“Ultimately, it is not the circumstances in life that affect us, but how we choose to perceive those circumstances.”
Source: Awake to What Is: Discovering Peace in the Present Moment
“It is our perception—of ourselves and of reality—that determines our experience.”
Source: Awake to What Is: Discovering Peace in the Present Moment
“We do not need an ashram or church, some secret initiation, a guru’s blessing, or an intentional community. As helpful or supportive as those may be at times, ultimately, what we need is the willingness to look at ourselves honestly, to feel what emotions lie within us, to acknowledge our thoughts and actions, to choose to be aware of what we ignore or suppress, and to let go of what limits and distracts us so we can open ourselves fully to the truth of life in this moment.”
Source: Awake to What Is: Discovering Peace in the Present Moment
“The way that we experience reality is determined by how our mind perceives reality.”
Source: Awake to What Is: Discovering Peace in the Present Moment
“Our perception of reality is not reality itself, but it is the lens through which we view reality. It is like looking outside through a stained-glass window—if we look through red glass, the outside world will appear to be red; if we look through blue glass, the outside world will appear to be blue. The outside world isn’t changing, we are just observing it through different colors of glass, which make it appear to have the same color as whatever color glass that we look through.”
Source: Awake to What Is: Discovering Peace in the Present Moment
“All human beings throughout the world are conditioned. It is an obvious and undeniable fact.
Yet, many of us are unaware of this fact of our conditioning. We are unaware of the ways in which our culture influences our minds and shapes our perception of reality. We do not realize that most of our thoughts, opinions, and beliefs are not really our own, but were simply inherited by our family and the society that we were raised in.”
Source: Awake to What Is: Discovering Peace in the Present Moment
“We all have only one true emotional need as human beings, and that is the need to feel loved. The majority of our actions aim towards this goal in one way or another. We seek relationships, we seek fame or success, we act (or don’t act) in certain ways simply because we feel the need to be accepted, the need to be recognized, the need to feel loved. This is a very powerful thing to realize.”
Source: Awake to What Is: Discovering Peace in the Present Moment
“It is actually not the objective circumstances that determine whether an event is traumatic, it is our interpretation, our subjective emotional experience of the event.”
Source: Awake to What Is: Discovering Peace in the Present Moment
“The psychological suffering of human beings on such a mass scale manifests as the physical suffering we see and experience in the world today. It is ignorant to objectify this suffering as if it were something outside of us, belonging only to the world and to those unfortunate beings who experience it. It is within each one of us, and to acknowledge our suffering is the only way to start to heal it, and by healing the suffering within ourselves, we help to heal the suffering of the world.”
Source: Awake to What Is: Discovering Peace in the Present Moment
“By healing the suffering within ourselves, we help to heal the suffering of the world.”
Source: Awake to What Is: Discovering Peace in the Present Moment