“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
“We often do not experience reality directly as it is, but rather we impose our own mental concepts and illusions onto reality, and then react to our own projections as if they were true.”
Source: Awake to What Is: Discovering Peace in the Present Moment
“If you have ever watched a football game, you will likely recall that while the game is being played, there is a commentator who is narrating the plays of the game and making interpretations. Our thoughts are just like this. In our mind, we have the direct experience and we have the commentator that narrates and describes our direct experience.
The commentator of a football game isn’t really necessary, and he doesn’t affect the activity of the game in any way. He is just describing the game to the audience, and doing so from his perspective, with his own opinions, based on his mood, memory, education, past experiences and so on. In ourselves, the commentator is also unnecessary, and does not change the experience that it is commenting on. It merely describes it from its own biased perspective, with its own opinions, based on its mood, memory, education, past experiences, and so on.
Our problem is that we have mistaken the comments of the commentator for the reality that is being commented on. We have confused our own identity as being that of the commentator, and we believe that what is being described is actually the truth of reality.”
Source: Awake to What Is: Discovering Peace in the Present Moment