Quotes About Presence

Making one's life into a meditation is different from using meditation to escape from life.

I began to think that there was something awesome about my timing. How was it that, at the exact moment of my stopping, such incredible things were happening? It took me longer than I am prepared to admit to realize that such things were always happening. It was only that I was finally paying attention.

After five minutes, or ten, or fifteen—it doesn't matter—open your eyes and resume your day. For a moment or two things might seem more alive.

the sense that there is an accessible vitality, present from birth, underlying our accrued personalities.

People disappear, leaving only bodies that flicker on and off in beds in time with the steady toggle of the dark.

It sounds like white noise everywhere, which is like silcence but not empty.

Her eyes showed that though she may have decided to regret him, as long as he was in her presence she could not.

Anywhere - and, it follows, nowhere - can be a place. As long as we are there, to think and talk, to listen and respond. The world, once conscious of itself in the form of human making, is a vast concert hall. What sounds there is not the divine music of celestial spheres, as the ancient Greek mathematicians believed, but the sound of one human after another issuing the daily plea: to be heard, to be understood, to be accommodated.

inhaling the sparkling light until there was no distinction between the radiance of the air freshener and myself

It seems that intuitive listening requires us to still our minds until the beauty of things older than our minds can find us.

Memories are not images of loved ones returning to us. They are the spirits of loved ones visiting us.

we may spend much of our time unaware and unenlightened, yet the presence of Truth and God, like a deep and ancient friend, can shape our entire lives. So the inner task becomes how do we make a lasting friendship with the Unities that are larger than us? How do we keep their light in our heart when no stars appear in sight?

Kindness is the antidote to everything. Just as water soothes fire, kindness calms how we burn each other from time to time. And under all the ways we burn and hurt, there's the soft and lasting presence we were born with, waiting to blossom in the midst of any trouble.

Breathe like a fallen leaf and think of nothing. Just breathe and let your heart and mind be carried, however briefly, by the spirit you can't quite see.

Live Humble as a Dog Live humble as a dog and the world will come alive in your mouth.

Now, I want only to give away all that I'm blessed to know and disappear in the stream.

The gift of patience opens when our body, heart, and mind slow enough to move in unison.

Whatever is held and listened to will show us where it lives in the world and in us.

My own time on earth has led me to believe in two powerful instruments that turn experience into love: holding and listening. For every time I have held or been held, every time I have listened or been listened to, experience burns like wood in that eternal fire and I find myself in the presence of love.

COMING OUT While there is much to do we are not here to do.   Under the want to problem-solve is the need to being-solve.   Often, with full being the problem goes away.   The seed being-solves its darkness by blossoming.   The heart being-solves its loneliness by loving whatever it meets.   The tea being-solves the water by becoming tea.

Once waking into the realization that eternity is waiting in every moment, I discovered that wealth is time, not money.

We cannot hold on to things and enter. We must put down what we carry, open the door, and then take up only what we need to bring inside.

We are so achievement-oriented that we often surge right by the true value of relating to what's before us, because we think that accomplishing things will complete us, when it is experiencing life that will.

Stop talking, stop thinking, and there is nothing you will not understand. —SENG-TS'AN