Reading Archives (Author)
Radical Response
M. Scott Peck
Although not wholly adequate, Matthew Fox's definition of prayer is still my favorite. It is a definition that doesn't even use the word 'God'. Fox defines it as "a radical response to the mysteries ...
Pain of Problems
M. Scott Peck
Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult - once we...
Arriving At Truth
MacDonald-Bayne
We talked long into the night about what I did and what I had learned, and, when he was satisfied that the journey was not in vain he said: "I am glad indeed at your successful sojourn, but you know ...
Going Beyond the Roles We Play
Mack Paul
We seem so very real. But our bodies are really not our own and we have no control over either their coming or going. We have roles that we play and try to convince ourselves that they are real. It is...
Unencumbered By Thought
Magliozzi Brothers
There is a process for reaching nirvana and it is this: You must repeat the mantra. And the mantra, which happens to be emblazoned on our flag, is: Non impediti ratione cogitatonis. Which, of course,...
Law Of Love
Mahatma Gandhi
I have found that life persists in the midst of destruction. Therefore there must be a higher law than that of destruction. Only under that law would well-ordered society be intelligible and life wort...
Blink of an Eye
Malcolm Galdwell
When it comes to the task of understanding ourselves and our world, I think we pay too much attention to those grand themes and too little to the particulars of those fleeting moments. But what would...
Radiating Photons of Goodwill
Marc Ian Barasch
Every now and then, I'll meet an escapee, someone who has broken free of self-centeredness and lit out for the territory of compassion. You've met them, too, those people who seem to emit a steady str...
Accept What Is, Lead To Improve
Marc Lesser
“Accepting what is” and trusting the Universe is an essential approach to life. But so is “fighting for change.” And if you want to be effective in business — and in rela...
Enjoy Your Work
Margaret Stevens
There was a man who died and found himself in a beautiful place, surrounded by every conceivable comfort. A white-jacketed man came to him and said, "You may have anything you choose -- any food, an...
Between Yes and No
Margaret Wheatley
Root of happiness is knowing that everything changes. That's all there is to happiness. It's nothing you pursue. It's living in the constant continual paradox of life. The Vedas say that the yes an...
Evolving From Hope to Hopelessness
Margaret Wheatley
[Rudolf Bahro said,] "When the forms of an old culture are dying, the new culture is created by a few people who are not afraid to be insecure." Could insecurity, self-doubt, be a good trait? I find i...
Disturb the System
Margaret Wheatley
Think about how we generally have treated information. We've known it was important, but we've handled it in ways that have destroyed many of its life-giving properties. For one thing, we haven't bee...
Element of Surprise
Margaret Wheatley
Very little about the emerging nature of life supports who we have tried to be. Life invites us to play along, discovering as we go. Life wants to work with us in surprising ways. We could make our...
Uncomfortable Place Of Uncertainty
Margaret Wheatley
We weren’t trained to admit we don’t know. Most of us were taught to sound certain and confident, to state our opinion as if it were true. We haven’t been rewarded for being confused...
Disturb Me, Please!
Margaret Wheatley
In graduate school, I had one professor who encouraged us to notice what surprised or disturbed us. If we were surprised by some statement, it indicate...
Who Do We Choose To Be?
Margaret Wheatley
The powerful always defend the status quo because it is the source of their power and privilege. Any change that benefits others would destroy their position. And their position is all they care about...
Hopium
Margaret Wheatley
The problem with hope is that it’s bipolar. Every time we rely on hope, we always bring in fear. Wisdom teaches that hope and fear are two sides of the same dynamic. You already know ...
The Order on the Other Side of Chaos
Margaret Wheatley
I use the word "chaos" to describe those times in an organization when people are confused, don't know what to do, and feel overwhelmed by information that they can't make sense of. ...
Love is the Source of Fearlessness
Margaret Wheatley
Some of the prison bars that we have constructed for ourselves are our fear of losing our jobs. Our fear of not being liked. Our need for approval. Our desire to make important changes but not have to...
Absurd Heroism
Margaret Wheatley
Consider Sisyphus. As described in both Greek and Roman mythology, Sisyphus was condemned by the gods to an eternity of futile and hopeless labor. He had to roll a rock to the top of the mountain, onl...
Big Enough to Take It All In
Margaret Wheatley
To want to see clearly is a true act of fearlessness. To open our heart and mind, to be open to what life is offering us in this moment, requires tremendous courage and steadfastness. In the openne...
To Have Without Holding
Marge Piercy
Learning to love differently is hard, love with the hands wide open, love with the doors banging on their hinges, the cupboard unlocked, the wind roaring and whimpering in the rooms rustling the ...
What Breaks Your Heart?
Maria Shriver
What breaks your heart? What does your soul long for? And, how is that connected to how you are living your life now? I love this question because it’s made me think about my passion and purp...
We Start Where We Are
Marianna Cacciatore
When we learn to be of service to one another without imposing our ideas and advice, eventually the truth of our wholeness begins to reveal itself. This is how it unfolds. In the beginning, w...
Emotional Chains
Marianne Williamson
The problem isn't that we're lost or apathetic, narcissistic or materialistic. The problem is we're terrified. A lot of us know we have what it takes--the looks, the education, the talent, the cred...
Born With One Purpose
Marianne Williamson
We spend so much time on unimportant things -- things with no ultimate meaning -- yet for reasons no one seems to fully understand, such nonessentials stand at the center of our worldly existence. The...
Giving it All up to the Stillness
Marion Wilson-Gruzalski
I realize that I have spent much of my life waiting for inspiration. Ever since I was a child, I have had an Inner Voice that has guided me through these many years, through all the difficult and pai...
Businessman and the Fisherman
Mark Albion
A young businessman was at the pier of a small coastal village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Seeing several large yellowfin tuna inside the small boat, the businessman compliment...
Thinking, Feeling, Willing
Mark Finser
In these difficult times, my great hope is that we can move to a culture that balances our needs and wants with our actions and insights. Insights come from our capacity to think in ways that ...
Integrity Grows From A Humbling Realization
Mark Gerzon
"The purpose of life is ... to know oneself. We cannot do so unless we learn to identify ourselves with all that lives." -- Mohandas K. Gandhi. I have never seen a conflict in which everyone could ...
Not Taking Things Personally
Mark Manson
An unfortunate side effect of our consciousness residing in our brains is that everything we experience in our lives involves us somehow. The car in traffic today cut you off. The cable news show...
From Transaction To Trust
Mark Manson
The most precious and important things in life are, by definition, nontransactional. And to try to bargain for them is to immediately destroy them. You cannot conspire for happiness; it is impossible....
To Witness and To Hold
Mark Nepo
We have been battered by modern times into obsessive problem solvers, but as life pares us down into only what is essential, it becomes clear that the deepest sufferings of heart and spirit cannot...
Living In The Freshest Chamber Of The Heart
Mark Nepo
Our ability to find something to love, and to love again for the first time depends greatly on how we resolve and integrate where we've been before. A great model for us exists in the chambered na...
The Energy of Being Real
Mark Nepo
"Mana" is a term originally used in a Polynesian and Melanesian cultures to describe an extraordinary power or force residing in a person or an object, a sort of spiritual electricity that charges any...
The Work Of Love Is To Love
Mark Nepo
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 bee...
The Unwatched Space
Mark Nepo
I tried so hard to please that I never realized no one is watching. I imagined, like everyone else at school, that my parents were sitting just out of view like those quiet doctors behind clean mi...
Outlasting the Fog
Mark Nepo
We all have these moments when the rose loses it color for some reason, or the music no longer stirs us, or the sweet, gentle soul across from us no longer seems to soften our heart. To move in and...
Love Like Water
Mark Nepo
Water in its clear softness fills whatever hole it finds. It is not skeptical or distrusting. It does not say this gully is too deep or that field is too open. Like water, the miracle of love is that ...
The Practice Before The Practice
Mark Nepo
From the moment we open our eyes, we are meaning-seeking creatures, looking for what matters though we carry what matters deep within us. And more than the hard-earned understandings we arrive at, mor...
Wisdom in Blinking
Mark Nepo
We blink a thousand times a day. A thousand times a day the world goes dark. A thousand times a day we wake. We can't escape this opening and closing. It's a reflex we can't control. Even as you read...
The Exquisite Risk
Mark Nepo
At any moment, if quiet enough and open enough, we can drop into the fabric of existence in which everything, even pain, has its vivid signature of energy that we call, at different times, truth or be...
The Rabbit And The Garden
Mark Nepo
In the movie Phenomenon, John Travolta's character has done everything he can think of to keep this pesky rabbit out of his garden. He's even put in fencing that goes three feet underground, and sti...
To Separate and Unify
Mark Nepo
The destruction or healing of the world hinges on which way this thought unfolds. Whether we pull things apart or put things together makes all the difference. Indeed, human history has unfolded with ...
Waterfall of Words
Mark Nepo
There was a time in my life during my years in college when I was so talkative that the waterfall of words kept others at a safe distance. Of course, in time, this cascade pushed others away. But wha...
Be Alight with Who We Are
Mark Nepo
There is always purpose in being, but not always being in purpose. How easily we get caught up in defining who we are in relation to those around us. I remember walking home from school in fourth g...
Honoring the Gill Inside You
Mark Nepo
A simple fish nosing its way along the bottom is in itself a profound teacher, and like the deepest teachers, it doesn't even know it is teaching. Yet in its tiny, efficient gill lives the mystery...
Superstition
Marshall Goldsmith
Walking under a ladder. Breaking a mirror. A black cat darting across our path. Whoa! Most of us scorn superstitions as silly beliefs of the primitive and uneducated. Deep down inside, we assure ours...
Blessed Unrest
Martha Graham
There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. If you block it, it will ...
A Newly Rich Life With Yourself
Martha Nussbaum
Do not despise your inner world. That is the first and most general piece of advice I would offer. Our society is very outward-looking, very taken up with the latest new object, the latest piece of go...
The Broken Piano In 1975
Marti Leimbach
My favourite piece of music is Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert, an hour-long piece improvised, as all of Jarrett’s concerts are, on a solo piano in front of a live audience. You know the...
Three Supports For Turning Towards Mystery
Martin Aylward
There are three primary supports for nonconceptual awareness. These three supports are obvious in many ways, and yet, their simplicity belies their extraordinary depth. Over the last thirty years of m...
We Shall Overcome
Martin Luther King Jr.
I refuse to accept the idea that the "is-ness" of man's present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal "ought-ness" that forever confronts him. I refuse to accept the ide...
Love Your Enemy
Martin Luther King Jr.
"Another way that you love your enemy is this: When the opportunity presents itself for you to defeat your enemy, that is the time which you must not do it. There will come a time, in many instances,...
Drum Major Instinct
Martin Luther King Jr.
There is deep down within all of us an instinct. It's a kind of drum major instinct.a desire to be out front, a desire to lead the parade, a desire to be first. And it is something that runs the whole...
Definition of Greatness
Martin Luther King Jr.
The setting is clear. James and John are making a specific request of Jesus -- "Now when you establish your kingdom, let one of us sit on the right hand and the other on the left hand of your throne....
His Own Eulogy
Martin Luther King Jr.
Every now and then I guess we all think realistically about that day when we will be victimized with what is life's final common denominator--that something we call death. We all think about it...
I Have Decided to Stick With Love
Martin Luther King Jr.
I’m concerned about a better World. I’m concerned about justice; I’m concerned about brotherhood and sisterhood; I’m concerned about truth. And when one is concerned about that...
Pilgrimage to Nonviolence
Martin Luther King, Jr.
First, it must be emphasized that nonviolent resistance is not a method for cowards; it does resist. If one uses this method because he is afraid or merely because he lacks the instruments of violen...
Building a Creative Temple
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Whenever you set out to build a creative temple, whatever it may be, you must face the fact that there is a tension at the heart of the universe between good and evil. Hinduism refers to this as a str...
Renewability Makes Something Valuable
Martin Prechtel
In the village, people used to build their houses out of traditional materials, using no iron or lumber or nails, but the houses were magnificent. Many were sewn together out of bark and fiber. L...
Keeping The Smoke Hole Open
Martin Shaw
In Siberian myth, when you want to hurt someone, you crawl into their tent and close the smoke hole. That way God can’t see them. Close the smoke hole and you break connection to the divin...
Three Types Of Leadership
Marty Krasney
There are three ways that human beings can accomplish anything together and each of them has its own type of leader. Very simply, the three domains of shared human endeavor can be characterized as For...
What Is Your Storyteller Doing?
Mary O'Malley
At 8:28 AM I slipped into the pool at my gym for my half hour swim. There was a water aerobics class that began at 9:00, which left just enough time for me to complete my swim. At around 8:55 a number...
My Work is Loving the World
Mary Oliver
My work is loving the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird - equal seekers of sweetness. Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums. Here the clam deep in the speckled sand...
When Death Comes
Mary Oliver
When death comes like the hungry bear in autumn; when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse to buy me, and snaps the purse shut; when death comes like the measle-pox when...
Starlings In Winter
Mary Oliver
Chunky and noisy, but with stars in their black feathers, they spring from the telephone wire and instantly they are acrobats in the freezing wind. And now, in the theater of air, they swing ...
The Central Commitment Of The Creative Life
Mary Oliver
Intellectual work sometimes, spiritual work certainly, artistic work always -- these are forces that fall within its grasp, forces that must travel beyond the realm of the hour and the restraint of th...
Meaning of Yin and Yang
Masahiro Oko
Everything has a right to live. Everything wants to exist and we have to respect that. The weaker side in any relationship naturally demands things, because of the need for mutual balance....
Do-Nothing Cultivation
Masanobu Fukuoka
The usual way to go about developing a method is to ask, "How about trying this?" or "How about trying that?" bringing in a variety of techniques one upon the other. This is modern agriculture and it...
The Way of the Farmer
Masanobu Fukuoka
Extravagance of desire is the fundamental cause which has led the world into its present predicament. Fast rather than slow, more rather than less -- this flashy "development" is linked d...
The Difference Between Natural and Unnatural
Masanobu Fukuoka
For thirty years I lived only in my farming and had little contact with people outside my own community. During those years I was heading in a straight line toward a "do nothing" agric...
Cultivating An Eagle Mind
Matthieu Ricard
Human qualities often come in clusters. Altruism, inner peace, strength, freedom, and genuine happiness thrive together like the parts of a nourishing fruit. Likewise, selfishness, animosity, and fear...
Go Placidly Amid the Noise and Haste
Max Ehrmann
Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and cle...
Now I Become Myself
May Sarton
Now I become myself. It's taken Time, many years and places; I have been dissolved and shaken, Worn other people's faces, Run madly, as if Time were there, Terribly old, crying a warning,...
The Day I Learned The Value of a Smile
Maya Angelou
My paternal grandmother who raised me had a remarkable influence on how I saw the world and how I reckoned my place in it. She was the picture of dignity. She spoke softly and walked slowly, with her ...
Groundlessness
Meg Wheatley
Hope is what propels us into action. We’ve been taught to dream of a better world as the necessary first step in creating one. We create a clear vision for the future we want, then we set a stra...
Going Beyond Hope and Fear
Meg Wheatley
For me and most of my colleagues, life these days is a roller coaster ride between hope and fear, oscillating wildly between what's possible and what is. Like all roller coasters, this one is both exh...
Objectivity and Relationships
Meg Wheatley
Why has expressing love become such a problem when it's a fundamental human characteristic? This is where I think we have over analyzed and over complexified something that is known to everyone alive....
The Messiah Is One Of Us
Megan McKenna
Once upon a time there was a wise abbot of a monastery who was the friend of an equally wise rabbi. This was in the old country, long ago, when times were always hard, but just then they were even wor...
I-ness At Arm's Length
Meher Baba
The activities you are engaged in of serving the nation and the people are good. But to acquire the full bliss through "karma yoga", there is only one way and method. And that is, while rendering ser...
The Danger of Service Without Spirituality
Meher Baba
Service, even when it is utterly selfless, ought to be guided by spiritual understanding; for selfless service, when unintelligently handled, often creates chaos and complications. It could even be th...
I Have Noticed
Melody Anderson
I have noticed that emptiness is just another word for spaciousness. I have noticed that attachments, like anchors in the water, may give you a feeling of bein...
The Simplest Meditation
Melvin McLeodÂÂ
How can everything be perfect if it’s so screwed up? That question goes to the heart of the situation we find ourselves in, which Buddhists call samsara. That’s the endless cycle driven...
What Breathes Us?
Meredith Krugel
When you touch your bliss, it rings, confirming with the showering of further delight. A song emerges from the core of your being when you touch this sacred space. Unlike any other joy, it is fulfilli...
Attachment is Habitual Thinking
Miao Tsan
We all judge our experiences through the filter of habitual thinking. In other words, we are unconsciously driven by how we think, and how we think determines the feelings and opinions we develop...
Giving Within For-Give-Ness
Michael Bernard Beckwith
People often say that Jesus taught, "You should turn the cheek if someone smites you; you should turn the other cheek if they wrong you." Many people interpret this as saying that if s...
Enlightenment is Intimacy with All Things
Michael Damian
Depending on how we use it, the mind can obscure or reveal truth and thereby create hell or heaven for us. In that sense, where we really live is in the quality of our state of mind. The factor t...
You Are Saved By Your Love
Michael Damian
Love is the power that reveals truth and drives our search for it. You may have noticed that if you study something deeply - an animal, a face, a piece of music - you begin to love it. You become one ...
Longer Ladders Don't Get You To The Moon
Michael Gordon
Sundials came into being over 3,000 years ago, telling time-based on shadows cast by the sun. But they were thrown off by variations in the length of days and by differences in latitude. Geometry was ...
End of Absence?
Michael Harris
As we embrace a technology’s gifts, we usually fail to consider what they ask from us in return — the subtle, hardly noticeable payments we make in exchange for their marvellous service. W...
Difference Between Healing and Curing
Michael Lerner, PhD
In my thirty years of working with cancer patients, I've seen a profound distinction between curing and healing. Curing is what a physician seeks to offer you. Healing, however, comes from with...
The Process Of Understanding
Michael Lipson
We'll focus on the union of two apparently contradictory gestures: simultaneous holding and releasing. Holding. I have a project, like writing a letter, or choreographing a musi...
Zero-Sum Game of Violence
Michael Nagler
When we have a non-violent outlook, we no longer look on a dispute as what's called a 'zero-sum game.' Instead of thinking that for me to win, you have to lose, we now believe there must be a way tha...
Zorba The Greek
Michael Pastore
From a book review of 'Zorba The Greek': The plot of Zorba is deceptively simple: a bookwormish writer (called in the novel "the boss"), who sleeps with a pocket edition of Dante's poems, travels to...
Surrender Your Data
Michael Quattrone
Surrender your data, and I will give you wisdom. Empty your bank accounts, and let me show you value. Shut your eyes to entertainment, and open them to beauty. Unplug your high-speed connection and I ...
The Highest Spiritual Path
Michael Singer
The highest spiritual path is life itself. If you know how to live daily life, it all becomes a liberating experience. But first you have to approach life properly, or it can be very confusing. To beg...
The Surrender Experiment
Michael Singer
Life rarely unfolds exactly as we want it to. And if we stop and think about it, that makes perfect sense. The scope of life is universal, and the fact that we are not actually in control of life&rsqu...
Pain, the Price of Freedom
Michael Singer
Wise beings do not want to remain a slave to the fear of pain. They permit the world to be what it is instead of being afraid of it. They wholeheartedly particip...
Spiritual Activism
Michael Singer
I'm an environmentalist and I'm very much into cars that get high mileage and don't pollute, and I see that somebody's driving a Hummer. It's a classic example, somebody's driv...
What You Have Given Your Mind to Do
Michael Singer
If you mistreat an animal, it becomes afraid. This is what has happened to your psyche. You have mistreated it by giving it a responsibility that is incomprehensible. Just stop for a moment and see wh...
The Anatomy Of Falling
Michael Singer
Leaving the seat of Self is not generally a willful act. The laws of attraction will cause it to happen. Consciousness is always drawn to the most distracting object: the bumped toe, the loud noise, o...
Blind Spots
Michael Talbot
Studies suggest that less than 50% of what we "see" is actually based on information entering our eyes. The remaining 50% plus is pieced together out of our expectations of what the world should look...
Attention Is Inseparable From Interrogation
Michel de Salzmann
Our attention is much more than we generally think. It is much more than a simple mental or cerebral mechanism. It concerns our whole being. If its potentialities are far from being fully actualized i...
Heart And Soul Bonds
Michelle
Our lives are greeted by different types of relationships. Some fun, some cozy and intimate, some crazy and adventurous, some inseparable. Nevertheless, there are also other type of connections, which...
Why I Make Movies
Mickey Lemle
All movies are an illusion. We think we are seeing motion but in fact we are seeing twenty-four still pictures every second. Half the time the screen is actually black. Yet movies seem so real, and so...
On Good and Evil
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Contemporary understanding of matter and energy also suggests a new way of thinking about good and evil. Evil in human affairs is analogous to the process of entropy in the material universe. We call ...
Changing Existence into Flow
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
"[Flow means] being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jaz...
Keep No Accounts With Love
Mikhail Naimy
You are the tree of Life. Beware of fractioning yourselves. Never set fruit against fruit, a leaf against a leaf, or a bough against a bough, the stem against the roots, or the tree against the mother...
Accessing Desire As Loving Motivation
Miki Kashtan
When Yannai, my sister Inbal’s son, was three and a half, his grandparents were visiting and were staying in the downstairs room. At about 8am the next morning Yannai started banging a pole on t...
Thirsty For Wonder
Mirabai Starr
Contemplative life flows in a circular pattern: awe provokes introspection, which invokes awe. Maybe you’re making dinner and you step outside to snip chives from the kitchen garden just as t...
The Dark Side of the Sacred
Miriam Greenspan
Emotions live in the body. It is not enough simply to talk about them, to be a talking head. We need to focus our attention on emotions where they live. This willingness to be present allows the emoti...
Wave is Part of the Ocean
Mitch Albom
"I heard a nice little story the other day," Morrie says. He closes his eyes for a moment and I wait. "Okay. The story is about a little wave, bobbing along in the ocean, having a grand old time. H...
Embarrassed by Silence
Mitch Albom
He enters the classroom, sits down, doesn't say anything. He looks at us, we look at him. At first, there are a few giggles, but Morrie only shrugs, and eventually a deep silence falls and we begin...
Part of the Ocean
Mitch Albom
Okay. The story is about a little wave, bobbing along in the ocean, having a grand old time. He's enjoying the wind and the fresh air - until he notices the other waves in front of him, crashing ag...
The Phenomenon of Boredom
MJ Ryan
The labeling of a huge part of human experience as boring is a relatively new phenomenon. The concept of boredom -- a sense of emptiness and a lack of stimulation -- didn't even exist until the ninete...
Secret of Aikido
Morihei Ueshiba
The secret of Aikido [a form of martial arts] is to harmonize ourselves with the movement of the universe and bring ourselves into accord with the universe itself. He who has gained the secret of Aik...
To Do Something Well
Mother
"If you want to do something well, what ever it may be.... you must become what you are doing and not remain a small person looking at himself doing it... Take a very amusing instance: you want to ...
Missing Drop In The Ocean
Mother Teresa
A friend of Mother Teresa from her early days came by hoping to have a quiet word with her and found, to her pleasant surprise, that there were few visitors that afternoon. She sat down on the old w...
Give It Your Best Anyway
Mother Theresa
It is reported that Mother Theresa had this on her wall ... People are often unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered; Forgive them anyway. If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ...
No Better Place to Meet Yourself
Moussa Ag Assarid
Moussa Ag Assarid (MAA): I don’t know my age. I was born in the Sahara desert, with no papers. I was born in a nomadic camp of Touaregs, between Timbuktu and Gao, in the north of Mali. ...
Reflections on Life from Death Row
Moyo
Reggie once told me that we could use these cells like meditation cells used by monks in monasteries. But prison is not a monastery. And although I may do my best to take advantage of the opportuni...