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“Effort is just what Grace (Awareness) looks like, from the point of view of the separate self….

So there is no conflict between making efforts and grace. We feel the efforts we make to return to our true nature, we feel “I am taking the journey back to our true nature”.

We don’t yet know that it is (Grace) reeling us in… No, the separate self does nothing. There is no separate self either to do something or not to do something…

So if you feel that you need to make the effort, make the effort, but know that it is always (Awareness) that is doing.“

— Rupert Spira

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“Just sitting, neither trying to think nor trying not to think, is the important aspect of Serene Reflection Meditation.“

— Dogen Zenji

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“I have found the animals and the natural world at large to have been my greatest spiritual teacher…even in the context of sitting for over 10 years with a Sangha…If what can be regarded as spiritual qualities across any discipline include states of being like presence and awareness and absolute acceptance of what is, then the nonhuman animals have got it…readily available to them…shining…is a present authenticity.

This is about helping us humans remembering our original wiring, how our brains and how the intelligence of our hearts was once in our conscious awareness, deeply wired to the collective of all the beings in our immediate environment.

Every particle of soil under our feet, the spider and her web, the leaf on every tree, the root under the ground or the deer species in the distance. And as we again remember through communication, through connections, we literally again, become members of a great collective…unified in our  shared awareness.

And we experience ourselves less and less as separate from the web of life.“

— Anna Breytenbach

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“I was exposed enough not just to my personal death but to the endings of fellow humans by the hundreds. And the consequence of that has been that I “long” after life even though I’m so very much alive…one way to be alive as a practice is to remember your death and to befriend it as an adversary and therefore, as an ally, not as an enemy. The presence of the adversary prompts better and deeper understanding in you.“

— Stephen Jenkinson

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“The blurring of boundaries, moving self, changing space, are Japanese spatial concepts steeped in the framework of this mind-body-space relationship that explain why Japanese gardens, tea rooms, and temples seem to encourage us to feel contemplative.“

— Dr. Yoko Kawai (paraphrased from this complete talk)

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