Quotes About Balance

family must be both differentiated and integrated. Differentiation means that each person is encouraged to develop his or her unique traits, maximize personal skills, set individual goals. Integration, in contrast, guarantees that what happens to one person will affect all others.

Poets make much of the majestic eagle soaring freely among the snowy peaks. But the eyes of the eagle are generally focused on the ground, searching for rodents lurking in the shadows. The lives of much of humanity could be summed up in similar terms. Let

Pleasure is an important component of the quality of life, but by itself it does not bring happiness.

The task is to learn how to enjoy everyday life without diminishing other people's chances to enjoy theirs.

Sleep, rest, food, and sex provide restorative homeostatic experiences that return consciousness to order after the needs of the body intrude and cause psychic entropy to occur. But they do not produce psychological growth. They do not add complexity to the self. Pleasure helps to maintain order, but by itself cannot create new order in consciousness.

Entropy is the normal state of consciousness—a condition that is neither useful nor enjoyable. To

Holistic medicine and such books as Norman Cousins's account of his successful fight against terminal illness and Dr. Bernie Siegel's descriptions of self-healing are beginning to redress the abstractly materialist view of health that has become so prevalent in this century.

Whether we are happy depends on inner harmony, not on the controls we are able to exert over the great forces of the universe

When there are too many demands, options, challenges, we become anxious; when too few, we get bored.

the control of consciousness determines the quality of life

The fathers of the Church well understood that infatuation with the pleasures of the flesh could easily drain psychic energy away from other goals.

that the control of consciousness determines the quality of life

This simple truth—that the control of consciousness determines the quality of life—has been known for a long time; in fact, for as long as human records exist.

People who learn to enjoy their work, who do not waste their free time, end up feeling that their lives as a whole have become much more worthwhile. "The future," wrote C. K. Brightbill, "will belong not only to the educated man, but to the man who is educated to use his leisure wisely.

Even the most highly respected physicist, artist, or politician becomes a hollow bore and ceases to enjoy life if all he can interest himself in is his limited role in the universe.

Although, as we have seen, people generally long to leave their places of work and get home, ready to put their hard-earned free time to good use, all too often they have no idea what to do there.

The purpose of the flow is to keep on flowing, not looking for a peak or utopia but staying in the flow.

Even the most highly respected physicist, artist, or politician becomes a hollow bore and ceases to enjoy life if all he can interest himself in is his limited role in the universe. 4.

Hay tantas cosas de las que debemos preocuparnos y tan poco tiempo para atenderlas todas…

As Democritus said so simply many centuries ago: "Water can be both good and bad, useful and dangerous. To the danger, however, a remedy has been found: learning to swim." To swim in this case involves learning to distinguish the useful and the harmful forms of flow, and then making the most of the former while placing limits on the latter. The task is to learn how to enjoy everyday life without diminishing other people's chances to enjoy theirs.

Unless consumed in highly skilled ritual contexts, as is practiced in many traditional societies, what drugs in fact do is reduce our perception of both what can be accomplished and what we as individuals are able to accomplish, until the two are in balance. This

There are no strict formulas, however, for how much time people actually have to work. It seems, for instance, that the early hunter-gatherers, like their present-day descendants living in the inhospitable deserts of Africa and Australia, spent only three to five hours each day on what we would call working—providing for food, shelter, clothing, and tools. They spent the rest of the day in conversation, resting, or dancing.

One of the most basic delusions of our time is that home life takes care of itself naturally, and that the best strategy for dealing with it is to relax and let it take its course.

The problem arises when people are so fixated on what they want to achieve that they cease to derive pleasure from the present. When that happens, they forfeit their chance of contentment.