Quotes from Darrell Calkins, Re:

Sometimes I wonder how much of our suffering we allow or impose on ourselves simply in search of our worthiness to accept our own respect and appreciation.

The exact proportion and combination of the qualities within you, as they are, even while you search and struggle for them to be different or better, is a unique beauty.

What you have to do to achieve what you want necessitates the creative actualization of the totality of your being as it is. Nothing more, but also nothing less.

The challenges are illusions, but necessary ones to determine if you can see through them.

Transformation, on the other hand, is creating beauty from horror or destruction (or, for beginners, an actually pleasant evening with the usual family problems).

Laughter has got to be the single healthiest activity one can perform. Just think how healthy you would be if you could sincerely laugh at that which now oppresses you.

Well-being, or wholeness, implies integrity and harmony between all existing elements, providing freedom for the whole.

Getting down to the gym a couple days a week and having low-fat milk in your morning latte isn't going to make much of a dent in a system or lifestyle that is essentially, well, unwell.

Appreciation, affection, focus and intention fill up the space of self-reflection, and one loses oneself in the engagement. And what a relief it is when you get there.

The nature of yearning is urgent so as to guarantee evolution, change.

The essential war within, and the cause of suffering, begins with the presumption that yearning, impulse and curiosity, desire and question, exist so as to end them. To attain, to acquire, to answer.

The subjective experience of intense pain ("That's all I can take") corresponds exactly to one's subjective experience in relation to truth ("That's all I can take").

By its nature, what you yearn for is most often intimidating. It produces, and itself is, a question, and one that is not easy to engage or answer.

My intention is not to define a perfect life and then cause an unhappy analysis of what you are not doing correctly or are incapable of doing.

If you are "playing" too much or "working" too much, you will have a reaction on the other side, which indicates your pace is off, too slow or too fast.

In making a clear distinction between desire (answer) and yearning (question), we inevitably end up back at personal purpose.