heartsteps

What a luxury to have a year to live! With 250,000 people dying each day and knowing we are somewhere down that line, who has time to put life aside? We prepare for death by living every second, living life minutely, exploring our body and mind with a merciful awareness. To be this close to the moment in which our life is unfolding we need to cultivate a deeper awareness through the development of a meditation practice.

Awareness is itself a healing quality. Where awareness is focused the deepest potentials for clarity and balance present themselves. Though what we are aware of may be incessantly changing, awareness itself remains a constant, a luminous spaciousness without beginning or end, without birth or death. It is the essence of life itself. It is what remains when all that is impermanent falls away. It is the deathless.

Stephen Levine

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

Marianne Williamson

Not
Christian or Jew or
Muslim, not Hindu, Buddhist, Sufi, or Zen.
Not any religion

Or cultural system. I am
not from the east
or the west. Not
out of the ocean or up

from the ground, not
natural or ethereal, not
composed of elements at all.
I do not exist,

am not an entity in this
world or next,
did not descend from
Adam and Eve or any

origin story. My place is
the placeless, a trace
of the traceless,
neither body or soul.

I belong to the beloved,
have seen the two worlds as one and
that one
call to and know,

first, last, outer, inner
only that breath breathing
Human being.

Rumi

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Derek Walcott

In the point of rest at the centre of our being, we encounter a world where all things are at rest in the same way. Then a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud a revelation, each man a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses. The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable.

Dag Hammarskjold

“I want to know the mind of God,” Einstein said. “The rest are details.” What is the mind of God? Consciousness. What does it mean to know the mind of God? To be aware. What are the details? Your outer purpose, and whatever happens outwardly.

So while you are still waiting for something significant in your life, you may not realize that the most significant thing that can happen to a human being has already happened within you: the beginning of the separation process of thinking and awareness.

Many people who are going through the early stages of the awakening process are no longer certain what their outer purpose is. What drives the world no longer drives them. Seeing the madness of our civilization so clearly, they may feel somewhat alienated from the culture around them. Some feel that they inhabit a no-man’s-land between two worlds. They are no longer run by the ego, yet the arising awareness has not yet become fully integrated into their lives. Inner and outer purpose have not merged.

Eckhart Tolle

Love brings us into the right relations with all persons and all things; love removes inharmony, perverted feelings. obstacles, barriers and all kinds of unnatural conditions, and produces that one perfect oneness through which the beautiful life can come forth. He who has placed himself in oneness with man can easily find his unity with God; but no one can find God who does not love man. When we love the whole race with the whole heart, then we can enter the presence of Him who is love.

Christian Larson

You are the heart, you are the hands
You are the voice of Spirit on Earth
And who you are, and all you do, is a blessing to the world.

We are the heart, we are the hands
We are the voice of Spirit on Earth
And who we are, and all we do, is a blessing to the world.

I am the heart, I am the hands
I am the voice of Spirit on Earth
And who I am, and all I do, is a blessing to the world.

Karen Drucker

“Self-awareness alone is not enough, for this
reason: There is an incessant urge back of
everything to create, to express life, to come to
the gratification of happiness, peace, joy, and
self-expression. Self- awareness is not enough. It
is merely clearing the track for right action.
Something has to be done with self-awareness. We are
not seeking a way to escape from life or living, for
this would be the exact opposite of the whole
purpose of existence, which is to express the self.
We have hands and feet as well as a mind, and,
unless the hands and feet are employed together with
all our other faculties, we shall not come into
complete self-expression.”

Dr. Ernest Holmes