Inspire

"Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be."

-RW Emerson

Rewards for facing the fear of being alone

"1. A deeper consciousness of oneself.
2. A deeper attunement to nature.
3. A deeper relationship with the transcendent (the numinous, the divine, the spiritual).
4. Increased creativity.
5. An increased sense of freedom."

-Sara Maitland

Love's greatest killer

"Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It creates the failures. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds onto you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic."

-Anais Nin

No spiritual epiphany

It just is, and it's great.

A consumer's awakened heart

“One sign of the moral confusion in our market-driven society is that people have the tendency to elevate consumer and lifestyle choices into matters of high moral drama, leading to overblown talk of ‘moral imperatives.’ Tortuous analysis of one’s thoughts and actions produces a facsimile of moral seriousness that is pleasing to the ego, but it is no substitute for the wisdom and compassion that arise from the awakened heart.”

-Randall Ryotan Eiger; The Slow Burn

Balance

"To live in the realm of Buddha nature means to die as a small being, moment after moment. When we lose our balance we die, but at the same time we also develop ourselves, we grow. Whatever we see is changing, losing its balance. The reason everything looks beautiful is because it is out of balance, but its background is always in perfect harmony. This is how everything exists in the realm of Buddha nature, losing its balance against a background of perfect balance. So if you see things without realizing the background of Buddha nature, everything appears to be in the form of suffering. But if you understand the background of existence, you realize that suffering itself is how we live, and how we extend our life. So in Zen sometimes we emphasize the imbalance or disorder of life."

-Shunryu Suzuki; Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind