“We dress up every day as if we were going to a masquerade, clothed in our bravado and our beliefs.  Seeing our own play-acting, we can change.  We can begin to sense what is going on beneath the words, free ourselves of automatic responses, and react authentically.”  don Miguel Ruiz

“Understanding impermanence can give us confidence, peace and joy. Impermanence does not necessarily lead to suffering.  Without impermanence, life could not be. … It is not impermanence that makes us suffer.  What makes us suffer is wanting things to be permanent when they are not.” Thich Nhat Hanh

“In the way we practice, we don’t say, ‘Hell is bad and heaven is good’ or ‘Get rid of hell and just seek heaven,’ but we encourage ourselves to develop an open heart and an open mind to heaven, hell, to everything.”  Pema Chödrön

“If you know you’re dreaming, can you continue to dream? That’s what the soul does – the soul appreciates that it’s a dream and that it contains the ego.  If you push away the ego, if you cultivate an aversion to that dream, you’re never going to be free because there will be an attachment.”  Ram Dass

“The universe is made up of experiences that are designed to burn out our reactivity, which is our attachments, our clinging — to pain, to pleasure, to fear, to all of it. And as long as there are places where we’re vulnerable, the universe will find ways to confront us with them.  That’s the way the dance is designed.”   Ram Dass

“What if we could recognize our faults and look to see what is beyond them? What if we could see, with great tenderness, the painful unmet needs that have shaped our behaviors?  For many of us, this process is the work of a lifetime…  Yet it begins the moment that we are willing to look at ourselves through the eyes of compassion.”   Tara Brach

“What we must come to understand is that awareness in the present is the only starting point and that this starting point is at the same time the point of arrival.”   Jean Klein

“Not every man with a heart is understanding, nor every man with an ear a listener, and nor every man with eyes able to see.”   Ali ibn Abi Talib

“When we silence the mind long enough to hear the heart song of our soul, the mind discovers its rightful place and no longer creates more suffering in the world.  It is only a mind that has not yet met the soul (or its higher Self) that cannot be trusted.”   Eileen Workman

“The mind will find myriad reasons to avoid the hard work of change, because it sometimes imagines its own role is to figure out what to do, rather than to problem-solve for the best way to perform the soul’s intentions, which are already set.”  Eileen Workman