Now if a teacher gives you a practice, he or she would perhaps point out when you don’t need it anymore or you realize yourself when you don’t need it anymore.
Is there a difference between happiness and inner peace? Yes. Happiness depends on conditions being perceived as positive; inner peace does not.
Being at ease with not knowing is crucial for answers to come to you.
Pick up any history book, and I suggest you begin with studying the 20th century, and you will find that a large part of the history of our species has all the characteristics we would normally associate with a nightmare or an insane hallucination.
Personally, I don’t teach practices as such. The power of the teaching is sufficient without needing to go for any practice.
When you live in complete acceptance of what is, that is the end of all drama in your life.
Accepting means you allow yourself to feel whatever it is you are feeling at that moment. It is part of the isness of the Now. You can’t argue with what is. Well, you can, but if you do, you suffer.
Actually, the ability to choose presence depends on the degree of presence that’s emerging in you. Ultimately, you are not choosing, there’s nobody there to choose. When you think you are choosing, presence is simply emerging in that moment.
Surrendering only refers to this moment, whatever “is” at this moment – to accept unconditionally and fully whatever arises at this moment.
Look at a tree, a flower, a plant. Let your awareness rest upon it. How still they are, how deeply rooted in Being. Allow nature to teach you stillness.
You get there by realizing you are already there.
The whole world accepts that being stressed is the normal way to live.
Pay more attention to the silence than to the sounds. Paying attention to outer silence creates inner silence: the mind becomes still. A portal is opening up.
Ego means self-identification with thinking, to be trapped in thought, which means to have a mental image of “me” based on thought and emotions. So ego is there in the absence of a witnessing presence.
If small things have the power to disturb you, then who you think you are is exactly that: small.
When you go deeply into the present, gratitude arises spontaneously, even if it’s just gratitude for breathing, gratitude for the aliveness that you feel in your body. Gratitude is there when you acknowledge the aliveness of the present moment.
Gratefulness for what is there is one of the most powerful tools for creating what is not yet there. What does gratefulness mean? It means you appreciate what is. You value, you give attention to, you honor whatever is here at this moment.
All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.
One could say that everybody in this world has a spiritual teacher. For most people, their losses and disasters represent the teacher; their suffering is the teacher.
Whenever you step out of the noise of thinking, that is meditation, and a different state of consciousness arises.