The power to choose, to respond, to change

“Everything you have in life can be taken from you except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation. This is what determines the quality of the life we’ve lived — not whether we’ve been rich or poor, famous or unknown, healthy or suffering. What determines our quality of life is how we relate to these realities,what kind of meaning we assign them, what kind of attitude we cling to about them, what state of mind we allow them to trigger.”

– Viktor Frankl Continue reading

“I have done my duty…..I will not harm him just because he tried to harm me.”

A tiger, a hunter, a bear and a fear

Once in a forest, a hunter, on being chased by a tiger, felt tired and climbed up a tree. There was a bear sitting on the top of the tree. Continue reading

Everything we want is right here in the present moment

Western civilization places so much emphasis on the idea of hope that we sacrifice the present moment. Hope is for the future. It cannot help us discover joy, peace, or enlightenment in the present moment. Continue reading

Change takes place, but not according to plan or as the result of intentional intervention

Problems and obstacles offer a chance for reflection that otherwise would be precluded by the swift routine of life. Continue reading

Ask the Horse

There is a story in Zen circles about a man and a horse. The horse is galloping quickly, and it appears that the man on the horse is going somewhere important. Continue reading

Opportunities will open up to us naturally…..

Imagine you see before you a carriage, a horse, and a driver. The carriage represents the physical body, the horse depicts the power of the emotions, and the driver corresponds to the intellect.

Continue reading

Seeing Who You Are

You can’t make radical changes in the pattern of your life until you begin to see yourself exactly as you are now. As soon as you do that, changes will flow naturally. You don’t have to force anything, struggle, or obey rules dictated to you by some authority. It is automatic; you just change. Continue reading

Planting Seeds

Think for a moment of a tomato plant. A healthy plant can have over a hundred tomatoes on it. In order to get this tomato plant with all these tomatoes on it, we need to start with a small dried seed. That seed doesn’t look like a tomato plant. It sure doesn’t taste like a tomato plant. If you didn’t know for sure, you would not even believe it could be a tomato plant. Continue reading