The key to knowing joy is being easily pleased.
When we heal ourselves, we heal the world.
Our job is not to expose the mystery but to participate in it.
The mystery is that whoever shows up when we dare to give has exactly what we need hidden in their trouble.
Each of us is born with an incorruptible spot of grace.
Let the miracles, even the ones we don’t want or see, unfold.
The resource of life is everywhere, even in the smallest of things and we’re never very far from it.
For being human, we remember and forget. We stray and return, fall down and get up, and cling and let go, again and again. But it is this straying and returning that makes life interesting, this clinging and letting go – damned as it is – that exercises the heart.
The practice of listening is one of the most mysterious, luminous, and challenging art forms on Earth.
When we don’t get what we want, there’s a legitimate grieving, and then the spiritual journey truly begins, because not getting what we want breaks our self-reference; and once that is broken, we are aware that we are a part of a larger whole. It changes everything.
To listen is to continually give up all expectation and to give our attention, completely and freshly, to what is before us, not really knowing what we will hear or what that will mean. In the practice of our days, to listen is to lean in, softly, with a willingness to be changed by what we hear.
I had over twenty years ago damaged the cilia in my ears. This has taught me many things. One thing I learned, paradoxically, is that there is much to be heard in silence.
Tragedy stays alive by feeling what’s been done to us, while peace comes alive by living with the results.
Part of the blessing and challenge of being human is that we must discover our own true nature.
In the same way that we have to clean wax from our ears and dirt from our eyes, we’re all asked to clean out our conclusions and judgments, which block our heart from meeting the world.
In a world where the great technologies enable us to record, replay, cut and paste, zoom in, and delete, listening is the crucial commitment to keep the heart touchable.
Everything in life opens and closes, sheds and renews. We are no different. Listening in its endless forms is the way we stay open, the way we stay in relationship, the way we refresh who we are and what we’re doing here.
The sun doesn’t stop shining because some people are blind.
Rather than finding heaven on earth, we are asked to release heaven by living on earth.
The life of expression is the tuning fork by which we find our way to the sacred.