LULLABY FOR THE SEEKER

“The woman you are becoming will cost you people, relationships, spaces, and material things. Choose her over everything.”

“The most intimate thing we can do is to allow people we love most to see us at our worst. At our lowest. At our weakest. True intimacy happens when nothing is perfect.”

“I like being alone. Therefore, in order to win me over, your presence has to feel better than my solitude.”

“I wonder how much of what weighs me down is not mine to carry.”

“If you want to go all the way, throw all away. And right there, there is a joy, a freedom and lightness. Strip everything back to nothing. Throw your attachments, your desires, your needs and immediately you are in a state of total freshness, total wholeness. Every human being should do this once in a while. The earnest seeker develops this unsparing attitude to free their minds from the cholesterol of egoic identity. Be in that emptiness and you see that emptiness is completeness. And the more you do it, the more you enjoy the effortlessness of it all. Now, ignore the voice of the interpreter, the journalist, the accountant or the mathematician and in a short while, you won’t want him back. If you want to go all the way, throw all away.”

“One of the most amazing things that can happen is finding someone who sees everything you are and won’t let you be anything less. They see the potential of you. They see endless possibilities. And through their eyes, you start to see yourself the same way. As someone who matters. As someone who can make a difference in this world.”

“Here we just sit quietly opening our heart so that the old story we carry, the old habit of grasping at who and what we are, can be seen, accepted and finally released harmlessly into the universe. Now we are no longer a victim to those old voices and conditioning and so, whatever we meet in the mind, whatever thought mood feeling emotion, whatever idea, mental projection into the future or memory of past deeds, is absolutely perfect in this moment. We don’t have to get rid of anything, or create something different, something spiritual, to experience. In this place, life is just life in the most beautiful way. The complaining mind falls quiet and things are seen to be only what they are, not good or bad, right or wrong, but events happening in time and space. We can interact or not. We can choose our response to each moment knowing that whatever we do will resonate with the pure hearted beings or not. Do not think that you are not seen by the pure in heart. You are known by the thoughts you empower, love or fear, compassion or greed, generosity or selfishness. The moment we free ourselves from the narrow limitations of the mind that is always chasing the next moment of happiness, we are free, and in that freedom we will see that whatever this old voice says, everything is perfect. May all beings live in peace, may all beings be happy.”

“When we are pushed and pulled in many different directions, we lose our sovereignty. We’re not free. Don’t allow yourself to be carried away anymore. Resist. Each mindful step is a step toward freedom.”

““In a room with forty people, there are forty different universes. Each one of us sits at the center of our universe. Because it is a universe that we have created, we believe in it. The problem is that each of us views our individual universe from our own particular little time and space, and our universes do not always coincide, so frictions develop.””

“Tell everyone you know: “My happiness depends on me, so you’re off the hook.” And then demonstrate it. Be happy, no matter what they’re doing. Practice feeling good, no matter what. And before you know it, you will not give anyone else responsibility for the way you feel-and then, you’ll love them all. Because the only reason you don’t love them, is because you’re using them as your excuse to not feel good.”

“Sometimes you need to distance yourself and create alone time so you can really discover what you want out of life.”

Perhaps most of all, though, you deserve to be okay. You deserve to know that a day in which you can just barely get out of bed because you are sad, or sick, or simply not ready to see the outside is not the end of the world. You deserve to know that moments of weakness do not make you fundamentally weak, only fundamentally human, and that sometimes we’re not going to be effusively happy, and that is okay.