if you belong or feel
abandoned,
if you can know despair or see it in others.
I want to know
if you are prepared to live in the world
with its harsh need
to change you. If you can look back
with firm eyes,
saying this is where I stand. I want to know
if you know
how to melt into that fierce heat of living,
falling toward
the center of your longing. I want to know
if you are willing
to live, day by day, with the consequence of love
and the bitter
unwanted passion of your sure defeat.

I have heard, in that fierce embrace, even the gods speak of God.

WHAT TO REMEMBER WHEN WAKING

In that first
hardly noticed
moment
in which you wake,
coming back
to this life
from the other
more secret,
moveable
and frighteningly
honest
world
where everything
began,
there is a small
opening
into the day
which closes
the moment
you begin
your plans.

What you can plan
is too small
for you to live

What you can live
wholeheartedly
will make plans
enough
for the vitality
hidden in your sleep.

THE HOUSE OF BELONGING

I awoke
this morning
in the gold light
turning this way
and that

thinking for
a moment
it was one
day
like any other.

But
the veil had gone
from my
darkened heart
and
I thought

it must have been the quiet
candlelight
that filled my room,

it must have been
the first
easy rhythm
with which I breathed
myself to sleep,

it must have been
the prayer I said
speaking to the otherness
of the night.

And
I thought
this is the good day
you could
meet your love,

this is the black day
someone close
to you could die.

This is the day
you realize
how easily the thread
is broken
between this world
and the next

and I found myself
sitting up
in the quiet pathway
of light,

the tawny
close grained cedar
burning round
me like fire
and all the angels of this housely
heaven ascending
through the first
roof of light
the sun has made.

This is the bright home
in which I live,
this is where
I ask
my friends
to come,
this is where I want
to love all the things
it has taken me so long
to learn to love

This is the temple
of my adult aloneness
and I belong
to that aloneness
as I belong to my life.

There is no house
like the house of belonging.

—David Whyte

"Don't surrender your loneliness / So quickly. / Let it cut more deeply. / Let it ferment and season you / As few human / Or even divine ingredients can."

—Hafez, poet (1315-1390)

"The only true injury in life occurs by going into an experience and not being able to find the love in it."

—Martia Nelson, Coming Home

"Thoroughly unprepared, we take the step into the afternoon of life. Worse still, we take this step with the false presupposition that our truths and our ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life's morning, for what was great in the morning will be little at evening and what in the morning was true, at evening will have become a lie."

—Carl Gustav Jung

"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you've imagined."

—Thoreau

"The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience."

—Eleanor Roosevelt

"Be the change you wish to see in the world."

—Gandhi

"Never let the odds keep you from doing what you know in your heart you were meant to do!"

—H. Jackson Brown Jr.

"Whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should..."

—Max Ehrmann