Quotes About Growth

I'm sure there will continue to be exciting new products and major changes, but it looks as if the existing technology has a great deal of room to grow and prosper.

As you become more intimate with your suffering, your heart grows tender.

Being on a spiritual path does not prevent you from facing times of darkness. But it teaches you how to use the darkness as a tool to grow.

The heart is like a garden. It can grow compassion or fear, resentment or love. What seeds will you plant there?

As we follow a genuine path of practice, our sufferings may seem to increase because we no longer hide from them or from ourselves. When we do not follow the old habits of fantasy and escape, we are left facing the actual problems and contradictions of our life.

One famous Zen master actually described spiritual practice as "one mistake after another," which is to say, one opportunity after another to learn. It is from "difficulties, mistakes, and errors" that we actually learn. To live life is to make a succession of errors. Understanding this can bring us great ease and forgiveness for ourselves and others—we are at ease with the difficulties of life.

The poet Hafiz writes, Don't surrender your loneliness So quickly. Let it cut more deep. Let it ferment and season you As few human Or even divine ingredients can.

Anger shows us precisely where we are stuck, where our limits are, where we cling to beliefs and fears.

To meditate is to discover new possibilities, to awaken the capacities of us has to live more wisely, more lovingly, more compassionately, and more fully.

The adult brain and nervous system grow and change throughout our lives. Until the very end, we are neurologically transformed by whatever we practice. We are not limited by the past.

We need to learn how to honor and use a practice for as long as it serves us—which in most cases is a very long time—but to look at it as just that, a vehicle, a raft to help us cross through the waters of doubt, confusion, desire, and fear.

Acceptance is not passivity. It is a courageous step in the process of transformation.

You can pick all the flowers but you can't stop the spring. —PABLO NERUDA

The basic principle of spiritual life is that our problems become the very place to discover wisdom and love. With

Accumulated knots in the fabric of our body, previously undetected, begin to reveal themselves as we open.

The place where we can most directly open to the mystery of life is in what we don't do well, in the places of our struggles and vulnerability. These places always require surrender and letting go: When we let ourselves become vulnerable, new things can be born in us. In risking the unknown we gain a sense of life itself. And most remarkably, that which we have sought is often just here, buried under the problem and the weakness itself.

Our belief in a limited and impoverished identity is such a strong habit that without it we are afraid we wouldn't know how to be.

No amount of meditation, yoga, diet, and reflection will make all of our problems go away, but we can transform our difficulties into our practice until little by little they guide us on our way.

There are several different kinds of painful feelings that we might experience, and learning to distinguish and relate to these feelings of discomfort or pain is an important part of meditation practice, because it is one of the very first things that we open to as our practice develops.

Being an artist means ripening like a tree which . . . stands confidently in the storm of winter not afraid that summer may not come. It always comes.

sorrow or a wound can heal, allowing us to grow into our fullest, most compassionate identity, our greatness of heart. When we truly come to terms with sorrow, a great and unshakable joy is born in our heart. HEALING

Notice when you are open, how others relax their own defensiveness. Let yourself be curious, loving, and concerned. Learn to see in new ways. It's never too late to open your heart and mind.

As we follow a genuine path of practice, our sufferings may seem to increase because we no longer hide from them or from ourselves. When we do not follow the old habits of fantasy and escape, we are left facing the actual problems and contradictions of our life. A

Fear is the membrane between what we know and something new. It tells us we are about to open to something bigger than the world we usually experience.